"I do trust you, darling mama. I do see that you are warm-hearted, full of kind impulses. But I think that your life is confused, uncertain of any goal. If you are to be near me in the way you crave, you must change. And we can, dear, with faith and effort. When you have found yourself, found a goal, I shall feel you near."

"Ah, but don't be so over-logical, dear child. You're my goal!" Valerie smiled and appealed at once.

Imogen, though smiling gravely too, shook her head. "I'm afraid that I'm only your last toy, mama darling. You have come over here to see if you can make me happy, just as if you were refurnishing a house. But, you see, my happiness doesn't depend on you."

"You are hard on me, Imogen."

"No; no; I mean to be so gentle. It's such a dangerous view of life—that centering it on some one else, making them an end. I feel so differently about life. I think that our love for others is only sound and true when it helps them to power of service to some shared ideal. Your love for me isn't like that. It's only an instinctive craving. Forgive me if I seem ruthless. I only want to help you to see clearly, dear."

Valerie, still holding her daughter's hands, looked away from her and around the room with a glance at once vague and a little wild.

"I don't know what to say to you," she murmured. "You make all that I mean wither." She was sad; her ardor had dropped from her. She was not at all convicted of error; indeed, she was trying, so it seemed, to convict her, Imogen, of one.

Imogen felt a cold resistance rising within her to meet this misinterpretation. "On the contrary, dear," she said, "it is just the poetry, the reality of life, in all its stern glory,—because it is and must be stern if it is to be spiritual,—it is just that, it seems to me, that you are trying to reduce to a sort of pretty, facile lyric."

Valerie still held the girl's hands very tightly, as though grasping hard some dying hope. And looking down upon the ground she stood silent for some moments. Presently she said, not raising her eyes, "I have won no right, I suppose, to be seen more significantly by you. Only, I want you to understand that I don't see myself like that."

Again Imogen felt the unpleasant sensation of being made to seem young and inexperienced. Her mother's very quiet before exhortation; her sad relapse into grave kindliness, a kindliness, too, not without its touch of severity, showed that she possessed, or thought that she possessed, some inner assurance for which Imogen could find no ground. In answering her she grasped at all her own.

"I'm very sure you don't," she said, "for I don't for one moment misjudge your sincerity. And what I want you to believe, my dear mother, is that I long for the time when any strength and insight I may have gained through my long fight, by his side, may be of use to you. Trust your own best vision of yourself and it will some day realize itself. I will trust it too, indeed, indeed, I will. We must grow if we keep a vision,"

Mrs. Upton now raised her eyes and looked swiftly but deeply at her daughter. It was a look that left many hopes behind it. It was a look that armed other, and quite selfless, hopes, with its grave and watchful understanding. The understanding would not have been so clear had it not been fed by all the springs of baffled tenderness that only so could find their uses. Giving her daughter's hands a final shake, as if over some compact, perhaps over that of growth, she turned away. Tison, who had followed her into the room and had stood for long looking up at the colloquy that ignored him, jumped against her dress and she stooped and picked him up, pressing her cheek against his silken side.

"You had better dress now, Imogen," she said, in tones of astonishing commonplace. "You've only time. I've kept you so long." And holding Tison against her cheek she went to the window.



XI

The tableaux were not to come off until the end of April, and Jack, having set things in motion, was in Boston at the beginning of the month. It was at this time that Mrs. Upton, too, was in Boston, with her old friend and his great-aunt, and it was at this time that he came, as he phrased it to himself, really into touch with her.

Jack's aunt lived in a spacious, peaceful house on the hill, and the windows of Jack's large flat, near by, looked over the Common, the Gardens, the Charles River, a cheerful, bird's-eye view of the tranquil city, breathed upon now by the first, faint green of spring.

Jack was pleased that Mrs. Upton and his aunt—a mild, blanched old lady with silvery side-curls under the arch of an old-fashioned bonnet-should often come to tea with him, for in the arrangement of his rooms-that looked so unarranged—he felt sure that she must recognize a taste as fine and fastidious as her own. He suspected Mrs. Upton of finding him merely ethical and he was eager that she should see that his grasp on life was larger than she might imagine. His taste was fine and fastidious; it was also disciplined and gracefully vagrant; she must see that in the few but perfect pictures and mezzotints on his walls; the collection of old white Chinese porcelain standing about the room on black carved stands; in his wonderful black lacquer cabinets and in all the charming medley of the rare and the appropriate.

Certainly, whatever was Mrs. Upton's impression of him, she frequently expressed herself as delighted with his rooms, and as they sat in the deep window-seat, which commanded the view of the city, he felt more and more sure that whatever that impression of him might be, it rested upon an essential liking. It was pleasant to Jack to feel sure of this, little as he might be able to justify to himself his gratification. Somehow, with Mrs. Upton, he didn't find himself occupied with justifying things. The ease that she had always made for him shone out, now, uninterruptedly, and as they talked, while the dear old aunt sat near, turning the leaves of a book, joining in with a word now and then, it was, in the main, the soft, sweet sense of ease, like the breath of violets in the air, that surrounded him. They talked of all sorts of things, or rather, as he said to himself, they babbled, for real talk could hardly be so discursive, so aimless, so merely merry. She made him think of a child playing with a lapful of flowers; that was what her talk was like. She would spread them out in formal rows, arrange them in pretty, intricate posies, or, suddenly, gather them into generous handfuls which she gave you with a pleased glance and laugh. It was queer to find a person who took all "talk" so lightly and who yet, he felt quite sure, took some things hard. It was like the contrast between her indolent face and her clear, unbiased gaze, that would not flinch or deceive itself from or about anything that it met. Apparently most of the things that it met she didn't take solemnly. The world, as far as he could guess, was for her mainly made up of rather trivial things, whether hours or people; but, with his new sense of enlightenment, he more and more came to realize that it might be so made up and yet, to her apprehension, be very bad, very sad, and very worth while too. And after seeing her as a child playing with flowers he could imagine her in some suddenly heroic role—as one of the softly nurtured women of the French Revolution, for instance, a creature made up of little gaieties, little griefs; of sprigged silk and gossamer, powder and patches; blossoming, among the horrors of a hopeless prison, into courageous graces. She would smile, talk, play cards with them, those doomed ones, she herself doomed; she would make life's last day livable, in every exquisite sense of the word. And he could see her in the tumbril, her arm round a terrified girl; he could see her mounting the steps of the guillotine, perhaps with no upward glance to heaven, but with a composure as resolute and as serene as any saint's.

These were strange visions to cross his mind as they sat and talked, while she made posies for him, and even when they did not hover he often found himself dwelling with a sort of touched tenderness upon something vaguely pathetic in her. Perhaps it was only that he found it pathetic to see her look so young when, measured beside his own contrasted youth, he felt how old she was. It was pathetic that eyes so clear should fade, that a cheek so rounded should wither, that the bloom and softness and freshness that her whole being expressed should be evanescent. Jack was not given to such meditations, having a robust, transcendental indifference to earthly gauds unless he could fit them into ethical significances. It was, indeed, no beauty such as Imogen's that he felt in Mrs. Upton. He was not consciously aware that her loveliness was of a subtler, finer quality than her daughter's. She did not remind him of a Madonna nor of anything to do with a temple. But the very fact that he couldn't tabulate and pigeon-hole her with some uplifting analogy made her appeal the most direct that he had ever experienced. The dimness of her lashes; the Japanese-like oddity of her smile; the very way in which her hair turned up from her neck with an eddy of escaping tendrils,—these things pervaded his consciousness. He didn't like to think of her being hurt and unhappy, and he often wondered if she wasn't bound to be both. He wondered about her a great deal. He received, on every day they met, hints and illuminations, but never the clear revealment that he hoped for. The thing that grew surer and surer for him was her essential liking, and the thing that became sweeter and sweeter, though the old perplexity mingled with it, was the superficial amusement he caused her. One of the things that, he began to see, amused her a little was the catholicity of taste displayed in the books scattered about his rooms, the volumes of French and Italian that the great-aunt would take up while they talked. They were books that she felt, he was quite sure, as funnily incongruous with his whole significance, and that their presence there meant none of the things that in another environment they would have stood for; neither cosmopolitanism nor an unbiased connoisseurship interested in all the flowers—du mal among the rest—of the human intelligence. That they meant for him his own omniscient appreciation, unshakenly sure of the ethical category into which he could place each fruit, however ominous its tainted ripeness; each flower, however freaked with perverse tints, left her mildly skeptical; so that he felt, with just a flicker of his old irritation, that the very plentifulness of esthetic corruption that he could display to her testified for her to his essential guilelessness, and, perhaps, to a blandness and narrowness of nature that lacked even the capacity for infection. Jack had to own to himself that, though he strove to make it rigorously esthetic, his seeing of d'Annunzio—to take at random one of the fleurs du mal—was as a shining, a luridly splendid warning of what happened to decadent people in unpleasant Latin countries. Such lurid splendor was as far from him as the horrors of the Orestean Trilogy. In Mrs. Upton's eyes this distance, though a distinct advantage for him, was the result of no choice or conflict, but of environment merely, and she probably thought that the problems of Nietzschean ethics were not to be solved and disposed of by people whom they could never touch. But all the same, and it was here that the atoning softness came in, he felt that she liked him the better for being able to see a fleur du mal only as if it were a weird pressed product under a glass case. And if he amused her it was not because of any sense of superior wisdom; she didn't deny her consciousness of wider contrasts, but she made no claim at all for deeper insight;—the very way in which she talked over the sinister people with him showed that,—asking him his opinion about this or that and opening a volume here and there to read out in her exquisite French or Italian some passage whose full beauty he had never before so realized. Any criticism or comment that she offered was, evidently, of the slightest weight in her own estimation; but, there again one must remember, so many things seemed light to Mrs. Upton, so light, indeed, that he had often with her a sense of pressures removed and an easier world altogether.

