As I drove away, I was proud of myself. I had listened to my death sentence with a face so smiling that he must almost have believed me unconscious; and also, it had not even entered my head, as I listened, to beg for mercy. Not that there would have been the least use in begging—as well try to pray a statue into life as try to soften that set will and purpose. Still, another sort of man than I would have weakened, and I felt—justly, I think—proud that I had not weakened. But when I was once more in my apartment—in our apartment—perhaps I did show that there was a weak streak through me. I fought against the impulse to see her once more that night; but I fought in vain. I knocked at the door of her sitting room—a timid knock, for me. No answer. I knocked again, more loudly—then a third time, still more loudly. The door opened and she stood there, like one of the angels that guarded the gates of Eden after the fall. Only, instead of a flaming sword, hers was of ice. She was in a dressing gown or tea gown, white and clinging and full of intoxicating hints and glimpses of all the beauties of her figure. Her face softened as she continued to look at me, and I entered.

"No—please don't turn on any more lights," I said, as she moved toward the electric buttons. "I just came in to—to see if I could do anything for you." In fact, I had come, longing for her to do something for me, to show in look or tone or act some sympathy for me in my loneliness and trouble.

"No, thank you," she said. Her voice was that of a stranger who wished to remain a stranger. And she was evidently waiting for me to go. You will see what a mood I was in when I say I felt as I had not since I, a very small boy indeed, ran away from home—it was one evening after I had been put to bed; I came back through the chilly night to take one last glimpse of the family that would soon be realizing how foolishly and wickedly unappreciative they had been of such a treasure as I; and when I saw them sitting about the big fire in the lamp light, heartlessly comfortable and unconcerned, it was all I could do to keep back the tears of self-pity—and I never saw them again.

"I've seen Roebuck," said I to Anita, because I must say something, if I was to stay on.

"Roebuck?" she inquired. Her tone reminded me that his name conveyed nothing to her.

"He and I are in an enterprise together," I explained. "He is the one man who could seriously cripple me."

"Oh," she said, and her indifference, forced though I thought it, wounded.

"Well," said I, "your mother was right."

She turned full toward me, and even in the dimness I saw her quick and full sympathy—an impulsive flash that was instantly gone. But it had been there!

"I came in here," I went on, "to say that—Anita, it doesn't in the least matter. No one in this world, no one and nothing, could hurt me except through you. So long as I have you, they—the rest—all of them together—can't touch me."

We were both silent for several minutes. Then she said, and her voice was like the smooth surface of the river where the boiling rapids run deep:

"But you haven't me—and never shall have. I've told you that. I warned you long ago. No doubt you will pretend, and people will say, that I left you because you lost your money. But it won't be so."

I was beside her instantly, was looking into her face. "What do you mean?" I asked, and I did not speak gently.

She gazed at me without flinching. "And I suppose," she said, satirically, "you wonder why I—why you—are repellent to me. Haven't you learned that, while I may have been made into a moral coward, I'm not a physical coward? Don't bully and threaten. It's useless."

I put my hand strongly on her shoulder—taunts and jeers do not turn me aside. "What do you mean?" I repeated.

"Take your hand off me," she commanded.

"What did you mean?" I repeated, strongly. "Don't be afraid to answer me."

She was very young—so the taunt stung her. "I was about to tell you," said she, "when you began to bluster."

I took advantage of this to extricate myself from the awkward position in which she had put me—I took my hand from her shoulder.

"I am going to leave you," she went on. "I am ready to go at any time. But if you wish it, I shall not go until my plans are arranged."

"What plans?" I demanded.

"That is no concern of yours."

"You forget that you are my wife," said I, my brain on fire.

"I am not your wife," was her answer, and if she had not looked so young and childlike, there in the moonlight all in white, I could not have held myself in check, so insolent was the tone and so hopeless of ever being able to win her did she make me feel.

"You are my wife, and you will stay here with me," I reiterated.

"I am my own, and I shall go where I please, and do what I please," was her contemptuous retort. "Why won't you be reasonable? Why won't you see how utterly unsuited we are? I don't ask you to be a gentleman—but just a man, and be ashamed even to wish to detain a woman against her will."

I drew up a chair so close to her that, to retreat, she was forced to sit in the broad window seat. Then I seated myself. "By all means, let us be reasonable," said I. "Now, let me explain my position. I have heard you and your friends discussing the views of marriage you've just been expressing. Their views may be right, may be more civilized, more 'advanced,' than mine. No matter. They are not mine. I hold by the old standards—and you are my wife—mine. Do you understand?" All this as tranquilly as if we were discussing fair weather. "And you will live up to the obligation which the marriage service has put upon you."

She might have been a marble statue pedestaled in that window seat.

"You married me of your own free will—for you could have protested to the preacher, and he would have sustained you. You put certain conditions on our marriage. I assented to them. I have respected them. I shall continue to respect them. But—when you married me, you didn't marry a dawdling dude chattering 'advanced ideas' with his head full of libertinism. You married a man. And that man is your husband."

I waited, but she made no comment—not even by gesture or movement. She simply sat, her hands interlaced in her lap, her eyes straight upon mine.

