THE LORDS OF HIGH DECISION

OTHER BOOKS BY
MEREDITH NICHOLSON

The Main Chance
Zelda Dameron
The House of a Thousand Candles
Poems
The Port of Missing Men
Rosalind at Red Gate
The Little Brown Jug at Kildare
The Hoosiers
(Historical. In National Studies in
American Letters)

JEAN MORLEY

The
Lords of High Decision

By
MEREDITH NICHOLSON

Illustrated by
ARTHUR I. KELLER

New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1909

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1909

TO BOWMAN ELDER AND EDWARD ROBINETTE
IN REMEMBRANCE OF OUR CANOE FLIGHT THROUGH THE
MAINE WOODS, WITH A BACKWARD GLANCE
AT INDIAN JOE
WHO FAILED TO FIND THE MOOSE

Mackinac Island,
September 20, 1909.

And the Fourth Kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise.

And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay.

And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly broken.

The Book of Daniel.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE LORDS OF HIGH DECISION

The Lords of High Decision

CHAPTER I
THE FACE IN THE LOCKET

AS Mrs. John McCandless Blair entered the house her brother, Wayne Craighill, met her in the hall. The clock on the stair landing was striking seven.

“On time, Fanny? How did it ever happen?” he demanded as she caught his hands and peered into his face. He blinked under her scrutiny; she always gave him this sharp glance when they met,—and its significance was not wasted on him; but she was satisfied and kissed him, and then, as he took her wrap:

“For heaven’s sake what’s up, Wayne? Father was ominously solemn in telephoning me to come over. John’s dining at the Club—I think father wants to see us alone.”

“It rather looks that way, Fanny,” replied Wayne, laughing at his sister’s earnestness.

“Well, is he going to do it at last?”

“There’s no use kicking if he is, so be prepared for the worst.”

“Well, if it’s that Baltimore woman——”

“Or that Philadelphia woman, or the person he met in Berlin—the one from nowhere——”

Their voices had reached Colonel Craighill and he came into the hall and greeted his daughter affectionately.

“Give me credit, papa! I was on time to-night!”

“We will give John credit for sending you. How’s the new car working?”

“Oh, more or less the usual way!”

Dinner was announced and they went out at once, Mrs. Blair taking a place opposite her father at the round table, with Wayne between them.

Roger Craighill was an old citizen; it may be questioned whether he was not, by severe standards, the first citizen of Pittsburg. There were, to be sure, richer men, but his identification with the soberer past of the City of the Iron Heart—before the Greater City had planted its guidons as far as now along the rivers and over the hills—gave indubitable value and dignity to his name. He was interested in many philanthropies and reforms, and he had just returned from Washington where he had attended a conference of the American Reform Federation, of which he was a prominent and influential member. Colonel Craighill, like his son, dressed with care and followed the fashion, and to-night in his evening clothes his daughter thought him unusually handsome and distinguished. He had kept his figure, and his fine colouring had prompted Mr. Richard Wingfield, the cynic of the Allequippa Club, to bestow upon him the soubriquet of Rosy Roger, a pleasantry for which Wingfield had been censured by the governors. But Colonel Craighill’s fine height and his noble head with its crown of white hair, set him apart for admiration in any gathering. He walked a mile a day and otherwise safeguarded his health, which an eminent New York physician assured him once a year was perfect.

Roger Craighill was by all tests the most eligible widower in western Pennsylvania, and gossip had striven for years to marry him to any one of a dozen women imaginably his equals. When the local possibilities were exhausted attention shifted to women of becoming age and social standing in other cities—New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore—Colonel Craighill’s frequent absences from home lending faint colour of truth to these speculations. His daughter, Mrs. John McCandless Blair, had often discussed the matter with her brother, but without resentment, save occasionally when some woman known to them and distasteful or particularly unsuitable from their standpoint was suggested. It was indicative of the difference in character and temperament between brother and sister that Wayne was more captious in his criticisms of the presumptive candidates for their mother’s place in the old home than his sister. When, shortly after Mrs. Craighill’s death, Wayne’s dissolute habits became a town scandal there were many who said that things would have gone differently if his mother had lived; that Mrs. Craighill had understood Wayne, but that his father was wholly out of sympathy with him.

Mrs. John McCandless Blair was immensely aroused now by the suspicion that her father was about to bring home a second wife, and she steeled her heart against the unknown woman. She was not in the least abashed by her father, who never took her seriously. He began describing his visit to Washington, to cover the four courses of the family dinner that must be eaten before—with proper deliberation and the room freed of the waitress—he apprised his children of the particular purpose of this family gathering.

Colonel Craighill was a capital talker and he gave an intimate turn to his account of the Washington meeting, uttering the names of his distinguished associates in the Federation with frank pride in their acquaintance. A Southern bishop, far-famed as a story-teller, was a member and Colonel Craighill repeated several anecdotes with which the clergyman had enlivened the conferences. He quoted one or two periods from his own speech at the dinner, and paused for Mrs. Blair and Wayne to admire their aptness. With a nice sense of climax he mentioned last his invitation to luncheon at the White House, where there was only one other guest—a famous English statesman and man of letters.

“It was really quite en famille. My impression of the President was delightful; I confess that I had wholly misjudged him. He addressed many questions to me directly—asking about political conditions here at home in such a way that I had to do a good deal of talking. As I was leaving he detained me a moment and asked my opinion of the business outlook. I was amazed to see how familiar he appeared to be with the range of my own interests. He told me that if I had suggestions at any time as to financial policies he wished I would come down and talk to him personally. But the published reports of my visit to the White House annoyed me greatly. I thought it only just to myself to write him a line to repudiate the interview attributed to me. There have, of course, been rumours of cabinet changes, but I don’t want office—all I ask is to be of some service to my fellow-men in the rôle of a private citizen.”

Mrs. Blair murmured sympathetic responses through this recital. Wayne ate his salad in silence. He knew that his father enjoyed nothing so much as these conferences in behalf of good causes; they required a great deal of time, but Colonel Craighill had reached an age at which he could afford to indulge himself. If he enjoyed delivering addresses and making after-dinner speeches it was none of Wayne’s affair. Their natures were antipodal. Wayne cared little what his father did, one way or another.

Mrs. Blair fell to chaffing her father about the work of the Federation. Her curiosity as to the nature of the announcement he had said he wished to make grew more acute as the minutes passed, and she talked with rather more than her usual nervous volubility.

“Just think,” she exclaimed, “of drinking champagne over the building of schools for poor negroes! If you would send them the champagne how much more sensible it would be! There’s a beautiful idea. Why not found a society for providing free champagne for the poor and needy!”

“It’s not for you to deride, Fanny. Only a little while ago you were raising a fund for the restoration of a Buddhist temple somewhere in darkest Japan—the merest fad. I remember that Doctor McAllister wrote me a letter expressing surprise that a daughter of mine should be aiding a heathen enterprise.”

“It was too bad, papa! But the temple is all restored now, and we had a little fund left over after the work was done—I was treasurer and didn’t know what else to do with it—so I gave it to help build an Episcopal parish house at Ironstead. And to-day I was out there in the machine and behold! Jimmy Paddock is running that parish house and a mission and is no end of a power in the place.”

“Paddock? What Paddock?” asked Wayne.

“Why, Jimmy Paddock. Don’t you remember him? You knew him in your prep. school, and he was on the eleven at Harvard while you were at the ‘Tech.’”

“Not the same man,” declared Wayne. “I knew my Jimmy like a top; he was no monk—not by a long shot. Besides, his family had money to burn. No parish house larks for Jim. He knew how to order a dinner!”

“It just happens,” replied Mrs. Blair, “that I knew Jimmy, too, back in your college days and I declare that I saw him this afternoon at Ironstead. I was out there looking for a maid who used to work for us and I met Jimmy Paddock in the street—a very disagreeable street it was, too. You know he was always shy and he seemed terribly embarrassed. It was hard work getting anything out of him; but he’s our old Jimmy and he’s a regular minister—went off and did it all by himself and has been out there at Ironstead for six months—all through the hot weather.”

“Does he wear a becoming habit and hold quiet days for women?” asked Wayne. “I remember that you affected the Episcopalians for a while—for about half of one Lent! That was just before those table-tippers buncoed you into introducing them to our first families.”

“That is unworthy of you, Wayne!” and Mrs. Blair frowned at her brother with mock indignation. “Nobody ever really explained some of the things those mediums did. They certainly told me things——!”

“I’ll wager they did,” laughed Wayne. “But go on about Jimmy.”

“He’s just a plain little minister—no habit or anything like that. He’s wonderful with men and boys. He thanked me for helping with the parish house, and when candour compelled me to tell him that I didn’t know it was his enterprise and that he had got what was left after restoring a Buddhist temple, he smiled in just his old boyish way, and I made him get in the machine and take me to see the place, which is the simplest. There was a sign on the door of the parish house that said, ‘Boxing Lessons Tuesday Night, by a Competent Instructor. All Welcome.’ And it was signed ‘J. Paddock, Rector.’”

“If this minister is the boy we knew when Wayne was at St. John’s I should think he would have come to see us,” remarked Colonel Craighill. “We used to meet his family now and then.”

“I scolded him for not telling us he’s here; and he said he had been too busy. He asked all about you, Wayne—said he was going to look you up; but when I asked him to come and dine with us he was so unhappy in trying to get out of it that I told him not to bother. He’s perfectly devoted to his work, and they say the people out there are crazy about him.”

“Dear old Jimmy!” mused Wayne. “I wonder how he’s kept it so dark. You never can tell! Jimmy used to exhaust his chapel cuts the first week every term. If he’s taken to saving souls, though, he’ll do it; he hangs on like a bull pup. I can see him now at that last Thanksgiving game going down the field with the ball under his arm—he was as fast as lightning. I’d like to take a few boxing lessons from Jimmy myself, if he’s in the business.”

Coffee was served; Mrs. Blair dropped the Reverend James Paddock and watched her father choose his single lump of sugar. He refused a cigar but waited until Wayne had lighted a cigarette before he dismissed the waitress and began.

“It must have occurred to you both that I might at some time marry again.”

“Yes, father; I suppose that possibility has occurred to many people,” replied his daughter, feeling that something was required at once. Wayne said nothing, but drew his chair back from the table and crossed his legs.

“I want you to understand that your dead mother’s life is a precious—a very precious memory. My determination to marry means no disloyalty to her.”

He bowed his head and drew one hand lightly across the table.

“I have been lonely at times; the management of the house in itself has been a burden, but I have not liked to give it up. I might have gone to live with you, Fanny,—you and John have been kind in urging me—but you have your own family; and as long as Wayne is unmarried the old place must be his home. The change I propose making will have no effect on your status in my house, Wayne—none whatever!”

“Thank you; I appreciate that, sir.”

“In fact,” continued Colonel Craighill, addressing his son, “you both understand that the house is really yours—I have only a life tenancy here—that was your mother’s wish and she so made her will. Maybe you don’t remember that this property was never mine. Your mother inherited a large tract of land up here from her father, and after I built the house the title remained in her name—the homestead will be yours, Wayne; your mother made it up to Fanny in other ways.”

“I understand—but wouldn’t it be better for me to leave—for a time at least—after your marriage?”

“No; I couldn’t think of that, and I’m sure Adelaide would be very uncomfortable if she felt you were being driven from home. And, moreover, you know how prone people are to gossip. It must not be said that my son left his father’s house through any act of mine.”

“The old story of the cruel stepmother!” smiled Wayne; but his father went on gravely, as though to rebuke this levity.

“There are ways in which you have been a great grief to me; I had not meant to speak of that, but Fanny has been a good sister to you and she knows the whole story. I should like you to remember—to remember that you are my son!”

Wayne nodded, but did not speak. After a moment his father resumed, addressing them both.

“I have known the lady I am to marry a comparatively short time, but I have become deeply attached to her. She is young, but that is not her fault”—and Colonel Craighill smiled—“or mine! Her father died when she was still a child, and she has lived abroad with her mother much of the time. She is of an old Vermont family. The marriage is to take place in a fortnight and by our own wish will be altogether simple and quiet. Please do not mention this; I have to go to Cleveland to-morrow for a day or two and I shall make the announcement when I return. I have thought to save your feelings and to prevent embarrassment all round by not asking either of you to the ceremony. We shall meet in New York and go quietly to Doctor McAllister’s residence—he is an old friend whom I have known long in church affairs—and we shall come home immediately. The name of the lady is Allen—Miss Adelaide Allen. I am sure you will learn to like her—that you and Fanny will see and appreciate the fine qualities in Miss Allen that have won my admiration and affection.”

There was a moment’s silence when he concluded. The candle nearest him sputtered and he adjusted it carefully. Then Mrs. Blair rose and kissed him.

“You sly old daddy!” she broke out; “and you never told a soul! Well”—and she seated herself again at the table and nibbled a bonbon—“tell us what she’s like, and her ways and her manners. I suppose, of course, she’s a teacher in one of your negro schools, or a foreign missionary or something noble like that! Tell us everything—everything——” and Mrs. Blair, elbows on table, denoted the breadth of her demand by an outward sweep of her hands from the wrists.

Colonel Craighill smiled indulgently in the enjoyment of his daughter’s eagerness.

“Tell us everything—her just being from Vermont doesn’t mean much. Is she a blonde?”

“Well,” replied Colonel Craighill, colouring slightly, “Now that I think of it, I believe she is!”

“I knew it!” exclaimed Mrs. Blair; “they’re always blondes! What are her eyes?”

“Blue.”

“Stout or thin?”

“I think her proportions are about right for her age.”

“Which is——?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Are you sure about that, papa? You know they sometimes forget to count their birthdays.”

“Whom do you mean by they?” asked Colonel Craighill guardedly.

“I mean the members of my delightful sex. Let me see, you are sixty-five, if I remember right. Twice twenty-nine is”—she made the computation on her slim, supple fingers—“fifty-eight: you’re rather more than twice her age.”

“It would be more polite, to say that she’s rather less than half mine.”

“Oh, it all gets to the same place! It will have the advantage of making me appear young to have a stepmother a few years my junior. But what a blow to these old dowagers who have been suspected of having designs on you! They little knew that all the time they were pursuing you to consult about their investments or church or charity schemes, you were casting about for some lovely young thing still in the lawful possession of her own hair and teeth. Why, if I’d known that was your idea there are lots of nice girls here in town that I should love to have in the family. Wayne, you will be careful not to flirt with her!”

“Fanny!”

Colonel Craighill struck the table so sharply that the candlesticks jumped. He was angry, and the colour deepened in his face.

“Please, papa,—I didn’t mean to be rude!”

Mrs. Blair touched her father’s coat-sleeve lightly with her hand. She loved her brother very dearly, and the effect upon him of this marriage was already, in her vivid imagination, the chief thing in it. She had long felt that her father had given Wayne up; that he believed the passion for drink that took hold of his son at times was in the nature of a disease, to be suffered patiently and borne with Christian fortitude.

Wayne was vexed at his sister’s manner; he disliked contention and there was nothing to be gained by being disagreeable over their father’s marriage. He left the room to find fresh cigarettes and when he came back the air had cleared. Colonel Craighill, anxious on his part to be conciliatory, was laughing at a renewal of Fanny’s cross-questioning.

“Where did Miss Allen attend school?” she was asking.

“I believe she had private teachers,” replied Colonel Craighill, though not positively.

“And she isn’t a teacher herself or a philanthropist? Has she money?”

“She and her mother are, I believe, in comfortable circumstances. I hope that you and Wayne will appreciate the difficulties before this lady in becoming my wife—that she is stepping into a place where she will be criticized unkindly from the very fact of my position here and the disparity in our years and fortunes. I appeal to you, Fanny, as to one woman on behalf of another. You can make her way easy if you will.”

He had, with the best intentions in the world, struck the wrong note. In so many words, he was asking mercy where there had been no accusation. Mrs. Blair had not the slightest intention of committing herself to any policy toward her father’s new wife. So far as the public was concerned she would carry off the situation with outward acceptance and approval; but just now she declined to consider the question in the key her father had sounded. To him she was a frivolous person with unaccountably erratic ways, and with nothing of his own measure or sobriety. She made no reply whatever to his appeal, but chose another bonbon and ate it with exasperating slowness. Wayne saw—as her father did not—that she was angry; but Mrs. Blair fell back upon the half-mocking mood with which she had begun, demanding:

“Is she modish? Does she wear her clothes with an air?”

“I hope,” said Colonel Craighill, betrayed into the least show of resentment by her refusal to meet his question—“I hope, Fanny, that she dresses like a lady.”

“So do I, papa, if it comes to that! You haven’t told us yet how you came to meet Miss Allen.”

“It was last spring when I went to Bermuda. She and her mother were on the steamer. I saw a good deal of them then; and I have since seen them in New York, which is now really their home.”

“Have they ever been here?—I have known Allens.”

“I’m quite sure you have never met them, Fanny. Since Adelaide’s father died they have travelled much of the time.”

“So your frequent trips to New York haven’t been wholly philanthropy and business! You speak her name as though you had got well used to it. It’s funny, but I’ve never known Adelaides. Have you ever known an Adelaide, Wayne?”

“A lot of them; so have you if you will think of it,” answered her brother. He saw that his father was growing restive and he knew that Fanny was going too far. There was a point at which she could vex those who loved her most, but being wiser than she seemed she usually knew it herself. She pushed away the bonbon dish and slapped her hands together lightly.

“Wayne,” she cried, “what are we thinking of? We must see her picture! Now, papa! you know you have it in your pocket!”

“Certainly, we must see Miss Allen’s picture,” echoed Wayne, relieved at his sister’s change of tone.

“Later—later!” but Colonel Craighill’s annoyance passed and he smiled again.

“It isn’t dignified in you to invite teasing, papa. You know you have her photograph. Out with it, please!”

She bent toward him as though threatening his pockets. He laughed, but coloured deeply; then he drew from his waistcoat a thin silver case a trifle larger than a silver dollar, and suffered Fanny to take it.

“Now,” said Colonel Craighill, settling himself in his chair, “you see I am not afraid, Fanny, of even your severe judgment.”

She weighed the unopened trinket in her palm as though taunting her curiosity. Wayne lighted a fresh cigarette and turned toward his sister. He was surprised at his own indifference; but he feigned curiosity to please his father, who naturally wished his children to be interested and pleased. Fanny opened the locket and studied it carefully for an instant.

“Charming! Perfectly charming!” she exclaimed; and then, holding it close and turning her head and pursing her lips as she studied the face, “but I thought you didn’t like such fussy hair dressing—you always told me so. I don’t like the ultra-marcelling; but it’s well done—and if it’s all hers and she can manage it without a rat she’s a wonder. You’ve always decried the artificial, but I see you’re finding that Nature has her weak points. Those eyes are just a trifle inscrutable, a little heavy-lidded and dreamy—but we’ll have to see the original. Her nose seems regular enough, and her mouth—well, I wouldn’t trust any photograph to tell the truth about a mouth. She’s young—my own lost youth smites me! Here, Wayne, behold her counterfeit presentment!”

Wayne inhaled a last deep draught of his cigarette and dropped it into the ash tray. He took the case into his fingers and bent over it, a slight smile on his lips.

“Be careful! Be careful!” ejaculated his sister. “This is a crucial moment.”

Wayne’s empty hand that lay on the table slowly opened and shut; the smile left his lips, but he continued to study the picture.

“Well, Wayne! Are you having so much trouble to make up your mind?” demanded Mrs. Blair, her keen sensibilities aroused by the fixedness of Wayne’s stare at the likeness before him and the resulting interval of suspense. There was something here that she did not grasp, and she was a woman who resented being left in the dark. This interview with her father had been trying enough, but her brother’s manner struck her ominously. Colonel Craighill smiled urbanely, undisturbed by his son’s prolonged scrutiny of the face in the locket; he attached no great importance to Wayne’s opinions on any subject. To Mrs. Blair, however, the silence became intolerable and she demanded:

“Are you hypnotized—or what has struck you, Wayne?”

“Nothing at all!” he laughed, closing the locket and handing it back. “I have no criticism—most certainly none. Father, I offer my congratulations.”

And this happened midway of September, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seven.

CHAPTER II
THE LADY OF DIFFICULT OCCASIONS

THE Lady of Difficult Occasions—such was the title conferred upon Mrs. John McCandless Blair by Dick Wingfield—looked less than her thirty-two years. A slender, nervous woman, Mrs. Blair had contributed from early girlhood to the picturesqueness of life in her city. Her interests were many and varied; she did what she liked and was supremely indifferent to criticism. She wore colours that no other woman would have dared; for colour, she maintained, possesses the strongest psychical significance, and to keep in tune with things infinite one’s wardrobe must reflect the rainbow. She had tried all extant religions and had revived a number long considered obsolete; her garret was a valhalla of discarded gods. One day the scent of joss-sticks clung to the draperies of her library, the next she dipped her finger boldly in the holy water font at the door of the Catholic cathedral and sent a subscription to the Little Sisters of the Poor.

She appeared fitfully in the Blair pew at Memorial Presbyterian Church, where her father was ruling elder and her husband passed the plate; and Memorial, we may say, was the most fashionable house of prayer and worship in town, frowning down severely upon the Allequippa Club over the way. “Fanny Blair is sure of heaven,” Dick Wingfield said, “for she has tickets to all the gates.” Mrs. Blair was generous in her quixotic fashion; her husband had inherited wealth, and he was, moreover, a successful lawyer, who admired her immensely and encouraged her foibles. She dressed her twin boys after portraits of the Stuart princes, and their velvet and long curls caused many riots at the public school they attended—sent there, she said, that they might grow up strong in the democratic spirit.

When they had adjourned to the library Mrs. Blair spoke in practical ways of the new wife’s home-coming. She tendered her own services in any changes her father wished in the house. Some of her mother’s personal belongings she frankly stated her purpose to remove. They were things that did not, to Colonel Craighill’s masculine mind, seem particularly interesting or valuable. Wayne grew restless as his father and sister considered these matters. He moved about idly, throwing in a word now and then when Mrs. Blair appealed to him directly. Evenings at home had become unusual events, and domestic affairs bored him. Mrs. Blair was, however, sensitive to his moods and she continued her efforts to hold him within the circle of their talk.

“Don’t you think a reception—something large and general—would be a good thing at the start, Wayne?”

“Yes; oh, yes, by all means,” he replied, looking up from a publisher’s advertisement that he had been reading.

He left the room unnoticed a few minutes later and wandered into the wide hall, feeling the atmosphere of the house flow around him. It was the local custom, in our ready American fashion of conferring antiquity, to speak of the mansion as the old Craighill place. The house, built originally in the early seventies, had recently been remodelled and enlarged. It occupied half a block, and the grounds were beautifully kept, faithful to traditions of Mrs. Craighill’s taste. The full force of the impending change in his father’s life now struck Wayne for the first time. There is no eloquence like that of absence. He stood by the open drawing room door with his childhood and youth calling to all his senses. The thought of his mother stole across his memory—a gentle, bright, smiling spirit. The pictures on the walls; the familiar furniture; the broad fireplace; the tall bronze vases that guarded the glass doors of the conservatory, whose greenery showed at the end of the long room—those things cried to him now with a new appeal. A great bowl of yellow chrysanthemums, glowing in a far corner, struck upon his sight like flame. He walked the length of the room and gazed up at a portrait of his mother, painted in Paris by a famous artist. Its vitality had in some way vanished; the figure no longer seemed poised, ready to step down into the room. The luminous quality of the face was gone; the eyes were not so brightly responsive as of old—he was so sure of these differences that he flashed off the frame lights with a half-conscious feeling that a shadow had fallen upon the spirit represented there, and that it was kinder to leave it in darkness.

His sister called him on some pretext—he was very dear to her and the fact that he and his father were so utterly unsympathetic increased her tenderness—and repeated the programme of entertainments which she had proposed.

“It’s quite ample. There’s never any question about your doing enough, Fanny,” he remarked indifferently.

Colonel Craighill announced that he must go down to the Club to a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Greater City Improvement League, in which his son-in-law was interested.

“Wayne, you will take Fanny home in your own car, won’t you? Or maybe you’ll wait for John to stop?”

“I must go soon; Wayne will look after me,” she said, and they both went to the door to see their father off.

“It’s like old times,” she sighed, as the motor moved away; “but those times won’t come any more.”

Then with a change of manner she turned upon Wayne and seized his hands.

“Wayne, have you ever seen that woman before?”

He shook himself free with a roughness that was unlike him.

“Don’t be silly: of course not. I never heard of her. How did you get that idea?”

“You looked as though you were seeing a ghost when you looked at her picture.”

“I was thinking of ghosts, Fanny, but I wasn’t seeing one.” He lighted a cigar. “I must say that your tact sometimes leaves you at fatal moments. The Colonel was almost at the point of getting mad. He wanted to be jollied—and you did all you could to irritate him.”

“I had a perfect right to say what I pleased to him. How do you suppose he came to walk into this adventuress’s trap? A girl of twenty-nine! The hunt will be up as soon as he makes the announcement and the whole town will join the pack.”

“The town will have to stand it if we can.”

“It’s the loss of his own dignity, it’s the affront to mother’s memory—this young thing with her pretty marcelled head! There are some things that ought to be sacred in this world, and father ought to remember what our mother was—how noble and beautiful!”

“Well, we know it, Fanny; she’s our memory now—not his,” said Wayne gently; and upon this they were silent for a time, and Fanny wept softly. When Wayne spoke again it was in a different key.

“Well, father has his nerve to be getting married right on the verge of a panic. Perhaps he is doing it merely to reassure the public, to steady the market, so to speak.”

“But papa says there will be no panic. The Star printed a long interview with him only yesterday. He says there must be a readjustment of values, that’s all; he must be right about it.”

“Bless you, yes, Fanny. If father says there won’t be any panic, why, there won’t! What does John say?”

“Well, John is always cautioning me about our expenses,” she admitted ruefully, so that he laughed at her. “But great heavens, Wayne!” she exclaimed.

“Well, what’s the matter now?”

“Why, he never told us a thing about her. Who do you suppose introduced him to her?”

“My dear Fanny,” began Wayne, thrusting his long legs out at comfortable ease, “can you imagine our father dear being worked? He backed off and sparred for time when you wanted to marry John, though John belongs to our old Scotch-Irish Brahmin caste, because a Blair once owned a distillery back in the dark ages, and there was no telling but the sins of the rye juice might be visited on your children to the third and fourth generation if you married John. And if I had craved the Colonel’s permission to marry some girl in another town—some girl, let us say, that I had met on a steamer going to Bermuda—you may be dead sure he would have put detectives on her family and had a careful assay made of her moral character. Trust the Colonel, Fanny, for caution in such matters! Don’t you think for a minute that he hasn’t investigated Miss Adelaide Allen’s family into its most obscure and inaccessible recesses! Our father was not born yesterday; our father is the great Colonel Roger Craighill, a prophet honoured even on his own Monongahela. Father never makes mistakes, Fanny. I’m his only mistake. I’m a great grief to father. He has frequently admitted it. He begs me please not to forget that I am his son. I am beyond any question a bad lot; I have raised no end of hell; I have frequently been drunk—beastly, fighting drunk. And father will go to his dear pastor and ask him to pray for me, and he will admit to old sympathizing friends that I’m an awful disappointment to him. That’s the reason he stopped lecturing me long ago; he doesn’t want me to keep sober; when I get drunk and smash bread wagons in the dewy dawn with my machine after a night among the ungodly he puts on his martyr’s halo and asks his pastor to plead with God for me!”

“Wayne! Wayne! What’s the matter with you?”

He had spoken rapidly and with a bitterness that utterly confounded her; and he laughed now mirthlessly.

“It’s all right, Fanny. I’m a rotten bad lot. No wonder the Colonel has given me up; but I have the advantage of him there: I’ve given myself up! Yes, I’ve given myself up,” he repeated, and nodded his head several times as though he found pleasure in the thought.

CHAPTER III
A LETTER, A BOTTLE AND AN OLD FRIEND

WHEN Wayne had taken Mrs. Blair to her own home and had promised on her doorstep to be “good” and to come to her house soon for a further discussion of family affairs, he told Joe, the chauffeur, that he wished to drive the machine, and was soon running toward town at maximum speed.

Joe, huddled in an old ulster, watched the car’s flight with misgivings, for this mad race preluded one of Wayne’s outbreaks; and Joe was no mere hireling, but a devoted slave who grieved when Wayne, as Joe put it, “scorched the toboggan.”