"The trouble with him—with all his cleverness and beauty—is that his picture isn't true," Mrs. Upton said of d'Annunzio, standing with a volume in her hand in the clear afternoon light.

"True to him," Jack amended, alert for the displayal of his own comprehension.

"I can't think it. Life is always, for everybody, so much more commonplace than he dares make it. He is afraid of the commonplace; he won't face it; and the revenge life takes on people who do that, people who are really afraid, people who attitudinize, is to infect them in some subtle, mocking way with the very thing they are trying to escape."

"Well, but he isn't commonplace."

"No; worse; he's silly." She had put down the book and taken up another, an older one. "Clough,—how far one must travel from d'Annunzio to come to him.

'It fortifies my soul to know That though I perish, Truth is so.'"

She meditated the Stoic flavor.

"The last word of heroism, of faith," Jack said, thinking of the tumbril. But Valerie turned the leaf a little petulantly. "Heroism? Why?"

"Why,"—as usual he was glad to show her that, if she really wanted to see clearly, he could show her where clearness, of the best sort, lay,—"why, the man who can say that is free. He has abdicated every selfish claim to the Highest."

"Highest? Why should it fortify my soul to know that truth is 'so' if 'so' happens to be some man-devouring dragon of a world-power?"

"Clough assumed, of course, that the truth was high—as it might be, even if it devoured one."

"I've no use for a truth that would have no better use for me," smiled Valerie, and on this he tried to draw her on, from her rejection of such heroism, to some exposal of her own conception of truth, her own opinions about life, a venture in which he always failed. Not that she purposely eluded. She listened, grave, interested, but, when the time came for her to make her contribution, fingering about, metaphorically, in a purse, which, though not at all empty, contained, apparently, a confused medley of coinage. If she could have found the right coin, she would have tendered it gladly; but she seemed to consider a vague chink as all that could be really desired of her, to take it for granted that he knew that he had lost nothing of any value.

* * * * *

Sometimes he and Mrs. Upton, Tison trotting at their heels, took walks together, passing down the steep old streets, austere and cheerful, to the gardens and along the wide avenue with its lines of trees and broad strip of turf, on and out to the bridge that spanned the river. They enjoyed together the view of the pale expanse of water, placidly flowing in the windless sunshine, and, when they turned to come back, their favorite aspect of the town. They could see it, then, silhouetted in the vague grays and reds of its old houses, climbing from the purplish maze of tree-tops in the Common, climbing with a soft, jostling irregularity, to where the dim gold bubble of the State House dome rounded on the sky. It almost made one think, so silhouetted, of a Durer etching.

"Dear place," Mrs. Upton would sigh restfully, and that she was resting in all her stay here, resting from the demands, the adjustments, of her new life, he was acutely aware. Resting from Imogen. Yes, why shouldn't he very simply face that fact? He, too, felt, for the first time, that Imogen had rather tired him and that he was glad of this interlude before taking up again the unresolved discord where they had left it. Imogen's last word about her mother had been that very ominous "Wait and see," and Jack felt that the discord had grown, more complicated from the fact that, quite without waiting, he saw a great deal that Imogen, apparently, did not. He had seen so much that he was willing to wait for whatever else he was to see with very little perturbation of mind, and that, in the meanwhile, as many Sir Basils as it pleased Mrs. Upton to have write to her should do so.

But Mrs. Upton talked a great deal about Imogen, so much that he came to suspect her of adjusting the conversation to some supposed craving in himself. She had never asked a question about his relations with her daughter, accepting merely with interest any signs they might choose to give her, but insinuating no hint of an appeal for more than they might choose to give. She probably took for granted what was the truth of the situation, that it rested with Imogen to make it a definite one. She did not treat him as an accepted lover, nor yet as a rejected one; she discriminated with the nicest delicacy. What she allowed herself to see, the ground she went upon, was his deep interest, his deep attachment. In that light he was admitted by degrees to an intimacy that he knew he could hardly have won so soon on his own merits. She had observed him; she had thought him over; she liked him for himself; but, far more than this, she liked him for Imogen. He often guessed, from a word or look, at a deep core of feeling in her where her repressed, unemphatic, yet vigilant, maternity burned steadily. From her growing fondness for him he could gage how fond she must be of Imogen. The nearness that this made for them was wholly delightful to Jack, were it not embittered by the familiar sense, sharper than ever now, of self-questioning and restlessness. A year ago, six months ago—no, three months only, just before her own coming—how exquisitely such sympathy, such understanding would have fitted into all his needs. He could have talked to her, then, by the hour, frankly, freely, joyously, about Imogen. And the restlessness now was to feel that it was just because of her coming, because of the soft clear light that she had so unconsciously, so revealingly, diffused, that things had, in some odd way, taken on a new color, so that the whole world, so that Imogen especially, looked different, so that he couldn't any longer be frank, altogether. It would have been part of the joy, three months ago, to talk over his loving perception of Imogen's little foibles and childishnesses, to laugh, with a loving listener, over her little complacencies and pomposities. He had taken them as lightly as that, then. They had really counted for nothing. Now they had come to count for so much, and all because of that clear, soft light, that he really couldn't laugh at them. He couldn't laugh at them, and since he couldn't do that he must keep silence over them, and as a result the talks about Imogen with Imogen's mother were, for his consciousness, a little random and at sea. Imogen's mother confidently based their community on a shared vision, and that he kept back his real impression of what he saw was made all the worse by his intuition that she, too, kept back hers, that she talked from his supposed point of view, as it were, and didn't give him a glimmer of her own. She loved Imogen, or, perhaps, rather, she loved her daughter; but what did she think of Imogen? That was the question that had grown so sharp.

* * * * *

On the day before he and Mrs. Upton went back together to New York, Jack gave a little tea that was almost a family affair. Cambridge had been one of their expeditions, in Rose Packer's motor-car, and there Eddy Upton had given them tea in his room overlooking the elms of the "Yard" at Harvard. Jack's tea was in some sort a return, for Eddy and Rose both were there and that Rose, in Eddy's eyes, didn't count as an outsider was now an accepted fact.

Eddy had taken the sudden revelation of his poverty with great coolness, and Jack admired the grim resolution with which he had cut down expenses while relaxing in no whit his hold on the nonchalant beauty. Poverty would, to a certain extent, bar him out from Rose's sumptuous world, and Rose did not seem to take him very seriously as a suitor; but it was evident that Eddy did not intend to remain poor any longer than he could possibly help it and evident, too, that his assurance in regard to sentimental ambitions had its attractions for her. They chaffed and sparred with each other and under the flippant duel there flashed now and then the encounters of a real one. Rose denied the possession of a heart, but Eddy's wary steel might strike one day to a defenceless tenderness. She liked him, among many others, very much. And she was, as she frequently declared, in love with his mother. Jack never took Rose seriously; she remained for him a pretty, trivial, malicious child; but to-day he was pleased by the evidences of her devotion.

The little occasion, presided over by Valerie, bloomed for him. Everybody tossed nosegays, everybody seemed happy; and it was Rose, sitting in a low chair beside Mrs. Upton's sofa, who summed it up for him with the exclamation, "I do so love being with you, Mrs. Upton! What is it you do to make people so comfortable?"

"She doesn't do anything, people who do things make one uncomfortable," remarked Eddy, lounging in his chair and eating sandwiches. "She is, that's all."

"What is she then," Rose queried, her eyes fixed with a fond effrontery on Valerie's face. "She's like everything nice, I know; nice things to look at, to hear, to taste, to smell, to touch. Let us do her portrait, Eddy, you know the analogy game. What flower does she remind you of? and what food? Acacia; raspberries and cream. What musical instrument? What animal? Help me, Jack."

"The musical instrument is a chime of silver bells," said Jack, while Valerie looked from one to the other with amused interest. "And the animal is, I think, a bird; a bright, soft-eyed bird, that flits and poises on tall grasses."

"Yes; that does. And now we will do you, Jack. You are like a very nervous, very brave dog."

"And like a Christmas rose," said Valerie, "and like a flute."

"And the food he reminds me of," finished Eddy, "is baked beans."

"Good," said Rose. "Now, Imogen. What flower is she like? Jack, you will tell us."

Jack looked suddenly like the nervous dog, and Rose handsomely started the portrait with, "Calla lily."

"That's it," Eddy agreed. "And the food she's like is cold lemon-shape, you know the stuff I mean; and her animal,—there is no animal for Imogen; she is too loftily human."

"Her instrument is the organ," Rose finished, as if to end as handsomely as she had begun; "the organ playing the Pilgrims' March from 'Tannhauser.'"

"Excellent," said Eddy.

These young people had done the portrait without help and after the slight pause with which their analogies were received Jack swiftly summed up Rose as Pate-de-foie-gras, gardenia, a piano, and a toy Pomeranian.

"Thanks," Rose bowed; "I enjoy playing impudence to your dignity."

"What's Imogen up to just now?" Eddy asked, quite unruffled by Jack's reflections on his beloved. "When did you see her last, Jack?"

"I went down for a dress-rehearsal the day before yesterday." Jack had still the air of the nervous dog, walking cautiously, the hair of its back standing upright.

"Oh, the Cripple-Hellenic affair. How Imogen loves running a show."

"And how well she does it," said Rose. "What a perfect queen she would have made. She would have laid corner-stones; opened bazaars; visited hospitals, and bowed so beautifully from a carriage—with such a sense of responsibility in the quality of her smile."