"You say, let us be reasonable," I went on. "Well, let us be reasonable. There may come a time when a woman can be free and independent, but that time is a long way off yet. The world is organized on the basis of every woman having a protector—of every decent woman having a husband, unless she remains in the home of some of her blood relations. There may be women strong enough to set the world at defiance. But you are not one of them—and you know it. You have shown it to yourself again and again in the last forty-eight hours. Further, though you do not know it, your bringing up has made you more of a child than most of the inexperienced women. If you tried to assert your so-called independence, you would be the easy prey of a scoundrel or scoundrels. When I, who have lived in the thick of the fight all my life, who have learned by many a surprise and defeat never to sleep except sword and gun in hand, and one eye open—when I have been trapped as Roebuck and Langdon have just trapped me—what chance would a woman like you have?"

She did not answer, or change expression.

"Is what I say reasonable or unreasonable?" I asked, gently.

"Reasonable—from your standpoint," she said.

She gazed out into the moonlight, up into the sky. And at the look in her face, the primeval savage in me strained to close round that slender white throat of hers and crush and crush until it had killed in her the thought of that other man which was transforming her from marble to flesh that glowed and blood that surged. I pushed back my chair with a sudden noise that startled her; by the way she trembled, I gauged how tense her nerves must have been. I rose and, in a fairly calm tone, said: "We understand each other?"

"Yes," she answered. "As before."

I ignored this. "Think it over, Anita," I urged—she seemed to me so like a sweet, spoiled child again. I longed to go straight at her about that other man. I stood for a moment with Tom Langdon's name on my lips, but I could not trust myself. I went away to my own rooms.

I thrust thoughts of her from my mind. I spent the night gnawing upon the ropes with which Mowbray Langdon and Roebuck had bound me, hand and foot.

XVI.

No sane creature, not even a sane bulldog, will fight simply from love of fighting. When a man is attacked, he may be sure he has excited either the fear or the cupidity of his assailants, for men fight either to protect that which they have or to gain that which they feel they must have. So far as I could see, it was absurd that cupidity was inciting Langdon and Roebuck against me. I hadn't enough to tempt them. Thus, I was forced to conclude that I must possess a strength of which I was unaware, and which stirred even Roebuck's fears. But what could it be?

Besides Langdon and Roebuck and me, there were six principals in the proposed Coal combine, three of them richer and more influential in finance than even Langdon, all of them except possibly Dykeman, the lawyer or navigating officer of the combine, more formidable figures than I. Yet none of these men was being assailed. "Why am I singled out?" I asked myself, and I felt that if I could answer, I should find I had the means wholly or partly to defeat them. But I could not even explain to my satisfaction Langdon's activities against me. I felt that Anita was somehow the cause; but, even so, how had he succeeded in convincing Roebuck that I must be clipped and plucked into a groundling?

"It must have something to do with the Manasquale mines," I decided. "I thought I had given over my control of them, but somehow I must still have a control that makes me too powerful for Roebuck to be at ease so long as I am afoot and armed." And I resolved to take my lawyers and search the whole Manasquale transaction—to explore it from attic to underneath the cellar flooring. "We'll go through it," said I, "like ferrets through a ship's hold."

As I was finishing breakfast, Anita came in. She had evidently slept well, and I regarded that as ominous. At her age, a crisis means little sleep until a decision has been reached. I rose, but her manner warned me not to advance and try to shake hands with her.

"I have asked Alva to stop with me here for a few days," she said, formally.

"Alva!" said I, much surprised. She had not asked one of her own friends; she had asked a girl she had met less than two days before, and that girl my partner's daughter.

"She was here yesterday morning," Anita explained. And I now wondered how much Alva there was in Anita's firm stand against her parents.

"I'm glad you like her," said I. "Why don't you take her down to our place on Long Island? Everything's ready for you there, and I'm going to be busy the next few days—busy day and night."

She reflected. "Very well," she assented, presently. And she gave me a puzzled glance she thought I did not see—as if she were wondering whether the enemy was not hiding a new and deeper plot under an apparently harmless suggestion.

"Then I'll not see you again for several days," said I, most business-like. "If you want anything, there will be Monson out at the stables, where he can't annoy you. Or you can get me on the 'long distance.' Good-by. Good luck."

And I nodded carelessly and friendlily to her, and went away, enjoying the pleasure of having startled her into visible astonishment. "There's a better game than icy hostility, you very young lady," said I to myself, "and that game is friendly indifference."

Alva would be with her. So she was secure for the present, and my mind was free for "finance."

* * * * *

At that time the two most powerful men in finance were Galloway and Roebuck. In Spain I once saw a fight between a bull and a tiger—or, rather, the beginning of a fight. They were released into a huge iron cage. After circling it several times in the same direction, searching for a way out, they came face to face. The bull tossed the tiger; the tiger clawed the bull. The bull roared; the tiger screamed. Each retreated to his own side of the cage. The bull pawed and snorted as if he could hardly wait to get at the tiger; the tiger crouched and quivered and glared murderously, as if he were going instantly to spring upon the bull. But the bull did not rush, neither did the tiger spring. That was the Roebuck-Galloway situation.