Joe Denny’s status at the Craighill house was not clearly defined. He lodged in the garage and appeared irregularly in the servants’ dining room with the recognized chauffeur who drove the senior Craighill in his big car. It had been suggested in some quarters that Colonel Craighill employed Joe Denny to keep track of Wayne and to take care of him when he was tearing things loose; but this was not only untrue but unjust to Joe. Joe had been a coal miner before he became the “star” player of the Pennsylvania State League, and Wayne had marked his pitching one day while killing time between trains at Altoona. His sang froid—an essential of the successful pitcher, and the ease with which he baffled the batters of the opposing nine, aroused Wayne’s interest. Joe Denny enjoyed at this time a considerable reputation, his fame penetrating even to the discriminating circles of the National League, with the result that “scouts” had been sent to study his performances. When a fall from an omnibus interrupted Joe’s professional career, Wayne, who had kept track of him, paid his hospital charges, and Joe thereupon moved his “glass” arm to Pittsburg. By shrewd observation he learned the management of a motor car, and attached himself without formality to the person of Wayne Craighill. For more than a year he had thus been half guardian, half protégé. Wayne’s friends had learned to know him; they even sent for him on occasions to take Wayne home when he was getting beyond control; and Wayne himself had grown to depend upon the young fellow. It was something to have a follower whom one could abuse at will without having to apologize afterward. Besides, Joe was wise and keen. He knew all the inner workings of the Craighill household; he advised the Scotch gardener in matters pertaining to horticulture, to the infinite disgust of that person; he adorned the barn with portraits of leading ball players, cut from sporting supplements, and this gallery of famous men was a source of great irritation to Colonel Craighill’s solemn German chauffeur, who had not the slightest interest in, or acquaintance with, the American national game. Joe’s fidelity to Wayne’s interests was so unobtrusive and intelligent that Wayne himself was hardly conscious of it. Such items of news as the prospective arrival or departure of Colonel Craighill; the fact that he was trading his old machine for a new one; or that Walsh, Colonel Craighill’s trusted lieutenant, had bought a new team of Kentucky roadsters for his daily drive in the park—or that John McCandless Blair, Wayne’s brother-in-law, was threatened with a nomination for mayor on a Reform ticket—such items as these Joe collected through agencies of his own and imparted to Wayne for his better instruction.

To-night the lust for drink had laid hold upon Wayne and his rapid flight through the cool air sharpened the edge of his craving in every tingling, excited nerve. His body swayed over the wheel; he passed other vehicles by narrow margins that caused Joe to shudder; and policemen, looking after him, swore quietly and telephoned to headquarters that young Craighill was running wild again. He had started for the Allequippa Club, but, remembering that his father was there, changed his mind. The governors of the Penn, the most sedate and exclusive of the Greater City’s clubs, had lately sent a polite threat of expulsion for an abuse of its privileges during a spree, and that door was shut in his face. The thought of this enraged him now as he spun through the narrow streets in the business district. Very likely all the clubs in town would be closed against him before long. Then with increased speed he drove the car to the Craighill building, told Joe to wait, passed the watchman on duty at the door and ascended to the Craighill offices.

A lone book-keeper was at work, and Wayne spoke to him and passed on to his own room.

He turned on the lights and began pulling out the drawers of his desk, turning over their contents with a feverish haste that increased their disorder. Presently he found what he sought: a large envelope marked “Private, W. C.” in his own hand. He slapped it on the desk to free it of dust, then tore it open and drew out a number of letters, addressed in a woman’s hand to himself, and a photograph, which he held up and scrutinized with eyes that were disagreeably hard and bright. It was not the same photograph that his father had shown at the dinner table, but it represented another view of the same head—there was no doubt of that. He studied it carefully; it seemed, indeed, to exercise a spell upon him. He recalled what Mrs. Blair had said about the eyes; but in this picture they seemed to conspire with a smile on the girl’s lips to tease and tantalize.

A number of letters that had been placed on his desk after he left the office caught his eye. One or two invitations to large social affairs he tossed into the waste-paper basket; he was only bidden now to the most general functions. He caught up an envelope bearing the legend of a New York hotel and a typewritten superscription. He tore this open, still muttering his wrath at the discarded invitations, and then sat down and read eagerly a letter in a woman’s irregular hand dated two days earlier:

“My dear Wayne:

“You wouldn’t believe I could do it, and I am not sure of it yet myself; but I wanted to prepare you before he breaks the news. There’s a whole lot to tell that I won’t bore you with—for you do hate to be bored, you crazy boy. Wayne, I’m going to marry your father! Don’t be angry—please! I know everything that you will think when you read this—but mama has driven me to it. She never forgave me for letting you go, and life with her has become intolerable. And please believe this, Wayne. I really respect and admire your father more than any man I have met, and can’t you see what it will mean to me to get away from this hideous life I have been leading? Why, Wayne, I’d rather die than go on as we have lived all these years, knocking around the world and mama raising money to keep us going in ways I can’t speak of. You know the whole story of that. I let mama think I am doing this to please her, but I am not. I am doing it to get away from her. I have made her promise to let me alone, and I will do all I can for her. She’s going abroad right after my marriage and I hate to say it of my own mother, but I hope never to see her again.

“Of course you could probably stop the marriage by telling your father how near we came to hitting it off. I have always felt that you were unjust to me in that—I really cared more for you than I knew—but that’s all over now. That was another of mama’s mistakes. She let her greed get the better of her and I suffered. But let us be good friends—shan’t we? You know more about me than anybody, Wayne—how ignorant I am, and all that. Why, I had to study hard—mama suggested it, that’s the kind of thing she can do—to learn to talk to your father about politics and philanthropy and those things. If anything should happen—if you should spoil it all, I don’t know what mama would do; but it would be something unpleasant, be sure of that. She sold everything we had to follow your father about to those small, select places he loves so well.

“I am going to try to live up to your father’s good name. I don’t believe I’m bad. I’m just a kind of featherweight; and you will be nice to me, won’t you, when I come? Your father has told me everything—about the old house and how it belongs to you. Of course you won’t run away and leave me and you will help me to hit it off with your sister, too. He says she’s a little difficult, but I know she must be interesting. As you see, I’ve taken mama’s name by her second marriage since our little affair. Explanations had grown tiresome and mama enjoys playing to the refined sensibilities of those nice people who think three marriages are not quite respectable for one woman....”

He read on to the end, through more in the same strain. He flinched at the reference to the home and to his sister, but at the close he lighted a cigarette and re-read the whole calmly.

“It was your dear mother that caught the Colonel, Addie; you are pretty and you like clothes and you know how to wear them, but you haven’t your dear mother’s strategic mind. Oh, you were a sucker, Colonel, and they took you in! You are so satisfied with your own virtue, and you are so pained by my degradation! Let’s see where you come out.”

He continued to mutter to himself as he re-folded the letter. He grinned his appreciation of the care which had caused its author to avoid the placing of any tell-tale handwriting on the envelope. “I’m a bad, bad lot, Colonel, but there are traps my poor wandering feet have not stumbled into.”

He glanced hurriedly at the packet of letters that he had found with the photograph and then thrust this latest letter in with the others and locked them all in a tin box he found in one of the drawers. When this had been disposed of he pulled the desk out from the wall and drew from a hidden cupboard in the back of it a quart bottle of whiskey and a glass. The sight of the liquor caused the craving of an hour before to seize upon him with renewed fury. He felt himself suddenly detached, alone, with nothing else in the world but himself and this bright fluid. It flashed and sparkled alluringly, causing all his senses to leap. At a gulp his blood would run with fire, and the little devils would begin to dance in his brain, and he could plan a thousand evil deeds that he was resolved to do. He was the Blotter, and a blotter was a worthless thing to be used and tossed aside by everyone as worthless. He would accept the world’s low appraisement without question, but he would take vengeance in his own fashion. He grasped the bottle, filled the glass to the brim and was about to carry it to his lips when the clerk whom he had passed in the outer office knocked sharply, and, without waiting, flung open the door.

“Beg pardon, but here’s a gentleman to see you, Mr. Craighill.”

With the glass half raised, Wayne turned impatiently to greet a short man who stood smiling at the door.

“Hello, Craighill!”

“Jimmy Paddock!” blurted Wayne.

The odour of whiskey was keen on the air and Wayne’s hand shook with the eagerness of his appetite; but the fool of a clerk had surprised him at a singularly inopportune moment. He slowly lowered the glass to the desk, his eyes upon his caller, who paused on the threshold for an instant, then strode in with outstretched hand.

“That delightful chauffeur of yours told me you were here and I thought I wouldn’t wait for a better chance to look you up. Had to come into town on an errand—was waiting for the trolley—recognized your man and here I am! Well!”

The glass was at last safe on the desk and Wayne, still dazed by the suddenness with which his thirst had been defrauded, turned his back upon it and greeted Paddock coldly. The Reverend James Paddock had already taken a chair, with his face turned away from the bottle, and he plunged into lively talk to cover Craighill’s embarrassment. They had not met for five years, and then it had been by mere chance in Boston, when they were both running for trains that carried one to the mountains and the other to the sea. Their ways had parted definitely when they left their preparatory school, Wayne to enter the “Tech,” Paddock to go to Harvard. Wayne was not in the least pleased to see this old comrade of his youth: there was a wide gulf of time to bridge and Wayne shrank from the effort of flinging his memory across it. As Paddock unbuttoned his topcoat, Wayne noted the clerical collar—noted it, it must be confessed, with contempt. He remembered Paddock as a rather silent boy, but the young minister talked eagerly with infinite good spirits, chuckling now and then in a way that Wayne remembered. As his resentment of the intrusion passed, some reference to their old days at St. John’s awakened his curiosity as to one or two of their classmates and certain of the masters, and Wayne began to take part in the talk.

Jimmy Paddock had been a homely boy, and the years had not improved his looks. His skin was very dark, and his hair black, but his eyes were a deep, unusual blue. A sad smile somehow emphasized the plainness of his clean-shaven face. He spoke with a curious rapidity, the words jumbling at times, and after trying vaguely to recall some idiosyncrasy that had set the boy apart, Wayne remembered that Paddock had stammered, and this swift utterance with its occasional abrupt pauses was due to his method of conquering the difficulty. Behind the short, well-knit figure Wayne saw outlined the youngster who had been the wonder of the preparatory school football team for two years, and later at Harvard the hero of the ’Varsity eleven. There was no question of identification as to the physical man; but the boy he had known had led in the wildest mischief of the school. He distinctly recollected occasions on which Jimmy Paddock had been caned, in spite of the fact that he belonged to a New England family of wealth and social distinction. Paddock, with his chair tipped back and his hands thrust into his pockets, volunteered answers to some of the questions that were in Wayne’s mind.

“You see, Craighill, when I got out of college my father wanted me to go into the law, but I tried the law school for about a month and it was no good, so I chucked it. The fact is, I didn’t want to do anything, and I used to hit it up occasionally and paint things to assert my independence of public opinion. It was no use; couldn’t get famous that way; only invited the parental wrath. Then a yellow newspaper printed a whole page of pictures of American degenerates, sons of rich families, and would you believe it, there I was, like Abou Ben Adhem, leading all the rest! It almost broke my mother’s heart, and my father stopped speaking to me. It struck in on me, too, to find myself heralded as a common blackguard, so I went into exile—way up in the Maine woods and lived with the lumber-jacks. Up there I met Paul Stoddard. He’s the head of the Brothers of Bethlehem who have a house over here in Virginia. The brothers work principally among men—miners, sailors, lumbermen. It’s a great work and Stoddard’s a big chap, as strong as a bull, who knows how to get close to all kinds of people. I learned all I know from Stoddard. One night as I lay there in my shanty it occurred to me that never in my whole stupid life had I done anything for anybody. Do you see? I wasn’t converted, in the usual sense”—his manner was wholly serious now, and he bent toward Wayne with the sad little smile about his lips—“I didn’t feel that God was calling me or anything of that kind; I felt that Man was calling me: I used to go to bed and lie awake up there in the woods and hear the wind howling and the snow sifting in through the logs, and that idea kept worrying me. A lot of the jacks got typhoid fever, and there wasn’t a doctor within reach anywhere, so I did the best I could for them. For the first time in my life I really felt that here was something worth doing, and it was fun, too. Stoddard went from there down to New York to spend a month in the East Side and I hung on to him—I was afraid to let go of him. He gave me things to do, and he suggested that I go into the ministry—said my work would be more effective with an organization behind me—but I ducked and ducked hard. I told him the truth, about what I didn’t believe, this and that and so on; but he put the thing to me in a new way. He said nobody could believe in man who didn’t believe in God, too! Do you get the idea? Well, I was a long time coming to see it that way.

“It was no good going home to knock around and no use discussing such a thing with my family, and I knew people would think me crazy. Stoddard was going West, to do missionary stunts in Michigan, where there were more lumber camps, so I went along. I used to help him with the lumber-jacks, and try to keep the booze out of them; and first thing I knew he had me reading and getting ready for orders; he said I’d better keep clear of divinity schools; and I guess he had figured it out that if I got too much divinity I would get scared and back water. Then I went home and broke the news to the family. They didn’t take much stock in it; they thought I would take a tumble and be a worse disgrace than ever. But there was plenty of money and I had no head for business, anyhow, and there was a chance that I might become respectable, so I got ordained very quietly three years ago at a mission away up on Lake Superior where a bishop had taken an interest in me—and here I am.”

The minister drew a pipe from his pocket, filled and lighted it, shaking his head at Craighill’s offer of a cigar.

“Thanks; I prefer this. Hope the smoke won’t be painful to you; it’s a brand they affect out in my suburb, but it’s better than what we used to have up in the lumber camps. I still take the comfort of a pipe, but the drink I cut out and the swearing. As I remember, it was you who taught me to cuss in school because my stammering made it sound so funny.”

Wayne had recalled a good many things about Paddock but the mood he had brought from his father’s house did not yield readily to the confessions of this boyhood friend who had reappeared in the livery of the Christian ministry. The new status was difficult for Craighill to accept and, conscious of the antagonism his recital had awakened, Paddock regretted that he had volunteered his story. The Craighill whom he had known was a big, generous, outspoken fellow whom everybody liked; the man before him was morose and obstinately resentful: and the fact that he had caught him in his own office at an unusual hour, about to indulge his notorious appetite for drink, was in itself an unhappy circumstance. The bottle and the glass were, to say the least, an unfortunate background for reunion. Paddock touched Wayne’s knee lightly; he wished to regain the ground he had lost by his frankness, which had so signally failed of response.

“You have certainly deviated considerably,” remarked Wayne without humour. “I believe they call your kind of thing Christian sociology, and it’s all right. I congratulate you on having struck something interesting in this life. It’s more than I’ve been able to do. Your story is romantic and beautiful; mine had better not be told, Jimmy. I’m as bad as they’re made; I’ve hit the bottom hard. When you came in I had just reached an important conclusion, and was going to empty a quart to celebrate the event.”

“Well?” inquired the minister, studying anew the fine head; the eyes with their hard glitter; the lips that twitched slightly; the fingers whose trembling he had noted in the lighting of repeated cigarettes. “Be sure I shall value your confidence, old man,” said the minister encouragingly, smiling his sad little smile.

“I’m glad you’re interested, Jimmy, but we’ve chosen different routes. Mine, I guess, has scenic advantages over yours and the pace is faster. You’re headed for the heavenly kingdom. I’m going to hell.”

CHAPTER IV
THE WAYS OF WAYNE CRAIGHILL

FOUR days passed. Wayne Craighill ceased twirling and knotting the curtain cord and held his right hand against the strong light of the office window to test his nerves. The fingers twitched and trembled, and he turned away impatiently and flung himself into a chair by his desk, hiding his hands and their tell-tale testimony deep in his pockets. Half a dozen times he shook himself petulantly and attacked his work with frenzied eagerness, as though to be rid of it in a single spurt; but after an hour thus futilely spent he threw himself back and glared at a large etching, depicting a storm-driven galleon riding wildly under a frightened moon, that hung against the dark-olive cartridge paper on the wall above his desk. Shadows appeared now and then on the ground-glass outer door, and lingered several times, testifying to their physical embodiment by violently seizing and rattling the knob. Craighill scowled at every assault, and presently when some importunate visitor had both shaken and kicked the door, he yawned and sought the window again, looking moodily down, as from a hill-top, upon the city of his birth, where practically all his life had been spent, the City of the Iron Heart, lying like a wedge at the confluence of the two broad rivers.

Wayne had used himself hard, as the lines in his smooth-shaven face testified; but the vigour of the Scotch-Irish stock survived in him, and even to-day he carried his tall frame erectly. His head covered with brown hair in which there was a reddish glint, was really fine and his blue eyes, not just now at their clearest, had in them the least hint of the dreamer. His suit of brown—a solid colour—became him: he was dressed with an added scrupulousness as though in conformity to an inner contrition and rehabilitation. He was in his thirtieth year but appeared older to-day as his gaze lay upon the drifting, shifting smoke-cloud that hung above the Greater City.

The son of Colonel Roger Craighill was inevitably a conspicuous person in his native city and his dissipated habits had long been the subject of despairing comment by his fellow-citizens, and the text of occasional lightly veiled sermons in press and pulpit. Dick Wingfield had once remarked that is was too bad that there were only ten commandments, as this small number painfully limited Wayne Craighill’s possible infractions. It was Wingfield who named Wayne Craighill the Blotter, in appreciation of Wayne’s amazing capacity for drink; and it was he who said that Wayne’s sins were merely an expression of the law of compensation and were thrown into the scale to offset Colonel Craighill’s nobility and virtue. Whatever truth may lie in this, it is indisputable that the elder Craighill’s rectitude tended to heighten the colour of his son’s iniquities.

The Blotter had been drunk again. This is what would be said all over the Greater City. At the clubs it would be remarked that he had also had a fight with two policemen, and that he had been put in pickle at the Country Club and then smuggled to his office to await the arrival of Colonel Craighill, who had been to Cleveland to address something or other. The nobler his father’s errands abroad, the wickeder were the Blotter’s diversions in his absences. The last time that Roger Craighill had attended the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church Wayne had amused himself by violating all the city ordinances that interposed the slightest barriers to the enjoyment of life as he understood it. But the Blotter, it is only just to say, was still capable of shame. His physical and moral reaction to-day were acute; and he shrank from facing the world again. More than all, the thought of meeting his father face to face sent the hot blood surging to his head, intensifying its dull ache. His sister Fanny would be likely to show her sympathy and confidence by promptly giving a tea or a dinner to which he would be specially bidden, to demonstrate to the world that in spite of his derelictions his family still stood by him. The remembrance of past offenses, and of the definite routine that his restorations followed, only increased his misery. The usual interview with his father, with whose mild, martyr-like forbearance he had long been familiar, rose before him intolerably.

A light tap at the inner door of Wayne’s room caused him to leap to his feet and stand staring for a moment at a shadow on the ground glass. The door led into Roger Craighill’s room, and as he had been thinking of his father, the knock struck upon his senses ominously. He hesitated an instant, curbing an impulse to fly; then the door opened cautiously, and Joe Denny slipped in, seated himself carelessly on a table in the centre of the room, and nursed his knee.

Consider Joe a moment; he is not the humblest figure in this chronicle: a tall, lithe young fellow, unmistakably Irish-American, with a bang of black hair across his forehead, and a humorous light in his dark eyes. His grin is captivating but we are conscious also of shrewdness in his face. (It took sharp sprinting to steal second when Joe had the ball in his hand!) He is trimly dressed in ready-made exaggeration of last year’s style. His red cravat is fastened with a gold pin in the similitude of crossed bats supporting a tiny ball, symbol of our later Olympian nine. You may, if you like, look up Joe Denny’s batting record for the time he pitched in the Pennsylvania State League, and you will thereby gauge the extent of New York’s loss in having bought his “release” only a week before he broke his wizard’s arm.

Joe, at ease on the table, viewed Mr. Wayne Craighill critically, but with respect. In his more tranquil moments Joe spoke a fairly reputable English derived from the public schools of his native hills, but his narrative style frequently took colour of the idiom of the diamond, and under stress of emotion he departed widely from the instruction imparted by the State of Pennsylvania on the upper waters of the Susquehanna.

“Say, the Colonel’s due on the 4:30.”

Wayne straightened himself unconsciously and his glance fell upon the desk on which lay an accumulation of papers awaiting his inspection and signature.

“Who said so? I thought he wasn’t due till to-morrow.”

“I was up at the house when Walsh telephoned for the machine to go to the station. I guess the Colonel wired Walsh.”

“I’d like to know why Walsh couldn’t have done me the honour to tell me,” said Wayne sourly.

“I guess Walsh don’t know you’re back. They asked me in the front office a while ago and I told ’em I guessed you were up at the Club; and then I came in here through the Colonel’s room to see if you had stayed put.”

Craighill was silent for a moment, then he asked:

“How long was I gone this time, Joe?”

He addressed young Denny without condescension, in a tone of kindness that minimized the obvious differences between them.

“It was Wednesday night you broke loose, and this is Saturday all right.”

“I must have bumped some of the high places—my head feels like it. How about the newspapers?”

“Nothing doing! Walsh fixed that up all right. You see it was like this: you made a row on the steps of the Allequippa Club when I was trying to steer you home. I’d been waiting on the curb with a machine till about 1 A. M., and some of the gents followed you out of the Club and wanted you to come back and go to bed; and when a couple of cops came along, properly not seeing anything, and not letting on, you must up and jump on one of ’em and pound his head. Then the other cop broke into the fuss, and there was a good deal doing and I got you into the machine and slid for the Country Club and got a chauffeur’s bed in the garage and sat on you till you went to sleep.”

Wayne shrugged his shoulders.

“Was that all I did? It sounds pretty tame; I must be getting better—or worse.”

He drew a cigarette from his case and struck a match before he remembered a rule that forbade smoking in office hours; then he found a cigar and chewed it unlighted. Joe eyed the littered desk reflectively.

“Say, you’d better brush that off before the Colonel comes.”

“Put that stuff out of sight,” commanded Wayne and tossed him his keys. “See here, Joe, I started Wednesday night and Thursday night I made a row on the Club steps, and you took me out to Rosedale in the machine and kept me there till you smuggled me in here this afternoon. That’s all right enough, but there was another chap in the row at the Club—I thought I was fighting the whole force, and you say there were two policemen there. There was another fellow besides the policemen.”

“Forget it! Forget it!” grinned Denny, waving his hand airily. “The bases were full for a few minutes and a young gent came along and took our side against the cops, see? The two cops had us going some and this little chap blowing in out of a minor league rapped a two-bagger on the biggest cop’s chin. ‘You Mr. Craighill’s chauffeur?’ he says to me, sweet and gentle-like; and between us we picked you up and threw you into the machine and I cut for the tall, green hills. As the coal-oil lit up and she got in motion, I looked back, and our little friend that hit the cop was a handin’ the cop his card.”

Craighill frowned fiercely with the effort of memory.

“Who was this man that took my part? He must have followed me out of the Club.”

“Nit; he was new talent; and listen—he was a Bible-barker.”

“A minister?”

“Sure. He wore his collar buttoned behind and a three-story vest. He wasn’t as tall as you or me but he was good and husky and he lined out three on the cop’s mug, snappy and zippy, like a triple-play in a tied game.”

“A priest? It wasn’t Father Ryan?”

“It wasn’t the father; it was new talent, I tell you. The gent who came up here to see you the night you broke loose. He was out looking for you Thursday night; guess he heard you were going some. And after he spiked the cop and we got off in the machine there he stood bowing and tipping his dice to the cops and handing ’em his card.”

Light suddenly dawned upon Wayne.

“Paddock; O Lord!” he ejaculated.

A clock tinkled five on the mantel and Wayne’s manner changed. He pointed to the outer door.

“You’d better clear out. Stop in the front office and tell Mr. Walsh I’m here, do you understand?”

“Say, Mrs. Blair’s been lookin’ for you; she’s had the ’phone goin’ for two days. She flew in her machine to Rosedale to look for you but they were on and didn’t give it away. You better call her up.”

“Yes, I’ll attend to it; clear out.”

Already Colonel Craighill had quietly entered the adjoining room followed by an office boy bearing a travelling bag. On his desk lay a dozen sheets of paper, hardly larger than a playing card, and these he examined with the swift ease of habit. They were reports, condensed to the smallest compass, and expressed in bald dollars and tons all the Craighill enterprises. It was thus that Roger Craighill, like a great commander, viewed the broad field of his operations through the eyes of others. Bank balances; totals of bills payable and receivable; so much coal mined at one point; so many tons of coke ready for shipment at another; the visible tonnage in the general market; the day’s prices—these bare data were communicated to the chief daily at the close of business, and in his frequent absences were sent to him by wire. He summoned a boy.

“Please say to Mr. Walsh that I’m ready to see him.”

Walsh appeared instantly: he had, indeed, been awaiting the summons, and was prepared for it. A definite routine attended every return of the chief to his headquarters. He invariably called Walsh, his chief of staff; and thereafter was ready to see his son. In every business office the high powers are merely tolerated by the subordinates, to whom the senior partner or the president is usually “the boss” or “the old man.” Roger Craighill was not to be so apostrophized even behind his back: he was “the Colonel” to everyone. To a few contemporaries only was Craighill “Roger” and these were citizens bound together by memories of the old city, who as young men had cheered Kossuth through the streets in 1851, and who a decade later had met in the Committee of Safety or marched South with musket or sword in hand.

“Ah, Walsh, how is everything going? I see that the pumps at No. 18 are out of order again. I think I’d better go after the Watkins people personally about that; we’ve been patient enough with them.”

Walsh nodded. He was short and thick and quite bald. He had formerly been the “credit man” of one of the Craighill enterprises, which, it happened, was a wholesale grocery; but he had grown into the confidence of Roger Craighill and when Craighill organized the grocery business into a corporation and began directing it from the fourteenth story of the Craighill building, Walsh became Craighill’s confidential man of affairs, with broad administrative powers.

Walsh thrust his hands into the pockets of his office coat and began talking at once of several matters of importance connected with the Craighill interests. Craighill nodded oftener than he spoke as Walsh made his succinct statements. There was no sentiment in Walsh; his voice was as dry and hard as his facts. He had studied credits so long that his life’s chief concern was solvency. He could tell you any day in the week the amount of bituminous coal in the bins at Cincinnati or Louisville; or whether the corner grocers of Johnstown or Youngstown had paid for their last purchases from the Wayne-Craighill Company. Craighill’s inquiries were largely perfunctory, a fact not lost upon Walsh, who fidgeted in his chair.

“Everything seems all right,” said Craighill, turning round and facing Walsh. “By the way, did the home papers report my address before the Western Reserve Society? Here’s a very fair account of it from the Cleveland papers. I’d be glad if you’d look it over. I’m often troubled, Walsh, by the amount of time these public and semi-public matters take, but in one way and another I am well repaid. They inject a certain variety into my life, and the acquaintances and friendships I have made among statesmen, educators, financiers and men of affairs are really of great value to me.”

“Um.”

Walsh twirled the clipping in his fingers. The discussion of anything outside the range of business embarrassed him. It was perfectly proper for Roger Craighill to spend his time with other gentlemen of wealth and influence in making after-dinner speeches and in seeking ways and means of ameliorating the condition of the poor whites or the poor blacks of the South, or in stimulating interest in the merit system, or in reforming the currency. Walsh thought favourably of these things, though he did not think of them deeply or often.

“Ah, Wayne!”

The moment had arrived for the son to show himself and Wayne Craighill entered from his own room and walked quickly to his father’s desk. Walsh rose and examined the young man critically with his small, shrewd eyes, then left with an abrupt good night. Father and son greeted each other cordially; the father held the young man’s hand a moment as they stood by the desk.

“Wayne, my boy!” said the elder warmly, “sit down. How’s Fanny? She came home from York Harbour rather early this year.”

“Oh, she’s all right,” replied Wayne, though he had not seen his sister during his father’s absence. He assumed that the fact of his latest escapade was known to his father. Everyone always seemed to know, though for several years Roger Craighill had suspended the rebukes, threats and expostulations with which he had met Wayne’s earlier lapses. His father’s cordiality put Wayne on guard at once: he suspected that he was to be taken to task for his sins with a severity that had drawn interest during his immunity.

“I am sorry to see that you have overdrawn your account somewhat,” remarked Colonel Craighill, holding up one of the papers and examining it through his eye-glasses. His manner was now that of a teacher who has summoned an erring student for reproof. The mildness of his manner irritated Wayne, who was, moreover, honestly surprised by his father’s statement.

“I didn’t know that; in fact I don’t believe that can be right, sir. What’s the amount?”

“Four thousand dollars.”

Wayne’s surprise increased.