"How inane you are, Rose," said Jack. "Nothing less queen-like, in that decorative sense, than Imogen, can be imagined. She works day and night for this thing in which you pretty young people get all the sixpences and she all the kicks. To bear the burden is all she does, or asks to do."

"Why, my dear Jack," Rose opened widely candid eyes, "queens have to work like fun, I can tell you. And who under the sun would think of kicking Imogen?"

"Besides," said Eddy, rising to saunter about the room, his hands in his pockets, "Imogen isn't so superhuman as your fond imagination paints her, my dear Jack. She knows that the most decorative role of all is just that, the weary, patient Atlas, bearing the happy world on his shoulders."

Mrs. Upton, in her corner of the sofa, had been turning the leaves of a rare old edition, glancing up quietly at the speakers while the innocent ripples slid on from the afternoon's first sunny shallows to these ambiguous depths. It was now in a voice that Jack had never heard from her before that she said, still continuing to turn, her eyes downcast:

"How excessively unkind and untrue, Eddy."

If conscious of unkindness, Eddy, at all events, didn't resort to artifice as Rose,—Jack still smarted from it,—had done. He continued to smile, taking, up a small, milky vase to examine it, while he answered in his chill, cheerful tones: "Don't be up in arms, mama, because one of your swans gives the other a fraternal peck. Imogen and I always peck at each other; it's not behind her back alone that I do it. And I'm saying nothing nasty. It's only people like Imogen who get the good works of the world done at all. If they didn't love it, just; if they didn't feel the delight in it that an artist feels in his work, or that Rose feels in dancing better and looking prettier than any girl in a ball-room,—that any one feels in self-realization,—why, the cripples would die off like anything."

"It's a very different order of self-realization"; Mrs. Upton continued to turn her leaves.

Jack knew that she was deeply displeased, and mingled with his own baffled vexation was the relief of feeling himself at one with her, altogether at one, in opposition to this implied criticism of Imogen. Together they shared the conviction—was it the only one they shared about Imogen?—that she simply cared about being good more than about anything else in the world; together they recognized such a purpose and such a longing as a high and an ennobling one.

The tone of her last remark had been final. The talk passed at once away from Imogen and turned on Jack's last acquisitions in white porcelain and on his last piece of work, just returned from a winter exhibition. Eddy went with him into the studio to see it and Mrs. Upton and Rose were left alone. It was then that Mrs. Upton, touching the other's shoulder so that she looked up from the fur she was fastening, said, "You are not a nice little girl, Rose."

The "little girl" stared. Anything so suave yet so firmly intended as unpleasant had never been addressed to her. For once in her life she was at a loss; and after the stare she flushed scarlet, the tears rushing to her eyes.

"Oh, Mrs. Upton," she faltered, "what do you mean?"

"Hitting in the dark isn't a nice thing to do."

"Hitting in the dark?"

"Yes. You know quite well."

"Oh, but really, really,—I didn't mean—" Rose almost wailed. There was no escape from those clear eyes. They didn't look sad or angry; they merely penetrated, spreading dismay within her.

Mrs. Upton now took the flushed face between her hands and gravely considered it. "Didn't you?" she asked.

Rose could look back no longer. Before that gaze a sense of utter darkness descended upon her. She felt, helplessly, like a naughty, cowering child. Her eyes dropped and the tears rolled down her cheeks.

"Please, please forgive me. I didn't dream you'd understand. I didn't mean anybody to understand, except, perhaps, Eddy. I don't know why, it's odious of me—but Imogen does irritate me, just a little, just because she is so good, you know—so lovely."

But this, too, Mrs. Upton penetrated. "Whether Imogen is so good and lovely that she irritates you is another matter. But, whatever you may think of her, don't,"—and here she paused a little over the proper expressing of Rose's misdeed,—"don't call her a calla lily," she found. And she finished, "Especially not before her mother, who is not so blind to your meaning as we must hope that Jack is."

Poor Rose looked now like the naughty child after a deserved chastisement.

"Oh, I am so miserable"; this statement of smarting fact was all she found to say. "And I do care for you so. I would rather please you than any one.—Can't you forgive me?"

But at this point the darkness was lifted, for Mrs. Upton, smiling at last, put her arms around her, kissed her, and said, "Be a nice little girl."



XII

Imogen, during this fortnight of her mother's absence, had time to contemplate her impressions of change.

Their last little scene together had emphasized her consciousness of the many things that lay beneath it.

Her mother had felt that the tears on that occasion were in part a result of the day's earlier encounter, muffled though it was, over Sir Basil, and had attempted, on ground of her own choosing, to lure her child away from the seeing, not only of Sir Basil—he was a mere symbol—but of all the things where she must know that Imogen saw her as wrong.

"She wanted to blur my reason with instinct; to mesh me in the blind filial thing," Imogen reflected. In looking back she could feel with satisfaction that her reason had dominated the scene as a lighthouse beacon shines steadily over tossing and ambiguous waters. Satisfaction was in the vision; the deep content of having, as she would have expressed it, "been true to her light." But it was only in this vision of her own stability of soul that satisfaction lay.

In Jack's absence, and in her mother's, she could gage more accurately what her mother had done to Jack. She had long felt it, that something different growing vaguely in him—so vaguely that it was like nothing with a definite edge or shape, resembling, rather, a shadow of the encompassing gloom, a shadow that only her own far-reaching beams revealed. As the light hovers on the confines of the dark she had felt—a silence.

He was silent—he watched. That was the summing up of the change. He really seemed to convey to her through his silence that he understood her now, or was coming to, better than he had ever done before, better than she understood herself. And with the new understanding it was exactly as if he had found that his focus was misdirected. He no longer looked up; Imogen knew that by the fact that when, metaphorically, her eyes were cast down to meet with approbation and sweet encouragement his upturned admiration, vacancy, only, met their gaze. He no longer—so her beam pierced further and further—looked at her on a level, with the frankness of mere mutual need and trust. No; such silence, such watchfulness implied superiority. The last verge of shadow was reached when she could make out that he looked at her from an affectionate, a paternal,—oh, yes, still a very lover-like,—height, not less watchful for being tender; not less steady for being, still, rather puzzled. Beyond that she couldn't pierce. It was indeed a limit denoting a silent revolution in their relationship. When she came to the realization, Imogen, starting back, indignant through all her being, promised herself that if he looked down she, at all events, would never lend herself to the preposterous topsy-turvydom by looking up. She would firmly ignore that shift of focus. She would look straight before her; she would look, as she spoke, the truth. She "followed her gleam." She stood beside her beacon. And she told herself that her truth, her holding to it, might cost her a great deal.

It was not that she feared to lose him,—if she chose to keep him; but it might be that there were terms on which she would not care to keep him. If, it was still an almost unimaginable "if," he could not, would not come once more to see clearly, then, as lover, he must be put aside, and even as friend learn that she had little use for a friendship so warped from its old attitude.

Under this stoic resolve there was growing in poor Imogen a tossing of confused pain and alarm. She could see change so clearly, but causes were untraceable, an impalpable tangle.

Why was it so? What had happened? What, above all, had her mother done to Jack?

It was all about her mother that change centered, from her that it came. It was a web, a complexity of airy filaments that met her scrutiny. Here hovered her mother's smile, here her thoughtful, observant silences. There Sir Basil's letter; Felkin's departure; all the blurred medley of the times when she had talked to Jack and Mary and her mother had listened. A dimness, a haze, was over all, and she only escaped it, broke through it, when, fighting her way out to her own secure air and sunlight, she told herself,—as, at all events, the nearest truth to hand,—that it was about Jack, over him, that the web had been spun: the web of a smile that claimed nothing, yet that chained men; the web of a vague, sweet silence, that judged nothing, yet softly blighted, through its own indifference, all other people's enthusiasms. And again and again, during these days of adjustment to the clear and the confused vision, Imogen felt the salt hot tears burning in her throat and eyes.

When Jack and her mother were both back again and he and she united in the mechanical interests of the tableaux, now imminent, the strangest loneliness lay in the fact that she could no longer share her grief, her fear, her anger, with Jack, He was there, near her; but he was, far, far away; and she must control any impulse that would draw him near.

She put him to the test; she measured his worth by his power of recognition, his power of discrimination between her mother's instinctive allurements and her own high demand. But while with her mind and soul, as she told herself, she thus held him away, she was conscious of the inner wail of loneliness and unconscious that, under the steady resolution, every faculty, every charm she possessed, was spinning and stretching itself out to surround and hold him.

She made no appeal, but he would feel her quiet sadness weigh upon him; she made no reproach, but she knew that he could but be full of pity for her weariness, of love for her devotedness, when her pale profile bent by lamplight over all the tedious work of the tableaux; knew that her patient "Good-night, dear Jack,—I'm too tired to stay and talk," must smite him with compunction and uneasiness.

It was no direct communication; she used symbols to convey to him the significance that he seemed to be forgetting. She took him to one of Miss Bocock's lectures, gently disowning praise for her part in their success. She took him to the hospital for cripple children, where the nurses smiled at her and the children clambered, crutches and all, into her lap,—she knew how lovely she must look, enfolding cripple children. She took both her mother and him to her Girls' Club on the East side, where they saw her surrounded by adoring gratitude and enthusiasm, where she sat hand in hand with her "girls," all sympathy, all tenderness, all interest,—all the things that Jack had loved her for and that he still, of course, loved her for. Here she must seem to him like a sister of charity, carrying high her lamp of love among these dark lives. And she was careful that their reflected light should shine back upon her. "I want you to know a dear friend of mine, Jack, Miss Mc-Ginty; and this, Evangeline, is my friend, Mr. Pennington,"—so she would lead him up to one of the girls, bold and gay of eye, highly decorated of person. She knew that she left her reputation in safe hands with Evangeline. "Are you a friend of Miss Upton's? She's fine. We're all just crazy about her." She had, as she went from them, the satisfaction of hearing so much of Evangeline's crude but sincere paon; they were all "just crazy" about her.