How to bait tiger Galloway to attack bull Roebuck—that was the problem I must solve, and solve straightway. If I could bring about war between the giants, spreading confusion over the whole field of finance and filling all men with dread and fear, there was a chance, a bare chance, that in the confusion I might bear off part of my fortune. Certainly, conditions would result in which I could more easily get myself intrenched again; then, too, there would be a by no means small satisfaction in seeing Roebuck clawed and bitten in punishment for having plotted against me. Mutual fear had kept these two at peace for five years, and most considerate and polite about each other's "rights." But while our country's industrial territory is vast, the interests of the few great controllers who determine wages and prices for all are equally vast, and each plutocrat is tormented incessantly by jealousy and suspicion; not a day passes without conflicts of interest which adroit diplomacy could turn into ferocious warfare. And in this matter of monopolizing the Coal, despite Roebuck's earnest assurances to Galloway that the combine was purely defensive, and was really concerned only with the labor question, Galloway, a great manufacturer, or, rather, a huge levier of the taxes of dividends and interest upon manufacturing enterprises, could not but be uneasy.

Before I rose that morning I had a tentative plan for stirring him to action. I was elaborating it on the way downtown in my electric. It shows how badly Anita was crippling my brain, that not until I was almost at my office did it occur to me: "That was a tremendous luxury Roebuck indulged his conscience in last night. It isn't like him to forewarn a man, even when he's sure he can't escape. Though his prayers were hot in his mouth, still, it's strange he didn't try to fool me. In fact, it's suspicious. In fact——"

Suspicious? The instant the idea was fairly before my mind, I knew I had let his canting fool me once more.

I entered my offices, feeling that the blow had already fallen; and I was surprised, but not relieved, when I found everything calm. "But fall it will within an hour or so—before I can move to avert it," said I to myself.

And fall it did. At eleven o'clock, just as I was setting out to make my first move toward heating old Galloway's heels for the warpath, Joe came in with the news: "A general lockout's declared in the coal regions. The operators have stolen a march on the men, who, so they allege, were secretly getting ready to strike. By night every coal road will be tied up and every mine shut down."

Joe knew our coal interests were heavy, but he did not dream his news meant that before the day was over we should be bankrupt and not able to pay fifteen cents on the dollar. However, he knew enough to throw him into a fever of fright. He watched my calmness with terror. "Coal stocks are dropping like a thermometer in a cold wave," he said, like a fireman at a sleeper in a burning house.

"Naturally," said I, unruffled, apparently. "What can we do about it?"

"We must do something!" he exclaimed.

"Yes, we must," I admitted. "For instance, we must keep cool, especially when two or three dozen people are watching us. Also, you must go and attend to your usual routine."

"What are you going to do?" he cried. "For God's sake, Matt, don't keep me in suspense."

"Go to your desk," I commanded. And he quieted down and went. I hadn't been schooling him in the fire drill for fifteen years in vain.

I went up the street and into the great banking and brokerage house of Galloway & Co. I made my way through the small army of guards, behind which the old beast of prey was intrenched, and into his private den. There he sat, at a small, plain table, in the middle of a room without any article of furniture in it but his table and his chair. On the table was a small inkstand, perfectly clean, a steel pen, equally clean, on the rest attached to it. And that was all—not a letter, not a scrap of paper, not a sign of work or an intention to work. It might have been the desk of a man who did nothing; in fact, it was the desk of a man who had so much to do that his only hope of escape from being overwhelmed was to dispatch and clear away each matter the instant it was presented to him. Many things could be read in the powerful form, bolt upright in that stiff chair, and in the cynical, masterful old face. But to me the chief quality there revealed was that quality of qualities, decision—the greatest power a man can have, except only courage. And old James Galloway had both.

He respected Roebuck; Roebuck feared him. Roebuck did have some sort of a conscience, distorted though it was, and the dictator of savageries Galloway would have scorned to commit. Galloway had no professions of conscience—beyond such small glozing of hypocrisy as any man must put on if he wishes to be intrusted with the money of a public that associates professions of religion and appearances of respectability with honesty. Roebuck's passion was wealth—to see the millions heap up and up. Galloway had that passion, too—I have yet to meet the millionaire who is not avaricious and even stingy. But Galloway's chief passion was power—to handle men as a junk merchant handles rags, to plan and lead campaigns of conquest with his golden legions, and to distribute the spoils like an autocrat who is careless how they are divided, since all belongs to him, whenever he wishes to claim it.

He pierced me with his blue eyes, keen as a youth's, though his face was seamed with the scars of seventy tumultuous years. He extended toward me over the table his broad, stubby white hand—the hand of a builder, of a constructive genius. "How are you, Blacklock?" said he. "What can I do for you?" He just touched my hand before dropping it, and resuming that idol-like pose. But although there was only repose and deliberation in his manner, and not a suggestion of haste, I, like everyone who came into that room and that presence, had a sense of an interminable procession behind me, a procession of men who must be seen by this master-mover, that they might submit important and pressing affairs to him for decision. It was unnecessary for him to tell anyone to be brief and pointed.

"I shall have to go to the wall today," said I, taking a paper from my pocket, "unless you save me. Here is a statement of my assets and liabilities. I call to your attention my Coal holdings. I was one of the eight men whom Roebuck has got round him for the new combine—it is a secret, but I assume you know all about it."

He laid the paper before him, put on his nose-glasses and looked at it.

"If you will save me," I continued, "I will transfer to you, in a block, all my Coal holdings. They will be worth double my total liabilities within three months—as soon as this lockout is settled and the reorganization is announced. I leave it to your sense of justice to decide whether I shall have any part of them back when this storm blows over."