“It’s an error. I have overdrawn no such amount; I’m sure of that.” But his head still ached and he sought vainly for an explanation of the item on the sheet his father passed over to him.

“Wayne,” began Colonel Craighill, “I simply cannot have you do this sort of thing. It’s bad for you, for you can have no need of any such sum of money in addition to your regular income and your salary; and it’s bad for the office discipline. I have prided myself that some of the foremost men of the country have placed their sons in my care. Think of the effect on these young men out there,”—he waved his hand toward the outer offices—“of your extravagant, wasteful ways.”

Wayne was familiar enough with the black depths of his infamy and he knew his value as an example; but he groped blindly for an explanation of the overdraft. Suddenly the knowledge flashed upon him that it represented the price of some shares in a coal-mining company in which his father was interested. They had been offered for sale in the settlement of an estate and as he supposed that the Craighill interests already controlled the property he had purchased them on his own account a few days before, with a view to turning them over to his father on his return if he wished them. The amount was small as such transactions go, and as he had not the required sum in bank he overdrew his account in the office. His own income from various sources—real estate, bonds and shares representing his half of the considerable fortune left by Mrs. Craighill—was collected through the office, where he kept an open account. His father’s readiness to pillory him increased the irritability left by his latest dissipation. A four-year-old child will not brook injustice; there is nothing a man resents more. He could very quickly turn his father’s criticism by an explanation; but just now in his bitterness he shrank from commendation. The gravamen of his offense was trifling; he had been misjudged; his pride had been touched; he refused to justify himself.

He returned to his own room where a little later Walsh found him. Walsh, having tapped on the outer door, was admitted in sulky silence and squeezed his fat bulk into a chair by Wayne’s desk. He gazed at the son of his chief with what, for Walsh, approximated benevolence.

“I’ve been drunk,” remarked Wayne, with an air of suggesting an inevitable topic of conversation.

“Um,” growled Walsh. “I had heard something of it.”

“I suppose everybody has heard it. My sprees seem to lack a decent cloistral quiet some way. Joe told me you had shut up the newspapers. When my head stops aching I’ll try to thank you in proper language.”

“I’ll tell you how you can avoid getting drunk in the future if you are interested,” remarked Walsh.

“If you mean burning down the distilleries I’d like you to know that I’m not in a mood for joking.”

“Um. I was not going to advise you to commit arson. I have never offered you any advice before; I’m going to give you some now. You’ve got about all there is out of drink and you’d better get interested in something else. The only way to stop is to quit, and you can do it. I’ve a notion that you and I are going to be better acquainted in the future. Such being the idea I’d like to be sure that you are going to keep straight. You make me tired.”

Wayne was not sure that he understood. No one, least of all his father’s grim, silent lieutenant, had ever spoken to him in just this tone, and he was surprised to find that Walsh’s method of attack interested him. He was humble before the old fellow in the linen coat.

“What’s the use, Tom? I’m well headed for the bottom; better let me go on down.”

“The top is less crowded and more comfortable than the bottom. Just as a matter of my own dignity I’d stay up as high as I could if I were you. I had a good chance to go down myself once, but I took a dip or two and it didn’t look good down below—too many bones. Um. That’s all of that.”

He chewed an unlighted cigar ruminantly until Wayne spoke.

“The Colonel’s going to get married.”

“Um,” Walsh nodded. His emotions were always under control and Wayne did not know whether he had imparted fresh information or not. He imagined he had, for it was not likely that his father would make a confidant of Walsh in any social matter.

“The Colonel knows his own business.”

“As a matter of fact, does he?”

“Um.”

Walsh’s cigar pointed to a remote corner of the ceiling, but his eyes were fixed on Wayne. He had apparently no intention of discussing Colonel Craighill’s marriage and he abruptly changed the subject.

“You bought fifty shares of Sand Creek stock the other day from the Moore estate.”

Wayne scowled; these were the shares he had overdrawn his office account to buy, with the intention of turning them over to his father, and his father’s criticism of the overdraft rankled afresh.

“Yes; I bought fifty shares. How did you find it out?”

“Tried to buy ’em myself and found you had beat me to ’em.”

“I overdrew my office account to buy them. I thought father would want them; but now he can’t have them.”

“Why?”

“Because in a fit of righteousness he jumped me for my overdraft. It was the first time I was ever over; you know that, and it would have squared itself in a few days anyhow. But if you want those shares——”

“I don’t want ’em. The Colonel wants ’em. He told me to get ’em but I didn’t know there was any great rush about it. The Colonel’s friends in New York, that he got into the Sand Creek Company, asked him to pick up those shares; their control is by a narrow margin, and they wanted to fortify themselves. They’d looked to the Colonel to take care of this little bunch. Does he know you’ve got ’em?”

“Oh, no; not on your life! After jumping me for buying them? My dear Tom Walsh, there are moments when the worm will turn!”

This was the first occasion on which Wayne had ever spoken of his father to Walsh except in terms of respect, and Walsh was perfectly aware of it.

“If I were you I’d turn those shares over to the Colonel.”

“If it’s anything to you—if you’re going to be criticized for failing to get them, I’ll give them to him—or I’ll sell them to you.”

“No, you don’t have to worry about me, my boy; I can take care of myself, but I don’t want you to feel that way toward your father. It ain’t healthy; it ain’t right.”

“Please don’t do that, Tom. My head aches, and you’re too good a fellow to preach. I didn’t know those shares were so valuable; it was just a piece of fool luck that I got them. I suppose they thought letting me have them was the same as passing them over to father.”

“That’s the way it ought to be.”

“But, dear old Tom,” and he laid his hand on Walsh’s thick knee, “dear old Tom, it isn’t, it isn’t, it ain’t!”

CHAPTER V
A CHILD OF THE IRON CITY

WAYNE and his father met the next morning at breakfast, a function at which, when Wayne appeared, the senior Craighill discussed the day’s news in his large way as a student of affairs. This morning he had brought the newspapers to the table and they were piled by his plate.

“I sent out notice of my engagement to all the papers last night. I suppose it was to be expected that they would treat the matter sensationally. They have spared nothing.”

Colonel Craighill deplored the pernicious tendencies of the American press generally and of the local newspapers particularly. They made light work of reputations, he declared; they were bitterly partisan in politics; and Colonel Craighill believed thoroughly that in an independent and courageous press lay the hope of the Republic. He pushed the papers toward his son with the tips of his fingers.

“They insisted on my portrait and had to have Miss Allen’s also. If I had refused they would probably have substituted something even worse than you see there. A picture like that is bound to awaken prejudice. It’s an outrage on public decency!” he ended indignantly.

Wayne eyed the papers critically. There was no lack of respect in the text which was spread across two columns at the top of the page beneath the joined portraits; he even caught the flavour of some of his father’s own phrases, though they were not directly quoted, and as for the illustrations, they were not better or worse than the average newspaper pictures. One journal presented a sketch of the Craighill family, with generous reference to Wayne’s mother and her high place among the women who had contributed to the city’s better life. Miss Allen was a woman of unusual charm, of an old New England family, who had lived much abroad, and her coming would be an event of interest and importance in the Greater City. Mrs. Blair and Wayne were mentioned in all these recitals to complete the family history.

“You get off easy,” remarked Wayne, carelessly, scanning the column of condensed news.

“The Star has an editorial on some of the points I made in my Cleveland speech. I suppose Bixby had that done. Bixby’s a good enough fellow, but why he should own a newspaper as vile as the Star I don’t know.”

“I guess men don’t own newspapers for fun,” remarked Wayne. “Bixby bought the Star to use as a club in his other businesses. It would help us if we had a sheet to fight back with.”

“I had a chance to buy the Star when Bixby took it, but I had too many cares already.”

“Well, you might have made a decent paper of it. That’s what you’ve always said we need in this town; but nobody wants to sink money in a daily Sunday-school organ.”

“If I had my life to live over again I should go into journalism; its opportunities for public service are limitless and I don’t believe the people really want these indecent things that are thrown on our doorsteps to-day.”

The decline of the American press was a familiar topic of conversation at the Craighill breakfast table, but to-day it served to divert attention from the great issue of the hour. When Wayne had finished with the papers he told the maid to take them away and addressed himself to the simple breakfast.

“They talk of running John for mayor,” remarked Colonel Craighill, “and I hope he’ll consent to be the Municipal League’s candidate. He’d have the support of the best element beyond a doubt.”

“Beyond a doubt,” Wayne repeated, not particularly interested in his brother-in-law’s political ambitions; “but that wouldn’t elect him. We’ve had reform candidates before who were just as good as John. They start all right, but they don’t finish.”

“All we can do in such matters is to keep up the fight. The powers of evil can’t prevail forever.”

“No; but they work with the boys in the trenches while the rest of us abuse them over expensive dinners. There’s a practical difference. This town’s all right. If we’d stop abusing it and suppress the muck-rakers we might get somewhere.”

“I’m glad Fanny takes my marriage in good part,” remarked Colonel Craighill, to whom Wayne’s political views were not important. Wayne answered cheerfully for his sister’s acceptance of the new situation in family affairs.

“Oh, Fanny’s all right! You can always be sure she’ll rise to an occasion.”

“Fanny is a fine woman,” declared Colonel Craighill.

“She is all of that,” replied Wayne.

“I used to fear, in her young girlhood, that she was a trifle flighty; but marriage settled her wonderfully.”

“There’s a prevailing impression that it will do that,” retorted Wayne.

“What a happy future would be yours, my son, if you would take life a little more seriously,” sighed Colonel Craighill. “I’ve spoken of you very little to Adelaide; but you must consider her hereafter. I hope that her coming may mark a new era for you. I cannot but think that her influence will be for good in the family.”

“I dare say it will,” assented Wayne. “You need have no fears about Fanny and me and our treatment of your wife. You know—about my habits and all that—I think I’m ready to quit. I’ve decided that there’s nothing in drink, and I’ve given it up.”

“God grant that it may be so!”

Colonel Craighill spoke with deep emotion. Wayne had, in the old times when his father used to pray over him, often promised under pressure: this morning he had voluntarily announced his intention to reform. It was in Colonel Craighill’s mind at once that already good was coming of the marriage; that Wayne’s pride was aroused; that he wished thus to mark the coming of the new wife. Wayne was pouring himself a third cup of coffee, and this unusual indulgence he associated with some method which his son had adopted for breaking down the baser appetite.

“I have given up drink,” repeated Wayne, helping himself to sugar; “there’s nothing in it”; and while his words and tone were not quite what Roger Craighill would have liked, he could not quibble over phrases or question the sincerity of this voluntary declaration. He had long ago ceased trying to understand Wayne’s moods; his son’s state of mind this morning was unusually baffling.

“That you should be an honourable man has been the great prayer of my life, Wayne,” he said, with feeling.

“I’m afraid you’ve been praying in the wrong place. If God never helped me, maybe the devil will; he knows me better!” Wayne dropped his spoon into his saucer and laughed. “That’s almost blasphemy, isn’t it? The car’s at the door and whenever you’re ready——”

They rode into town together, each in his own corner of the tonneau as was the morning habit, and Colonel Craighill spoke only once or twice. In the lobby of the building that bore his name the day’s sensation was already in the air. One or two friends, tenants of his building, greeted Colonel Craighill cordially as the elevator shot them skyward and congratulated him with warmth; and every clerk in the Craighill offices, where the announcement had already been freely discussed, watched father and son pass on to their own rooms with a newly awakened curiosity.

“Oh, Wayne,” said Colonel Craighill, as they separated, “I should like you to lunch with me at the Club to-day—the Allequippa—about one. We’ll walk over together.”

Wayne pondered this when he had settled himself at his own desk. In normal circumstances he saw little of his father during the day. Colonel Craighill usually took luncheon with half a dozen men of his own age who represented the solid interests of Pittsburg. He prided himself on his knowledge of the general business conditions; he liked, as he put it, to keep in touch with the life of the city, and he so managed his hour and a half at the Allequippa as to gain information from authoritative sources on all manner of subjects. He was more or less conscious of the fact that he touched life on more sides than the majority of his fellows. They talked of iron and coal because they were, like himself, interested in forges and mines; but he could discuss cotton with knowledge of the conditions in India, or wheat, with the Argentine forecast in his mind. He subscribed for English reviews which he occasionally passed on to business friends whose narrower horizons were otherwise amply illuminated by the newspapers.

The Allequippa Club, at the luncheon hour, became a seething board of trade whose unrecorded transactions ran to large figures. Stock subscription papers were handed from table to table as carelessly as the wine card. Through these years of the Great Prosperity it was as easy to count millions as to count heads. In fact, Mr. Richard Wingfield, watching and listening in his corner, announced that a million had become a contemptible sum that hardly assured one’s daily bread.

Wayne Craighill was, in the fullest sense, a child of the city. Its oldest blood was in his veins. His mother had been a Wayne, the daughter of a merchant whose great-grandfather had fought in the Continental army, and whose grandfather had shared Perry’s glory on Lake Erie. The Craighills were not so old on this soil, but the name was not a negligible one in local history. Wayne’s grandfather Craighill had sat in the State Legislature and in Congress, and when Roger Craighill married the only daughter of the house of Wayne and the last of the family, the best blood of the State was united. The Craighill building, rising tower-like in the steep, narrow street of this many-towered Babel, spoke not merely for present affluence, but for the prescience that had secured and held the iron hills surrounding.

Eastern Pennsylvania is better known in song, story and history than the state’s western hills, but the Greater City, big, brawny, powerful, sprawled over valley and hill where the broad rivers gather new courage for their adventure seaward, hides in its iron heart many and sonorous Iliads. It may fairly be said that Pennsylvania is our most typical state and Pittsburg our most typical city, for here the weakness and strength of the democracy wage daily war. Here political corruption has been venomously manifested. Those who seek to account for the unaccountable ask whether the old Scotch clan-instinct has not reasserted itself in the politics of the state. The question is suggestive; but it may not be discussed in these pages. The spirit of Democracy, brooding upon the hills, and looking down upon the City of the Iron Heart, must smile often, wondering that a people so highly favoured and with antecedents so honourable, tamely submit to plunder and bend their necks so meekly to the spoilsman. But a new era was even now at hand. “There shall be an highway for the remnant of his people,” declared Isaiah, prophet of the day of kings, but a higher light was already stealing into the Iron City. The “remnant” was proving its own quality by searching out the squalor of its back doors and “runs” where wan spectres of Decadence elbowed ill-begotten, helpless, staring-eyed Defectives and Dependents.

It may be said that at Pittsburg the East ends and the West begins. The division is in nothing more pronounced than in the speech of the native. In the noonday throng of the Allequippa Club it puzzles the stranger. It is not the lazy drawl that crept into the Central West from the Southeast with the early migration, and that is still discernible wherever the old stock has held its own, but a hybrid wrought of Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch influences. It is less interesting for elisions and the flattening of vowels than for its cadences. In familiar dialogue these are marked and weave a spell upon the unfamiliar ear. They are not peculiar to the man in the street, but flavour in the polite babble of drawing rooms. They lure the ear of strangers, and newcomers unconsciously adopt them. The operators at the telephone exchange teach the most common and the most readily communicable of these cadences daily. In repeating a number of four figures the voice invariably rises on the next to the last syllable to fall again at the end. The native tongue, long attuned to this practice, adds a word to short sentences so that the intonation may not fail to scan and thus miss its effect. For example: “Did he get it?” does not quite lend itself to the usage; but if we prefix And: (And did he get it?) the speaker satisfies his own ear. Those who are keen for controversy in such matters may gnaw this bone all they like. Some will trace it to Scotch, others to Irish influences; but from the lips of the pretty girls of the Greater City, whether behind shop counters or tea tables, it is melodious and haunting. To some shrewder pen than this must be left a prediction as to the ultimate fate of our language at this great Western gateway, where the mingling of dialects spoken under all the flags of Europe is bound to exert in time new influences on the common speech.

As Colonel Craighill and his son entered the Club to-day commerce seemed less insistently dominant. Their names had been on many lips; and they were at once the centre of attraction. The ticker curled its tape unnoticed in the basket while the Craighill marriage was discussed. As the two checked their coats the congratulations began, and in the lounging room they were immediately the centre of a group of friends. Wayne, it seemed, was the object of more attention than his father; the “Colonel,” as nearly everyone called him would of course beam in his characteristic way; but Wayne, in his own relation to the matter, was to be viewed in a fresh aspect. There were those among his intimates who chaffed him about his new stepmother. She would, they hinted, undoubtedly visit upon him the traditional contumely of stepmothership. Others re-appraised the Craighill millions with a view of determining just how much the new wife’s advent would cut into the expectations of Mrs. Blair and Wayne. Roger Craighill’s first wife, everyone remembered, had brought him a considerable fortune, and many were now trying to recall how much of this had reposed in him, and how much had passed direct to the children.

Dick Wingfield, who crystalized in his own person the Greater City’s aspirations in art and music, declared as he surveyed the large dining room and contemplated the two Craighills in their unusual intimacy, that for the hour Pig Iron had yielded the centre of the stage to Cupid. Many gentlemen left their tables, napkin in hand, to congratulate the Colonel; and Wayne, too, submitted his hand to many grasps, some of them lingeringly sympathetic, others expressive of a general friendliness and liking. The Colonel was a shrewd one, so many remarked; it was a real stroke to present himself to the eye of the Greater City in company with his son on this memorable day. It was not like Colonel Craighill to make a marriage that would estrange his children; the outward and visible acceptance by them of the impending union was indubitably presented in the corner where father and son ate their luncheon together. When there came a lull in the visits to the Craighill table Wingfield lounged thither, and drew up his chair for a chat with Wayne. Not being a hypocrite, Wingfield shook hands with the Colonel but did not refer to the topic of the hour. He addressed himself to Wayne on the prospects of the Greater City’s orchestra for the winter and called his attention to some new pictures at the Art Institute. He mentioned the presence in America of a great French portrait painter with whose work Mr. Craighill was familiar.

“You should certainly have him paint you, Colonel. This is the best place in the world for the assembling of works of art; the grime soon makes old masters of them all. The orchestra trustees meet at three this afternoon in the board room of the Fine Arts building. Your check was generous, Colonel; but Wayne will have to work. Don’t forget the meeting, Wayne. We count on him, Colonel Craighill. By the way, Wayne, an old friend of ours has turned up here—Paddock of agile legs and stammering tongue. What profits it, may I ask, for any man to lay up store of wealth for his children when they’re likely to scorn the fleshpots for locusts and wild honey? One might expect Paddock to come here to study the iron business, but bless me! he’s come to save our souls.”

“Yes; I’ve seen Jimmy.”

“I thought you hadn’t seen him,” remarked Colonel Craighill in surprise.

“Oh, yes; I ran into him the other night by chance,” replied Wayne, “just after we had been talking about him. He’s the same chap. Our meeting wasn’t very fortunate—in fact, we didn’t seem to hit it off.”

“He always was modest about himself, you remember,” said Wingfield. “I wanted to give him a dinner at the Club to interest people in his missionary schemes, but he wouldn’t have it.”

“He’s doing a noble work, I hear,” said Colonel Craighill. “It’s unfortunate that he won’t accept help from those among us who know the local conditions.”

“Well, it’s a relief that philanthropy can enter this town just once without preluding itself with a lot of bombast and brag,” sighed Wingfield. “I’m for Paddock; in fact, I have every honourable intention of placing my soul at his disposal. It’s only decent to patronize new home industries.”

Colonel Craighill had not known of Wayne’s election to the orchestra board, and as Wingfield left he said:

“That’s the kind of thing I like our name to be identified with—the best aims and endeavours of the city. I’m deeply gratified to know that you are interested in the orchestra. We older men have our hands full. It’s for your generation to build upon our foundations.”

“They put me on the board, I guess, because I used to play the fiddle!”

“So you did! That was your dear mother’s idea—that you should take violin lessons. As I remember, you showed considerable aptitude.”

“I believe I rather liked it.”

And Wayne saw himself again in knickerbockers standing at his mother’s side by the piano, in the half-remembered days of his happy childhood. He was thrown back upon the mood of four nights before, when he had stood before his mother’s portrait and felt the call of memory. There was in his heart a turbulent rebellion against this impeccable father, who faced him as always, bland, poised, assured. Imaginary wrongs grew real; slight injuries and injustices, long forgotten, cried fiercely in their recrudescence for vengeance.

And conscious of its foulness he had planned an evil thing. It had crossed his mind like a dark shadow, obscuring the fair horizon of his better nature the moment he looked upon the face of the woman his father was about to marry. He had known her first, that was the beautiful irony of it; and he was keeping silent because in her, installed as his father’s wife, he saw a means of retaliation. His hatred of his father was no growth of a day, and the face in the locket, the letter from the woman herself that he had read the night he began his latest debauch, had hardened it into a fixed idea.

The knowledge that his father had brought him here to-day merely to advertise the perfect amity of their relationship angered him; and now Colonel Craighill dismissed him urbanely, saying that he would take his cigar with Fraser, the short, grave, round-faced corporation lawyer, who was soon, it appeared, to accept the nation for his client.

Wingfield, with his eye on the situation, carried Wayne below for a game of billiards.

CHAPTER VI
BEFORE A PORTRAIT BY SARGENT

WAYNE CRAIGHILL’S education had been planned by his father on broad lines. The Craighills had of old been Presbyterians, but Colonel Craighill was no bigot; therefore, in keeping with his generous attitude in such matters, Wayne was sent to a preparatory school in Vermont conducted under Episcopalian auspices. Moreover, the head of St. John’s was a personal friend, whom Colonel Craighill knew well. Nothing could be better for the boy than a few years spent under the eye of the famous master. The transition from the Presbyterianism in which he was born to the High Church school was abrupt. The very vocabulary of worship was different; the choral services in the beautiful chapel appealed to his emotional nature, and he found a quiet joy in his own participation in the singing when he attained in due course to a place in the orderly offices of the choir. From the preparatory school Wayne went to the Institute of Technology. His mother had pleaded for the law; but Colonel Craighill pointed out the superiority of scientific education in a day when science guarded so many of the approaches to success. And Wayne, born among the iron hills, was persuaded that his best course lay in fitting himself for a career in keeping with the greatest interests of his native state, and so his father prevailed, and Wayne had, not without much stress and resistance of spirit, taken his degree in science. Certain aspects of mining, and of the chemistry of the forge had appealed to him, but rather to his strong imagination than to any practical use he saw in his knowledge. He had spent a summer in a large colliery, obedient to his father’s wish that the young man should apply and test theory before he had a chance to forget the teaching of the schools; and Wayne had entered into this with relish. But while he had taken into his own strong hands every tool used in mine labour, and fed boiler furnaces and sat by the scales in weigh houses, he had shared also the social life of the world of coal. He had spent his evenings in the saloons of the mine village, talking and drinking with the miners in a spirit of democracy that won their affections. His violence when drunk had first manifested itself at this period. He was so big and powerful that the fierce reinforcement of his natural strength by drink made him a terror. He had once run wild through the long black lane of a mine, driving an electric motor and train of wallowing mine cars, captured after a fight from their lawful conductors, smashing finally a line of coal pillars with a force that might have shaken the huge cave down upon him.

So far as his own aptitude and taste were concerned his education went for naught. The Homeric, picturesque side of industrial Pennsylvania appealed to him. The wresting of the enormous latent power from the hills; the sky lighted by the glow of multitudinous ovens and furnaces; the roar and shriek of machinery; the grimy toilers at their moulding and tempering—these and like phenomena touched his imagination, and he cared little for their practical side while they were so much more captivating as panorama than as trade. We need not deal in unprofitable speculations as to what a different education might have made of Wayne Craighill; for an intelligent appreciation of books and pictures and a love of music are too easily confused with genius. Let it suffice that some playful god had injected into his blood a drop of the divine essence, enough merely to visit upon him the fleeting moods of the dreamer and the restless longings of those who seek the light that never was.

His nature was compounded of many elements of good and evil. Taste, delicacy, fine feeling, he had in abundance; he was sensitive to the appeal of beautiful things. In fits of solitude and industry he would read voraciously; many subjects awakened his curiosity. But his passions were strong and deep, and they had their way with him. Again, his restraint and measure were surprising. Wingfield, who knew him best of all, was amazed at times by the sobriety and wisdom of Wayne’s judgments. We have said that he was the child of his city; more than this, he not unfitly expressed its genius, its confused aims, its weaknesses and its aspirations. The iron of the hills was in his blood; and iron, let us remember, has the merit as well as the defects of its qualities!

Joe drove Wayne to the Modern Art Institute in the machine. He went early to have a glimpse of several recent additions to the collection before the meeting of the orchestra committee, and later he was to go to his sister’s.

The peace of the quiet gallery enfolded him gratefully. He paid his respects to old favourites, saving a half-hour for the new arrivals. Dick Wingfield’s mother, convoying two girls, was among the other visitors. He had reached a point at which, half-unconsciously, he gave the women he knew an opportunity to cut him if they wished. The two girls became rather obviously intent upon the upper line of canvasses as he passed them. They were the daughters of his father’s neighbours; they had known him all their lives, and yet they deliberately turned their backs upon him. He had paused, a little resentful, a little ashamed, in a farther corner, when Mrs. Wingfield drew near and spoke to him. She had been one of his mother’s intimate friends and she touched him gently on the arm.

“I am glad to see you, Wayne. We very rarely meet any more. I wish you would come to see me.”

She was so gentle, the meaning of her kindness struck so deep that he flushed as he took her hand.

“I have never lost faith in you, Wayne.”

“Thank you; you’re the only one, then, Mrs. Wingfield. You and Dick are about all I have left.”

“Who is this woman your father is marrying?” she demanded with sudden asperity.

“A lady, of course. What would you expect of my father?”

“I would expect him to be like all the other old fools,” she declared. “A woman like your mother, Wayne Craighill, can have no successor.”

She still clasped his hand lightly, and he bent over her with deferential courtesy.

“I hope he is marrying a good woman for your sake—and Fanny’s.”

“Father wouldn’t marry any other kind; you may be sure of that,” laughed Wayne.

“I don’t know anything of the kind. I have waited a good many years to see your father do something outrageous and now I’m going to be satisfied. Who is this person, anyhow?”

“I positively decline to hear my future stepmother spoken of as a person!”

“I dare say the word flatters her. I’m telling all your mother’s old friends that we’ve got to cut the woman on principle.”

“The town will sit at her feet. You will yourself call upon her the day of her arrival.”

“Not unless I’m insane, Wayne Craighill! The newspapers everywhere are making us out the wickedest city in the world, and between stock gambling and poker and divorces and worse we’re undoubtedly going to the bad. It’s time for us old settlers to assert ourselves. This woman your father is going to marry may be perfectly respectable, but I decline to know her.”

With this declaration Mrs. Wingfield rejoined her charges who hovered discreetly in a far corner in the belief that she was lecturing Wayne Craighill upon his sins. Wayne had been touched by her kindness in speaking to him when other women in her own circle were cutting him; and the encounter left him brooding upon his father’s marriage.

He wondered whether his mother’s friends would really show any resentment at the coming of his father’s new wife. He had watched such cases before and was skeptical. His father was a man of far-reaching business interests, and while there were women like Mrs. Wingfield who were courageous enough themselves to support a sentiment, their husbands would counsel caution and advise against incurring the ill-will of a man of Colonel Craighill’s wealth and influence. He had the gallery to himself for a few minutes and sat down before one of the more important new portraits that he had particularly wished to see. He could not fix his mind upon it, but sat staring at the canvas.

A young woman had entered the hall and was moving slowly along the line studying the pictures with the greatest intentness. She was without hat or coat and carried in her hand a tablet and pencil. She quite obscured now the portrait at which he had been staring vacantly; it seemed, for an instant, before his eyes accommodated themselves to the intrusion of her interposed figure, that she had slipped into the canvas itself. The lady of the portrait, in her sumptuous evening toilet, was not, however, long to be confused with this girl in her plain cloth skirt and simple shirt-waist. She was studying the portrait critically, her head tilting now to one side, now to another, as she surveyed the great artist’s work. Her movements were swift and eager, and she made, he thought, an obeisance of reverence before the lady’s portrait; but she remained crouched upon one knee and upon the other held her tablet and sketched rapidly with her pencil. He had at first thought her an attachée of the gallery, but now he surmised that she was a student of the art school, rendering homage before a picture whose charm and technical perfection commanded her admiration. It was a worthy object for anyone’s homage, Wayne knew, as he surveyed it over the girl’s dark head. He sat very quiet, fearing that he might disturb her, glancing from the richly clad lady in the frame to her kneeling figure. Her shirt-waist was plain and of cheap material; the skirt disclosed a coarse shoe that had clearly been bought for service. Poor girls with ambitions in the arts did not appeal to him abstractly; there was never any chance of their getting anywhere. But he was, it cannot be denied, a man who rarely missed an opportunity where women are concerned. His adventures had been many and discreditable. He had tried his powers often and had the conceit of his successes. He was already seeking some excuse for addressing her.