And a further shining of light suggested itself to her.

"Mamma darling," she said, as they were going home in the clashing, clattering "elevated," "you mustn't think me naughty, but I had to ask them—my own particular girls—to go with us to the Philharmonic. They are becoming so interested in their music and it will be a treat for them, will really mean something in their lives, will really live for them, in them."

Mrs. Upton leaned forward to listen in the mingled uproar of banging doors and vociferous announcements from the conductor. A look of uncertainty crossed her face and Imogen hastened to add: "No, it's not the extravagance you think. I had a splendid idea. I'm going to sell that old ring that Grandmamma Cray left me. Rose told me once that I could get a lot of money for it."

Swiftly flushing, her brows knitted, the din about them evidently adding to her perturbation, Mrs. Upton, with a sharpness of utterance that Jack had never heard from her, said: "Your sapphire ring? Your grandmother's ring? Indeed, indeed, Imogen, I must ask you not to do that!"

"Why, mama dear, why?" Imogen's surprise was genuine and an answering severity was checked by Jack's presence.

"It was my mother's ring."

"But what better use could I make of it, mama? I rarely wear any ring but the beautiful pearl that papa gave me."

"I couldn't bear to have you sell it."

"But, mama dear, why? I must ask it. How can I sacrifice so much for a mere whim?"

"I must ask you to yield to a mere whim, then. Pray give up the thought. We will find the money in some other way."

"Of course, mama, if you insist, I must yield," Imogen said, sinking back in her seat beside the attentive Jack, and hoping that her mournful acquiescence might show in its true light to him, even if her mother's sentimental selfishness didn't. And later, when he very prettily insisted on himself entertaining the club-girls at the Philharmonic, she felt that, after all, no one but her mother had lost in the encounter. The girls were to have their concert (though they might have had many such, had not her mother so robbed them, there was still that wound) and she was to keep her ring; and she was not sorry for that, for it did go well with the pearl. Above all, Jack must have appreciated both her generous intention and her relinquishing of it. Yet she had just to test his appreciation.

"Indeed I do accept, Jack. I can't bear to have them disappointed for a childish fancy, like that of poor mama's, and we have no right to afford it by any other means. Isn't it strange that any one should care more for a colored bit of stone than for some high and shining hours in those girls' gray lives?"

But Jack said: "Oh, I perfectly understand what she felt about it. It was her mother's ring. She probably remembers seeing it on her mother's hand." So Imogen had, again, to recognize the edge of the shadow.

They, all of them, Jack, Mary, and her mother, went with her and her girls to the concert. Jack had taken two boxes in the semicircle that sweeps round Carnegie Hall, overhanging the level sea of heads below. Rose Packer, just come to town, was next them, with the friends she was visiting in New York, two pretty, elaborately dressed girls, frothing with youthful high spirits, and their mother, an abundant, skilfully-girthed matron. The Langleys were very fashionable and very wealthy; their houses in America, England, Italy, their yachts and motorcars, their dances and dinners, furnished matter for constant and uplifted discourse in the society columns of the English-speaking press all over the world. Every one of Imogen's factory girls knew them by name and a stir of whispers and nudges announced their recognition.

Mrs. Langley leaned over the low partition to clasp Mrs. Upton's hand,—they had known each other since girlhood,—and to smile benignly upon Imogen, casting a glance upon the self-conscious, staring girls, whose clothing was a travesty of her own consummate modishness as their manners at once attempted to echo her sweetness and suavity.

"What a nice idea," she murmured to Imogen; "and to have them hear it in the best way possible, too. Not crowded into cheap, stuffy seats."

"That would hardly have been possible, since I do not myself care to hear music in cheap seats. What is not good enough for me is not good enough for my friends. To-day we all owe our pleasure to Mr. Pennington."

Mrs. Langley, blandly interested in this creditable enlightenment, turned to Jack with questioning about the tableaux.

"We are all so much interested in Imogen's interests, aren't we? It's such an excellent idea. My girls are so sorry that they can't be in them. Rose tells me, Imogen, that there was some idea of your doing Antigone."

"None whatever," said Imogen, with no abatement of frigidity. She disapproved of leaders of fashion.

"I only meant," Rose leaned forward, "that we wanted you to, so much,"

"And can't you persuade her? You would look so well, my dear child. Talk her over, Valerie, you and Mr. Pennington." Mrs. Langley looked back at her friend.

"It would hardly do just now, I think," Valerie answered.

"But for a charity—" Mrs. Langley urged her mitigation with a smile that expressed, to Imogen's irritated sensibilities, all the trite conformity of the mammon-server.

"I don't think it would do," Valerie repeated.

"Pray don't think my motive in refusing a conventional one," said Imogen, with an irrepressible severity that included her mother as well as Rose and Mrs. Langley. These two sank back in their seats and the symphony began.

Resting her cheek on her hand, her elbow on her knee, Imogen leaned forward, as if out of the perplexing, weary world into the sphere of the soul. She smiled deeply at one of her girls while she fell into the listening harmony of attitude, and her delicate face took on a look of rapt exaltation.

Jack was watching her, she knew; though she did not know that her own consciousness of the fact effectually prevented her from receiving as more than a blurred sensation the sounds that fell upon her ear.

She adjusted her face, her attitude, as a painter expresses an idea through the medium of form, and her idea was to look as though feeling the noblest things that one can feel. And at the end of the first movement, the vaguely heard harmony without responding to the harmony of this inner purpose, the music's tragic acceptance of doom echoing her own deep sense of loneliness, the strange new sorrow tangling her life, tears rose beautifully to her eyes; a tear slid down her cheek.

She put up her handkerchief quietly and dried it, glancing now at Jack beside her. He was making a neat entry in a note-book, technically interested in the rendering by a new conductor. The sight struck through her and brought her soaring sadness to earth. Anger, deep and gnawing, filled her. He had not seen her tears, or, if he had, did not care that she was sad. It was little consolation for her hurt to see good Mary's eyes fixed on her with wide solicitude. She smiled, ever so gravely and tenderly, at Mary, and turned her eyes away.

A babble of silly enthusiasm had begun in the Langley box and Rose had just effected a change of seat that brought her next to her adored Mrs. Upton and nearer her dear Mary. Imogen almost felt that hostile forces had clustered behind her back, especially as Jack turned in his chair to talk to Mary and her mother.

"Just too lovely!" exclaimed one of the younger Miss Langleys, in much the same vernacular as that used by Imogen's protegees.

She looked round at these to see one yawning cavernously, on the cessation of uncomprehended sound; while another's eyes, drowsed as if by some narcotic, sought the relief of visual interest in the late-comers who filed in below. A third sat in an attitude of sodden preoccupation, breathing heavily and gazing at the Langleys and at Rose, who wore to-day a wonderful dress. Only a rounded little Jewess, with eyes of black lacquer set in a fat, acquiline face, quite Imogen's least favorite of her girls, showed a proper appreciation. She was as intent and as preoccupied as Jack had been.

The second movement began, a movement hurrying, dissatisfied, rising in appeal and aspiration, beaten back; turning upon itself continually, continually to rise again,—baffled, frustrated, yet indomitable. And as Imogen listened her features took on a mask-like look of gloom. How alone she was among them all.

She was glad in the third movement, her mind in its knotted concentration catching but one passage, and that given with a new rendering, to emphasize her displeasure by a little shudder and frown. An uproar of enthusiasm arose after the movement and Imogen heard one of the factory girls behind her, in answer to a question from her mother, ejaculate "Fine!"

When her mother leaned to her, with the same "Wasn't it splendid?" Imogen found relief in answering firmly, "I thought it insolent."

"Insolent? That adagio bit?"—Jack, evidently, had seen her symptoms of distress.—"Why, I thought it a most exquisite interpretation."

"So did I," said Mrs. Upton rather sadly from behind.

"It hurt me, mama dear," said Imogen. "But then I know this symphony so well, love it so much, that I perhaps feel intolerantly toward new readings."

As the next, and last, movement began, she heard Rose under her breath yet quite loud enough, murmur, "Bunkum!" The ejaculation was nicely modulated to reach her own ears alone.

With a deepened sense of alienation, Imogen sat enveloped by the unheard thunders of the final movement. Yes, Rose would hide her impertinence from others' ears. Imogen had noted the growing tenderness, light and playful, between her mother and the girl. Behind her, presently, she rustled in all her silks as she leaned to whisper something to Mrs. Upton—"You will come and have tea with me,—at Sherry's,—all by ourselves?" Imogen caught.

Her mother was not the initiator, but her acquiescence was an offense, and to Imogen, acutely conscious of the whispered colloquy, each murmur ran needles of anger into her stretched and vibrating nerves. At last she turned eyes portentously widened and a prolonged "Ss-s-s-h" upon them.

"People oughtn't to whisper," Jack smiled comprehendingly at her, when they reached the end of the symphony; the rest of the movement having been occupied, for Imogen, with a sense of indignant injury.

She had caught his attention, then, with her reproof. There was sudden balm in his sympathy. The memory of the unnoticed tear still rankled in her, but she was able to smile back. "Some people will always be the money-lenders in the temple."