"Why didn't you go to Roebuck?" he asked, without looking up.

"Because it is he that has stuck the knife into me."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I suspect the Manasquale properties, which I brought into the combine, have some value, which no one but Roebuck, and perhaps Langdon, knows about—and that I in some way was dangerous to them through that fact. They haven't given me time to look into it."

A grim smile flitted over his face. "You've been too busy getting married, eh?" And I then thought that the grim smile was associated with his remark. I was soon to know that it was an affirmation of my shrewd guess about Manasquale.

"Exactly," said I. "It's another case of unbuckling for the wedding feast and getting assassinated as a penalty. Do you wish me to explain anything on that list—do you want any details of the combine—of the Coal stocks there?"

"Not necessary," he replied. As I had thought, with that enormous machine of his for drawing in information, and with that enormous memory of his for details, he probably knew more about the combine and its properties than I did.

"You have heard of the lockout?" I inquired—for I wished him to know that I had no intention of deceiving him as to the present market value of those stocks.

"Roebuck has been commanded by his God," he said, "to eject the free American labor from the coal regions and to substitute importations of coolie Huns and Bohemians. Thus the wicked American laborers will be chastened for trying to get higher wages and cut down a pious man's dividends; and the downtrodden coolies will be brought where they can enjoy the blessings of liberty and of the preaching of Roebuck's missionaries."

I laughed, though he had not smiled, but had spoken as if stating colorless facts. "And righteousness and Roebuck will prevail," said I.

He frowned slightly, a sardonic grin breaking the straight, thin, cruel line of his lips. He opened his table's one shallow drawer, and took out a pad and a pencil. He wrote a few words on the lowest part of the top sheet, folded it, tore off the part he had scribbled on, returned the pad and pencil to the drawer, handed the scrap of paper to me. "I will do it," he said. "Give this to Mr. Farquhar, second door to the left. Good-morning." And in that atmosphere of vast affairs, speedily dispatched, his consent without argument did not stir suspicion in me.

I bowed. Though he had not saved me as a favor to me, but because it fitted in with his plans, whatever they were, my eyes were dimmed. "I shan't forget this," said I, my voice not quite steady.

"I know it," said he, curtly. "I know you."

I saw that his mind had already turned me out. I said no more, and withdrew. When I left the room it was precisely as it had been when I entered it—except the bit of paper torn from the pad. But what a difference to me, to the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, directly and indirectly interested in the Coal combine and its strike and its products, was represented by those few, almost illegible scrawlings on that scrap of paper.

Not until I had gone over the situation with Farquhar, and we had signed and exchanged the necessary papers, did I begin to relax from the strain—how great that strain was I realized a few weeks later, when the gray appeared thick at my temples and there was in my crown what was for such a shock as mine a thin spot. "I am saved!" said I to myself, venturing a long breath, as I stood on the steps of Galloway's establishment, where hourly was transacted business vitally affecting the welfare of scores of millions of human beings, with James Galloway's personal interest as the sole guiding principle. "Saved!" I repeated, and not until then did it flash before me, "I must have paid a frightful price. He would never have consented to interfere with Roebuck as soon as I asked him to do it, unless there had been some powerful motive. If I had had my wits about me, I could have made far better terms." Why hadn't I my wits about me? "Anita," was my instant answer to my own question. "Anita again. I had a bad attack of family man's panic." And thus it came about that I went back to my own office feeling as if I had suffered a severe defeat, instead of jubilant over my narrow escape.

Joe followed me into my den. "What luck?" asked he, in the tone of a mother waylaying the doctor as he issues from the sick room.

"Luck?" said I, gazing blankly at him.

"You've seen the latest quotation, haven't you?" In his nervousness his temper was on a fine edge.

"No," replied I, indifferently. I sat down at my desk and began to busy myself. Then I added: "We're out of the Coal combine, I've transferred our holdings. Look after these things, please." And I gave him the checks, notes and memoranda of agreement.

"Galloway!" he exclaimed. And then his eye fell on the totals of the stock I had been carrying. "Good God, Matt!" he cried. "We were ruined!"

And he sat down, and buried his face and cried like a child—and it was then that I measured the full depth of the chasm I had escaped. I made no such exhibition of myself, but when I tried to relight my cigar my hand trembled so that the flame scorched my lips. I registered a vow never to gamble again—not with stocks, not with cards, not at all. And I've kept faith with myself.

"Ruined?" I said to Joe, easily enough. "Not at all. We're back in the road, going smoothly ahead—only, at a bit less stiff a pace. Think, Joe, of all those poor devils down in the mining districts. They're out—clear out—and thousands of 'em don't know where their families will get bread. And though they haven't found it out yet, they've got to leave the place where they've lived all their lives, and their fathers before them—have got to go wandering about in a world that's as strange to them as the surface of the moon, and as bare for them as the Sahara desert."