Suddenly she rose, with a little hopeless sigh, crumpling the sketch in her fingers.

“Sargent didn’t do it either, the first time,” remarked Wayne.

“No,” she replied, her eyes wistfully upon the picture, “I suppose he didn’t.”

She did not look at him; but he was studying her face, which was still rounded in girlish lines. She was wonderfully fair, of the type distinguished by close texture of skin and faintest colour beneath,—the merest hint of colour, subdued, half-revealed, vague, like the pink shadow in white roses. Her eyes at once arrested and held his attention. They were blue—the indefinable blue of sun-flooded mid-sea—and her dark head had not prepared him for this. She looked at him gravely once, but, with the portrait still in her eyes, only half seeing him. The dejection of the young aspirant who gazes upon an achievement he feels to be immeasurably beyond his own powers was written upon her face. Wayne had expected that she would show embarrassment when he revealed himself, but her indifference piqued him. Here, clearly, was no subject for easy conquest. She seemed sincerely interested in the beautiful painting before which they stood, and perhaps, after all, she was not the usual paint-smearing trifler, but a serious student. She spoke further of the portrait, and he had now a half-amused sense that she was speaking to herself rather than to him. He was, in a way, a lay figure, to be suffered for a moment as though he were as wooden as the bench from which he had risen.

“I was trying to copy the hand—the fifth time to-day—and I simply can’t do it. As it rests on the arm of the chair—there—it is perfectly natural; but I can’t get it; I simply can’t.”

She uncrumpled her sketch and glanced at it again; then with fresh disdain she shut her hand upon it. Her pencil dropped and he picked it up. The point was broken. She put out her hand for it but he looked at it ruefully.

“If you can wait a moment I will sharpen it for you.”

“No, thank you. I must get my things and go.”

“But to leave the gallery with a spoiled sketch and a broken point to your pencil would be most unfortunate. If you will hold the paper to catch the shavings I’ll sharpen it in a jiffy. Then you can go away armed for another day’s attack. To retreat now, discouraged, with a pointless pencil would never do in the world.”

He laughed his pleasure in the encounter. She carried her dark head a little high; and now that he looked directly into her eyes there hovered in them the faintest hint of gray that further strengthened the suggestion of the sea.

“I am not the least superstitious,” she said.

“But I am! As a friend of art I could not think of allowing you to leave with a broken pencil. Something would undoubtedly happen to you on the way home.”

He had caught her attention; his manner was half mocking, half serious; and he drew out his knife to prolong the interview. Flattery spoke in his words and manner: Wayne Craighill was not ignorant of the way of a man with a maid. The girl held the paper while he sharpened the pencil deliberately, and she took careful note of him and his belongings.

“We must be very careful not to drop the shavings. The curator would make a terrible row about it. Now that we seem to be alone, with a knife in our possession, we might cut this portrait out of its frame and you could take it home to study at your leisure. Rolled up, you could carry it right out of the front door, and the newspapers would have a seven days’ wonder, the stolen Sargent! There! Not a bad job if I do say it myself.”

He handed her the pencil and took from her the paper with its shavings and lead dust.

“Now, it’s only fair that I should have your sketch for my trouble! I shall keep it as a slight souvenir—of the beginning—of our acquaintance——”

He was folding it carefully to hold the litter, and he glanced up to find that she had flushed angrily.

“Give it to me, please.”

“But really——”

“Give it to me!”

“I beg your pardon.”

She held out her hand and he placed the little packet in her palm. It was, he saw, a hand that had known labour. It was a long hand and a hand of strength, and as he was mindful of such matters, it impressed itself upon his memory.

“Thank you,” she said, and turned away.

“I am sorry I made you angry. I did not mean to do that. I come here quite often. I hope I shall see you again. Some day you will catch the trick of the lady’s hand. I’m sure of that.”

His tone was kind, his manner ingratiating; the meeting was altogether to his liking—from such a beginning he had often gone far. This girl bore the marks of cultivation; it was in her voice, her manner, the poise of her splendid head. She was poor—that was evident—but this was no barrier; her poverty presented, in fact, an avenue of access. It had been his experience that the bold approach was the surest. She was already moving away, carrying her head high, the anger still in her face, and he followed her.

“Please don’t be too hard on me,” he begged; and she stopped and looked at him, looked at him with frank curiosity that turned, as their eyes met, to a scorn not less frank.

“I don’t care for your acquaintance, Mr. Wayne Craighill,” she said with all composure, and walked hurriedly from the room.

He was fully sensible of the contempt with which she had spoken his name, a name that was odious to clean women in this city of his birth. He mused upon this fact as he started toward the door through which she had vanished; he was a notorious character whom people of all classes knew by sight and reputation. She had, he imagined, suffered him to speak to her only that she might see for herself how contemptible man might become. The girl’s scorn emphasized his degradation. She was unknown and poor, but he had sunk so low that even poverty and obscurity shrank from him. Those simpering young things who had cut him a little while before, those bread and butter misses who reflected merely the meticulous virtue of their own social order, did not matter. But this young woman with her labour-roughened hands had widened the gulf between him and decency with a glance, a turn of the head, a word. Her words continued to mock him as he left the gallery and descended the stairway to the orchestra board’s room below. He kept wondering what musical instrument her voice suggested and the thought of her was so enthralling that he passed the committee room and did not come to himself until a guard touched his cap and pointed him to the door.

He and Wingfield were the only members of the board who appeared to-day, as frequently happened. Wayne sat down at a window to discuss the programmes that had been submitted by the orchestra director, which Wingfield now proceeded to tear to pieces.

“That Dutchman’s idea of popular music is certainly exquisite. We’re not going to appeal to the primitive tastes of our dear fellow-citizens by larding a Wagnerian programme with the Blue Danube waltz and the Bon-Ton two-step. And Mendelssohn’s Spring Song as a harp solo is too stale. We’re going to keep on shoving symphonies into the people of our dear city this winter as you shovel coal into a furnace. Well, what now?”

Wayne’s glance, straying to the street through the window by which they sat, had fallen upon the girl whom he had left in the gallery a moment before. She had emerged from the main entrance of the building and was moving off briskly. But what had drawn an exclamation from Craighill was the appearance upon the scene of a man who seemed to have been waiting and who now followed the girl at a discreet distance. It was, beyond question, Joe, Wayne’s chauffeur, whom he had dismissed for the day an hour before.

Wingfield, following Wayne’s glance, saw only the girl, now passing rapidly out of sight.

“Who’s your Diana, Wayne? She has the stride of a goddess and carries her head as though she had just brushed the rest of the deities off Olympus.”

“I don’t know her,” said Craighill, and changed the subject.

CHAPTER VII
WAYNE COUNSELS HIS SISTER

MR. RICHARD WINGFIELD, unjustly called the Cynic, was suspected of literary ambitions; but the suspicion was based upon nothing weightier than a brochure on golf which he had printed at his own expense for private circulation, and a study of the Greater City, abounding in sly ironies, which had appeared with illustrations in a popular periodical.

Wingfield, if we may enter briefly into particulars, was tall and thin, with a close-cropped beard and dark hair combed to the smoothness of onion-skin. He was near-sighted, and his twinkling eye-glasses were protected by a slight gold chain. His aspect was severe, his manner disconcertingly serious. He carried, in all weathers, an umbrella whose handle bore on a silver plate the anticipatory legend, “Stolen from Richard Wingfield.” He was on many committees; he gave luncheons for actors, lecturers and other distinguished visitors; he attended the opera in New York and was reported now and then to be engaged to a prima donna. He patronized a private gymnasium and was a capital fencer. He cultivated the society of physicians, discussing the latest discoveries of Vienna and Paris in sophisticated terminology; he sat in the amphitheatre at surgical clinics, inscrutable and grave. His interest in medicine gave rise to the belief about the Club that he suffered from an incurable malady; but his medical cronies declared that he was as sound as wheat and would live forever. He affected an air of not caring greatly; he uttered paradoxes and enjoyed mystifying people; he quizzed likely subjects and had never been known to laugh aloud. It was he who first announced that five generations constitute an old family in Pittsburg. Practical men called Wingfield a loafer; others insinuated that his private life would not bear scrutiny. (A man who drinks nothing but koumiss in a club famed for its rye essences is sure to be the victim of calumny.) There was a particular little table in the corner of the Allequippa Club’s smoking-room—a room where all branches of human endeavour were represented at five o’clock every afternoon, from the twisting of stogies up through the professions to the canning of entrées—there, at his own little table, sat Mr. Wingfield, watching, as he said, the best men of the Greater City at the light-hearted occupation of hardening their arteries.

There was no telling what might happen; it was never safe to leave town, and having spent two years abroad in his young manhood, Wingfield abstained from further foreign travel. One must pick up gossip when it is fresh. Nothing, he said, is so discouraging as to miss the prologue; and so he spent most of his time at home. “But for the invention of sleeping-cars, and the fact of our being only one night from New York we should be the most moral city in the world,” he averred. Wingfield was a University of Pennsylvania man, and spoke in bitter contumeliousness of Yale and Harvard, which are, as all Pennsylvania men are able to demonstrate, grossly inferior institutions. Princeton, to all such, is only a blot on the Mosquito Strip and the seat of ignorance. His mother was a Philadelphian, and Dick’s two aunts were still residents of that city, where, through much careful instruction on their part, he knew Chestnut Street’s meridional importance and the sacred names one must whisper and those one must not utter at all. His income was derived from coke ovens situated in three districts, and these it pleased his humour to call Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.

Wingfield walked to Mrs. Blair’s gate with Wayne talking of pictures and music. He was a diligent collector of anecdotes of the brief sort that end with abrupt and unforeseen climaxes, and he recounted a number for Wayne’s amusement. He carefully avoided any reference to Colonel Craighill’s marriage, though he knew Wayne better than anyone else and might have spoken his mind without offense. Wayne had appeared unusually dull and depressed, a mood that frequently followed a debauch, and Wingfield, familiar with his latest escapade, wished to lift his friend’s spirits if he could. At the Blairs’ gate he declined Wayne’s invitation to enter; but before they parted he made a point of suggesting that they have luncheon together the next day. He was wiser and kinder than most people gave him credit for being, and here, it had occurred to him, he might do a little good.

Wayne entered his sister’s house with a latch-key which it had been her own idea that he should carry. Mrs. Blair came out of the reception room while he was hanging up his hat and coat and asked him to go into the parlour for a few minutes.

“I have a caller—a matter of business—I’ll be with you in a minute, Wayne. Find something to read, won’t you?”

He bade her take her time and sought a table covered with magazines in three languages which gave to her library a rather club-like air. Mrs. Blair believed in self-culture and practised it à la carte, not overlooking the hors d’œuvres and desserts. He lighted a cigarette and turned over the periodicals until he found one that interested him. The murmur of voices reached him from the room across the hall; and he argued that the caller was no one he knew, or he should have been asked to come in and speak to her, such being Mrs. Blair’s way. In a few minutes she carried the conversation to what appeared from her tone to be a satisfactory conclusion. It had grown dark and a servant brightened the hall and adjoining rooms with the mild electric glow that was Mrs. Blair’s ideal of house lighting. Wayne, lifting his eyes at the soft flooding of his page, saw that his sister’s caller was the girl he had met in the art gallery. Her long coat made her appear taller as she stood against the background of the reception room portières. She was laughing happily at some remark of Mrs. Blair’s. She murmured something that did not reach him, but Mrs. Blair caught her hands exclaiming:

“Don’t trouble about it; it will soon begin to come easier. You are going to do something really worth while; remember, I have faith in you and you’re bound to arrive. No one ever disappoints me!”

“I certainly hope I shan’t be a disappointment to you, Mrs. Blair. I can never thank you enough for what you are doing for me.”

As the outer door closed, Mrs. Blair appeared before Wayne.

“Well, what are they saying? Is the male population taking it calmly? Is there rebellion anywhere?”

Wayne tossed his magazine aside as his sister bent over and kissed him. She curled up in a big chair, while he brought his mind to bear upon her question.

“My dear Fanny, why do you ask anything so preposterous? Do you suppose anybody is going to tell our father that he ought to consider well the seriousness of a second marriage, his duty to his children, his duty to their mother and all that kind of rot? Not on your life, my dearest sister! Nor is our father’s pastor going to ask him for the credentials of the lady he proposes to honour. Everybody downtown is delighted. He got a jolly from every man he saw at the Club to-day where, by the way, I was taken to show our delight in the prospect of seeing a new face at the ancestral dinner table. So much for us males; how about the women? Are there any signs of revolt? I met Dick’s mother a while ago, and she had her knife sharpened.”

“Many people are still away, but my telephone has rung all day and the town’s buzzing.”

“It’s a good thing for the town to have something that it can concentrate on for a few days. Dick Wingfield says the trouble with us here is our lack of social unification. Our approaching stepmother’s advent may have the effect of concentrating social influences.”

“The older women resent it; they declare they will have nothing to do with her.”

“Those estimable ladies whose husbands have paper in banks where father is a director will sing a different tune this evening.”

“Men don’t know how we women feel about such matters; if mama had not been the woman she was it wouldn’t be so hard.”

“Oh, yes, it would, Fanny! Besides you don’t know what sort of a woman father’s going to bring home to fill our Christmas stockings.”

“Please don’t make it all more horrible than necessary,” she cried. “It’s that sort of thing, Wayne, the Christmas and the birthdays and the Sunday evenings at the piano, when she taught us to sing songs together—it’s all that that hurts me.”

Her eyes were bright with tears. Wayne rose and walked the length of the room.

“For God’s sake, Fanny, cut all that out.”

“That’s what it means to me and it means even more to you. I think we made a mistake in not showing resentment when father told us. But we took it as calmly as though he had told us he had bought a new chair or a hat rack.”

“You’re rating the lady as a piece of furniture, which is putting it pretty high. You mustn’t let Mrs. Wingfield and these other old ladies give you nervous prostration over this business. As I’ve already reminded you, father wasn’t born yesterday; you may be sure that he is making no mistake. Very likely she has a few millions in bank for spending money. For myself, I await her coming with the liveliest anticipations.”

A shadow crossed his sister’s face as she listened. He had spoken harshly and she did not like the look in his eyes. She knew that he would care, but she did not know that he would care so much. He took a cigar from the tabarette at his elbow and lighted it. She studied him carefully as the match flamed. His hands were quite steady to-day, and there was an air of assurance about him that puzzled her deeply. He blew a smoke-ring and threw out his arms to shake down his cuffs.

“Does anyone know a thing about the woman? Have you found out anything?”

“That question, my dear sister, has been asked many times in the Greater City to-day, and the answer has been, so far as I know, an emphatic negative. But so much the better. If the gossips have nothing to work on they can’t do much. The fact of the woman being unknown is nothing; it’s all in her favour. Mrs. Craighill, with her faint background of New Hampshire—or is it Vermont?—her long sojourns abroad and all that, will strike town with a clean bill of health. I tell you father is wise in his generation. No old bones to pick. The woman will come into camp as fresh and new as her trousseau.”

“I couldn’t say anything the other night when father told us, but now that the newspapers have done their worst it seems like the end of everything,” sighed Mrs. Blair.

“To me,” said Wayne musingly, “it is only the beginning. We had been travelling in a hard rut. I had become immensely bored with the family life. Now we shall see the vista broaden and lengthen. My curiosity is on edge. My father’s wife—ah, the thought of it! I am at her feet; I crave her blessing! Your point of view is all wrong, dear sister. We must put such feelings aside; our duty, Fanny, is not to the dead but to the living.”

“Wayne! Wayne! Will you stop? You are not yourself; it’s not like you to talk so.”

“My dear Fanny,” he persisted, flicking the ash from his cigar, “if in intimating that I am not myself you imply that I have been drinking I will say to you that you never did me a greater wrong. Not only have I had no form of drink to-day but our own chaste river water, but it may interest you to know that I have cut out the whiskey when it is red altogether. I scorn it; I put it away forever. I signalize our father’s marriage by renouncing drink. Will you not congratulate me?”

“I don’t understand you. It is not like you to talk this way.”

She was mystified, and stared at him with dry eyes, wondering.

“You don’t seem impressed by my reformation; maybe you don’t believe I can quit! I tell you, Fanny, the Blotter will soak up the blithesome cocktail no more. When the new Mrs. Roger Craighill comes she shall find me the most abstemious person in town. My friends—and I still have one or two—will be incredulous and amazed; my enemies will express regret; the kind who have robbed me when I’ve been loaded will miss an income that has been as sure as taxes. I have already committed myself to father, and he expressed himself with his habitual reserve as delighted.”

Mrs. Blair rose and changed her seat to get nearer him; her mystification grew. There was a bitter undernote that belied his surface lightness.

“Wayne, there is something I want you to do: I want you to move out of father’s house; I don’t want you to stay after this woman comes.”

“But, Fanny, I’ve promised father to remain! Can’t you see what a lot of gossip would be caused by my leaving? Think of the embarrassment and annoyance to father! Here we should have a realization of the old joke about the cruel stepmother and the incorrigible, brow-beaten son, driven from home! I tell you, father is no child; he has foreseen exactly that possibility, as he foresees all possibilities. He is vain of his prophetic vision; you can’t lose father, I tell you!”

“But after a few weeks,” she pleaded, “when the town has got used to her being here, you will have settled all that and you can make some plausible excuse for leaving. You can come here and live with us. John would be only too glad.”

“To leave after a few months would certainly look bad; and it’s the look of the thing that interests father. No; he has asked me to stay, and I’m going to stay. Besides, my dear Fanny, shall I kick myself from my own doorstep? You must remember that the house is mine. Mother wanted it that way; she had a sentiment about it.”

“Yes; the house will be yours when father dies; but while he lives it is his. I wish you hadn’t mentioned that; it makes the whole matter more hideous. The very ground was dear to mother; the coming of this other woman is a profanation.”

Wayne put down his cigar and stood before his sister, who sat crumpled in her seat playing nervously with her handkerchief.

“See here, Fanny; there’s no use in being hysterical about this business. We’d better grin and accept the situation. Believe the worst: that father has been trapped by an adventuress; we’ve got a little pride of our own, I hope! On the other hand, she may prove a perfectly delightful person.”

“I don’t see how you can say such things,” she moaned.

“It’s remarkable how much faith you women have in one another. You trust one another about as far as you could push a mountain in a wheel-barrow. Why should you condemn her before she has a chance to speak for herself? Put yourself in her place!”

He smiled at his own nobility. His sister was not heeding him, but Wayne had really a great deal of influence with her; and he went on to discuss the matter in its more practical aspects, which had been the object of his coming and her own intention. He defended his father for excluding them from the ceremony itself; he persuaded her that it was better so, just as his father had said. Fanny Blair did not often strike her colours, but the strain of the day, with its incessant telephoning, and the daring of intimate friends who had sought her out with the effect, at least, of bringing the daily newspapers in their hands for confirmation, had told upon her. When Wayne pleased he could be helpful; and they were soon discussing quite calmly the series of entertainments which Mrs. Blair had already planned. She even laughed at Wayne’s comments on some of the combinations she proposed for two or three dinners which were designed to give the older friends of the family an opportunity to inspect the bride immediately.

“Get the old stagers first; that’s the card to play, for we are an old and conservative family. Your dance, reception and tea will bring in the other elements; but the dinner is more intimate, and offers better hypnotic possibilities.”

“She’s more likely to paralyze than hypnotize. Her face in that picture has haunted me, Wayne.”

“Ah! I knew it would come! You already feel her spell. So do I!”

She rose and peered into his face searchingly, laying her hands on his shoulders.

“Wayne, I believe you know that woman! Play fair with me about this; have you ever seen her? Have you ever heard of her before?”

“Fanny, how absurd you are! You asked me that question before and I answered no. Do you imagine I have seen her to-day? Come now, please be the reasonable little sister you always have been. You are the brightest, cleverest, dearest girl in the world. That gown is a dream, if you ask me; you should be painted by Alexander for the family portrait gallery. Dick Wingfield suggested to father to-day his own duty in the matter and I see the finished product—father full-length in a frock coat, with his hand resting lightly on a volume of his own speeches.”

Mrs. Blair’s eyes filled with tears.

“Poor mama!” she mourned. “I’m glad her portrait was painted just when it was—the picture is so dear. I’m going to get it out of the house before that creature comes if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Please, Fanny, don’t do that,” he pleaded, touched in his own heart more than he wished her to know. “Come, now, cheer up, for I must trot if I get home for dinner. I promised father to be there; it’s close upon our last tête-à-tête. Count on me for all your functions. I’ll get Wingfield to support me at the teas and so on. If you want me to come to your antiquarians’ dinner I shall be here and you may place me next the solemnest dowager you invite to the banquet. You needn’t go on a cold-water basis for the occasion either; my glasses shall be turned down; remember that!”

“I’m glad, oh, so glad, Wayne! I can’t tell you what that means to me.”

She stood in the doorway and watched him slip into his topcoat. He moved with the athlete’s ease; there was a real grace in him. He had never been so dear to her sisterly heart as now, in the light of this new event before which they waited. For sister-love goes far and deep. Like charity, it suffereth long and is kind. In self-effacement and service it is happiest; and it knows the pangs of neglect and jealousy. Fanny’s eyes were upon Wayne in love and admiration as she watched him fasten his coat and draw on his gloves.

“By the way, Fanny, that was a stunning girl you had in there when I came. I caught a glimpse of her against those dark red curtains—a very pleasing portrait if I’m asked!”

“She has known trouble, poor child; I’m doing what I can to help her.”

“That’s like you, Fanny.”

“She’s very interesting; she has a lot of talent.”

“If you need help in advancing her cause you may call on me,” he said lightly, but she knew him so well that she fathomed his serious wish to know about her protégée. He had taken up his hat, but lingered expectantly. “I saw her in the art gallery to-day, and she’s certainly unusual. I wish you would introduce me to her!”

Mrs. Blair had not been prepared for the directness of his request. Her figure stiffened; she must be on guard against the joy in him that had filled her heart.

“I know the way round at the Institute and I might be of service to her,” he said carelessly, but she knew that he was deeply interested—women always interested him—and she saw no way at the moment of putting him off.

“I can’t, Wayne.”

“I should like to know why not?” and he laughed as he balanced his hat by its brim in his hands. She usually yielded readily to any of his requests and he was surprised that she parleyed now.

“I can’t; I mustn’t; and please, Wayne, don’t make any effort to find out who she is. I beg you not to; I don’t want you to know her,” she ended, with pleading in her voice and eyes.

His face clouded and he turned to the door and opened it. Then he flung round upon her roughly:

“My God, Fanny; have I sunk as low as that!”

She stepped into the vestibule and watched him striding through the shrubbery toward the gate. She pressed her face to the glass of the vestibule doors, shielding her eyes from the overhead light with her hands as she looked after him. She always made a point of sending him away happy when she could; and now he had left her in anger. She still watched him after he had left the grounds and passed into the street, walking slower than was his wont, and with his head bowed. The curious mood in which he was accepting his father’s marriage still distressed her; and his declaration that he had given up drink had carried no real conviction, now that she pondered his words and manner. She waited until an opening through the trees gave her a last glimpse of him across the hedge under the electric light at the corner, then with a deep sigh she turned into the house.

When, a little later, he called her on the telephone and begged her not to mind anything he had said on leaving—his usual way of making peace after their occasional tiffs—she was only half relieved.

CHAPTER VIII
THE COMING OF MRS. CRAIGHILL

“MY promptness deserves a better cause!” exclaimed Mrs. Blair as she stepped from her motor at the entrance to the railway station, where Wayne in his father’s car had arrived but a moment earlier. Mrs. Blair had brought down her two children, and these in their smart fall coats were still protesting against the haste with which they had been snatched from their beds and dressed in their Sunday clothes; but their faces brightened at the sight of their uncle, upon whom they fell clamorously with a demand to be taken into the train sheds to see the locomotives. Wayne was more amiable than his sister had seen him since their father gave the first warning of his marriage. He chaffed the children and promised to take them to a football game the next Saturday if they would let him off as to the engines; and when they were appeased he held up for his sister’s inspection the morning papers, with their first-page account of the marriage in New York the preceding day.

“‘Simplicity marked all the arrangements,’” he read. “‘Only the bride’s mother and the necessary witnesses were present—dined very quietly at Sherry’s—scarce noted in the fashionable throng of the great dining room—Colonel Craighill’s private car attached to the Pittsburg Flyer’—and so on,” and Wayne shook out the paper to display the portraits of Colonel and Mrs. Craighill and a view of the Craighill home.

The picture of the house evoked an exclamation of disgust from Mrs. Blair.

“Oh, Wayne, they might have spared us that! The house—it hurts worse than anything else. It’s sacrilege—it isn’t fair.”

Wayne folded the paper and thrust it into his pocket to get it out of her sight.

“Now, Sis, you’ve got to cheer up. You’re looking bullier than ever this morning. Those clothes must have eaten a hole in John’s check-book. It’s rather nasty of John not to come down and face the music with you.”

“John couldn’t; he simply couldn’t,” she declared defensively.

“Wouldn’t, you mean! John Blair is not a man to get up to meet his wife’s relations on an early train if he can duck it. But the kids help out a lot. They’re a charming feature of the morning. You ought to have taught them to sing a carol and scatter flowers as grandpapa comes through the gates leading their new grandmama by the hand. It would have been nuts for those reporters over there with the camera men.”

“No; you don’t mean that they are here!” she gasped.

He indicated with a nod several men and two women waiting near the news-stand. They carried cameras and were watching Wayne and his sister with interest.

“The women are the society reporters; they’re going to do this thing right. Mrs. Craighill’s coming-home gown will be described in proper dry-goods language; no blundering male eye for this job!”

“How perfectly horrible! I wish I hadn’t brought the children if we’re all to get into the papers.”

“Brace up! You can’t flinch now. Besides, there’s the train!”

He led the way out of the waiting room and into the train-shed as the New York express rolled heavily in.

The private car was at the end of the train and before they reached it Colonel Craighill’s children saw his tall figure in the vestibule. Their eyes were, however, upon the lady behind him, whose hat and coat had already been appraised by Mrs. Blair in that sharp coup d’œil by which one woman dissects the garb of another. The porter jumped out with his arms filled with hand baggage, and as Colonel Craighill stepped sedately forth, Mrs. Blair’s arms were at once about her father’s neck. For an instant there was a sob in her throat, but she stifled it and her hands were immediately extended to her father’s wife, who hesitated upon the car steps.

“Fanny, this is my wife, Adelaide. Good morning, Wayne!”

“Welcome home!” cried Mrs. Blair bravely, and seized the lady’s hands nervously in her own. Then with a sudden impulse, as though to complete, beyond any criticism, her acceptance of the newcomer, she kissed her stepmother on the cheek.

“You are just my height, aren’t you!” she exclaimed, stepping back.

Wayne waited hat in hand, smiling.

“Adelaide, this is my son, Wayne!”

“Good morning! I am glad to see you,” said Wayne, bowing over Mrs. Craighill’s hand; and as he raised his head their eyes met with, it seemed, a particular inquiry and plea in hers.

“I’ll attend to the baggage. Give me your checks, father.”

It was over, this first meeting between Colonel Craighill’s wife and her husband’s children. As they walked through the waiting room there was a click of cameras. Other eyes than Mrs. Blair’s had already noted the new Mrs. Craighill’s outlines, and the films in the newspaper cameras had recorded a trim, graceful figure of medium height, a well-set head, crowned with a pretty toque, and a light travelling coat of unimpeachable cut.

In the waiting room the Blair boys were presented, while their mother watched the meeting critically. A slight to her children, an indifference to their charm would have been fatal; but Mrs. Craighill bent to them graciously. She had even remembered their names, and applied them correctly. The lads suffered themselves to be kissed and were thereupon sent home in the Blair motor.

Colonel Craighill had asked Mrs. Blair to come to his house for breakfast, and they were all soon seated in his car, which the chauffeur drove slowly, so that Colonel Craighill might point out to his wife features of the urban landscape that struck him as particularly interesting. As the rise of the boulevard lifted them out of the commercial district, the dark cloud that brooded above the rivers gave Colonel Craighill an opportunity to introduce his wife, with a wave of the hand, to the prodigious industries which thus advertised themselves upon the very sky. He was at the point of quoting the enormous tonnages to which the ironmongery of the region ran; but Mrs. Blair thwarted him.