At once the balm was embittered. She had trusted too much to his sympathy. He flushed his quick, facile flush, and she was again at the confines of the shadow. Really, it was coming to a pass when she could venture no least criticism, even by implication, of her mother.

But, keeping up her smile, she went on: "You don't feel that? To me, music is a temple, the cathedral of my soul. And the chink of money, the bartering of social trivialities, jars on me like a sacrilege."

He looked away, still with the flush. "Aren't we all, more or less, worshipers or money-lenders by turn? My mind often strays."

"Not to the glitter of common coin," she insisted, urging with mildness his own better self upon him; for, yes, rather than judge her mother he would lower his own ideal. All the more reason, then, for her to hold fast to her own truth, and see its light place him where it must. If he now thought her priggish,—well, that did place him.

"Oh, yes, it does, often," he rejoined; but now he smiled at her as though her very solemnity, her very lack of humor, touched him; it was once more the looking down of the shifted focus. Then he appealed a little.

"You mustn't be too hard on people for not feeling as you do—all the time."

Consistency did not permit her an answer, for the next piece had begun.

When the concert was over, Mrs. Langley offered the hospitality of her electric brougham to three of them. Rose and her girls were going to a tea close by. Imogen said that she preferred walking and Jack said that he would go with her; so Mary and Mrs. Upton departed with Mrs. Langley and, the factory girls dispatched to their distances by subway, the young couple started on their way down crowded Fifth Avenue.

It was a bright, reverberating day, dry and cloudless, and, as they walked shoulder to shoulder, their heels rang metallically on the frosty pavements. Above the sloping canon of the avenue, the sky stretched, a long strip of scintillating blue. The "Flat-Iron" building towered appallingly into the middle distance like the ship prow of some giant invasion. The significance of the scene was of nothing nobly permanent, but it was exhilarating in its expression of inquisitive, adventurous life, shaping its facile ideals in vast, fluent forms.

Imogen's face, bathed in the late sunlight, showed its usual calm; inwardly, she was drawn tight and tense as an arrow to the bow-head, in a tingling readiness to shoot far and free at any challenge.

A surface constraint was manifested in Jack's nervous features, but she guessed that his consciousness had not reached the pitch of her own acuteness, and made him only aware of a difference as yet unadjusted between them. Indeed, with a quiet interest that she knew was not assumed, he presently commented to her on the odd disproportion between the streaming humanity and its enormous frame.

"If one looks at it as a whole it's as inharmonious as a high, huge stage with its tiny figures before the footlights. It's quite out of scale as a setting for the human form. It's awfully ugly, and yet it's rather splendid, too."

Imogen assented.

"We are still juggling with our possibilities," said Jack, and he continued to talk on of the American people and their possibilities—his favorite topic—so quietly, so happily, even, that Imogen felt suddenly a relaxation of the miserable mood that had held her during all the afternoon.

His comradely tone brought her the sensation of their old, their so recent, relation, complete, unflawed, once more. An impulse of recovery rose in her, and, her mind busy with the sweet imagination, she said presently, reflectively, "I think I will do your Antigone after all."

Completely without coquetry, and sincerely innocent of feminine wiles, Imogen had always known, sub-consciously as it were, for the matter seldom assumed the least significance for her, that Jack delighted in her personal appearance. She saw herself, suddenly, in all the appealing youth and beauty of the Grecian heroine, stamping on his heart, by means of the outer manifestation, that inner reality to which he had become so strangely blind. It was to this revelation of reality that her thought clung, and an added impulse of mere tenderness had helped to bring the words to her lips. In her essential childishness where emotion and the drama of the senses were concerned, she could not have guessed that the impulse, with its tender mask, was the primitive one of conquest, the cruel female instinct for holding even where one might not care to keep. At the bottom of her heart, a realm never visited by her unspotted thoughts, was a yearning, strangely mingled, to be adored, and to wreak vengeance for the faltering in adoration that she had felt. Ah, to bind him!—to bind him, helpless, to her! That was the mingled cry.

Jack looked round at her, as unconscious as she of these pathetic and tigerish depths, but though his eye lighted with the artist's delight in the vision that he had relinquished reluctantly, she saw, in another moment, that he hesitated.

"That would be splendid, dear,—but, can you go back on what you said?"

"Why not? If I have found reason to reconsider my first decision?"

"What reason? You mustn't do it just to please me, you know; though it's sweet of you, if that is the reason. Your mother, you see, agreed with you. I hadn't realized that she would mind. You know what she said, just now."

Jack had flushed in placing his objection, and Imogen, keeping grave, sunlit eyes upon him, felt a flush rise to her own cheeks.

"Do you feel her minding, minding in such a way, any barrier?" She was able to control the pain, the anger, that his hesitation gave her, the quick humiliation, too, and she went on with only a deepening of voice:

"Perhaps that minding of hers is part of my reason. I have no right, I see that clearly now, to withhold what I can do for our cause from any selfish shrinking. I felt, in that moment when she and Mrs. Langley debated on the conventional aspect of the matter, that I would be glad, yes, glad, to give myself, since my refusal is seen in the same category as any paltry, social scruple. It was as if a deep and sacred thing of one's heart were suddenly dragged out and exhibited like a thickness of black at the edge of one's note-paper.

"Will you understand me, Jack, when I say that I feel that I can in no way so atone to that sacred memory for the interpretation that was an insult; in no way keep it so safe, as by making it this offering of myself. It is for papa that I shall do it. He would have wished it. I shall think of him as I stand there, of him and of the children that we are helping."

She spoke with her deliberate volubility, neither hesitating nor hurrying, her meaning, for all its grandiloquence of setting, very definite, and Jack looked a little dazed, as though from the superabundance of meaning.

"Yes, I see,—yes, you are quite right," he said. He paused for a moment, going over her chain of cause and effect, seeking the particular link that the new loyalty in him had resented. And then, after the pause, finding it: "But I don't believe your mother meant it like that," he added.

His eyes met Imogen's as he said it, and he almost fancied that something swordlike clashed against his glance, something that she swiftly withdrew and sheathed. It was earnest gentleness alone that answered him.

"What do you think she did mean then, Jack? Please help me to see if I'm unfair. I only long to be perfectly fair. How can I do for her, unless I am?"

His smoldering resentment was quenched by a sense of compunction and a rising hope.

"That's dear of you, Imogen," he said. "You are, I think, unfair at times. It's difficult to lay one's finger on it."

"But please do lay your finger on it—as heavily as you can, dear Jack."

"Well, the simile will do for my impression. The finger you lay on her is too heavy. You exaggerate things in her—over-emphasize things."

She was holding herself, forcing herself to look calmly at this road he pointed out to her, the only road, perhaps, that would lead her back to her old place with him. "Admirable things, you think, if one saw them truly?"

"I don't know about admirable; but warm, sweet—at the worst, harmless. I'm sure, to-day, that she only meant it for you, for what she felt must be your shrinking. Of course she had her sense of fitness, too, a fitness that we may, as you feel, overlook when we see the larger fitness. But her intention was perfectly,"—he paused, seeking an expression for the intention and repeated,—"Sweet, warm, harmless."

Imogen felt that she was holding herself as she had never held herself.

"Don't you think I see all that, Jack?"

"Well, I only meant that I, since coming to know her, really know her, in Boston, see it most of all."

"And you can't see, too, how it must stab me to have papa—papa—put, through her trivial words, into the category of black-edged paper?"

Her voice had now the note of tears.

"But she doesn't," he protested.

"Can you deny that, for her, he counts for little more than the mere question of convention?"

Jack at this was, perforce, silent. No, he couldn't altogether deny it, and though it did not seem to him a particularly relevant truth he could but own that to Imogen it might well appear so. He did not answer her, and there the incident seemed to end. But it left them both with the sense of frustrated hope, and over and above that Jack had felt, sharper than ever before, the old shoot of weariness for "papa" as the touchstone for such vexed questions.



XIII

Mrs. Upton expressed no displeasure, although she could not control surprise, when she was informed of Imogen's change of decision, and Jack, watching her as usual, felt bound, after the little scene of her quiet acquiescence, to return with Imogen, for a moment, to the subject of their dispute. Imogen had asked him to help her to see and however hopeless he might feel of any fundamental seeing on her part, he mustn't abandon hope while there was a stone unturned.

"That's what it really was," he said to her. "You do see, don't you?—to respond to whatever she felt you wanted."

Imogen stared a little. "Of what are you talking, Jack?"

"Of your mother Antigone—the black edge. It wasn't the black edge."

She had understood in a moment and was all there, as fully equipped with forbearing opposition as ever.

"It wasn't even the black edge, you mean? Even that homage to his memory was unreal?"

"Of course not. I mean that she wanted to do what you wanted."

"And does she think, do you think, it's that I want,—a suave adaptation to ideals she doesn't even understand? No doubt she attributes my change to girlish vanity, the wish to shine among the others. If that was what I wanted, that would be what she would want, too."

"Aren't you getting away from the point a little?" he asked, baffled and confused, as he often was, by her measured decisiveness.

"It seems to me that I am on the point.—The point is that she cared so little about him—in either way."

This was what he had foreseen that she would think.

"The point is that she cares so much for you," he ventured his conviction, fixing his eyes, oddly deepened with this, his deepest appeal, upon her.

But Imogen, as though it were a bait thrown out and powerless to allure, slid past it.

"To gain things we must work for them. It's not by merely caring, yielding, that one wins one's rights. Mama is a very 'sweet, warm, harmless' person; I see that as well as you do, Jack." So she put him in his place and he could only wonder if he had any right to feel so angry.