"That's so," said Joe. "It's hard luck." But I saw he was thinking only of himself and his narrow escape from having to give up his big house and all the rest of it; that, soft-hearted and generous though he was, to those poor chaps and their wives and children he wasn't giving a thought. Wall Street never does—they're too remote, too vague. It deals with columns of figures and slips of paper. It never thinks of those abstractions as standing for so many hearts and so many mouths, just as the bank clerk never thinks of the bits of metal he counts so swiftly as money with which things and men could be bought. I read somewhere once that Voltaire—I think it was Voltaire—asked a man what he would do if, by pressing a button on his table, he would be enormously rich and at the same time would cause the death of a person away off at the other side of the earth, unknown to him, and probably no more worthy to live, and with no greater expectation of life or of happiness, than the average sinful, short-lived human being. I've often thought of that dilemma as I've watched our great "captains of industry." Voltaire's dilemma is theirs. And they don't hesitate; they press the button. I leave the morality of the performance to moralists; to me, its chief feature is its cowardice, its sneaking, slimy cowardice.

"You've done a grand two hours' work," said Joe.

"Grander than you think," replied I. "I've set the tiger on to fight the bull."

"Galloway and Roebuck?"

"Just that," said I. And I laughed. Then I started up—and sat down again. "No, I'll deny myself the pleasure," said I. "I'll let Roebuck find out when the claws catch in that tough old hide of his."

XVII.

On about the hottest afternoon of that summer I had the yacht take me down the Sound to a point on the Connecticut shore within sight of Dawn Hill, but seven miles further from New York. I landed at the private pier of Howard Forrester, the only brother of Anita's mother. As I stepped upon the pier I saw a fine looking old man in the pavilion overhanging the water. He was dressed all in white except a sky-blue tie that harmonized with the color of his eyes. He was neither fat nor lean, and his smooth skin was protesting ruddily against the age proclaimed by his wool-white hair. He rose as I came toward him, and, while I was still several yards away, showed unmistakably that he knew who I was and that he was anything but glad to see me.

"Mr. Forrester?" I asked.

He grew purple to the line of his thick white hair. "It is, Mr. Blacklock," said he. "I have the honor to wish you good-day, sir." And with that he turned his back on me.

"I have come to ask a favor of you, sir," said I, as polite to that hostile back as if I had been addressing a cordial face. And I waited.

He wheeled round, looked at me from head to foot. I withstood the inspection calmly; when it was ended I noted that in spite of himself he was somewhat relaxed from the opinion of me he had formed upon what he had heard and read. But he said: "I do not know you, sir, and I do not wish to know you."

"You have made me painfully aware of that," replied I. "But I have learned not to take snap judgments too seriously. I never go to a man unless I have something to say to him, and I never leave until I have said it."

"I perceive, sir," retorted he, "you have the thick skin necessary to living up to that rule." And the twinkle in his eyes betrayed the man who delights to exercise a real or imaginary talent for caustic wit. Such men are like nettles—dangerous only to the timid touch.

"On the contrary," replied I, easy in mind now, though I did not anger him by showing it, "I am most sensitive to insults—insults to myself. But you are not insulting me. You are insulting a purely imaginary, hearsay person who is, I venture to assure you, utterly unlike me, and who doubtless deserves to be insulted."

His purple had now faded. In a far different tone he said: "If your business in any way relates to the family into which you have married, I do not wish to hear it. Spare my patience and your time, sir."

"It does not," was my answer. "It relates to my own family—to my wife and myself. As you may have heard, she is no longer a member of the Ellersly family. And I have come to you chiefly because I happen to know your sentiment toward the Ellerslys."

"I have no sentiment toward them, sir," he exclaimed. "They are non-existent, sir—non-existent! Your wife's mother ceased to be a Forrester when she married that scoundrel. Your wife is still less a Forrester."

"True," said I. "She is a Blacklock."

He winced, and it reminded me of the night of my marriage and Anita's expression when the preacher called her by her new name. But I held his gaze, and we looked each at the other fixedly for, it must have been, full a minute. Then he said, courteously: "What do you wish?"

I went straight to the point. My color may have been high, but my voice did not hesitate as I explained: "I wish to make my wife financially independent. I wish to settle on her a sum of money sufficient to give her an income that will enable her to live as she has been accustomed. I know she would not take it from me. So I have come to ask you to pretend to give it to her—I, of course, giving it to you to give."

Again we looked full and fixedly each at the other. "Come to the house, Blacklock," he said at last in a tone that was the subtlest of compliments. And he linked his arm in mine. Halfway to the rambling stone house, severe in its lines, yet fine and homelike, quaintly resembling its owner, as a man's house always should, he paused. "I owe you an apology," said he. "After all my experience of this world of envy and malice, I should have recognized the man even in the caricatures of his enemies. And you brought the best possible credentials—you are well hated. To be well hated by the human race and by the creatures mounted on its back, is a distinction, sir. It is the crown of the true kings of this world."

We seated ourselves on the wide veranda; he had champagne and water brought, and cigars; and we proceeded to get acquainted—nothing promotes cordiality and sympathy like an initial misunderstanding. It was a good hour before this kind-hearted, hard-soft, typical old-fashioned New Englander reverted to the object of my visit. Said he: "And now, young man, may I venture to ask some extremely personal questions?"

"In the circumstances," replied I, "you have the right to know everything. I did not come to you without first making sure what manner of man I was to find." At this he blushed, pleased as a girl at her first beau's first compliment. "And you, Mr. Forrester, cannot be expected to embark in the little adventure I propose, until you have satisfied yourself."

"First, the why of your plan."

"I am in active business," replied I, "and I shall be still more active. That means financial uncertainty."