“Adelaide!” she cried. “There! Did you see how naturally I spoke your name the first time! I may call you that, mayn’t I?”

The two ladies clasped hands, while Colonel Craighill smiled upon them in benignant approval.

“I was going to call attention to that speck of soot that has just settled on your nose—your first!” Mrs. Blair continued. “Ah! there you have it now!” she concluded as Mrs. Craighill found the offender with her handkerchief.

“That, we may say, marks your baptism into full citizenship,” beamed Colonel Craighill.

As the residential area unfolded itself, he named the owners of many of the houses they were passing, while Mrs. Blair summarized their history in short, amusing phrases. Wayne, sitting on the front seat, turned his head to throw in a word now and then; but for the greater part he kept his own counsel. He overheard his sister’s rapid survey of the social geography of the Greater City. She declared that there was no debating the claims of the East End to social supremacy, though there were what she called “nice people” in the red brick homes of transpontine Allegheny. “Dick Wingfield,” she quoted, “always says that in crossing the river, Charon and not the bridge company gets the fee. Dick calls the river the Stygian wave.” Mrs. Blair was not sure that Mrs. Craighill quite took this in, but it did not matter in one who smiled responsively at everything and appeared anxious to please.

There was the usual difficulty in explaining to a stranger the triangular shape of the city clasped by its two rivers that so quickly flow as one, and the fact that you may, if you like, take a boat here for New Orleans if you are bent upon adventure. “Are there suburbs?” Mrs. Craighill asked; and rising to this prompting Mrs. Blair flashed an illuminating glance upon Stanwixley, where, she conceded, there were delightful people, but why they should live where they did was beyond her powers of understanding. Colonel Craighill protested now and then, but smilingly, as one who would, at the fitting moment, pronounce the final word in all such matters. Greater philosophers than Fanny Blair have found it difficult to hit off in a few phrases the social alignments of the Greater City. Where there is no centre, no common and unifying social expression, it is not easy to find a point of departure. Even the terra sancta of the East End presents no stern walls to the newcomer who can provide himself with a house and a chef. And it is not correct to speak of social strata in the City of the Iron Heart, for the term implies depth, and the life here at this period was wholly superficial, a thing of geography and cliques, the one fairly rigid, the other unstable and shifting. But these were the Years of the Great Prosperity, a time of broad social readjustments and generous inclusion. Poverty alone, we may say, enforces the rules of exact social differentiation; there has never been in America any society so scrupulous, proud and sensitive as that of the Southern cavaliers when they threw off their armour and returned to their despoiled estates.

It did not seem possible during these bountiful years that the wolf would ever yelp in the steep cañons of the Greater City, or that steel, iron and coal could ever less magically change to gold. It was, indeed, inconceivable that the prosperous citizens would not forever disport themselves in the glittering hotels of New York and go on discovering, like so many Columbuses, the delights of London and Paris. Nowhere were these Midases more in evidence than on the transatlantic steamers, where their millions were computed in awed whispers by less favoured travellers and the stewards danced with unwonted alacrity in the confident hope of largess.

“It’s our American habit”—Colonel Craighill was saying—“and not a bad trait, to believe our own state and our own city and our own quarter of the block where we live the most ideal place in the world. And this, Adelaide, is home!”

Mrs. Blair flung off her wraps in the hall and went to the dining room to interview the maid about breakfast. She arranged with her own hands the roses she had sent for this first table, and, this accomplished to her satisfaction, she peered into the cabinet that held the best of her mother’s Sevres with a lingering regret that she had not made way with it while there was yet time; for Mrs. Blair was eminently human, and women are never so weak as before the temptation to loot. She heard her father’s voice above, describing to his wife the character of the upper chambers and she joined Wayne in the library where he stood in the bay window looking out upon the thinning boughs of the maples.

“Well,” she exclaimed with a half sigh, “the worst is over.”

“You’ve done bully, Fanny. You’ve risen to the occasion!”

“Oh, it might be worse! It might be infinitely worse. What do you think of her?”

“Oh, she’s not bad! I should call her a pretty woman.”

“Well, she doesn’t seem to have much to say!”

“No one can, Sis, when you get going. She remarked quite distinctly that she liked summer better than winter, and I thought she did well to get that in.”

“Well, she was nice to the children, anyhow,” sighed Mrs. Blair, not heeding him.

Steps were heard on the stair and in a moment Mrs. Craighill entered at her husband’s side.

“I hope we haven’t kept you waiting. It’s so good of you to stop.”

“Breakfast is served always at eight o’clock,” Mrs. Blair explained as they moved toward the dining room. “I was driven from my home by that rule. Father would never yield fifteen minutes even when I had been dancing all night.”

Wayne drew back the chair for the new mistress of the house, and then sat down opposite his sister at the round table. All contributed a few commonplaces to the first difficult moments at the table, and Mrs. Blair took advantage of the opportunity to scrutinize the newcomer more closely. Mrs. Craighill was pretty, undeniably that; but it was a prettiness without distinction; it lay in the general effect, and in her ready smile rather than in particular features. Her hands were not to Mrs. Blair’s liking; they were a trifle too broad, but even this was minimized by the woman’s graceful use of them. The appearance of the coffee, which was made in a device that Wayne had set over to domestic use from the Club, brought him into the talk with his personal apologies for the absence of the silver breakfast service.

“That machine isn’t so formidable as it looks. It is warranted not to blow up. But I advise you against its product, Adelaide; the brew is as fierce as lye and will shatter the strongest nerves. Father requires water in his—about one hundred per cent. Please don’t feel obliged to use that trap if you don’t like it.”

He had spoken her name easily, and as he mentioned it she lifted her head from the cups and smiled at him with a little nod. Mrs. Blair, observant of everything, could not, in spite of the smooth-flowing talk, forget the waste areas of her ignorance of this woman, who had slipped unchallenged into her mother’s old place at the table, and whom she and Wayne were endeavouring to please. This last point touched her humour; that they, with their prior claims upon their father and the house, should be trying to impress the new wife favourably was to Fanny Blair’s mind decidedly funny.

“I suppose our severest winter weather will hardly equal the cold you have been used to in Vermont,” she remarked, stirring her cup.

“It gets very cold there, but it is bracing and wholesome,” replied Adelaide, meeting Fanny’s gaze. “But I have hardly been there since I grew up. Mama found she couldn’t stand the climate about the time I needed some schooling, so we went abroad, and you know how easy it is to stay on once you are over there. Our home in Vermont was at Burlington—you know, on the lake?—and the winds do come howling terribly down from Canada! It is lovely in summer, though. I’m going to take your father up there next summer,” she ended, smiling at her husband, who gazed at her fondly.

It had been some time since Mrs. Blair had heard anyone speak of taking her father anywhere. Her memory pricked her at once with the recollection that in her mother’s lifetime her father had yielded reluctantly to all pleas for vacations. The children had usually been taken away by their mother—sometimes to hotels at quiet summer places, at other times to houses rented for the season. Colonel Craighill did not always like the places chosen by his wife, but he had never quarrelled with her plans and decisions in such matters. He liked to travel and fell into the habit of an annual trip abroad, going usually alone, chiefly, he declared, for the sea trip. Now, however, Mrs. Blair reflected, everything would be different.

Breakfast passed smoothly, and they lingered later in the library. Mrs. Craighill seemed in no awe of her elderly husband. She talked more freely now, and mentioned many foreign places where she and her mother had lived at different periods. Most of them were obscure and unfashionable, and some of them were wholly unknown to Mrs. Blair; but she was dimly conscious that there was cleverness behind this careless sketching of the leisurely foreign itinerary pursued by this young woman and her widowed mother. At the same time the background which Mrs. Craighill created for herself was shadowy; against it she and her mother were as unsubstantial as figures on a screen. There was nothing that you could put your hand on. Vermont, to Mrs. Blair, was even more remote and inaccessible than those French and German towns where winters and summers had been spent by the mother and daughter. Mrs. Blair, in her rapid visualization of their flights, saw them huddled where the pension charges were lightest.

Wayne soon called for his runabout and went to the office, as his father had announced that he would remain at home until after luncheon. Wayne had acted becomingly, to his father’s satisfaction and to his sister’s great relief. Mrs. Blair was, in fact, quite proud of him as he said good-bye to her and stood very straight and tall before his stepmother and bade her good morning. He bore the stamp of breeding—she had never felt this more than now—and he could be relied on in emergencies.

“Are you all coming over to-night—the children and everybody?” asked Colonel Craighill.

“No; you must have your first dinner alone,” Mrs. Blair replied; “but to-morrow night you are coming to us.”

“I am dining with Fanny to-night, so you will have a clean sweep,” said Wayne, in conformity with his sister’s earlier instructions.

The sensation of being suddenly established as mistress of a home over which another woman had presided for twenty years, and in which she has borne and reared children and died, was to be Mrs. Craighill’s fully to-day. Mrs. Blair went thoroughly into all the domestic arrangements with the housekeeper attending. She revealed the repositories of linen, the moth-proof lodgments for woollen fabrics, the secret storehouses of fruit and vegetables. On these rounds Mrs. Blair evinced a sincere desire to be of help. She had fortified herself against heartache, but there were things that hurt. The ineffaceable marks of her mother’s forethought and labour were wrought into the deeper history of the house, and could never be understood by this newcomer, who laid ignorant hands upon the ark of the domestic covenant and yet escaped destruction.

Several times, on this tour of inspection, Colonel Craighill spoke his first wife’s name, and his manner and tone gave to his daughter’s sensitive intelligence a completer idea of his perfect detachment from the earlier tie. She felt the tightening of the heart that every woman feels when an illustration of man’s forgetfulness strikes close home. She foresees at once her own replacement by another; fickle flowers of remembrance are rusty patches on her grave where the winds of December moan forever. Fanny Blair, already, by this prevision, saw herself forgotten and her own successor entering her husband’s door, while her children, unkempt and tearful, wailed dolorously before the gates of oblivion.

CHAPTER IX
“HELP ME TO BE A GOOD WOMAN”

WHEN Wayne returned to the office after luncheon he looked in upon his father, who, having cleared his desk with his habitual easy dispatch, was addressing himself to the consideration of new business. Roger Craighill’s desk was never littered; a few sheets of figures lay before him as he glanced over his glasses at Wayne.

“Sit down a moment. You may remember that I have wanted, for several years, to get out of the jobbing business. Now I have an offer for it that it seems best to accept. Walsh wishes to buy it.”

“Walsh!” exclaimed Wayne.

“I was surprised that he should want to leave us,” Colonel Craighill continued.

“I’m rather more surprised that he should be able to!” said Wayne, who saw nothing heinous in Walsh’s wish to leave the office if he could do better elsewhere. It was, however, quite like his father to express amazement that a valued subordinate should desert his standard. Within a fortnight Wayne’s attitude toward his father had unconsciously hardened; what once had been fitful rebellion was now stubborn revolt. In his heart, Wayne felt that his father had never appreciated Walsh, and he hoped now, that if the silent lieutenant left, the loss would precipitate the breaking down of this complacency, this perfect self-confidence.

“Walsh has made a fair offer. He knows the business well—as well, practically, as I myself. His offer is based on the last invoice to which he adds one hundred thousand dollars for the name and good will of the house. The capitalization is just as your grandfather left it. Walsh has owned, for a number of years you remember, ten shares of the capital stock. You and I together own the rest. The few shares held by men in the office to complete the organization are all assigned to us. You have, if you remember——”

“Twenty shares,” said Wayne promptly, irritated that his father was assuming that he would not know.

“Quite right. You own twenty; I hold sixty-five; and that leaves five shares held by the clerks that are practically mine. I take it for granted that you will wish to sell your holding if I dispose of the controlling interest.”

“No; I hardly think I shall,” replied Wayne. “The earnings are better than they ever were, and I shouldn’t know where to do so well. Besides,” he added in a tone that caused his father to wince, “the business was started by Grandfather Wayne and I have always felt that I owed it to mother to keep my interest there. I suppose the corporate name will not be changed?”

“I had assumed it would not be,” replied Colonel Craighill smiling. “It is a part of the assets!”

“Certainly, the Wayne-Craighill Company! As I am both a Wayne and a Craighill I prefer to stay in; I assume you don’t care one way or another.”

“On the other hand, I am glad to see that you have a mind of your own in the matter, and your feeling about your grandfather, the founder of the house, does you great credit, my son. It pleases me more than I can say. I should not be retiring myself if this were not in line with my plans of several years for concentrating my interests. I can use this money to better advantage elsewhere.”

He did not explain how he proposed to re-invest the money derived from the sale of the jobbing business, and Wayne asked no questions. A number of men were waiting, as usual, to see Colonel Craighill, who presently took up several cards from his desk and rang for the office boy to begin admitting the callers.

Wayne had ordered Joe to bring down his runabout at four o’clock and for half an hour he idled as he waited in his own office. He came and went as he liked by the hall door in his room so that the clerks in the outer office never knew whether he was in or not.

“Home, Joe!” and he sat silently pondering until the car drew up at his father’s door. As he hung up his coat he was conscious of a new expectation, a new exhilaration. His heart beat fast as he stood, listening intently, like one who is startled by an obscure sound in a lonely house and waits for its recurrence. He had gone home to see his father’s wife; he had gone expecting to find her alone, and he peered into the dim drawing room guardedly as though fearful of detection. A clock on the stair struck the half-hour and its chime, familiar from childhood, beat upon his ears jarringly, and sent confused alarms bounding through his pulses. He turned into the library and there the thronging hosts of memory that the scene summoned, steadied and sobered him as he stood within the portières. Then, as he swung round into the hall, he heard a light laugh above, and Mrs. Craighill came running down to meet him. Her step on the stair was noiseless; his pictorial sense was alive to the grace of her swift descent.

“Home so soon!”

She put out her hand and waited at the foot of the stair. A rose-coloured house-gown, whose half-sleeves disclosed her arms from the elbow, seemed to diffuse a glow about her. He stood staring and unsmiling where her laugh had first arrested him until she spoke again.

“I didn’t know I was so forbidding as all that!” she said and walked past him into the library. She found a seat and he threw himself into a chair a little distance away from her. They looked at each other intently, he grave and sullen, she smiling.

“Well, you did it!” he said presently.

“Please!”

She turned with her lips pouting prettily and glanced over her shoulder. “Please be nice to me!”

“You haven’t changed your tricks; you don’t have to beg admiration, so cut it all out. What if I had stopped it?”

“Well, you didn’t—though I gave you your chance.”

“You needn’t give me credit for too much generosity. I was on a spree and didn’t get your letter until the trap was well sprung, and, besides, the name threw me off. It was only when the Colonel showed me your photograph, carried sacredly in his pocket, that I knew who you were. How’s your dear mama?”

“For once in her life I think she’s satisfied; she’s gone abroad, thank heaven!”

“Now that you’re fixed I suppose she will do something on her own account. She’s a wonder, that mother of yours.”

“Mama has her ambitions,” Mrs. Craighill observed pensively.

“Her greed, you mean. How did you get on with Fanny this morning?”

“Your sister’s a dear! I’m quite in love with her; she was perfectly lovely to me—kind as could be and anxious to be helpful. I’m already very fond of her.”

“I dare say your affections will include the whole family before you get through with us.”

This meeting was not to his taste. He had taken advantage of the first opportunity to be alone with his father’s wife, and now that they were together he was failing to give the right tone to the interview. It was proving disagreeable and he did not know how to change its key. It irritated him to find that Mrs. Craighill was calmly giving it direction.

“Wayne, dear,” she said, her arm thrown over the back of her low chair, “you came home to see me and now you are not a bit nice.”

“I came home because it’s home,” he replied doggedly.

“But you haven’t been home at this hour within the memory of anybody on the place. I asked the maids—very discreetly—what time Mr. Wayne came home and they were embarrassed. You cut the Club for me this afternoon; I’m not going to have it any other way.”

He rose and walked the length of the room, and when he had gained the bay window he looked back at her. She did not move and her head, the pretty arch of her neck, the graceful lines of her figure brought him quickly to her side. He took her hands roughly and drew her to her feet.

“Yes, I came home when I did to see you alone,” he cried eagerly. “You knew I would come; you counted on it; you were sure of it!”

“What a mind-reader you are!” she laughed, looking languidly up at him.

He clasped her hands in both his own, and peered into her face. Her eyes questioned him long; they held him away from her as though by physical force. Then the colour surged suddenly in her face and throat as he bent toward her lips and she cried out softly and freed herself.

“No! No! Not like that!”

“There is no other way. You didn’t think you could come here and begin all over again and live under the same roof with me and have me forget! I tell you I am not brass or wood! No woman was ever so much to any man as you are to me. If I had not been a fool you would have belonged to me; and now, now you are here and we cannot be less to each other than we were once. You know that; I know it!”

She was looking at him questioningly, with a wide-eyed gravity, and she was very white. She lifted her head slightly, as though by the act summoning her own courage, and took a step that brought her close to him; she laid her hands on his shoulders.

“Wayne, I want you to help me—I want you to help me to be a good woman.”

Her pallor had deepened; her lips trembled; the tears shone in her eyes.

“Why did you come here? If you wanted my help you took a strange way of getting it. It strikes me that the reason you came is something that we had better not go into.”

“That is not like you, Wayne. I suppose—I suppose—it would not occur to you that I admire and love your father; that, after the life I have led, the shelter of such a home as this and the protection of such a man mean more than I know how to describe. I haven’t the words to tell you what it means!” she ended with a little moan, and then: “It was only chance that threw me again in your way.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” he replied harshly. “I think your mother must have chuckled to herself at finding that she could catch the father if she couldn’t land the more sophisticated son. She thought she was taking revenge on me. Those are nice things you have”—his eye swept her gown—“and if your mother has gone abroad it’s a fair assumption that she tapped the Craighill till pretty soon after the wedding—if not just before!”

“You have no right to make such insinuations. It’s infamous. I don’t intend that you shall insult me under this roof.”

“Under this roof!” he mocked.

“Oh, I understand that it’s yours; that when your father dies it will belong to you; but while he lives it’s my shelter, it’s my home; the first, Wayne, that I ever had.”

He studied her with a puzzled look in his eyes. He had thought he knew her; that out of his earlier knowledge he could readily establish a new tie. The thought of this had filled his mind from the moment he had recognized her photograph at his father’s table.

“What I ask you for, Wayne, what I beg you to give me, is my chance. I have never had it yet. I have been hawked about and offered in a good many markets. I might have been married to you if mama had not counted too little on your sanity and tried to get money out of you before she had you well hooked. It is possible that I was a little—just a little slow at the game. I let you escape—I could have held you if I had wanted to—and I suffered for it afterward. You may be sure she punished me for that.”

“I dare say she did,” he muttered, watching her.

“If it hadn’t been that I really cared for you, Wayne, I think I should have gone ahead. You thought you were eluding me; the fact is that I precipitated that row myself to give you your chance to get away. The mater wanted to follow you into the courts; I stopped that by burning your letters and declining to give any aid.”

“Ha! my benefactress, you are discovered!”

“No, that is not the tone for you to take with me, Wayne. I have no intention of asking favours. I think,” and she pondered gravely as though anxious to be exact, “I believe I realize the enormity of what I have done perfectly, and I ask forgiveness, mercy, kindness. I have bought my freedom, and I want to be sure I shall have it—and peace. Oh, peace, decency; to stop being a vagabond, flung in the eyes of every man suspected of having money! That mother of mine didn’t sell me at the last; I made the bargain. And now that I bear your father’s name I am not going to dishonour it; I am not going to bring any cloud upon his old age, no disgrace and no shame. There is no nobler man in the world than he is, and as far as I can, with my poor, miserable, hideous past, and my poor wits, I am going to try to live up to him. There is just that one prayer in my heart—after all these temptations, and heartache, heartache, heartache!—that I may be a good woman—a good woman, Wayne! What a wonderful thing it would be if I could—goodness, with peace!”

Her voice was low and failed wholly now and then and he found himself watching her lips to read the words that his ears lost. He had been rejoicing in the thought that his father was the victim of a vulgar connivance between an avaricious and designing woman and a willing and not too scrupulous daughter; and the situation was one which he had counted upon playing with in his own fashion. The gossamer web of this hope now fluttered broken on the wind. In the silence that followed he saw for an instant the ignoble and shameful aspect of the thing that had been in his heart. Then a new idea flashed upon him; it was base, base enough to satisfy even this stubborn mood in which Mrs. Craighill’s appeal had left him. He felt a joy in his cunning; his heart warmed as the anger and resentment against his father took form again. The conquest was not to be so easy as he had imagined, but it would be all the sweeter for delay. Vengeance for wrongs and injustices might yet be secured. He experienced a thrill of gratification that his mind had responded to this need in defeat. His imagination built up a new tower of possibilities upon a fresh foundation: it was this new wife who had been deceived in the marriage, not his father! He would gain in the end what he sought and the blow at his father should lose nothing of its force when strengthened by her disappointment and humiliation. It was inconceivable that Roger Craighill would ever treat the woman as an equal; that there could ever be any real sympathy between them. With all the zest of youth in her, and with her love of life, she was sure to seek escape from the bleak zone he, as Roger Craighill’s son, knew well, but whose far-lying levels she now saw rosy with promise.

Mrs. Craighill had not looked at Wayne through the latter part of her recital and appeal; but she rose now and turned to him smilingly. She wore an air, indeed, of having defined an unassailable position; of having fully mastered its defense, with her own soul supreme in the citadel. Her confidence revealed itself in her voice as she addressed him; he was piqued to find that she apparently dismissed him a little condescendingly, as though their future relations were established on a basis determined by herself and that there was no question of maintaining them there.

“Good-bye, Wayne, I must run along now to dress for dinner. You dine with Fanny, don’t you? Please tell your sister how much I appreciate her kindness this morning; and I am grateful for yours, too, Wayne!”

He rose as she put out her hand. He looked at her fixedly as though her identity were suddenly in question. Then he laughed softly.

“Good-bye, Addie!”

He followed her into the hall. She did not look back at him, but went slowly up the stair with a dignity that was new in her. It was as though she wore her new wifehood as a protecting shield and cloak.

When he heard her door close he went up to his own room.

CHAPTER X
MR. WALSH MEETS MRS. CRAIGHILL

WINGFIELD was mistaken when he announced at the Allequippa Club, apropos of Walsh’s purchase of a controlling interest in the Wayne-Craighill Company, that Roger Craighill had never appreciated Walsh’s services. Colonel Craighill not only valued Walsh highly, but he took occasion to express, in a statement given to the newspapers, his “deep sense of loss upon the retirement of my faithful chief of staff, who after years of painstaking labour, reaps the reward of his own industry and fidelity.” More than this, Colonel Craighill made Walsh’s passing the occasion for a dinner to all the employees in his office and to the managers of the mines and coking plants in which he was interested. Walsh was thus used as an illustration of the qualities that make for honourable success. This banquet, provided at a leading hotel toward the end of October, was memorable on many accounts, and not least for the address delivered to the company by the head of the table—an utterance marked by noble sentiment and expressing the highest ideals of conduct in commercial life. Wingfield characterized this somewhat coarsely as “hot air” when he read it in the newspapers; the Colonel was, he averred, the Prince of the Platitudinous.

“The Colonel thinks he is looking through the windows of his soul upon Humanity,” remarked Wingfield to a shrewd, skilful occulist with whom he shared such heresies; “but the windows of his soul are all mirrors.” But Wingfield was almost the only man in town who refused to accept Roger Craighill at rather more than face value.

Wayne, glancing a few days later at Mrs. Blair’s list of persons to be invited to her reception in their stepmother’s honour, suggested that Walsh ought to be asked.

“Why Walsh?” asked Mrs. Blair bluntly. “When I pass him in the park driving his beautiful horses and with a long black cigar in his mouth, he makes me shudder.”

“When he takes up a list of accounts payable and runs his eye down the column, all the people who owe money anywhere on earth shudder. He’s a sphinx, but I like him. He’s been mighty good to me and if you don’t mind I’ll say that he will be missed at the office more than the Colonel knows.”

“Oh, tush, Wayne! Father has always said that no man is indispensable, and he wouldn’t have lost Walsh if he had needed him. Father’s proud that an old subordinate can go out of the office into a business of his own.”

“Maybe,” persisted Wayne, “maybe Walsh isn’t the subordinate.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that Walsh has been, far more than the Colonel knows, the deus ex machina of our affairs. Father has not known the details of his various interests for years—not since I went into the office. He sees only the results and, thanks to Walsh, they have been very satisfactory. When there was a nasty trip to take in a hurry to head off a strike, or to see why we weren’t making the usual tonnages, old Walsh slipped out of town and looked after it without a word. Father thinks he did it all; probably thinks it honestly; and Walsh let him think it. That’s Walsh’s way. When father went out in his private car and found all the properties in bang-up shape he thought he was looking at the results of his own management; but in fact Walsh’s eagle eye and iron grip had done the real work.”

“You mustn’t talk so of father, Wayne; you have grown bitter toward him and can’t judge him fairly. But if you think Mr. Walsh ought to be asked to the reception I’ll send him a card. There isn’t any Mrs. Walsh, I believe?”

“No. He’s married happily to his horses and cigars. Don’t take this too hard; Walsh has never manifested any interest in social fusses yet and he’ll hardly begin now. I can’t see him in a dress suit! He won’t come to your party but it would be decent to send him a ticket.”

“Certainly, Wayne; not because Mr. Walsh has been father’s brains but because you ask it.”

“Oh, never mind that! Walsh has always been bully to me. I’m keeping my stock in the mercantile company just because I like him. When we closed that deal the other day and I told Tom I was going to hold on to my stock he came as near being affected as I suppose is possible in such a hardy old plant. The name of the corporation isn’t to be changed and he said he hoped I’d come to see him occasionally to help his credit. He was really a good deal tickled over it.”

The Blair house lent itself well to large entertainments. At ten o’clock the hostess breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that her party was a success. The representative people of the Greater City were there. Men and women who, in Mrs. Blair’s phrase, “stood for something,” had passed in review before Mrs. Roger Craighill. Mrs. Blair was catholic-minded in social matters. The wide advertisement of her city through the coarse social exploits of some of her citizens during the Great Prosperity had aroused her bitter resentment, and she had summoned for this occasion many who, able to declare themselves guiltless of wealth, proved in their own lives and aspirations that something besides vulgarity and greed emerge from the seething caldron to which the Greater City may be likened. It was Mrs. Blair’s delight to discover, and as far as lay in her power, to stimulate and reward ambition in the arts and sciences. She had promoted the fortunes of a long line of young physicians, placing them on hospital boards and sending them influential patients. Poor artists were sure to find sitters if she took them up; the young girl seeking countenances to immortalize in miniature would, if satisfactorily weighed in Mrs. Blair’s balance, find herself embarrassed with clients. John McCandless Blair could never tell, when he went home to dinner, what new musical genius would be enthroned in the music room—young men in flowing black scarfs, or, rather more delectable, young girls of just the right type to look well at the harp, and who, no matter what strains might be evoked by their fingers, yet possessed in the requisite degree what Mrs. Blair capitalized as Soul.

Mrs. Blair’s reception drew a wide circle within which Mrs. Craighill made the acquaintance of her husband’s fellow-townsmen. Curiosity proved stronger in most cases than fealty to the dead, even among the first Mrs. Craighill’s friends. The obvious answer to any invidious question as to the wife’s previous history was that a man standing as high as Colonel Craighill, and as careful as he of his honour and good name, was unlikely to make a marriage that would jeopardize his position.

There were, however, absences that expressed the resentment of certain old friends of the family who had, in Mrs. Blair’s phrase, “taken a stand.” These were fewer than Mrs. Blair had hoped for but Mrs. Wingfield did not appear; the pastor emeritus of Memorial Church, a gentleman who had been favoured by fortune and was in no wise dependent on Craighill patronage, had declined earlier an invitation to dine and a request for the honour of his presence at the reception; and a retired general of the army, who sat with Roger Craighill among the elders of Memorial, not only scorned these overtures but expressed discreetly his feeling that the marriage had been an act of disloyalty to the Craighill children. There were not more than half a dozen of these instances, and while they were not, to be sure, of great importance, Mrs. Blair magnified their significance and took pains to thank the absentees later for their attitude. Dick Wingfield, keen in such matters, found upon analysis that those who, like his own mother, rejected the newcomer, were persons who had nothing whatever to lose by incurring the disfavour of Roger Craighill. His mother was rich and an independent spirit if ever one existed; the old minister’s income could not be disturbed by Roger Craighill or anyone else; the retired general had, as a lieutenant, invested his scant savings in Omaha and Seattle town lots, and checks from Washington were only an incident of his income. Nobody, in fact, whom Roger Craighill could possibly reach, no one likely to need his help in any way whatever, had joined in this tame rebellion.