The preparations for the new tableau were at once begun and a few days after their last uncomfortable encounter, Jack and Imogen were again together, in happier circumstances it seemed, for Imogen, standing in the library while her mother adjusted her folds and draperies, could but delight a lover's eye. Mary, also on view, in her handmaiden array,—Mary's part was a small one in the picture of the restored Alcestis,—sat gazing in admiration, and Jack walked about mother and daughter with suggestion and comment.

"It's perfect, quite perfect," he declared, "that warm, soft white; and you have done it most beautifully, Mrs. Upton. You are a wonderful costumiere."

"Isn't my chlamys a darling?" said Valerie happily from below, where she knelt to turn a hem.

"Mama won't let us forget that chlamys," Imogen said, casting a look of amusement upon her mother. "She is so deliciously vain about it." Imogen was feeling a thrill of confidence and hope. Jack's eyes, as they rested upon her, had shown the fondest admiration. She was in the humor, so rare with her of late, of gaiety and light assurance. And she thirsted for words of praise and delight from Jack.

"No wonder that she is vain," Jack returned. "It has just the look of that heavenly garment that blows back from the Victory of Samothrace. The hair, too, with those fillets, you did that, I suppose."

"Yes, I did. I do think it's an achievement. It has the carven look that one wants. Imogen's hair lends itself wonderfully to those long, sweeping lines."

But, Jack, once having expressed his admiration for Imogen, seemed tactlessly bent on emphasizing his admiration for the mere craftswoman of the occasion.

"Well, it's as if you had formed the image into which I'm to blow the breath of life. I'm really uncertain, yet, as to the best attitude." Imogen was listening to this with some gravity of gaze. "Do take that last position we decided upon, Imogen. And do you, Mary, take the place of the faltering old Oedipus for a moment. Look down, Imogen; yes, a strong, brooding tenderness of look."

"Ah, she gets it wonderfully," said Valerie, still at her hem.

"Not quite deep or still enough," Jack objected. "Stand back, Mary, please, while we work at the expression. No, that's not it yet."

"But it's lovely, so. You would have found fault with Antigone herself, Jack," Mrs. Upton protested.

"Jack is quite right, mama, pray don't laugh at his suggestions. I understand perfectly what he means." Imogen glanced at herself in the mirror with a grave effort to assume the expression demanded of her. "Is this better, Jack?"

"Yes—no;—no, you can't get at all what I mean," the young man returned, so almost pettishly that Valerie glanced up at him with a quick flush.

Imogen's resentment, if she felt any, did not become apparent. She accepted condemnation with dignified patience.

"I'm afraid that is the best I can do now, though I'll try. Perhaps on the day of the actual performance it will come more deeply to me. There, mama darling, that will do; it's quite right now. I can't put myself into it while you sew down there. I can hardly think that I'm brooding over my tragic father while I see your pins and needles. Now, Jack, is this better?" With perfect composure she once more took the suggested attitude and expression.

Mrs. Upton, her dusky flush deepened, rose, stumbling a little from her long stooping, and, steadying herself with her hand on a table, looked at the new effort.

"No,—it's worse. It's complacent—self-conscious," burst from Jack. "You look as if you were thinking far more about your own brooding than about your father. Antigone is self-forgetting; absolutely self-forgetting." So his rising irritation found impulsive, helpless expression. In the slight silence that followed his words he was aware of the discord that he had crashed into an apparent harmony. He glanced almost furtively at Mrs. Upton. Had she seen—did she guess—the anger, for her, that had broken into these peevish words? She met his eyes with her penetrating depth of gaze, and Imogen, turning to them, saw the interchange; saw Jack abashed and humble, not before her own forbearance but before her mother's wonder and severity.

Resentment had been in her, keen and sharp, from his first criticism; nay, from his first ignoring of her claim to praise. It rose now to a flood of righteous indignation. Sweeping round upon them in her white draperies, casting aside—as in a flash she saw it—petty subterfuge and petty fear, coldly, firmly, she questioned him:

"I must ask you whether this is mere ill-temper, Jack, or whether you intentionally wish to wound me. Pray let me have the truth."

Speechless, confused, Jack gazed at her.

She went on, gaining, as she spoke, her usual relentless fluency.

"If you would rather that some one else did the Antigone, pray say so frankly. It will be a relief to me to give up my part. I am very tired. I have a great deal to do. You know why I took up the added burden. My motives make me quite indifferent to petty, personal considerations. All that, from the first, I have had in mind, was to help, to the best of my poor ability. Whom would you rather have? Rose?—Mary?—Clara Bartlett?—Why not mama? I will gladly help any one of them with all that I have learnt from you as to dress and pose. But I cannot, myself, go on with the part if such malignant dissatisfaction is to be wreaked upon me."

Jack felt his head rise at last from the submerging flood.

"But, Imogen, indeed,—I do beg your pardon. It was odious of me to speak so. No one can do the part but you."

"Why say that, Jack, when you have just told me that I do it worse and worse?"

"It was only a momentary impression. Really, I'm ashamed of myself."

"But it's your impression that is the standard in those tableaux. How can I do the part if I contradict your conception?"

"You can't. I was in a bad temper."

"And why, may I ask, were you in a bad temper?"

The gaze from her serene yet awful brows was bent upon him, but under it, in a sudden reaction from its very serenity, its very awfulness, a firm determination rose in him to meet it. Turning very red but eyeing Imogen very straight: "I thought you inconsiderate, ungrateful, to your mother, as you often are," he said.

For a long moment Imogen was silent, glancing presently at Mary—scarlet with dismay, her hastily adjusted eye-glasses in odd contrast to her classic draperies—and then turning her eyes upon her mother who, still standing near the table, was frowning and looking down.

"Well, mama dear," she asked, "what have you to say to this piece of information? Have I, all unconsciously, been unkind? Have I been ungrateful? Do you share Jack's sense of injury?"

Mrs. Upton looked up as though from painful and puzzling reflection. "My dear Imogen," she said, "I think that you and Jack are rather self-righteous young people, far too prone to discussing yourselves. I think that you were a little inconsiderate; but Jack has no call to take up my defense or to express any opinion as to our relations. Of course you will do the Antigone, and of course, when he recovers his temper,—and I believe he has already,—he will be very glad that you should. And now let's have no more of this foolish affair."

None of them had ever heard her make such a measured, and, as it were, such a considered speech before, and the unexpectedness of it so wrought upon them that it reduced not only Jack but even the voluble Antigone to silence. But in Jack's silence was an odd satisfaction, even an elation. He didn't mind his own humiliation—that of an officious little boy put in a corner—one bit; for there in the corner opposite was Imogen, actually Imogen, and the sight of it gave him a shameful pleasure.

Meanwhile Mrs. Upton calmly resumed her work at the hem, finished it, turned her daughter about and pronounced it all quite right.

"Now get into warmer clothes and come down to tea, which will be here directly," she said.

Imogen, by now, was recovered from the torpor of her astonishment.

"Mary, will you come with me, I'll want your help." And then, as Mary, whom alone she could count as an ally, joined her, she paused before departure, gathering her chlamys about her. "If I am silent, mama, pray don't imagine that it is you who have silenced me," she said. "I certainly could not think of defending myself to you. My character, with all its many faults, speaks for itself with those who understand me and what I aim at. All I ask of you, mama, is not to imagine, for a moment, that you are one of those."

So Antigone, white, smiling, wrathful, swept away, Mary behind her, round-eyed and aghast, and Valerie was left confronting the overwhelmed Jack.

He could find not one word to say, and for some moments Valerie, too, stood silent, slipping her needle back and forth in her fingers and looking hard at the carpet.

"It's all my fault!" Jack burst out suddenly. "Blundering, silly fool that I am! Do say that you forgive me."

She did not look at him, but, still slipping her needle with the minute, monotonous gesture back and forth, she nodded.

"But say it," Jack protested. "Scold me as much as you please. It's all true; I'm a prig, I know. But say that you forgive me."

A smile quivered on her cheek, and putting out her hand she answered: "There's nothing to forgive, Jack. I lost my temper, too. And it's all mere nonsense."

He seized her hand, and then, only then, realized from something in the quiver of the smile, something muffled in the lightness of her voice, that she was crying.

"Oh!" broke from him; "oh! what brutes we are!"

She had drawn her hand from his in a moment, had turned from him while she swiftly put her handkerchief to her eyes, and after the passage of the scudding rain-cloud she confronted him clearly once more.

"Why, it's all my fault,—don't you know,—from the beginning," she said.

He understood her perfectly. She had never been so near him.

"You know that's not true," he said. And then, at last, his eyes, widely upon her, told her on which side his sympathies were enlisted in the long-drawn contest between,—not between poor Imogen and herself, that was a mere result—but between herself and her husband.

And that she understood his understanding became at once apparent to him. He had never seen her blush as she blushed then, and when the deep glow had passed she became very white and looked very weary, almost old.

"No, I don't know it, Jack," she said. "And you, certainly, do not. And now, dear Jack, don't let us speak of this any more. Will you help me to clear this table for the tea-things."

* * * * *

So this, for Imogen, was the result of her loving impulse during the frosty walk down Fifth Avenue. All her sweet, wordless appeals had been in vain. Jack had admired her as he might have admired a marionette; her beauty had meant less to him than her mother's dressmaking; and as she sat alone in her room on that afternoon, having gently and firmly sent Mary down to tea with the ominous message that she cared for none, she saw that the shadow between her and Jack loomed close upon them now, the shadow that would blot out all their future, as a future together. And Imogen was frightened, badly frightened, at the prospect of that empty future.