His suspicion of me started up from its doze and rubbed its eyes. "Ah! You wish to insure yourself."

"Yes," was my answer, "but not in the way you hint. It takes away a man's courage just when he needs it most, to feel that his family is involved in his venture."

The old man settled back, partially reassured. "Why do you not make the settlement direct?" he asked.

"Because I wish her to feel that it is her own, that I have no right over it whatever."

He thought about this. His eyes were keen as he said: "Is that your real reason?"

I saw I must be unreserved with him. "Part of it," I replied. "The rest is—she would not take it from me."

The old man smiled cynically. "Have you tried?" he inquired.

"If I had tried and failed, she would have been on the alert for an indirect attempt."

"Try her, young man," said he, laughing. "In this day there are few people anywhere who'd refuse any sum from anybody for anything. And a woman—and a New York woman—and a New York fashionable woman—and a daughter of old Ellersly—she'll take it as a baby takes the breast."

"She would not take it," said I.

My tone, though I strove to keep angry protest out of it, because I needed him, caused him to draw back instantly. "I beg your pardon," said he. "I forgot for the moment that I was talking to a man young enough still to have youth's delusions about women. You'll learn that they're human, that it's from them we men inherit our weaknesses. However, let's assume that she won't take it. Why won't she take your money? What is there about it that repels Ellersly's daughter, brought up in the sewers of fashionable New York—the sewers, sir?"

"She does not love me," I answered.

"I have hurt you," he said, quickly, in great distress at having compelled me to expose my secret wound.

"The wound does not ache the worse," said I, "for my showing it—to you." And that was the truth. I looked over toward Dawn Hill, whose towers could just be seen. "We live there." I pointed. "She is—like a guest in my house."

When I glanced at him again, his face betrayed a feeling which I doubt if anyone had thought him capable in many a year. "I see that you love her," he said, gently as a mother.

"Yes," I replied. And presently I went on: "The idea of anyone I love being dependent on me in a sordid way is most distasteful to me. And since she does not love me, does not even like me, it is doubly necessary that she be independent."

"I confess I do not quite follow you," said he.

"How can she accept anything from me? If she should finally be compelled by necessity to do it, what hope could I have of her ever feeling toward me as a wife should feel toward her husband?"

At this explanation of mine his eyes sparkled with anger—and I could not but suspect that he had at one time in his life been faced with a problem like mine, and had settled it the other way. My suspicion was not weakened when he went on to say:

"Boyish motives again! They show you do not know women. Don't be deceived by their delicate exterior, by their pretenses of super-refinement. They affect to be what passion deludes us into thinking them. But they're clay, sir, just clay, and far less sensitive than we men. Don't you see, young man, that by making her independent you're throwing away your best chance of winning her? Women are like dogs—like dogs, sir! They lick the hand that feeds 'em—lick it, and like it."

"Possibly," said I, with no disposition to combat views based on I knew not what painful experience; "but I don't care for that sort of liking—from a woman or from a dog."

"It's the only kind you'll get," retorted he, trying to control his agitation. "I'm an old man. I know human nature—that's why I live alone. You'll take that kind of liking, or do without."

"Then I'll do without," said I.

"Give her an income, and she'll go. I see it all. You've flattered her vanity by showing your love for her—that's the way with the women. They go crazy about themselves, and forget all about the man. Give her an income and she'll go."

"I doubt it," said I. "And you would, if you knew her. But, even so, I shall lose her in any event. For, unless she is made independent, she'll certainly go with the last of the little money she has, the remnant of a small legacy."

The old man argued with me, the more vigorously, I suspect, because he found me resolute. When he could think of no new way of stating his case—his case against Anita—he said: "You are a fool, young man—that's clear. I wonder such a fool was ever able to get together as much property as report credits you with. But—you're the kind of fool I like."

"Then—you'll indulge my folly?" said I, smiling.

He threw up his arms in a gesture of mock despair. "If you will have it so," he replied. "I am curious about this niece of mine. I want to see her. I want to see the woman who can resist you."

"Her mind and her heart are closed against me," said I. "And it is my own fault—I closed them."

"Put her out of your head," he advised. "No woman is worth a serious man's while."

"I have few wants, few purposes," said I. "But those few I pursue to the end. Even though she were not worth while, even though I wholly lost hope, still I'd not give her up. I couldn't—that's my nature. But—she is worth while." And I could see her, slim and graceful, the curves in her face and figure that made my heart leap, the azure sheen upon her petal-like skin, the mystery of her soul luring from her eyes.

After we had arranged the business—or, rather, arranged to have it arranged through our lawyers—he walked down to the pier with me. At the gangway he gave me another searching look from head to foot—but vastly different from the inspection with which our interview had begun. "You are a devilish handsome young fellow," said he. "Your pictures don't do you justice. And I shouldn't have believed any man could overcome in one brief sitting such a prejudice as I had against you. On second thought, I don't believe I care to see her. She must be even below the average."

"Or far above it," I suggested.

"I suppose I'll have to ask her over to visit me," he went on. "A fine hypocrite I'll feel."

"You can make it one of the conditions of your gift that she is not to thank you or speak of it," said I. "I fear your face would betray us, if she ever did."

"An excellent idea!" he exclaimed. Then, as he shook hands with me in farewell: "You will win her yet—if you care to."