Wingfield, not easily astonished by anything, was nevertheless amazed to meet Walsh at Mrs. Blair’s reception. He imagined that he knew Walsh pretty well, but their acquaintance had been a matter of contact at the Club, warmed into friendliness during a period in which Wingfield had, as he put it, “affected horse.” Wingfield was looking for the youngest débutante when he came upon Walsh stolidly smoking in the Blair library. Walsh in a white waistcoat was something new under the sun. It occurred to Wingfield that he had never seen him in anyone’s house before. He stopped to smoke a cigarette that he might, if possible, analyze Walsh’s emotions in this alien air.

“So you’ve quit the Colonel—taken over the Wayne-Craighill Company. If you have any stock to sell I’d like to have a slice. I’ve always thought the grocery business must be entertaining. Its ethnological relations would appeal to me. I understand that these people who pile themselves on our social dump—the riff-raff of Europe—bring their delectable appetites with them, and that your cellars are as savoury as a Chinese stinkpot with the bouquet of finnan haddie and such epicurean delights. So Wayne’s going to stay in, is he?”

Walsh took the cigar from his mouth and nodded.

“Yes; Wayne’s vice-president of the company now.”

“That’s good. You and I are the only people hereabouts who really appreciate Wayne. There are things that Wayne can do.”

Walsh nodded again. He settled himself back in his chair comfortably and looked at Wingfield with liking. A bronze Buddha, a striking item of the lares and penates of the Blair home, gazed down upon them benevolently.

“Wayne,” said Walsh deliberately, “was born to be a man of power. He was built for big transactions.”

Wingfield was surprised into silence. He had never before heard Walsh express himself as to the character of any man and there was something akin to heartiness in this endorsement of Wayne Craighill. Wingfield forgot his quest of the débutante in his eagerness to hear the inscrutable Walsh’s opinions. Fearing that he might relapse into one of the silences for which he was famous, Wingfield applied the prod.

“The Colonel never understood Wayne,” he remarked leadingly.

“That is possible,” replied Walsh, after a moment of deliberation.

“Wayne could do anything he wanted to—lead forlorn hopes, command a battleship, preach a sermon, run a coal mine, or sell a gold brick. The Scotch in him is pretty sound yet. He’s a free spender, but he has his thrifty side.”

“Um—yes. Wayne has brains.”

“Why don’t you take him in hand, Walsh, and teach him how to work?”

After a prolonged silence Walsh asked dryly:

“Why?”

“Because the Colonel has failed at it.”

The two men looked at each other fixedly for a moment.

“He tried hard enough. He’s disappointed in Wayne.”

Walsh spoke as though he were repeating an accepted opinion rather than voicing his own thought. Wingfield caught him up.

“It pleases the Colonel to think that he possesses anything as well authenticated as a thankless child. The serpent’s tooth tickles the Colonel’s vanity. Resignation becomes the Colonel like a pale lavender necktie.”

“He may work his way out. Marriage might help him.”

“That’s not so easy. A bad marriage would send him clear to the bottom. You’ve got to find a particular sort of girl for his case.”

“I agree with you. The girls that are here to-night—the pretty daughters of best families—that kind would be no good for him; and besides, they’re not going to try it. Their papas and mamas wouldn’t let them if they wanted to.”

Wingfield was delighted to hear these expressions from Walsh. It was as though the sphinx, breaking the silence of centuries, had suddenly bent down and addressed a chance traveller on the topics of the day. Walsh spoke, moreover, with the quiet conviction of one who had thought deeply on the subject under discussion.

“You are quite right. I agree with you fully!” declared Wingfield, anxious to hear further from Walsh. “It would take a plucky girl to tackle Wayne.”

“Brains, common sense, patience! A good, sensible working-girl would be my choice.”

Walsh stroked his bald pate with his hand, and drew deeply upon his cigar. Wingfield was pondering Walsh’s words carefully, fully appreciating the flattery of the old fellow’s unwonted loquacity.

“How are we going to find her?”

“We are not going to find her. Wayne’s a lucky devil—such fellows are usually lucky—and his future must take care of itself.”

“So our prince must marry a pauper, the girl behind the glove counter, the angel whose nimble digits gambol merrily upon the typewriter, the low-voiced houri who trifles with the world’s good nature in the telephone exchange? Wayne is fastidious. How are you going to arrange the time and the place and the loved one altogether?” demanded Wingfield.

“I’m not a fool, Mr. Wingfield; I’m not going to arrange it at all! I’d look pretty in the matchmaking business,” concluded Walsh grimly.

“No; I guess not,” smiled Wingfield; but he was startled by Walsh’s next statement, delivered quietly and with his cigar in his mouth.

“I could hardly qualify as an expert on marriage, having failed at it myself.”

Walsh’s tone forbade inquiry. He had opened a door into some dark chamber of his past, then closed it tight and shot the bolt back into place. He rose, clumsily and lumberingly, and dropped his cigar into an ash tray. The long, blank surface of his bald head wrinkled as his brows lifted, and his eyes widened as though fixed on a horizon against which he had glimpsed the familiar outlines of some wave-washed and hopeless argosy. By a common impulse the men clasped hands silently.

“An election bet or what?” cried Mrs. Blair in the doorway. “With all the trouble there is about getting men, I should like to know what you two mean by hobnobbing here by yourselves. I shall punish you for this, Mr. Walsh, by making you take me in to supper.”

The guests were being served in the dining room and in the hall and conservatory adjoining. Mrs. Blair convoyed Walsh to a corner where Mrs. Craighill was seated at a table with the solidest bank president of the Greater City. This person was, however, slightly deaf, and as Mrs. Blair rose frequently, in her office of hostess, to assure herself of the comfort of the others who were straying in for supper, Walsh found opportunity for speech with Mrs. Craighill, whom he had observed only passingly in the drawing room.

“This is the most hospitable place! Everyone is so very kind,” murmured Mrs. Craighill.

“I suppose so,” replied Walsh, his glance falling upon Roger Craighill, who was relating an anecdote to a circle of wrapt listeners near by. The financier was intent upon his salad, and Mrs. Craighill gave her whole attention to Walsh.

“Colonel Craighill has told me a great deal about you, Mr. Walsh. Let me see what it was that he said—you know how splendidly he puts everything—he said, ‘Mr. Walsh is a born trustee; you can trust him with anything.’”

“Those are strong words,” said Walsh, meeting her gaze quietly.

“But you are leaving him, and he is very glad when any of his men go away from him to do better for themselves. He feels that it’s a credit to him. I suppose it’s like the pride the colleges take in a successful graduate.”

Here obviously was an opportunity for Walsh to follow her line of thought and speak in praise of his alma mater; but he switched the subject abruptly.

“You are a stranger here, Mrs. Craighill?”

“Yes, I was! But I’m beginning to feel at home already. I suppose it will take me years to learn everything about this wonderful city.”

“I have been here twenty-five years and have it all to learn—I mean this sort of thing,” and Walsh glanced about as though to broaden into generalization his ignorance of society. “This is the first time I have ever crossed a threshold in this town.”

“How strange!” He was even more difficult than the deaf financier, this strange old fellow with the shiny pate and unsmiling countenance. “But,” she laughed, “I’m going to take this as personal to me—your coming to-night! You won’t grudge me the belief that I’m responsible for your appearance—your first appearance—if you really mean me to believe that it is the first!”

“There is no doubt of that. It’s what they call my début. I came”—and he smiled, a smile that was of the eyes rather than the thin lips—“I came for that. I came just to see you.”

He looked at her so fixedly that she shrugged her shoulders and turned away. This might be the privilege of an old friend of her husband, but his words fell harshly, as from lips unused to gracious speech. Very likely he was an eccentric character, who, from his own statement, was ignorant of social usage. His keen scrutiny made Mrs. Craighill uncomfortable for a moment.

“Now that you have seen me, Mr. Walsh, please tell me your verdict; spare nothing!”

“I think,” said Walsh bluntly, “that you are much nicer than I expected.”

He was trying to take a lump of sugar for his coffee with the tongs, but his hand shook.

“Fingers were made first! Allow me! You are smoking too much—that’s the answer,” she laughed. Walsh was annoyed by this evidence of weakness, for his nerves were usually steady, and he was vexed to be obliged to accept her help.

“Horses and cigars are your only diversions, I hear, Mr. Walsh.”

“Who told you that?”

“It was Wayne, I think.”

“Oh, yes; Wayne,” repeated Walsh, as though recalling the name with difficulty.

“Wayne and you are great friends.”

“Well, I don’t know that he would admit it,” and Walsh smiled. Mrs. Craighill reflected that there was something akin to tenderness just now in the face of this curious man.

“Oh, he told me about it! He spoke of you much more enthusiastically than Colonel Craighill did. It was not that Colonel Craighill didn’t say everything that was kind; but with Wayne, it was as though——”

“Well?”

“As though he loved you—there!”

The colour deepened in Walsh’s weather-beaten face, ruddy at all times from the park air, where he drove in every sort of weather; even his bald crown reddened. He was undoubtedly pleased; but he said, with an effort at lightness:

“That’s just like Wayne; he’s a great joker.”

Mrs. Blair flashed back upon them now, and charged them with treasonable confidences. The old banker had detached himself some time earlier and joined the circle which Colonel Craighill was addressing in his semi-oratorical key on the opposite side of the room. Mrs. Craighill and Walsh, having satisfied their own imaginary social hunger, remained with Mrs. Blair while she had her coffee.

“You must come up and see the dance. All the prettiest girls have come. You must go up to the ballroom, too, Mr. Walsh. And I’m going to tell you now, for fear I forget it, how pleased I am that you came.”

“You were kind to ask me. It has been a privilege to meet Mrs. Craighill.”

Walsh stood up abruptly, bowed with a quaint touch of manner to each of the ladies, pleaded an engagement downtown, and left them.

Mrs. Craighill was surprised to find herself turning her head to watch his burly figure through the door.

Wayne, roaming the house restlessly, drifted into the conservatory. It had been his sister’s habit to ignore what was practically ostracism as far as he was concerned socially. She realized the justice of his exclusion, but inwardly, with sisterly fidelity, resented it. There was a pathos in him that touched her; and as she saw him moving about alone, or joining some group where size minimized the danger of contamination, her heart ached for him. Wayne, as he lounged listlessly in the dining room door, saw Walsh in conversation with Mrs. Craighill a moment before Mrs. Blair rejoined them. Wayne stood just behind his father and several of Colonel Craighill’s auditors looked up and smiled, but without relaxing their attention.

“You young people,” Colonel Craighill was saying, “can’t be expected to love this town of ours as we old folks do, who, you might say, fought and bled for it. Even now,” he continued, adjusting his plate carefully upon his knee and lifting his eyes dreamily, “the Civil War period is as remote in the minds of the new generation as the Wars of the Roses.”

“Tell us a war story, Colonel!” cried a girl in the circle; “something really terrible—of how you led a forlorn hope, the flag lifted in one hand and your trusty sword in another, sprinting right over the ramparts at Saratoga or The Cowpens, or whatever the place was——”

Colonel Craighill joined in the laugh at his own expense, and appealed to the group:

“Doesn’t this prove what I was saying? You children know nothing of American history. I didn’t quite come over with Columbus, Julia. A few weeks ago I was talking to the president—I hadn’t really gone to Washington for the purpose but we got into it somehow——”

Wingfield, who had brought the prettiest of the débutantes down from the ballroom, paused a moment to catch the drift of the Colonel’s story. He was bound for the conservatory, where there were opportunities for the better study of his butterfly, who was a trifle awed by the attention of a grown man, one who had, in fact, been in her father’s class at Pennsylvania. Wayne, with something akin to a grin on his face, turned away abruptly out of hearing of his father’s voice, nodded to Wingfield and passed on. His friend, with the careless ease that distinguished him, had sighted a waiter and two chairs in a far corner of the conservatory and led the way thither.

“Did you hear Julia Morse sting the Colonel?” he asked the girl, as he unfolded his napkin. “I shall have to look her up; I’ve done her a cruel injustice. I supposed Julia was a stanch subscriber to the Craighill superstition, but she’s clearly deeper than I imagined. It’s odd I never knew Julia’s true worth; I’m annoyed by my own density. The salad—yes!”

“The Craighill superstition?” asked the girl, the knowledge and wisdom of Wingfield’s forty-three years towering over her youth and inexperience like a mighty cliff.

“Just that—quite that! The Colonel’s military greatness ranks with the ladder superstition, the Friday superstition, the thirteen at table superstition, and all those things.”

“But Colonel Craighill was a soldier in the Civil War—of course not in the Revolution, I know that.”

“Now really, if you won’t ever say I told you—if this can be a little confidence just between ourselves as old friends—I’ll tell you something. The Colonel was never a real colonel at all. But when General Lee started for Chicago by way of Gettysburg in the summer of 1863, Pittsburg was terribly frightened, so the old folks say—I wasn’t here, I assure you!—and Colonel Craighill bossed the men who dug entrenchments around the city to keep the Confederates out. He did it well. When your father and I were kids together—doesn’t it seem absurd that you and I can’t be contemporaries, instead?—oh, my, please forget that I began that sentence; it leads clear back to the time when the Indians camped where the Craighill building stands.

“Well, as I was saying, the Colonel was only a sort of home-guard trench-digger and that sort of thing. He helped the women manage fairs and did it very prettily, but ever since the War the Colonel’s stock as a red-handed slayer of his country’s foes has been rising. He ranks with Wellington and Grant, with a little dash of Sheridan thrown in.”

“I sit behind Colonel Craighill in church and it doesn’t seem possible that he would deceive anyone,” remarked the girl, half afraid to yield to her delight in these profane utterances.

“Ah! but he deceives himself; he really believes that he held up the pillars of the Union cause and who are we to question him? And he’s an ardent if cautious reformer; he’d rather cut the ten commandments to a scant six than mutilate the present tariff, which alone is holy to us Pennsylvanians. Do you know, this salad is really edible; I must congratulate Mrs. Blair on her cook. Of course we’re to see you everywhere now. Please don’t be running off all the time; it’s demoralizing. If we good people don’t stay at home, what, may I ask, will become of Pittsburg? We produce everything in Pennsylvania, as you may have noticed—everything but local pride!”

CHAPTER XI
PADDOCK DELIVERS AN INVITATION

IT WAS remarked by the clerical staff in the Craighill offices that in the weeks following Walsh’s removal to the jobbing house, Wayne was unusually attentive to his office duties. Clerks in the habit of leaving reports on his desk found themselves questioned in regard to them before the young man gave his visé, which had been scrawled carelessly heretofore upon anything thrust before him. It should not too lightly be assumed that Wayne had experienced any sudden conversion or that his unwonted diligence was due to the prickings of conscience; but it had occurred to him, at the passing of Walsh, that he really knew little of his father’s affairs.

Roger Craighill’s reputation for business ability was solidly established. Until it became the fashion for trust companies to perform such services, he had often been chosen to administer estates; but in keeping with his wish to give more time to public service he had gradually freed himself of such duties. His marriage, changing necessarily the ultimate distribution of his estate, had piqued Wayne’s curiosity as to his father’s wealth. His long-gathering resentment against his father needed facts with which to fortify and strengthen itself. He was skeptical as to all of his father’s virtues and the marriage had demolished his confidence in his father’s conservatism and caution. He now began to test the outward gilt of the resplendent statue of Roger Craighill already imaginably set up by admiring fellow-citizens in the market place. He had only the vaguest idea of the nature of contracts; but he examined a great number of these documents, affecting the ownership and control of properties whose titles were only names to him. He even began summarizing and tabulating these, the better to study them. His father, as of old, referred to him, day by day, matters whose triviality now struck him with greater force than before in view of his growing grasp of affairs.

Wayne had really believed, like everyone else, that his father was a man whose fortune entitled him to be classed with comfortable millionaires—not, indeed, among the Pittsburg collossi, but among the eminently solid and unspectacular rich. As he pondered his computations and scanned the precis derived from them he reached the startling conclusion that his father’s fortune was in reality a huge and unsupported shell. He had begun studying his father’s affairs in the hope of finding some weapon which, at the fitting moment, he might use to humiliate this proud and self-sufficient parent, who had been so intolerant of his sins and weaknesses. Any trifling error or some badly judged investment would have served; but for the fact that his curiosity had been awakened in the beginning as to the amount of his father’s possessions he would have abandoned his researches long before.

It was now perfectly clear that Roger Craighill had ceased to be a factor in the coal and iron industries; that he had been gradually relinquishing his holdings in the substantial enterprises with which he had earlier been identified and that he had re-invested his money in securities of little or no standing in the market. These reflected, Wayne realized, his father’s large, imaginative way of viewing “world questions”—as Colonel Craighill called them. For example, his faith in American colonial development was represented in large holdings in Philippine and Porto Rican ventures that struck Wayne as being properly a pendant to an address his father had delivered Somewhere before Something on “America’s Duty to Her Colonies.”

Wayne had, during the summer of nineteen hundred and seven, given little heed to the whispered rumours of approaching panic. The Great Prosperity had become an old story, and pessimists had predicted its termination for several years without shaking faith in it. On Saturday, the twenty-sixth of October, business closed confidently; before Monday morning a mysterious stifling fog had stolen over the country. It did not seem possible that any human agency could have so thoroughly diffused the word—whatever it was—that paralyzed the financial energy of the remotest village, for it was paralysis, not panic. The newspapers ignored the situation and suppressed the truth; a few men around mahogany director’s tables alone dealt in facts; the rest of the country groped among rumours. Money went into hiding; banks drew the curtains over paying-tellers’ windows and calmly declared that there was no cause for alarm. Finance whistled in a graveyard and everyone pretended that nothing was the matter. Colonel Craighill, astute student of affairs, fed the journals with optimistic statements affirming the perfect security of the national glory as proved by credible statistics. Everybody was rich, yet nobody had any money; credits were never sounder, but nobody could borrow a cent. The Great Prosperity had been followed by the Great Scare and yet there was no panic in the strict sense of the term. Colonel Craighill was encouraged by his business friends to talk in the newspapers; no one else was so plausible, no one else could so deftly enwreathe the smiling brow of Mammon. His pronouncements soothed the fretful and put to shame those dull persons who had been disposed to question the edicts of the Mahogany Tables. If Colonel Craighill said that Finance is a science not intended to be understanded of the people, it must be so, and mere ignorant mortals did well not to bother their poor heads about it.

Colonel Craighill, believing firmly that merit and length of tenure should be favoured in promotions, had installed as Walsh’s successor an accountant who had been chief book-keeper in the office for many years. Walsh had mildly suggested Wayne, but Colonel Craighill rejected the recommendation.

“The suggestion does credit to your kindness of heart, Walsh, but—you must know it is impossible.”

Paddock called on Wayne at the office one afternoon to find him bending studiously over a mass of papers. Wayne greeted his old friend amiably.

“Don’t be afraid! I’ll not bite you this time.”

He cleared a chair of papers and bade the clergyman make himself at home.

“I won’t conceal it from you, old man, that I was in bad shape that night you came in on me here. I saw everything red—not pink, but a bright burning scarlet. You won’t mind my saying it, but your call was deucedly inopportune. I had come up here with my tongue hanging out to drink that quart, and to be caught with the goods on by a gentleman of the cloth annoyed me. I’ll not spare your feelings in the matter! And then you looked so fresh and fit and good that that riled me too. I was ashamed of it afterward—the way I received your life confession. And the bottle——”

“Did you eat it?” laughed Paddock, delighted to find his old friend in this gay humour.

“I told you I was going to the bad that night, and you went out with a hurt look as though I had kicked your dog or done some low thing of that sort. Your tact is wholly admirable. If you had said one word to me when I told you I had started for hell I should have screamed and made a terrible fuss. Strong men could not have held me. You went away and left me, by which token I know you possess the wisdom of serpents. And I proceeded at once to get beautifully drunk.”

Paddock said nothing, but smiled sadly.

“But I have cut it out now. I shall look no more upon the rum bottle when it’s red, not because I don’t like it, but because I’ve thought of much more dreadful and heinous sins.”

“Then,” said Paddock, not understanding, “I have merely stimulated your ambition as a sinner.”

“That’s exactly it. There’s something rather contemptible about drunkenness. A man of education ought to do worse or be very, very good. Well, how goes the work?”

“First rate. That’s what I came in to see you about. I want you, as a leading citizen, to come and look at my plant.”

“Certainly, I’ll do that with pleasure, sometime, provided your real design isn’t to show me off as an awful example. Mind you, I don’t stand for that. At any rate, I was brought up in the strict letter of the Presbyterian faith, and if I have any value as an example of what shouldn’t be, the Presbyterians have first call. It would be low down in me to pose for you Episcopalians, who are a rival body.”

“I don’t want you to pose as anything; just sit on the back seat and watch the events of an evening. The hat isn’t passed—no sermon—maybe a song or two, but you don’t have to sing. Your chauffeur will know how to take you out; he quite eclipses me. His batting averages make him a marked man; his record of strike-outs his last season on the diamond lifted him quite out of the back-lot class.”

“Am I to understand that Joe Denny has fallen under your spell and frequents the parish house? Well, I thought he was sneaking the machine out at night pretty often, but I didn’t give him credit for anything so noble. I thought it was somebody’s housemaid.”

“He says he can pitch with his left hand just as well as with his right, but he’s passed up the cheering diamond out of devotion to you. He talks about you with tears in his eyes.”

“He takes quite the paternal attitude toward me—looks after me as though I were four years old. The paternal attitude,”—Wayne repeated musingly—“odd phrase that, Paddock. When is it you want me to come to your joss-house?”

“Why not to-night? The various sections are going to get together for the first time, and it will be interesting to see how they mix. Jim Balinski of Altoona will do a sparring stunt with Mike the motorman; songs and recitations will be provided and the girls’ cooking class will attend to the refreshments. I dare you to do better.”

“I’m embarrassed,” laughed Wayne, lacing his fingers behind his head and sprawling out in his chair. “I’m due to sit in a poker game to-night with a few hardened veterans; but your programme appeals to me as more wholesome. I’ll come as long as it’s you, but with the distinct understanding that you don’t try to convert me. I’ll do it once for an old friend; our friendship will suffer if it ever happens again. But,” and he drew down his hands and squared himself in his chair, “but how about all these people you are working for down there? You are going to feed them on cakes and ale and make them dissatisfied, so that they will march into the East End some pleasant evening and tear the citizens from their homes and decorate the trolley poles with them. Your mission in life is pretty, but after all, Jimmy Paddock, can you stick a lever under the lower stratum of society and lift it?”

He struck a match and lighted a cigarette.

“Let me see,” replied Paddock soberly, “whether I can explain just what my idea really is. I don’t propose to lift the whole mass with my little lever. It seems to me that the books on these subjects are just a lot of phrases. I don’t know anything about the deep philosophy of our social organization—I can’t understand those things. I haven’t the brains to debate social questions with people who don’t see them my way. I can’t talk to people who say my kind of work is futile; I can’t discuss it with them or defend my idea, for two reasons: one is that I don’t even understand their phraseology; and the other is that they make me so hot that I want to beat their brains out with a featherduster. There, you see, old man, the wild Indian in me isn’t all dead yet; I’m far from being a saint. I don’t believe that even the most ignorant and depraved are going to be spoiled, as you say, by being treated like human beings. I don’t think the taste of cakes and ale will send them up into the East End to kill and loot. I may be mistaken, but I believe that those singed and scorched fellows in the steel mills are just as good as I am. I don’t recognize class distinctions. I positively decline to allow any sociologist to classify me and pin me on a card like a new kind of flea. But every man is a social class by himself as I look at it. I’m not big enough or strong enough morally or intellectually to try to pull up one of the social strata and transplant it; but I can go out and find some poor devil who is down on his luck or who has got into the gutter, and I can put my poor individual lever under him and pull for all I’m worth and maybe, by the grace of God, I can lift him up a little, just a little bit. Now, you think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“No,” said Wayne, “not in the least. You’re worse; you’re a blooming sentimentalist. But you’re a good fellow anyhow, and I don’t think you ought to be discouraged. I’d like to contribute——” and he glanced toward a check-book that lay on his desk.

“No you don’t!” cried Paddock. “I don’t want your money. I suppose you could give me a good-sized sum and never miss it; but I don’t want that kind of money. I accept contributions not as a favour to me but as a favour to the giver; you see, there’s a large difference. The richest churchwarden in Pittsburg came out with a party of ladies the other Sunday. He sent me a check for a thousand dollars the next day and advised me to ventilate my chapel; he didn’t like the smell of my congregation. I sent him back his check. A girl who works in a laundry for six dollars a week offered me one of those dollars to help pay for the refreshments to-night and I took it!”

“By George, you have it bad! I suppose the laundry girl’s money carried with it the idea of purification. I do wish they would keep chemicals out of my shirts. Perhaps if you would reason with them, Jimmy, you could stop the havoc.”

“You illustrate the individual in his most selfish aspect,” laughed the minister. “You see only your own torn shirt. Your remedy lies not with the girl but with her employer. You tell him you want better work and that unless he raises the wages of his employees you’ll carry your shirts elsewhere.”

“That would be far too much trouble; it’s a lot easier to buy new linen.”

“That’s the secret of the whole situation we’re talking about; it’s easier to buy a new shirt than to take care of the one you’ve got. By the same token it’s easier to wear out a coal miner and throw him away when you can’t use him any longer than to preserve the men who are digging our coal to-day. They all go on the rubbish heap—they’re just old scrap. I’ve been up in the anthracite districts where children under the age limit are employed in the breakers; and in the churches of the towns up there men devoutly thank God every Sunday for so kindly putting all this mineral wealth in the hills of the State of Pennsylvania so they may give their own children comforts and luxuries won by the blackened hands of other men’s children.”

“We have laws that cover such cases; enforce the laws. I’m for that,” said Wayne.

“But we don’t want to do it that way! We must do it not by law but by love,” and the minister smiled his sad smile.

Wayne laughed and threw away his cigarette.

“You’re a mighty good fellow, Jimmy Paddock, but you’re a sentimentalist, that’s all. There may be some of that in me down underneath somewhere, but I doubt it. Anyhow, I’ll take a peep at your little party to-night; I dare say it won’t do me any harm.”

CHAPTER XII
THE SHADOWS AGAINST THE FLAME

“DO I know the place? Sure!” said Joe Denny when Wayne ordered the chauffeur to be ready with the limousine at eight o’clock. The runabout was in the shop and the limousine was a next year’s model that Wayne had just acquired. “He’s the wonder, this Father Jim.”

“What’s that?” demanded Wayne.

“Father Jim, they call him out at Ironstead. Say, he knows how to put the boys to work.”

“What line of study have you tackled?”

“Me study? Say, you’re not on to me. I’m one of the professors.”

Wayne glared at him without speaking and the former ball player explained, with unmistakable pride and a gradual lapse into the vernacular.

“I’m the baseball professor. We’re going to put up a nine in the spring that will make anything else look sick that gets in front. Say, they’re good people out there. It’s a new one on me, that kind of religion; all friendly and sociable-like, and the strong, glad hand. He don’t ask you to sign the pledge or come to church. He says he ain’t running in opposition to the saloons, he’s just going to put up a better show. But he’s made a deal with the tank joints. He’s told all of ’em that if they sell to a fellow what’s loaded or to hurry-the-can kids he’ll prosecute ’em and have their license took up. He goes into the saloons and talks to the bosses quite confidential-like and tells ’em he doesn’t object to their business as such. He says the workin’ man’s entitled to sip his suds the same as the gents in the Allequippa Club; but the bar-keep ought to throw out any man that gets loaded, which is not being a gent any more. He talks kind o’ natural and reasonable, like he had been a bar-keep himself some time. Say, it’s a sure thing he could do his own bouncin’ all right. There was a Roumanian low-brow out there who cheered himself with alcohol straight and went over to the parish house to clean it out. He butted in and kicked open the door where the geography class was learnin’ all about Afriky where the niggers and monks come from. The kids in the night school skidooed for the home plate, seein’ the fire in the Roumanian’s eye. ‘This is a hell of a place,’ he yells, and reached for the Father. Father Jim caught him one under the ear and knocked ’im over a big globe they have out there to find the North Pole on. The bum thought the earth had caved in on ’im for sure and laid on his back bleatin’ like a sick sheep. Some of the kids had got the cops and when they chased in the Father was pourin’ ice water on the Roumanian, delicate-like. ‘We’ll give him about six months for this,’ says the sergeant; ‘don’t bother, Father, to clean him up—he’ll come to in the wagon all right,’ says the sergeant. ‘Sorry, boys, you’ve been put to the trouble,’ says Father Jim, settin’ the earth on its right end again, ‘but my friend was late to his lesson to-night and came in so fast he had heart failure,’ says Father Jim. ‘Step downstairs, officers, and the night cookin’ class will give you some coffee,’ says Father Jim. And if he didn’t put the slob to sleep in his own bed—honest to God he did!