Her fragrant branch of life that had bloomed so fully and freshly in her hand, a scepter and a fairy wand of beneficence, had withered to a thorny scourge for her own shoulders. She looked about her, before her. She realized with a new, a cutting keenness, that Jack was very rich and she very poor. The chill of poverty had hardly reached her as yet, the warm certainty of its cessation had wrapped her round too closely; but it reached her now, and the thought of that poverty, unrelieved, perhaps, for all her life, the thought of the comparative obscurity to which it would consign her, filled her with a real panic; and, as before, the worst part of the panic was that she should feel it, she, the scorner of material things. Suppose, just suppose, that no one else came. Everything grew gray at the thought. Charities, friends, admiration, these were poor substitutes for the happy power and pride that as a rich man's adored wife would have been hers. And the fact that had transformed her blossoming branch into the thorny scourge was that Jack's adored wife she would never be. His humbled, his submissive, his chastened and penitent wife,—yes, on those terms; yes, she could see it, the future, like a sunny garden which one could only reach by squeezing oneself through some painfully narrow aperture. The fountains, the flowers, the lawns were still hers—if she would stoop and crawl; and for Imogen the mere imagining of herself in such a posture brought a hot blush to her forehead. Not only would she have scorned such means of reaching the life of ample ease and rich benevolence, but they were impossible to her nature. A garden that one must crouch to enter was a prison. Better, far better, her barren, dusty, lonely life than such humiliation; such apostasy.

She faced it all often, the future, the panic, during the last days of preparation for the tableaux, days during which, with a still magnanimity, she fulfilled the tasks that she had undertaken. She would not throw up her part because her mother and Jack had so cruelly injured her; it was now for her father and for the crippled children alone that she did it.

Sitting in her bedroom with its many books and photographs, the big framed one of her father over her bed, she promised him, her eyes on his, that she would have strength to face it all, for all her life if necessary. "It was too easy, I see that now," she whispered to him. "I had made no real sacrifices for our thing. The drop of black blood had never yet been crushed out of my heart,—for when you died, it was submission that was asked of me, not sacrifice. It was easy, dear, to give myself to the work we believed in—to be tired, and strong, and glad for it—to live out bravely into the world—when you were beside me and when all the means of work were in my hand. But now I must relinquish something that I could only keep by being false to myself—to you—to the right. And I must go uphill—'yes, uphill to the very end'—accepting poverty, loneliness, the great need of love, unanswered. But I won't falter or forget, darling father. As long as I live I will fight our fight. Even if the way is through great darkness, I carry the light in my heart."

The noble pathos of such soliloquies brought her to tears, but the tears, she felt, were strengthening and purifying. After drying them, after reading some of the deeply marked passages in the poets that he and she,—and, oh, alas! alas! she and Jack, lost Jack—had so often read together, she would go down-stairs, descend into the dusty, thorny arena again, feeling herself uplifted, feeling a halo of sorrowful benignity about her head. And this feeling was so assured that those who saw her at these moments were forced, to some extent, to share it.

Toward her mother, toward Jack, she showed a gentle, a distant courtesy; to Mary a heartbreaking sweetness. Mary, perhaps, needed to have pettier impressions effaced, and certain memories could but fade before Imogen's august head and unfaltering eyes.

If she had been wrong in that strange little scene of the Antigone, Mary was convinced that her intention had been high. Jack had hurt her too much; that was it; and, besides, how could she know what had gone on behind the scenes, passages between mother and daughter that had made Imogen's attitude inevitable. So Mary argued with herself, sadly troubled. "Oh, Imogen, please tell me," she burst forth one day, the day before the tableaux, when she was sitting with Imogen in the latter's room; "what is it that makes you so sad? Why are you so displeased with Jack? You haven't given him up, Imogen!"

Imogen passed her hand softly over Mary's hair, recalling, as she did so, that the gesture was a favorite one with her father.

"Won't you, can't you tell me?" Mary pleaded.

"It is so difficult, dear. Given him up? No, I never do that with people I have cared for; but he is no longer the Jack I cared for. He is changed, Mary."

"He adores you as much as ever,—of course I've always known how he adored you; it made me so happy, loving you both as I do; and he still adores you I'm sure. He is always watching you. He changes color when you come into the room."

"He, too, knows and feels what ominous destinies are hanging over us, Mary." The deeply marked passages had been in Maeterlinck that day. "We are parted, perhaps forever, because he sees at last that I will not stoop. When one has grown up, all one's life, straight, facing the sunrise, one cannot bend and look down."

"You stoop! Why it's that that he would never let you do!"

"No? You think that, after the other day? He has stooped, Mary, to other levels. He breathes a different air from mine now. I cannot follow him into his new world."

"You mean?—you mean?—" Mary faltered.

Imogen's clear eyes told her what she meant; it did not need the slow acquiescence of her head nor the articulated, "Yes, I mean mama.—Poor mama. A little person can make great sorrows, Mary."

But now Mary's good, limpid eyes, unfaltering and candid as a child's, dwelt on her with a new hope. "But, Imogen, it's just that: is she so little? She isn't like you, of course. She can't lift and sustain, as you can. She doesn't stand for great things, as you do and as your father did. But I seem to feel more and more how much she could be to you.—It only needs-more understanding; and, if that's all, I really believe, Imogen darling, that you and Jack will be all right again. Perhaps," Mary went on with a terrible unconsciousness, "perhaps he has come to understand, already, better than you do,—I thought that, really, the other day,—and it's that that makes the sense of division. You are at different places of understanding. And he hasn't to remember, and get over, all the mistakes, the faults in her past; and perhaps it's because of that that he sees the present reality more clearly than you do. Jack is such a wonderful person for seeing the real self of people."

Imogen's steady gaze, during this speech, continued to rest unwaveringly upon her; Mary felt no warning in it and, when she had done, waited eagerly for some echo to her faith.

But when Imogen spoke, it was in a voice that revealed to her her profound miscalculation.

"You do not understand, Mary. You see nothing. Her present self is her past self, unchanged, unashamed, unatoned for. It is her mistakes, her faults, that Jack now stands for. It is her mistakes and faults that I must stand for, if I am to be beside him again. That would be the stooping that I meant. I fear that not only Jack but you are blinded, Mary. I fear that it is not only Jack but you that she is taking from me." Her voice was calm, but the steely edge of an accusation was in it.

Mary sat aghast. "Taking me from you! Oh, Imogen, you don't mean that you won't care for me if I get fond of her!"

The crudely simple interpretation brought the blood to Imogen's cheeks. "I mean that you can hardly be fond of us both. It is not I who will cease to care." Under the accusation was now an added note of pain and of appeal. All Mary's faiths rallied to that appeal.

"Imogen!" she said, timidly, like the wrong-doer she felt herself to be, taking the other's hand; "dear, brave, wonderful Imogen,—how can you—how can you say it! Why there is hardly any one in the world who has counted to me as you have. Why, your mother is like a sweet child beside you! She hasn't faiths; she hasn't that healing, strengthening thing that I've always so felt in you. She could never mean what you do. Oh, Imogen! you won't think such dreadful things, will you? You do forgive me if I have blundered and hurt you?"

Imogen drew in the fragrant incense with long breaths; it revived her, filled her veins with new courage, new hope. The two girls kissed solemnly. They were going out together and they presently went down-stairs hand in hand. But as an after-flavor there lingered for Imogen, like a faint, flat bitterness after the incense, a suspicion that Mary, in wafting her censer with such energy, had been seeking to fill her own nostrils, also, with the sacred old aroma, to find, as well as give, the intoxication of faith.



XIV

"Sir Basil!" Valeria exclaimed.

She rose from the tea-table, where she and Jack and Mrs. Wake were sitting, to meet the unexpected new-comer.

A gladness that Jack had never seen in her seemed to inundate her face, her figure, her outstretched hands; she looked young, she looked almost childlike, as she smiled at her friend over their clasp, and Jack saw, by the light of that transfiguration, how gray these last months must have been to her, how strangely bereft of response and admiration, how without savor or sweetness. He saw, and with the insight came a sharp stir of bitterness against the new-comer, who threw them all like this into a dull background, and, at the same time, a real echo of her gladness, that she should have it.

He actually, in the sharp, swift twist of feeling, hardly remembered Imogen's forecasts and warnings, hardly remembered that Mrs. Upton's gladness and Sir Basil's beaming gaze put Imogen quite dreadfully in the right. He did not think of Imogen at all, nor of the desecration of the house of mourning by this gladness, so absorbed was he in watching it, in sharing it, and in being hurt by it.

"Mrs. Wake, of course, is an old friend," Valerie said, leading Sir Basil up to the tea-table; "and here is a new one—Jack Pennington, whom you must quite know already, I've written so much about him. Sit down here. Tell me all about everything. Why this sudden appearance? Why no hint of it? Is it meant as a surprise for us?"

"Well, Frances and Tom were coming over, you knew that—"

"Of course. I wrote Frances a steamer letter the day before yesterday. You got in this morning with them then? They said not a word of your coming when I last heard from them."

"I only decided to join them at the last minute. I thought that it would be good fun to drop upon you like this, so I didn't write. It is good to see you again." Sir Basil, while his beam seemed to include the room and its inmates, included them unseeingly; he had eyes, it was evident, only for her. He went on to give her messages from the Pakenhams, in New York but for a week on their way to Canada and eager to see her at once. They would have come with him had they not been rather knocked up by the early rise on the steamer and by the long wait at the custom-house.

"You must all come with me to-morrow to our tableaux," said Valerie. "Imogen is in them. She is out this afternoon, so you will see her for the first time at her loveliest. She is to be Antigone."

"Oh, so I sha'n't see her till to-morrow. I've always been a bit afraid of Miss Upton, you know," said Sir Basil, with a smile at Jack.