As I steamed up the Sound, I was tempted to put in at Dawn Hill's harbor. Through my glass I could see Anita and Alva and several others, men and women, having tea on the lawn under a red and white awning. I could see her dress—a violet suit with a big violet hat to match. I knew that costume. Like everything she wore, it was both beautiful in itself and most becoming to her. I could see her face, could almost make out its expression—did I see, or did I imagine, a cruel contrast to what I always saw when she knew I was looking?

I gazed until the trees hid lawn and gay awning, and that lively company and her. In my bitterness I was full of resentment against her, full of self-pity. I quite forgot, for the moment, her side of the story.

XVIII.

It was the next day, I think, that I met Mowbray Langdon and his brother Tom in the entrance to the Textile Building. Mowbray was back only a week from his summer abroad; but Tom I had seen and nodded to every day, often several times in the same day, as he went to and fro about his "respectable" dirty work for the Roebuck-Langdon clique. He was one of their most frequently used stool-pigeon directors in banks and insurance companies whose funds they staked in their big gambling operations, they taking almost all the profits, and the depositors and policy holders taking almost all the risk. It had never once occurred to me to have any feeling of any kind about Tom, or in any way to take him into my calculations as to Anita. He was, to my eyes, too obviously a pale understudy of his powerful and fascinating brother. Whenever I thought of him as the man Anita fancied she loved, I put it aside instantly. "The kind of man a woman really cares for," I would say to myself, "is the measure of her true self. But not the kind of man she imagines she cares for."

Tom went on; Mowbray stopped. We shook hands, and exchanged commonplaces in the friendliest way—I was harboring no resentment against him, and I wished him to realize that his assault had bothered me no more than the buzzing and battering of a summer fly. "I've been trying to get in to see you," said he. "I wanted to explain about that unfortunate Textile deal."

This, when the assault on me had burst out with fresh energy the day after he landed from Europe! I could scarcely believe that his vanity, his confidence in his own skill at underground work, could so delude him. "Don't bother," said I. "All that's ancient history."

But he had thought out some lies he regarded as particularly creditable to his ingenuity; he was not to be deprived of the pleasure of telling them. So I was compelled to listen; and, being in an indulgent mood, I did not spoil his pleasure by letting him see or suspect my unbelief. If he could have looked into my mind, as I stood there in an attitude of patient attention, I think even his self-complacence would have been put out of countenance. You may admire the exploits of a "gentleman" cracksman or pickpocket, if you hear or read them with only their ingenuity put before you. But see a "gentleman" liar or thief at his sneaking, cowardly work, and admiration is impossible. As Langdon lied on, as I studied his cheap, vulgar exhibition of himself, he all unconscious, I thought: "Beneath that very thin surface of yours, you're a poor cowardly creature—you and all your fellow bandits. No; bandit is too grand a word to apply to this game of 'high finance.' It's really on the level with the game of the fellow that waits for a dark night, slips into the barnyard, poisons the watch dog, bores an auger hole in the granary, and takes to his heels at the first suspicious sound."

With his first full stop, I said: "I understand perfectly, Langdon. But I haven't the slightest interest in crooked enterprises now. I'm clear out of all you fellows' stocks. I've reinvested my property so that not even a panic would trouble me."

"That's good," he drawled. I saw he did not believe me—which was natural, as he thought I was laboring in heavy weather, with a bad cargo of coal stocks and contracts. "Come to lunch with me. I've got some interesting things to tell you about my trip."

A few months before, I should have accepted with alacrity. But I had lost interest in him. He had not changed; if anything, he was more dazzling than ever in the ways that had once dazzled me. It was I that had changed—my ideals, my point of view. I had no desire to feed my new-sprung contempt by watching him pump in vain for information to be used in his secret campaign against me. "No, thanks. Another day," I replied, and left him with a curt nod. I noted that he had failed to speak of my marriage, though he had not seen me since. "A sore subject with all the Langdons," thought I. "It must be very sore, indeed, to make a man who is all manners neglect them."

My whole life had been a series of transformations so continuous that I had noted little about my advance, beyond its direction—like a man hurrying up a steep that keeps him bent, eyes down. But, as I turned away from Langdon, I caught myself in the very act of transformation. No doubt, the new view had long been there, its horizon expanding with every step of my ascent; but not until that talk with him did I see it. I looked about me in Wall Street; in my mind's eye I saw the great rascals of "high finance," their respectability stripped from them, saw them gathering in the spoils which their cleverly trained agents, commercial and political and legal, filched with light fingers from the pockets of the crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them "captains of industry"! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. "Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?" I asked myself. "Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane in a lunatic world?"

I did not linger on that problem. For me action remained the essential of life, whether I was sane or insane. I resolved then and there to study out a new course. By toiling like a sailor at the pump of a sinking ship, I had taken advantage to the uttermost of the respite Galloway's help had given me. My property was no longer in more or less insecure speculative "securities," but was, as I had told Langdon, in forms that would withstand the worst shocks. The attacks of my enemies, directed partly at my fortune, or, rather, at the stocks in which they imagined it was still invested, and partly at my personal character, were doing me good instead of harm. Hatred always forgets that its venomous shafts, falling round its intended victim, spring up as legions of supporters for him. My business was growing rapidly; my daily letter to investors was read by hundreds of thousands where tens of thousands had read it before the Roebuck-Langdon clique began to make me famous by trying to make me infamous.