“And listen,” continued Joe, pleased to see that Wayne was interested, “the gayest that happened was about old Isidore, the Jew ole-clothes man, who had a row with the rabbi. He had it in for the rabbi good and strong and he got a pair of pig’s feet and slipped ’em under the rabbi’s chair in the synagogue, which was against the religion, and oh, my, some of the members of that church got after Isidore and was goin’ to make ’im into a burnt sacrifice all right. But Father Jim hid ’im in the cellar at the parish house and went to square it with the rabbi. You might think, them not bein’ members of the same church, and viewin’ matters quite different, they’d give each other the razzle; but Father Jim umpired the row all right and Isidore buys his meat at the kosher shop now, which is proper, Father Jim says, him bein’ a Jew, which is a great race, he says. Shall I crank the buzz wagon?”

Guided by a pillar of cloud that wavered against the stars of the keen, autumn night, the motor sped on toward Ironstead. The black pall was lighted fitfully by fierce gusts of flame; golden showers of sparks rose ceaselessly, fountain-like, and gave a glory and charm to the scene. At one point there fell on Wayne’s ears the mighty cymbal-crash of hammers, now ringing clear and resonant, and lost again in a moment in other tumults of the valley. The spectacle, the sounds, spoke with a new language to his imagination. Here was the most stupendous thing in the world, this forging of the power of the hills into implements and structures and weapons for man’s use. The steel frames of towering buildings, the ribs of swift ships, the needle that sews the finest seam—these were all born of this uproar.

Wayne stood up in the motor to peer upon figures that moved about in a glare of flame as though on a great stage set for a fantastic drama. He knew the practical side of these smelting and forging and riveting processes; but it suited his mood to-night to think of them as part of some tremendous phantasmagoria. He singled out one dark Titan as the chief actor, and named him Vulcan; and these were his slaves, these shadowy shapes that swung the brimming crucibles on huge cranes or manipulated with ease the long glowing bars that might have been the prop and stay of some fiery-hearted Ætna. What could it all mean to these hurrying, leaping men, the discordant hymn of the hammers, the terrible heat, the infernal beat and clash, the nerve-wracking cry of the saws as they severed the hot bars, the venomous, serpent-like hissing that marked the last protest of the rebellious ore against these tyrants who had wrested it from earth’s jealous treasuries.

And Joe, sitting unmoved, with his hands upon the wheel, turned to see why his master delayed. Wayne crouched in the open door of the tonneau, his broad shoulders filling the opening, his cap on the back of his head, gazing upon a spectacle with which he had been familiar from childhood; but to-night it took new hold of him. To these “singed and scorched” beings, the shadows against the flame, Jim Paddock was giving his life.

“Go on, Joe!” he shouted, and slammed the door.

CHAPTER XIII
JEAN MORLEY

THE parish house of St. Luke’s was a remodeled two-story business block adjoining the frame church. One of the store-rooms had been cut in two, half of it serving as a reading-room for men; the rest of it was used as a crèche where young children were looked after at hours when their mothers were too busy to care for them. The other half of the building served as an assembly room on occasions and here the exercises of the evening were already in progress when Wayne arrived. At one end of the room a ring had been improvised and within the roped enclosure a string quartet was playing a waltz to which the feet of a considerable portion of the audience kept time. The place was packed and Wayne stood until the end of the number sandwiched between two labourers who had paused on their way home. Their faces were still grimy; their dinner-pails rubbed Wayne’s legs democratically. A prestidigitator followed the quartet with a series of sleight-of-hand tricks. He was a young Italian and was warmly applauded by representatives of his race in the audience. A young woman sang a popular ballad, the pastoral note of whose refrain, “In the woodland, by the river, I await my love, my own,” was plaintively incongruous in the place.

Wayne was aware of an undercurrent of excitement, especially among the men and boys. They were on their good behaviour, but the tameness of the programme had begun to cloy. A recitation by a girl in pale blue, who stood in painful embarrassment for several minutes while her memory teased her afar off with forgotten rhymes, elicited a few mutterings of disapproval. Someone on the back benches cried, during a long and seemingly endless pause, “Where did you lose it, Minnie?” whereat she withdrew in tearful confusion, followed by sympathetic applause. A scuffle in the rear caused general disorder and drew attention away from the platform. The brother of the recitationist was, it seemed, trying to punch the head of the culprit who had mocked her. Wayne had so far seen nothing of Paddock, but the minister now rose near the scene of conflict and with a quiet word subdued the belligerents. A young man, in a necktie of violent green, who appeared to be the master of ceremonies, leaped to the stage and called for order. He announced that the literary and musical numbers were concluded. “If the gents back there wot wants to fight will ca’m theirselves, we’ll give ’em a few points on how it’s done by real scrappers. The evenin’s stunts will close with five rounds between Jim Balinski of Altoona, and Mike, the motorman. You fellas that want to be noisy better get out now or be chased out.”

A wild cheer, punctuated by cat-calls, greeted the two boxers, as, clad in tights, they stepped nimbly into the roped enclosure and saluted the admiring audience. A howl of “Kill the Irishman” from a violent partisan was drowned in groans and shrieks of “Put him out” in four languages. At this moment Paddock appeared, divested of his coat and waistcoat, gave a hitch to his belt, amid cheers, examined the gloves of the combatants and admonished them as to the rules. Wayne noted with interest that Joe, his chauffeur, was time-keeper, with a dish-pan and stick for gong. A hush fell upon the crowd as the men warily began feeling of each other. The round ended in lively sparring without apparent advantage to either man. The Irishman was, Wayne learned from one of his neighbours, a member of Paddock’s own class in boxing at the parish house and sentiment seemed to favour him. The second round was marked by clever foot-work by the Irishman, who walked round the Altoona visitor to the delight of the spectators. In the third and fourth rounds the Irishman continued to play with his antagonist, who doggedly sought an opening for a heavy blow. He landed heavily with his right several times, but the Irishman’s nimbleness saved him from damage. In mere cleverness, the local man was the better boxer, a fact which was clear enough to his adversary, who held back and waited for an opportunity to break through the Irishman’s ready guard with a telling blow. The strategic moment came when, in the last round, the Irishman jumped away after raining half a dozen blows on the enemy’s head, and grinned his satisfaction amid laughter and howls of delight. In his joy of the situation he made a gesture that indicated his complete confidence in the fortune of battle to his friends in the crowd, and his insolence was promptly rewarded by a telling clip in the face that brought him blinking to his knees.

He came to time, however, with rage in his eyes. Several women shrieked at the sight of his blood-smeared nose and there was a slight commotion as a girl near the door was led out to faint. “Kill ’im, Mike!” roared a dozen voices. “You’re all right, Altoona!” yelled a lone supporter of the visitor. They clinched, but the Altoona man flung off the Irishman with ease. “Knock ’im out, Mike!” chorused the motorman’s friends. The Irishman feinted elaborately, but his antagonist sullenly maintained his guard and waited. The time was short in which to achieve victory, but he had saved himself for a supreme effort. The Irishman hit him a smart clip on the chin that staggered him for a moment, and then the man from Altoona drew back and gathered himself together. He swung his arm high, as though it had been a hammer, and the Irishman cowered under it, slipped as he side-stepped and the Altoona man, striking out wildly, landed in a heap with his knees in the Irishman’s face.

The male portion of the crowd charged the stage with a roar. Wayne was aware that Joe, whose voice had occasionally risen above the tumult, seemed now to be trying to bring order out of the prevailing chaos. The combatants quickly retired; Paddock donned his coat and begged all to remain for refreshments, which were further announced in the odour of coffee that stole up from the basement. Many to whom the boxing contest had been the beginning and end of the entertainment, were already crowding into the street, and no effort was made to detain them. Half the benches were carried out under Joe’s direction by two or three stalwart young fellows while the former light of the diamond, filled with the pride of brief authority, watched its effect upon Wayne, who was somewhat embarrassed to know what to do with himself. Paddock strolled about addressing a few words to everyone. The colour glowed warmly under the clergyman’s dark skin; his smile was less sad than usual. A young man dropped the plate of ice cream he was passing to a girl and Paddock met the tragic situation by telling a story of a similar mishap of his own.

He spoke to Wayne last of all and drew him into a group of half a dozen saying, “Young friends, this is an old schoolmate of mine; won’t you make room for us?” With paper napkins on their knees he and Wayne were soon taunting each other with some of their old-time adventures, while the listeners beamed their delight at the intimate quality of the colloquy. Wayne told several stories about Paddock that were listened to eagerly by the little circle. The girls giggled; the young men laughed aloud. Paddock threw in a word here and there to elicit some new tale. Wayne’s success with his auditors stimulated him; the circle widened, and he talked of some of his experiences in the coal mines during the year of his probation, using colloquial phrases of the men underground as he had learned them in the bituminous mines. The simple frocks of the girls; their red, labour-scarred hands; these young men in their cheap, ready-made clothing; the brassy jewelry worn by several of them, touched both his humour and his pity. But he was aware, too, that he enjoyed their attention. In his sister’s house a few nights before, among people of his own order, no such experience as this would have been possible. He rose presently at the climax of an anecdote that had pleased his hearers particularly.

“Don’t hurry away; I want to show you what we have here,” said Paddock. “About all I say for it is that it is clean—most of the time. In there is the men’s reading-room; a table for writing, too. Pipes, you notice, are not discouraged.”

They looked in where a dozen men of all ages sat about small tables reading newspapers and periodicals.

“Some of these old fellows are as regular as British Museum readers. Every man who comes here can have a cup of coffee and a sandwich in the evening for the asking; the cooking class downstairs looks after that. I’m putting on a lot of foreign newspapers. A few books over there—just a beginning. Anybody can take a book home by writing his name on a card. Bring them back? Oh, well, what if they don’t? Down below is the kitchen—mind the step!—the building was in bad shape when I got hold of it; I’ll get after that stairway to-morrow. Here’s the cooking school; about twenty girls are taught by a domestic science teacher regularly. A part of the class volunteered to provide the refreshments to-night. That coffee wasn’t bad, was it?”

At the foot of the dark stairway they emerged into a low basement whose cleanliness and order were at once apparent even to the lay sense.

“Don’t let me bore you. I just want you to get a bird’s-eye view. This plant isn’t complete yet—we have only the essential requirements; the frills will come later. These are more advanced pupils; younger girls we get in the afternoons. Rather remarkable young woman over there, wiping dishes. Came out last Sunday and volunteered to help in her leisure. I must speak to those girls a minute.”

Wayne followed the clergyman through the unfamiliar apparatus of the school kitchen to the farther end of the room. The young women indicated were evidently enjoying themselves and as the two men approached one of them laughed happily—a laugh of quality that drew Wayne’s attention to her. He stopped suddenly, seeing that she was beyond question the girl he had met in the art gallery; there was no mistaking that head of hers! Her back was toward the door, and she had not heard the men approach. Her laugh rang out again—it was like a flash of water down a hillside, or any other bright and happy thing. She turned, towel and cup in hand, as the minister greeted her companion and introduced Wayne.

“This is Mr. Craighill, looking for a model cooking school, and he knew where to come!”

“Oh, Miss Morley, this is my friend, Mr. Craighill. He’s been watching our show upstairs. I haven’t dared ask how he liked it, but he’s a judge of coffee and he drank all of yours!”

Paddock’s joy in his work shone in his face; he was immensely pleased that Wayne had given him the evening. One of the dish-washers drew him away to meet a newcomer, and Wayne and Miss Morley regarded each other gravely. Her arms were bared to the elbows; she held a half-dried cup in her hands; a blue check apron covered her gown. There was no question of recognition; both remembered their former meeting. Wayne spoke at once.

“This is different from the art gallery. I was sorry about that. You were quite right—not to want to know me. I have thought about that afternoon a good deal.”

“I have thought about it too,” said the girl, “and I have been sorry I spoke to you as I did. I had no right to assume that you did not mean to be kind. I shouldn’t have stopped to talk to you that afternoon if I had not been so full of the picture that I really didn’t think about myself—or you. The portrait seemed somehow to make it right enough in the first place—it all seemed impersonal. But I didn’t like your wanting to take my sketch.”

“You didn’t like it,” said Wayne, “because I am who I am. And you were right. I have thought of it since and you were quite right. I am glad to have this chance of telling you so. I saw you in my sister’s house that same afternoon and I asked her who you were and she would not tell me—you see I am a very bad man,” he concluded, and bowed slightly, looking down at her hands that were long and fine, but labour-roughened, as he had seen that first day.

“I didn’t know you were interested in this sort of work,” she said, so obviously wishing to be kind that he smiled as their eyes met. Her crown of dark hair, her fair skin, her splendid blue eyes with their mystical gray shadows struck him anew.

“I can’t allow you to be deceived about me. I was never here before or in any such place. I have heard of such things, and haven’t approved of them. I came out to-night because Mr. Paddock is an old friend.”

“He is wonderful; I came to a service last Sunday out of curiosity; I had never seen any of this settlement work. He talked to the people as though he were one of themselves—I suppose you wouldn’t call it preaching at all—and it is easy to see how they all love him.”

“No doubt he interests them; but I suppose we’ll have to judge his work by its results,” he ventured, wishing to see what she would say.

“I don’t agree with that, Mr. Craighill. If a man has the heart for a work like this, that’s enough, isn’t it? The results don’t matter.”

He smiled at her earnestness, but replied gravely:

“It’s a good deal; it’s undoubtedly a whole lot!”

He had not been deeply impressed by the evening’s entertainment as a moral force. It seemed, in fact, a far cry from the performances of Paddock’s clumsy amateurs to the souls of the spectators. The reading-room he had liked better; and the cooking school was well enough, though it was difficult to reconcile any of it with his earlier knowledge of Paddock. He did not quite formulate the idea into words, but he was unable to see just how Paddock was to profit by these labours; nor was he persuaded that the people the minister served would be materially benefited. So far as Paddock was personally concerned he could join heartily enough in the girl’s admiration. But now that chance had thrown her again in his way, he wished to make the most of it; a poor art student, contributing her services in this humble fashion to the work of a social settlement, was a new species. She must be an unusual young woman or Fanny Blair would not have taken her up. The remembrance of her sharp rebuff in the art gallery did not make it easy to talk to her now; but she put down her cup and towel and addressed him with a directness that was disquieting.

“I said a moment ago that I was sorry I had spoken to you in the way I did. I want to put it a little differently now. It troubled me afterward—I felt that I had been unjust; and I don’t think we ought to feel about anybody as I showed I felt about you—as though——”

“As though being an infamous sort of person decent people shrink from was a bar,” he supplied, curious as to what she meant to say further.

“Well,” she continued, “I didn’t apply to you that day one of my own principles: that we all owe something to each other—that we have no right to hurt anyone, no matter who it is. It’s what I think Mr. Paddock has come here to teach; it’s what I think religion is!”

She was trying to apply Paddock’s religion to his case, and her sincerity was making a serious business of it. It was an odd sensation, this, of talking to a remarkably handsome young woman who frankly wished to deal with him in the light of her religion. He was surprised to find that he felt no inclination to laugh at her; she interested him immensely and he was sorry when Paddock returned and interrupted their interview.

“I thank you,” he said; “I appreciate your kindness to me.”

Paddock carried him off to see the remainder of the house, whose facilities he hoped to augment by purchasing the adjoining property and adding a swimming pool.

“I think I like the cooking school best,” observed Wayne, “but a pool would be a valuable addition; I see that. If you bathe the flock and persuade them not to fry their food you’re doing a lot for their bodies, and I suppose it won’t hurt their souls any.”

Paddock opened a door at the back of the second floor and turned on the electric lights, disclosing a small room containing an iron bed, a table, a shelf of books, a desk and little else.

“Remember that cup? Got it at St. John’s for sprinting. You were second, Craighill, a fact which I always remember with satisfaction. That’s the only bit of ancient memorabilia that I lug about with me. Those were the good times of the consulship of Plancus all right, and seeing you brings them back with a rush. Off here is a little special indulgence I allow myself—a shower; I take all my ice water that way. But let’s go down and see what they’re doing below.”

Joe had put the assembly room in order and stood by the door discussing baseball with a group of admiring youngsters. Paddock had carried his hat and coat to the assembly room.

“I’m going to take Miss Morley and her friend into town. Here they are now.”

The young women were just appearing at the head of the basement stairway. Joe crossed the room to meet Wayne.

“Are you ready, sir?”

“Yes, bring the car up. And, Paddock, if you are going in with those women, I’ll take you all in the car; there’s plenty of room.”

“Thank you. I’m sure we’ll be grateful. The trolleys are a torture.”

Wayne went into the street to where Joe was lighting the car lamps at the curb, leaving Paddock to repeat his invitation to the young women. As he returned to the assembly room Miss Morley met him.

“It’s kind of you to offer to take us in; but it’s unnecessary for Mr. Paddock to go. He means to come back here to-night and it’s a hard trip. After what I said to you that day at the Institute you might think——”

“Yes,” he said, fumbling the buttons of his coat.

“Whatever I felt that day I don’t feel any more. And I don’t want to be a trouble to Mr. Paddock.”

He smiled as she finished. What she meant was that having seen him in this place and having found that he and Paddock were friends, she could forgive him for having tried to flirt with her; that his visit to the settlement had in a way lightened the burden of his sins and made their acquaintance possible.

Paddock saw them into the car, not sorry to be relieved of the long journey into town. Wayne said that he would drive himself, and when Paddock had bidden the young women good night, the minister turned and shook hands with Joe, who had been making sure of the rear light. Wayne leaned out to ask him what was the matter and saw Joe staring into the car with an odd look on his face. His hand went to his cap and he mumbled something which the noise of the engine drowned. Then he ran round and jumped to the vacant seat beside Wayne, where he crouched in silence throughout the journey. Occasionally Wayne checked the car’s speed to ask the chauffeur the way, and once Joe jumped out to investigate an ominous change in the throb of the engine; but Wayne was spared the familiar ironies with which Joe usually criticized his driving. The expression of Joe’s face at the car door and this subsequent moody silence puzzled Wayne; and as his memory sought to reconstruct in all its trifling details his encounter with Miss Morley at the Institute the fact that he had afterward seen Joe following the girl through the dusk as he sat with Wingfield pondering the orchestra’s affairs took precedence of every other incident of that first meeting. He heard the voices of the passengers occasionally, but he did not once turn his head. He was trying, for almost the first time, to drive the car carefully, and the effort began presently to vex him.

“You take it, Joe,” he said.

He repeated the address Miss Morley had given him, and Joe drove to it without comment, a boarding house in an unfashionable quarter at the edge of that anomalous borderland where the long line of dingy shops and tenements paused a little nonplussed before the broad open area in which cathedral spires and new smart dwellings strove, it seemed, to make peace with art and music as enthroned within the solid walls of the Institute.

Wayne waited on the steps until Miss Morley and her companion had opened the door. The young women expressed their thanks cordially in the flickering light of the hall lamp. As he turned back to the car, the voice of Miss Morley’s friend was flung out by the closing door—“Jean!”

Wayne bade Joe drive home, and shut himself in with her name.

CHAPTER XIV
A LIGHT SUPPER FOR TWO

AS WAYNE entered his father’s house he saw with surprise that the little reception parlour, adjoining the drawing room, which was usually dark at this hour, was brilliantly lighted. His surprise increased as Mrs. Craighill appeared in the door and gazed at him without speaking.

“Well!” he said.

“Well!” she returned.

“Just home from a party, are you? Where’s father?”

She put her finger to her lips, and indicated the closed library door with a slight movement of the head.

“He’s writing a speech or something. He had a stenographer come up right after dinner. I was de trop, so I have been waiting all this time for you to come home and amuse me. And you are very, very late, you bad boy.”

He followed her into the reception room, a place rendered comfortless by the decorator and furnisher, and Mrs. Craighill resumed her seat in the least forbidding of its chairs. She suffered Wayne to mitigate its severe lines with pillows.

“There are better loafing places in the house,” he observed, as he sat down opposite her and felt for his cigarette case.

“No smoking! You can’t get it out of these draperies.”

“You’ll have to this time.” He dropped the match stick into a Sevres urn at his elbow and looked her over.

“The Colonel’s been at it ever since dinner?”

“Since eight-thirty by the stair clock.”

“You might have gone to bed.”

“Oh, yes, there’s always that; but it’s a bore, going to bed right after dinner. I’ve never been used to it. And besides, you never can tell: I might have been needed; the door might have swung open at any minute and a demand made for a date—at just what hour George crossed the Delaware, and whether it was real or stage ice they put into history so the Father of his Country would look well lithographed in the boat with his cloak pulled round his shoulders.”

“You needn’t trouble about being called in for consultation. When the oration is all done you will be given a chance to attend a dress rehearsal—or two of them. I used to hear those things; but now you’ve cut me out.”

This was the first time since the afternoon of her arrival that Wayne had seen his stepmother alone. He had, in fact, seen little of her. They met usually at the breakfast table, but Wayne was never home at midday and as often as not he dined at the Club. A series of dinners and receptions in her honour had engaged Mrs. Craighill’s attention; her coming had forced the season and these functions were now lagging. Her presentation to the society of the Greater City had, however, been accomplished; and she was now woven into the social fabric, one of its bright figures, discernible to any eye. She was Mrs. Craighill, a sufficient answer to any inquiry. She had met nearly everyone it was necessary to meet; even the small band of recalcitrants who had sworn that she should never cross their thresholds had sat with her at other people’s tables, and taken her hand at larger functions whose charging battalions were recruited from the blue-book.

“What have you been doing?” she asked, after a moment.

“I’m afraid to tell you; you would never believe it of me. I’ve been out to Ironstead seeing how the other half amuses itself in my old friend Paddock’s parish house. There was a boxing-match; a girl recited ‘Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night,’ or enough of it, then a social mix-up with ice cream and coffee.”

“Something new, isn’t it, your going in for that sort of thing?”

“Rather a new shot; but not so tiresome as you might imagine. As a social diversion it would compare favourably with shows I’ve attended in this neighbourhood.”

“I’ve met Mr. Paddock; I’m on the Children’s Hospital committee with him. You see, as Mrs. Craighill I’m ex-officio—is that right?—in a lot of things already. I’d rather prefer to wait a little and be recognized on my own merits, but then——”

“Maybe they’re afraid to wait for your merits to disclose themselves,” he suggested.

“Please don’t say unkind things to me. I’m likely to cry.”

“Don’t do that. Tears wouldn’t add anything to the effect of that gown; it’s one of the most perfect things I have ever seen you wear.”

“It isn’t bad, is it?” she rose with sudden animation and took a turn across the room, looking over her shoulder at her shadow in a long mirror.

“It’s charming. There’s no denying that there’s something very nice about you, Addie. You know how to wear your clothes; this matronly air you’ve been cultivating—the much-married look, isn’t wholly to my taste, but you’ll do. What’s that you’ve been reading?”

He stooped and picked up what appeared to be a magazine in a linen cover, stamped with gold letters. She caught at it, but he held it away and opened upon several hundred sheets of typewritten manuscript neatly bound into the case.

He flung it aside, laughing aloud.

“The Colonel’s speeches! Lord, Addie, do you think you have to do it?”

She had coloured, but manifested no resentment at his tone.

“He asked me if I didn’t want to read some of his things, and what was the answer?”

“Yes; what was it? It’s taking a mean advantage though! It was fitting that you should come in here to read those orations; they’re like the furniture—lines of austerest grace, with a little gilt stuck on here and there. You must have had a roaring time of it.”

“Oh, I haven’t done so badly!” She produced a novel and tapped the cover significantly. “I really haven’t felt called on to commit all the speeches to memory. You wouldn’t suggest that, would you?”

“I shouldn’t exclude that from the parental expectations. It would undoubtedly boost you in the Colonel’s regard. It would show a becoming interest in his affairs. A man of ideals must have a sympathetic wife.”

“He’s locked up with his ideals, which are probably quite beyond me—and I’m outside the door,” she concluded plaintively.

“That’s wholly complimentary. You are distracting—never more so than now. You affect my own ideals pleasantly. It was always so. I wonder what would have happened if—well, if your dear mother hadn’t been so obviously and beastly grasping.”

He had not expected it to come so soon, this change—this appeal, this cry, faint though it was, of distress. His eyes brightened as he watched her. A black velvet band clasped her throat and a diamond twinkled in a pendant that swung from it by a tiny chain. The line from her brow, with the brown hair rising abruptly above it, to her fair throat, could not have been improved upon. Though he had never thought of her as common or vulgar, in his assay she had never been of standard weight and fineness; she had been offered at too many prices in too many markets, and he was not sure yet how much alloy lay under the bright surface. On the day of her home-coming he had mistakenly expected to find her ready to meet him on his own terms, but she had rebuffed him. He had felt that she must share in time his own contempt for his father; he had been content to wait for that, and he felt that he had not waited in vain. To-night, with only a month of married life behind her, she had a grievance; she was bored, and eager for sympathy. Her youth and prettiness, her charm, of which she was not ignorant, meant as little to her elderly husband as moonlight to strong, deep-flowing waters. Like a troublesome child she had, in effect, been told to sit in a corner outside the door while her husband gave heed to important matters within. It was inevitable that Wayne, by reason of their old acquaintance, and with the same roof sheltering them, should be her chief dependence in unhappy hours.

She had gathered herself with an effort and frowned; but a smile played about her lips, and she bent her head with a becoming grace.

“I thought I asked you not to think of that. We buried all that that first afternoon.”

“I’m not so sure we buried it. The ghost of it still walks!”

“It had no ghost; it was too dead for that.”

“If it had been dead——”

“Well, what would have happened?” she asked, bending toward him, her elbow on her knee, her chin in her palm, as was her way.

“For one thing, you wouldn’t have sat here all evening in this hideous, stiff room. You have a comfortable sitting room upstairs where you could have taken your ease while the Colonel prepared his oration.”

“I don’t believe I understand,” she said. “You know I am a very dull person, Wayne; I am not a bit—what do you call it?—subtle?”

“You’re a mighty pretty woman; there’s no doubt of that. And knowing I think so and would be likely to mention it, you stayed down here to be sure not to miss me when I came home.”

“Please don’t speak to me like that; it is not what I expected of you. I told you when I came here that I meant to be very, very good. More than that, I asked you to help me. I threw myself on your mercy!”

The tears were bright in her eyes and she leaned back and turned her face away from him.

He rose with a laugh.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t cry! It’s bad for the complexion. Let’s dig in the pantry for something to eat.”

“Splendid!” she cried, jumping up.

He tried to take her hand, but she brushed by him and ran toward the dining room, where she bade him turn on the lights and wait while she foraged.

“Stay right here, please! I will bring the things myself; don’t expect too much, but I think—I think there will be cold chicken.”

“The strong drink is usually kept locked—you must have the key.”

“Nothing but milk, or distilled water! You may have either. You wait here—it would look better.”

She pursed her lips and bent her head with the slightest of inclinations toward the library.

When he heard her at the swinging pantry door a moment later he sprang up and flung it open. She carried a fowl and bread, and told him he might fetch knives and forks and other essentials of their feast. She was in a laughing mood now, and in the midst of their preparations, she ran to the hall door and listened, like a child about to ravish the jam pots. The grace of her slight figure, her pretty way of catching up her skirts, the mockery of her anxiety lest they be discovered, brought them into a new and delightful intimacy.

“Do you remember?” asked Wayne, crossing his legs at ease and nibbling the sandwich she had made for him, “do you remember our little picnic on the rocks up there at Struby’s Cove, when we got lost on the drive home? There was chicken then—perhaps it was a distant cousin of this one. All chickens are sacred henceforth!”

“And there was a new moon and the wind blew in cold from the sea and the pine grove by the shore was dark and sad.”

“And I kissed you that night—the first time!”

She was serious instantly and held up her hand warningly.

“Don’t be naughty; that was a long time ago!”

“Two years last August, which is not so very long!”

“Long enough to be forgotten, though.”

“I am not in the habit of forgetting pleasant things. You were a being to worship that night.”

“Your worship was pretty short; you took that Philadelphia widow driving the next day.”

“But we didn’t have a picnic and get lost.”