"Well, the first impression will be a reassuring one," said Valerie. "Antigone is the least alarming of heroines."

"I don't know about that," Sir Basil objected, folding a slice of bread and butter, "A bit gruesome, don't you think?"

"Gruesome?"

"She stuck so to her own ideas, didn't she? Awfully rough on the poor fellow who wanted to marry her, insisting like that on burying her brothers."

Valerie laughed. "Well, but that sense of duty is hardly gruesome; it would have been horridly gruesome to have left her brothers unburied."

"You'll worst me in an argument, of course," Sir Basil replied, looking fondly at her; "but I maintain that she's a dreary young lady. Of course I don't mean to say that she wasn't an exceedingly good girl, and all that sort of thing, but a bit of a prig, you must allow."

Jack listened to the bantering colloquy. This man, so hard, yet so kindly, so innocent, yet so mature, was making him feel by every tone, gesture, glance, oddly boyish and unformed. He was quite sure that he himself was a great deal cleverer, a great deal more conscious, than Sir Basil; but these advantages somehow assumed the aspect of schoolboy badges of good conduct beside a grown-up standard. And, as he listened, he began to understand far more deeply all sorts of things about Valerie; to see what vacancies she had had to put up with, to see what fullness she must have missed. And he began to understand what Imogen, Cassandra-like, had declared, that the unseasonable fragrance of devotions hovered about her widowed mother; to remember the ominous "Wait and see."

It showed how far he had traveled when he could recall these words with impatience: could answer them with: "Well, what of it? Doesn't she deserve some compensation?"—could quietly place Sir Basil as a no longer hopeless adorer and feel a thrill of satisfaction, in the realization. Yes, sitting here here in the house of mourning he could think these things.

But if he was so wide, so tolerant, the very expansion of his sympathies brought them a finer sensitiveness. Only a tendril-like fineness could penetrate the complexities of that deeper vision. He began to think of Imogen, and with a new pity, a new tenderness. How she would be hurt, and how, more than all, she would be hurt by seeing that he, while understanding, while sympathizing, should, helplessly, inevitably, be glad that Sir Basil had come. Poor Imogen,—and poor himself; for where did he stand among all these shiftings of the scene? He, too, knew the drifting loneliness and desolation, and though his heart ached for the old nearness he could not put out his hand to her nor take a step toward her. In himself, in her, was the change, or the mere fate, that held them parted. The wrench had come slowly upon them, but, while he ached with the pain of it, he could already look upon it as accomplished. Only one question remained to be asked:—Would nothing, no change, no fate, draw them again together?

For all answer a deep, settled sadness descended upon him.

Sir Basil took himself off before Mrs. Wake seemed to think it tactful to depart, and since, soon after, she too went, Jack and Valerie were left alone together.

She turned her bright, soft eyes upon the young man and he recognized in them the unseeing quality that he had found in Sir Basil's—that happy preoccupation with inner gladness. She made him think of the bird alighted to sing on the swaying blade; and she made him think of a fountain released from winter and springing through sunlight in a murmur and sparkle of ecstasy. She was young, very young; he almost felt her as young in her gladness as he in his loneliness and pain. Smiling a trifle nervously, he said that he was glad, at last, to see something of her old life. "Of your real life," he added.

"My real life?" she repeated, and her look became more aware of him.

"Yes. Of course, in a sense, all this is something outlived, cast aside, for you. You've only taken it up for a bit while you felt that it had a claim upon you; but, once you have settled things, you would,—you would leave us, of course," said Jack, still smiling.

She was thinking of him now, no longer of herself and of Sir Basil, and perhaps, as she looked at him, at the thin brown face, the light, deep eyes, she guessed at a stir of tears under the smile. It was then as if the fountain sank from its own happy solitude and became a running brook of sweetness, sad, yet merry. She didn't contradict him. She was sorry that she couldn't, yet glad that his statement should be so obviously true.

"You mean that I'll go back to my little Surrey cottage, when I settle things?" she said. "Perhaps, yes. And you will miss me? I will miss you too, dear Jack. But we will often see each other. And then it may take a long time to settle all you young people."

Her confidence so startled him, so touched him with pity for its blindness, that, swiftly, he took refuge in ambiguity.

"Oh, you'll settle us!" he said, wondering in what that settling would consist, wondering what would happen if Imogen, definitely casting him off, to put the final settling in that form, were left on her mother's hands. She would have to settle Imogen in America and what, in the meanwhile, would become of her "real" life?

But from the mother's confidence, her radiance, that accepted his speech in its happiest meaning, he guessed that she didn't foresee such a contingency; he even guessed that, were she brought face to face with it, she wouldn't accept its unsettling of her own joy as final. The fountain was too strong to heed such obstacles. It would find its way to the sunlight. Imogen, in time, would have to accept a step-father.



XV

Jack did not witness the revelation to Imogen of the ominous arrival, but from her demeanor at lunch next day he could guess at how it had impressed her. He felt in her an intense, a guarded, excitement, and knew that the news had fallen upon her with a tingling concussion. The sound of the thunder-bolt must reverberate all the louder in Imogen's ears from her consciousness that to Mary's it was soundless, Mary, who had been the only spectator of its falling. Her mother, too, was unconscious of such reverberations, so that it must seem to her a ghost-like subjective warning, putting into audible form all her old hauntings.

That she at once sought in him evidences of the same experience, Jack felt, and all through the early lunch, where they assembled prior to his departure with the two girls for the theater, he avoided meeting Imogen's eyes. He was too sure that she felt their mutual knowledge as a bond over the recent chasm. The knowledge in his own eyes was far too deep for him to allow her to wade into it; she would simply drown. He was rather ashamed of himself, but he resolutely feigned a cheerful unconsciousness.

"You are going with your friends, later?" he asked Valerie, who, he was quite sure, also feigning something, said that since Imogen and Mary dressed each other so well, and since he would be there to see that every detail was right, she, with the Pakenhams and Sir Basil, would get her impression from the stalls. Afterward, they would all meet here for tea.

"It was a surprise, you know, their coming," Imogen put in suddenly, from her end of the table, fixing strangely sparkling eyes upon Jack.

"No," said her mother, in tones of leisurely correction, "I expected the Pakenhams, as I told you."

"Oh, yes; it was only Sir Basil's surprise. You didn't expect him. Does he like playing surprises on people, mama?"

"I don't know that he does."

"He only plays them on you."

"I knew that he was coming, at some time."

"Ah, but you didn't tell me that; it was, in the main, my surprise, then; but not so soon, I suppose."

"So soon? So soon for what?"

Imogen, at this, allowed her badly adjusted mask of lightness to fall and a sudden solemnity overspread her features.

"Don't you feel it rather soon for friends to play pranks, mama?"

The words seemed to erect a catafalque before their eyes, but, facing the nodding blackness with a calm in which Jack detected the glint of steel, Valerie answered: "I am not aware that they have been playing pranks."

For all the way to the theater Imogen again assumed the mask, talking exclusively to Mary. She talked of these friends of her mother's, of Sir Basil, Mr. and Mrs. Pakenham, what she had heard of them; holding up, as if for poor, frightened Mary's delectation, an impartial gaily sketched little portrait of their oddities. It was as if she felt it her duty to atone to Mary by her lightness and gaiety for the gloom that had overspread the lunch; as if she wished to assure Mary that she wouldn't allow her to suffer for other people's ill-temper,—Mrs. Upton had certainly been very silent for the rest of that uncomfortable meal,—as if it were for Mary's sake that she were assuming the mask, behind which, as Jack must know, she was in torture.

"I'm glad you're to see them, Mary darling; they will amuse you. From your standpoint of reality, the standpoint of Puritan civilization—the deepest civilization the world has yet produced; the civilization that judges by the soul—you will be able to judge and place them as few of our people are, as yet, developed enough to do. They are of that funny English type, Mary, the leisured; their business in life that of pleasure seeking; their social service consisting in benevolent domination over the servile classes beneath them. Oh, they have their political business, too; we mustn't be unfair; though that consists, in the main, for people of their type, in maintaining their own place as donors and in keeping other people in the place of recipients. In their own eyes, I'm quite sure, they are useful, as upholding the structure of English civilization. You'll find them absolutely simple, absolutely self-assured, absolutely indifferent, quite charming,—there's no reason why they shouldn't be; but their good manners are for themselves, not for you,—one must never forget that with the English. Do study them, Mary. We need to keep the fact of them clearly before us, for what they represent is a menace to us and to what we mean. I sometimes think that the future of the world depends upon which ideal is to win, ours or the English. We must arm ourselves with complete comprehension. Already they have infected the cruder types among us."

These were all sentiments that in the past, Mary felt sure, Jack must have acquiesced in and approved of, and yet she felt surer that Imogen's manner of enunciating them was making Jack very angry. She herself did not find them as inspiring as she might have expected, and looking very much frightened and flurried she murmured that as she was to go back to Boston next day she would not have much opportunity for all this observation. "Besides—I don't believe that I'm so—so wise—so civilized, you know, as to be able to see it all."

"Oh, Imogen will tell you what to see!" said Jack.

"It's very kind of her, I'm sure," poor Mary faltered. She could have burst into tears. These two!—these beloved two!

Meanwhile, at a little later hour, Valerie and Mrs. Wake made their way to the theater, there to meet the group of friends from whom they had parted in England six months before.

The Pakenhams, full of question and comment, were intelligently amassing well-assorted impressions of the country that was new to them. Sir Basil, though cheerfully pleased with all to which his attention was drawn, showed no particular interest in his surroundings. His concentration was entirely for his regained friend.