“Decidedly not, as she was from Philadelphia!” And they laughed softly, in the subdued key of their talk.

A little later Colonel Craighill was heard at the library door bidding the stenographer good night. Mrs. Craighill rose, clutching her plate and glass.

“Service was for one only,” she whispered, and on this hint Wayne restored her chair to its place against the wall, and with a little nod, a shrug of her shoulders, a pretty lifting of the brows, she vanished through the pantry door and took flight upward by way of the back stairs. Wayne heard the click of the buttons in the hall as his father turned off the lights, and a moment later Colonel Craighill appeared at the door with a handful of papers.

“You up, Wayne? I thought a burglar was entertaining himself. I really believe I’m hungry, too. I’ve delayed writing a statement I was asked to prepare of the educational conditions of the South, and there was a lot of statistical matter to go over. I think I have it the way I want it though.”

He stretched himself at ease in a chair, while Wayne brought a plate and cut him a slice of the fowl.

“What have you been up to to-night?”

“I went out to Ironstead to a show at Paddock’s parish house.”

Colonel Craighill’s face expressed surprise and pleasure.

“I’m glad to hear it; Paddock’s a good man for you to cultivate.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that!” said Wayne, instantly resentful. “I’m not sure but he’s a dangerous character.”

“No man who gives his life for the good of mankind can be any other than a useful member of society.”

“I suppose that’s so, but if Paddock should lead his ragged legion in an attack on the banks downtown and raid the shops it would be less admirable.”

“We must take a hopeful view of society; every school-house in the land is an outpost of democratic ideals,” declared Colonel Craighill impressively, plucking, Wayne guessed, a phrase from the address he had been preparing.

“Here at home we’re going to need a good many school-houses to knock the spirit of democracy into the riff-raff of Europe. When do you go away again?”

“Oh, not till early in December, when I go to Boston for the conference of the Municipal Service League. Adelaide will go with me.”

“I have intended speaking to you about one or two matters. Since Walsh left I’ve been going over all our affairs.”

Colonel Craighill stared at his son in frank surprise.

“You have been checking over the securities? If you had asked me I could have saved you a good deal of bother. I have them all tabulated so that their salient features can be seen at a glance of the eye.”

“Yes; I have a copy of your synopsis and have been checking it.”

“I have had that done from time to time so that it has been kept up to date. I’m glad, however, that you are taking an interest in these matters.”

“The whole story is not told in your list,” said Wayne, ignoring his father’s approval.

“Very likely; only the more important items are noted.”

“In the case of that Gregory property you put into the Sand Creek combination, Gregory maintains that he has a claim—I don’t quite understand what it is. He’s a hard one to get anything out of.”

“I don’t recall just the terms of that arrangement, but the old fellow’s become a great nuisance. The whole Sand Creek field used to be covered with shafts sunk by small operators who were killing each other by preposterous competition. When we organized the Sand Creek Company and took them all over, we were obliged to shut down two-thirds of the old shafts to make anything out of any of them. As I remember, I made the deal with Gregory myself, more out of kindness to him than anything else. I had known him many years and he had been unfortunate. It has always been my policy to deal generously with such cases. The vein through his acreage is poor, the coal inferior and with many ugly faults in it.”

“But there’s a lower vein that is all right. I found the engineer’s report with an estimate of the amount of coal in his hundred acres.”

“Well, it’s a matter we must look into. We’ll take it up before the end of the year. There’s never any use in being in a hurry about such things. I have always remembered what your grandfather Wayne said to an anxious young real estate agent once, in your grandfather’s old age. The young man was trying to sell your grandfather a lot downtown somewhere and became offensively persistent. One day your grandfather turned round on him and said—the thing impressed me, for your grandfather was exceedingly wise: ‘Young man, I have never made any money by being in a hurry.’ I have thought of that remark a thousand times!”

“I remember with equal distinctness,” said Wayne, smiling a trifle, “that once when grandfather was teaching me to play checkers he said never to imagine that the other fellow in any game was a fool.”

“Quite characteristic; he had almost Emerson’s way of shooting into the bull’s eye. I wish there were more men like Andrew Wayne; he was faithful in all his obligations, a man of absolute exactness in all his dealings. I used to hope you had inherited some of his traits.”

Colonel Craighill’s eye rested on the glass of water which stood by his son’s plate. The significance of the glance was not wasted on Wayne. With an almost imperceptible movement he pushed the glass away from him.

“You have been very regular at the office lately: I want you to know that I have noticed it, and that it has pleased me very much—very greatly indeed. I have sometimes wondered, Wayne, whether Dick Wingfield’s influence has been the best for you. I’m afraid he doesn’t take life very seriously. With his intelligence and leisure he might be of great help in our reform work.”

“Dick’s interested in the fine arts and not in politics. I’m sorry you don’t approve of him; he’s the best friend I’ve ever had. He’s the only man in town who hasn’t kicked me at some time or other. I probably need kicking, but it’s nice to know there’s one human being who withholds his foot.”

“You will find, if you follow your present course, and practice sobriety and industry, that you will not lack friends.”

“I suppose so, but it’s the sinner that needs friends, not the saint. But in this Gregory matter—if you are going to be gone next week——”

“I’ll write to Gregory and tell him to come in later on and we’ll talk over his case. He’s always appreciated the fact that I took care of him at the time we formed the Sand Creek Company. I’ll fix that up with him; he’ll have to be reasonable. He’s a simple old fellow and if he sees the absurdity of his claim he’ll be glad to settle.”

He yawned and looked at his watch. “Dear me, it’s half-past one! Will you put out the lights?”

Wayne heard his father’s door close, but he sat smoking and pondering. His interview with him had left him irritated and restless. He was well aware that Mrs. Craighill had found relief and pleasure in his company, and he smiled as he recalled her hurried flight through the pantry at his father’s approach. The incident lacked dignity, but his father’s treatment of her had lacked, too, and she was a young woman and admiration was sweet to her. The girl at the parish house stole across the smoke-dimmed horizon of his dreaming, in her gingham apron, with the towel and cup in her hands. Her friend had called her Jean—Jean, dearest of names, with its hint of Scottish mists and moors and heatherbloom; and Jean seemed the inevitable name for her, predestined of all time. Simplicity and sincerity were in the haunting tones of her voice. His ready imagination threw a bright glamour round her. She suggested all manner of pictures; perhaps it was the remembrance of her against Sargent’s masterly portrait that prompted this; at any rate she was the most vivid person he had ever known, and his memory flung him back sharply upon that first meeting, and he saw the anger in her eyes and heard her saying: “I don’t care for your acquaintance, Mr. Wayne Craighill.”

He turned off the lights impatiently and went to bed.

CHAPTER XV
MRS. BLAIR IS DISPLEASED

WAYNE went on a Saturday afternoon in November to a matinée of the Symphony Orchestra, expecting to find Wingfield, who kept close touch with the box-office in the interest of the guarantors. Not seeing his friend at once, he climbed to the gallery where Wingfield sometimes went to study the emotions of those who, he said, got more for their money than holders of first-floor seats. Wingfield again proved elusive, but Wayne sat down on the last row and gave heed to the Tannhaüser overture. His eyes roamed the audience aimlessly; he was, it seemed, the only man in the place. He was aware, as the familiar strains wove their spell upon the house, of something familiar in the dark head before him. He bent forward slightly to make sure; but there was, he told himself, but one head like that—there was no doubt of its being Jean Morley.

She did not stir until the end of the number. Then with a little sigh she turned slightly so that he saw the faint shadow of a dark lash on her cheek. A scarlet ribbon, tied under a plain collar, flashed an instant’s colour to her face before she settled herself for the next number. There was something distinguished, noble even, in the poise of her head; and soon before the mad flight of the Valkyries it bent as to a storm. It pleased his fancy that the waves of sound floating upward surged round her with a particular intent. He was quite sure, however, that she must not see him here. He knew the quality of her anger; the ground he had gained at the parish house must not be lost. If he wished to retain her respect he must avoid the appearance of lying in wait for her. The sensation of caring for anyone’s respect, least of all that of this unknown girl, who had instinctively, on first sight, set up barriers of defense against him, was new to his experience. He left before the last number to continue his search for Wingfield, and found a scrawl at the box-office explaining his friend’s absence, but suggesting that they dine together at the Club. Wayne glanced at the treasurer’s report, made a note of the day’s proceeds, and as he mingled in the crowd, found himself walking at Miss Morley’s side.

“It was beautiful, wasn’t it?” she said, as the crowd caught and held them. One or two women bowed to him distantly and eyed with cold interest the tall girl in the unfashionable clothes to whom he was speaking. He was conscious of this inspection of her and it angered him. He heard his name spoken by someone behind him—“That’s Wayne Craighill,”—as though he were a notorious character to be pointed out boldly to strangers.

“You think they liked it? It wasn’t too much on one key?”

“It was lovely, but of course I don’t know, I never heard an orchestra before. It probably meant more to me for that reason.”

“Yes, I suppose first times bring the rarest sensations. They really did the Valkyries in great form.”

“That was perfectly glorious; I should like to hear all the opera.”

“You are beyond doubt a natural born Wagnerian; I must tell my friend Wingfield how well the audience took his programme. He’s the power behind the orchestra, and he contends that the best is not too good, that people who never heard these things before are just as competent to criticize as trained musicians. You should hear a symphony now—give Beethoven a chance, then try the opera—on and up to the heights.”

“I don’t know about the heights, but I was pretty well up on the slope this afternoon, and the whole world was mine.” She spoke with feeling, this girl who had never heard an orchestra before, but who had followed the trumpets to new and strange summits and still carried dreams in her eyes.

It was a gray November afternoon and he intended to make it easy for her to leave him here, under the bright entrance lights.

“I’m going to Mrs. Blair’s,” she explained.

“Won’t you let me go along, please? You see—you see, I’m dining there!”

“Not really!”

He laughed aloud. He had lied and she was not fair game for falsehood.

“Well, I carry a key to my sister’s front door and I can always have a place there.”

They dropped the discussion for the moment; it was quite a mile to the Blair’s and the moment was sufficient unto itself. He forgot that there could be any question of her accepting his escort. His heartbeats quickened as he found her walking beside him with a free step that fell in comfortably with his own swinging stride. She walked as people walk who are bred in a hill country—with a slight sway of the body from the hips—and she carried her head high. In imagination he robed her in fashionable raiment, a figure of distinction in any company, only to protest to himself that her qualities were superior to feathers or flounces and were as new in her as though no woman had ever possessed them before. The music still sang in her heart; she had been greatly moved by it. Before Sargent’s portrait he had felt only her tyro’s ineptness; but music had stolen her away from herself, and carried her close to golden lands of promise.

“How does the work go at the Institute?”

“Oh, I keep at it. I have good days and bad. Sometimes my eyes don’t see straight and my fingers are sticks. This afternoon the music made it all seem easy; I think it would help if the orchestra played in our class room.”

“A capital idea; I’ll speak to the directors about it. Music does seem to pry us loose from the earth. You may be surprised to know that I used to dabble at the violin myself—a long time ago. I was looked on as a promising student, and might have been a real good fiddler if I had kept it up.”

“But you still play, of course?”

“Not by a long shot! I broke my fiddle on my seventeenth birthday and turned toward a business career.”

“I suppose you had to do that.”

“Well, it didn’t seem quite square to my ancestors to fit myself to be the third fiddler in an orchestra; they were eminently practical persons. If I had kept at music as a life business very likely their shades would have haunted me and snapped my fiddle strings. But I have no regrets. I should probably have starved to death if my early ambitions hadn’t been thwarted. Anyhow, I guess I’m a kind of fatalist; if it had been in the books that I was to go fiddling through the world—why, I should have fiddled. And in the same way, it was ordained that you should go in for art, and here you are, spending your days at it and nothing could head you off.”

“Oh, yes; many things could! Many things tried!”

“I can’t believe it! I believe that everybody has a destiny; I don’t know what mine is, but I undoubtedly have it. I wouldn’t have you think that because I fell on my fiddle and smashed it and lost my chance of immortality that way, I am a person without accomplishments. I would have you know that I’m a man with a profession. I’m a mining engineer and can prove it by my diploma, and—no other way!”

His spirits were high; they talked and laughed together without restraint. He had not in a long time laughed and chaffed with a girl in this way. This walk through the dusk was oddly complete in itself; he felt no curiosity about her now, no interest in her life beyond this half-hour. Her simplicity, the frank way in which she disclosed her own ignorance, her serious belittling of her work in the art school, interested and touched him. She did not quite understand him; she was not used to his kind of banter. His mention of his youthful study of the violin she had taken soberly and she talked of her own aims to show her sympathy.

“There are so many students all over the world studying art that it seems silly for me to be wasting time over it. I had better be learning to do office work or how to sell things in a shop, or how to cook for some of these East End people, or dust rooms and wait on table. But sometimes my teachers have praised me, and that puts off the evil day when I shall have to come down to hard work and burn my portfolio——”

“Just as I smashed my fiddle! But no! I tell you, the fates have charge of our business. They are the supreme and ultimate court—the lords of high decision. They have already fixed the fabulous prices which you are to get for your portraits. My sister will undoubtedly have you paint hers. If you and she are friends you can’t escape. Fanny’s always having her picture painted.”

“Oh, but I’m not so foolish as to think I could do portraits—not if I lived a thousand years. My ambition stops at pen and ink. If I can only learn to be just a little bit of an illustrator I shall be satisfied.”

“Excellent! I approve of that! It’s just as hard, they tell me, and the market is better! When you are not studying or helping at the settlement house or listening to music what do you do? You must have a scheme of life all worked out for yourself.”

“Oh, I often go for long walks, in the afternoon—take a trolley as far as it will carry me and then strike off for the hills, and walk and walk and walk.”

“I suppose you carry a sketch book to see how nature compares with the landscapes at the Institute?”

“No; landscape is beyond me; it’s too big for me. People interest me more, children particularly.”

“Well, of course if you want juvenile models I needn’t offer myself.”

“No, you needn’t,” she said with so crisp an emphasis that he laughed.

“But you might take me along to sit by and sharpen the pencils; that would save you a lot of bother.”

“It might, but you see I use ink!”

“Then,” he cried in despair, “there is nothing left for me but to hold the bottle. Let’s change the subject before you tell me I may not do that!”

They had passed, soon after leaving the concert, the Craighill house, whose lights flashed at them through the bare trees, and were now drawing close to the Blairs’. She grew suddenly silent, then stopped abruptly.

“I don’t believe I’ll go to see your sister now—it’s so late. I’ll telephone her that I’m not coming.”

“You’re afraid my sister won’t like your coming with me, isn’t that it?”

“No, I’m not afraid of your sister—she’s been kinder to me than anyone else ever was——”

“But you don’t think you ought to go to her house with me. I would have you know that my sister thinks rather well of me!”

“I must not do anything she would dislike,” persisted the girl.

“You think she wouldn’t like your going there with me? I could leave you at the gate!”

They had resumed their walk to avoid the appearance of dallying. He had no wish to jeopardize the girl’s relations with his sister; but it was pleasant to talk to her; he had never known just this kind of girl before. Her poverty, her ignorance, her ambitions interested him and set her apart. It had never been his way to hide his iniquities; he was persuaded that he meant her no harm and he rebelled against the thought that there were reasons why she should not be seen with him. His own sister had expressed this clearly enough and he did not know what Fanny would say to him—one never knew about Fanny!—and the hope that his sister would seat Jean Morley and himself at her dinner table only rose to fade. Fanny was capable of it, but she was capable, also, of scolding him sharply before the girl and sending him out of the house.

“Mrs. Blair has a right to question anything I do. She is doing a great many beautiful things for me.”

“Oh, I’ll explain it to Fanny. She and I are great pals,” he said lightly.

“I couldn’t deceive your sister. If she should learn that you had walked to her house with me without telling her, she wouldn’t like it and if she knew she wouldn’t like it; so you can’t know me—you mustn’t know me! Nothing could be clearer than that.”

“I certainly can’t know you this way; that’s as plain as daylight.”

“There’s no way of knowing me at all! You must understand that now—once and for all. I’m very busy and have my work to do.”

“Well, we’ll put it up to Fanny.”

And so, the girl still reluctant, they entered the house, where Mrs. Blair darted out from the library with many exclamations. She seemed, on the surface, to take the appearance of her callers as a matter of course, but she waved him into the library with an air of brushing him out of existence.

While he waited he scrutinized the new books with a view to determining in just what field of thought his sister now disported. Miss Morley’s errand with Mrs. Blair was of the briefest and as they concluded their conference in the hall he appeared before them promptly. His sister’s glance did not encourage his hope to carry off the situation lightly; but he could not do less then accept full responsibility for the visit and he resolved to put a bold face upon it. Mrs. Blair had just rung for her motor, and she sent the maid upstairs for her wraps with the obvious intention of making it unnecessary for Wayne to accompany the girl further.

“Fanny,” he began, “Miss Morley and I have become acquainted in the most astonishing fashion. We met at Paddock’s parish house not long ago by the merest chance; this afternoon, while at the concert, estimating the deficit for the day, I ran into her again; and I begged Miss Morley’s consent to walk up here with her; and here I am.”

“It really was unnecessary,” murmured the girl.

“I think you ought to tell Miss Morley to give me just a little of her time, Fanny—just a little. Of course she is busy; but then——”

Mrs. Blair looked from one to the other. The girl was so plainly embarrassed, Wayne’s good humour and high spirits were so appealing, that Fanny Blair found this one of her most difficult occasions.

“I’m sure Miss Morley is quite able to manage her affairs without any help from me. Are you dining here, Wayne?”

“I’m afraid I intimated as much to Miss Morley so she would let me come with her; I promise never to tell another lie.” He bowed in mock humility but the frown on his sister’s face showed her displeasure.

“I’m going to take Miss Morley home in the motor. If you are dining here you can make yourself comfortable as usual.”

“Oh, but I really can’t stay! You’ll have to take me along. Now that I think of it, Dick expects me at the Club.”

Fanny was clearly not pleased, but he was confident of mollifying her later. The girl’s plight was a more serious matter: he had taken an unfair advantage, he had put her in a false position with his sister, and he bitterly accused himself. Fanny pointedly ignored him while they waited for the motor, and he stood by like a boy in disgrace while she talked to Miss Morley about a dozen irrelevant things. He sought to save his dignity by hastening the arrival of the motor from the garage; and when the car came and he shut them in—Fanny left him to find a seat outside.

She gave him Miss Morley’s address as though he had been the footman, and he climbed humbly to a seat beside the chauffeur. When the boarding house was reached Mrs. Blair descended and rang the bell herself, and when a slatternly maid opened the door Mrs. Blair stepped inside for a few minutes, that there might be no question of the sex of Miss Morley’s escort.

“Well?” demanded Mrs. Blair as soon as he had seated himself beside her in the tonneau.

“Why so tragic, Fanny? Paddock asked me to come and see him and his good works—I went; he insisted that I look at his kitchen and there was your girl with the adorable head dutifully wiping the dishes—a pretty picture! Paddock was going to take her and a friend into town on the trolley, but the hour was late and I took them home in my car—she and the other girl inside, poor old me decorously out in the cold. Then I went to see how much Wagner the dear people were swallowing at popular prices this afternoon; went into the balcony to look for Dick, and lo! the adorable head was just in front of me. But no, I did not let her see me; I knew she would lose faith in me if she thought I was pursuing her; I went about my business, but on my way out ran into her again. What could be more natural than that I should walk to my sister’s house with her?”

“You must have known she was going to the settlement house; it’s a little hard to accept so many coincidences. And I had asked you to let her alone.”

“Paddock invited me to visit him; she and her friend were cleaning up the dishes. It was her first visit, too.”

“So you took her home in your car? You did that?”

“And her friend with her. Joe is a kind of usher and policeman at the settlement house. Paddock seems to be gathering in all sorts and conditions—even me!”

“Joe!” exclaimed Mrs. Blair with more animation; and then: “You must get rid of that fellow. I don’t like him.”

Mrs. Blair spoke with so much energy that Wayne laughed aloud.

“Why, Fanny, Joe has saved my life many times. He’s been so miserable when I went bad that I’ve been ashamed to face him.”

Mrs. Blair relapsed into silence, and he saw by the flashes of the electric lamps at the corners that she was seriously troubled.

“You know without my telling you that you must let this girl alone. These chance meetings won’t occur again—if they have been chance meetings!”

“I swear it, Fanny!”

“She’s terribly poor; she has ambitions, and I’m trying to help her. She’s utterly unsophisticated, as you can see; you will ruin her future and make her wretchedly unhappy if you don’t avoid her.”

“When do you think a man can begin to be good? Do you think I am so utterly rotten that no decent women may ever dare know me? Come now, Fanny.”

“There are plenty of girls you can know if you want to—who don’t live in boarding houses and starve their way through art schools.”

“But they haven’t her eyes; they don’t carry their heads like goddesses,” he persisted.

“You’ve seen too many eyes in too many divine heads. I tell you, it won’t do! If you will think of it a minute you will see that only a word is enough to wreck that girl’s life. Do you suppose you can call on her at her boarding house? Are you going to walk with her to her lessons? Do you quite see yourself taking her to concerts and to church Sunday mornings? My big brother, if you don’t stop being preposterous I shall get angry.”

“Oh, no. Please don’t! I’m disappointed; I thought you had advised me to be good and marry and settle down.”

“Marry! That girl? Wayne, you are impossible!”

“Very likely; but the girl isn’t so impossible. I hadn’t thought of marrying her, but the idea doesn’t exactly terrify me. She’s an immensely interesting person—she haunts me like a theme in music. She’s poor and if I could save her from the pitfalls of art—the failures, the heartache of failing to arrive—that isn’t so impossible, is it?”

“Yes, it’s absolutely out of the question. And if you don’t let her alone I’ll ship her back where she came from; just one more of these coincidences and I’ll do that. We’ve had enough marriages in the family, I hope, to last for some time.”

“Ah! So this bitterness of spirit is not all for me? Has John taken to evil ways?”

“What’s the matter at father’s? Why was Addie crying this morning when I went in to see her?”

“I dare say she cried because you came, if you were as fierce as you are now.”

“She had been crying and looked miserably unhappy.”

“Probably a row with the cook. She isn’t used to keeping house. She’s going to Boston with the Colonel and that will set her up again.”

Mrs. Blair was silent for a moment then flashed:

“How much do you see of her?”

“Precious little. Breakfast, and a glimpse sometimes as I go to my couch at night.”

“You must leave the house; you must come and live with us at once,” declared Mrs. Blair with impressive finality.

“Thanks!” Wayne laughed. “Do you think I tease my stepmother to make her cry? Do you think my moral example is bad for her? Addie snubs me every chance she gets. Only this morning at breakfast, while the Colonel read a papal encyclical or something equally exciting, Addie and I discussed the relative merits of country sausage and chocolate éclaires. To see me sitting at the breakfast table between the Colonel and my stepmother is edifying beyond any words. Addie is a good girl; I like Addie. But she isn’t in the same class with your protégée. Here’s the Club; shall I detach John McCandless from the sacred rye-pots and send him out?”

“You know John never drinks; and he’s in Buffalo to-day.”

“Then he will drink beyond any doubt; one must—in Buffalo!”

While he stood chaffing her at the car door, she clasped his hand tightly and begged him to see her soon. As the car started a newsboy hailed Wayne familiarly from the street and Fanny saw her brother’s broad shoulders bent over the lad and his elbow crooked as he felt for a coin. How true it was that everyone liked Wayne! His generosity was boundless; the very recklessness and extravagance of his derelictions endeared him to many. As the Club door closed upon him the newsboy dashed off with an exultant shout on the wings of new fortune.

CHAPTER XVI
THE TRIP TO BOSTON

MRS. CRAIGHILL bore the scrutiny of her new fellow-citizens with dignity, and by the first of December she had ceased to be a curiosity. She had met everyone of importance; even Mrs. Wingfield had been obliged to bow to her at a reception. Those who persisted in their determination to ignore her advent were too few to count. It had been hinted that she would prove loud; that she was dull; that she would make her husband’s money fly—“such women” always did; but no one worth considering was willing at the end of two months to say that she was properly to be classed among “such women.” Her severest critics were those who, habituated to the contemplation of Roger Craighill’s presence in a front pew at church, feared that by marrying one of “such women”—they being young adventuresses headed brazenly for the divorce court—their idol might suffer the pains and penalties of scandal and alimony. Even the most conservative now admitted that if Mrs. Craighill’s motives in marrying her elderly husband had not been the noblest, she was carrying herself well. Members of her own set, who had been among the original doubters, had waited for the complete disclosure of Mrs. Craighill’s wardrobe before committing themselves, but the taste and sobriety of her raiment disarmed criticism; she was not loud. In another of the circles within the Circle it was questioned whether the newcomer was fitted intellectually to be Roger Craighill’s wife, but Fanny Blair vouched for the worthiness of her stepmother’s interests. “Addie reads everything,” declared Mrs. Blair sweepingly, whereupon Mrs. Craighill was promptly nominated for membership in the Woman’s Club. Many were saying that her conduct, in circumstances the most difficult, had been admirable and the frequency with which, in these first weeks, Fanny Blair had gone about with her, advertised the completeness of the new wife’s acceptance in the family. It was even whispered that Wayne had reformed, and this startling announcement, where it found credence, was attributed to his stepmother’s influence.

Roger Craighill and his wife were dining alone at home the evening before the day of their departure for Boston. He had long made a point of dressing for dinner and she wore a gown he had not seen before and whose perfection he praised.

“Your taste is exquisite, Addie. I like you in light things; they seem to be a part of you—to express you. You are the most graceful and charming woman in the world.”

Her face brightened. They had been dining out a great deal and it was a pleasure to have this evening at their own table. She felt again the dignity of her position as Roger Craighill’s wife. She had been hurt deeply by his exclusion of her on the night he had written his address; but she thought now how handsome he was, how well he carried his years, and it was no mean thing to have been chosen by such a man to share his home and fame. She had found it all too easy to take refuge in Wayne’s ready comradeship; the stolen references to their earlier acquaintance that she had suffered him to make had shown her how dangerous it was to trust to his consolations. Wayne must be kept at a distance; she would take care that he did not see her again alone.

In this fresh access of loyalty to her husband she excused and justified his conduct in shutting himself in to prepare his address; very likely it was the way of busy men who thus give their leisure to public service. She must sacrifice her own pleasure just as he did and bring herself into sympathy with these labours of his. There was flattery in his frequent monologues on public matters and public men; she was perforce the listener, but he was older and in her ignorance it was an agreeable relief not to be expected to contribute more than an inquiry, thrown in to lead him on. She resolved to keep a scrap-book of the offerings of the clipping bureau to which he subscribed, that a complete history might be made of his public services. At Boston she expected to hear him speak for the first time; she had seen the programme of the conferences and several men of national prominence were to make addresses.

She poured the coffee and sent the maid away, to prolong the mood of this hour. The quiet service, the substantial appointments of the room, the realization that she bore the honoured name of the man who faced her contributed to her happiness. It was pleasant to be Mrs. Craighill; she was enjoying her position in the thousand ways possible to her nature—the stir of the clerks in the shops when she appeared, the whispered interest her presence occasioned anywhere. She was, indeed, Mrs. Craighill and everyone was anxious to serve her. To be sought first by those persons who are forever seeking victims to act as patronesses; to be asked to head subscription lists; the deference shown her—these things she enjoyed with a pardonable zest and she would not jeopardize her right to them.

“As you haven’t seen Boston in late years,” Colonel Craighill was saying, “you will find much to interest you while we are there for the municipal conferences. Though I haven’t the slightest ancestral claim on New England I feel a certain kinship with her people. If we were not so firmly planted here I should like to move to Boston to spend my last years there. Contact with some of her fine, public-spirited citizens would be an inspiration. Some of my best friends are Bostonians, friends I have made through my connection with public work. People ask me—and they will be asking you from time to time—why I spend so much time on these movements for the public welfare; but they have been a great resource to me. I have been well repaid for all I have done. I have had my perplexities and worries, a modern business man is ground in a hard mill; but I am conscious of having done my little toward bettering our political and social conditions, and nothing in my life makes me happier than that thought. Do you know,” and he smiled depreciatingly, “I heard from one or two quarters that Harvard was going to confer a degree on me next year for my work in behalf of civic reform; it was only an intimation, but one of my friends, whom I have learned to know well at our annual conferences, is a prominent alumnus, and he has remarked several times that they’d have to make a Harvard man of me somehow.”

“I think it is so remarkable,” said Mrs. Craighill, “that you never went to college. You seem like a college man.”