"I am strong and secure," said I to myself as I strode through the wonderful canyon of Broadway, whose walls are the mighty palaces of finance and commerce from which business men have been ousted by the cormorant "captains of industry." I must use my strength. How could I better use it than by fluttering these vultures on their roosts, and perhaps bringing down a bird or two?

I decided, however, that it was better to wait until they had stopped rattling their beaks and claws on my shell in futile attack. "Meanwhile," I reasoned, "I can be getting good and ready."

TO BE CONTINUED.



A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM

By FRANCIS METCALFE

In the region of South Washington Square there are many ancient dwellings which have fallen into uses which would make their original owners, who were the solid men of old New York, turn over in their narrow vaults in Trinity churchyard if they could know of them. Alien peoples, swarthy of skin and picturesque of dress, occupy and surround them, and strange industries are carried on under the roofs which once sheltered the families of the dignified old Knickerbockers who formed the aristocracy of the city.

In many of these transformed residences of the wealthy, after climbing many flights of stairs, whose quaint old mahogany balustrades have been marred by generations of careless movers, one comes to apartments which are provided with skylights and northern windows, and these, being classified as studios, command relatively high rents, considering the lack of every modern convenience and comfort. They are occupied by the younger and unknown artists, who cannot afford the rents demanded in the more fashionable studio buildings, and the reek of the oil stove and odor of cooking, mingling with the smell of paint and turpentine, which pervades the hallways, indicate that they are used as living quarters and work rooms combined.

The whole quarter abounds in cheap restaurants, places where one may obtain a full course dinner, of sorts, and a small bottle of alleged claret included, for an absurdly small sum; but a carton of biscuits, a tin of sardines and a can of condensed milk are usually in evidence on the littered tables of the studios, and, together with the odor of stale coffee, bespeak an economy of diet which is incompatible with the good work which comes of the well-fed body.

It was in one of these small rooms, perched at the top of the tallest among the houses, that a girl lay on a couch, her face buried in her hands, as the early dusk of a winter's afternoon softened the tawdriness of the furnishings. A curtain of burlaps screened one corner, hiding the toilet arrangements, which would have suggested that the couch served as a bed by night; and the flowering plants at the window, the arrangement of artistic posters and sketches on the walls, and, above all, the neatness and orderliness of the room, proclaimed feminine occupancy.

Her attitude was that of dejection, and she had not waited to remove coat or hat before seeking consolation in the refuge of tears; but there was determination in her expression and in the set of her shoulders when she sat up and looked resentfully at the flat package lying on the table. The imprint of a well-known publishing house was on the wrapping paper, and in her hand was a letter from the same firm, thanking her for the privilege of examining the sketches and regretting that they were not fitted to their immediate needs. She lighted a gas jet and re-read the letter, trying to derive some comfort from the courtesy of the declination, but when she unwrapped the sketches, she was forced to acknowledge to herself that they did not seem so strong as when she hopefully submitted them a fortnight before.

These two weeks had been a time of anxiety for Elizabeth Thornton, for so much depended upon the sale of the sketches, the results of months of labor, that she had alternately built castles in the air and wondered what was to become of her, as her mood made her hopeful or despondent of their acceptance. She had sold some of her work during her three years of study in New York, but not enough to pay even her very modest living expenses, and these, together with the fees for tuition at the art school and the purchase of material, had diminished almost to the vanishing point the few hundreds of dollars which she possessed when she commenced her studies.

A knock on the door caused her to glance hastily around the room, to be sure that evidences of domestic occupancy were not scattered about, before opening it to the tall, good-looking young fellow who stood hat in hand, his fur-lined coat thrown open and an expectant smile on his face.

"I have climbed so many stairs that I am not sure whether I have reached heaven or the studio of Miss Elizabeth Thornton," he said, breathlessly, in a cheery voice; but the girl, whose face was in the shadow while his was in the light, extended her hand and greeted him warmly.

"Tom, you irreverent boy! Come inside this minute, before you scandalize my neighbors," she exclaimed. "And now that you are in, tell me how you found me out and how you happen to be in New York."

"In the first place, I am fortunate enough not to find you out, and, secondly, I don't happen to be in New York; I just live here, as I have done any time these past three years. But I didn't know that you did until I met old Oliver, who gave me your address. I didn't know whether it was your place of business or your dwelling; but I came on the chance of finding you."

"And I don't think you appreciate yet that it is both," she said, an amused expression on her face, as she saw him glance around the room.

"Do you really live here, too?" he asked. The evidence of the studio was there, but none of the delicate and dainty traces of a feminine bedchamber.

"Indeed I do, and when it comes 'by-low' time, there is a grand transformation scene," she answered, laughing; and, although he joined in her laughter, there was sadness in his heart as he realized the import of the meager accommodations.

"I don't see a kitchen, at any rate, so I suppose there is no reason why you can't come out to dinner with me this evening," he said.

"Nothing but your presence, which prevents me from changing my gown," she replied, doubtfully. "You can choose between walking the streets and sitting on the stairs outside while I get ready."

"Don't make it as long a proceeding as in the old days, then," he said, as he stood by the table and carelessly turned over the sketches, and she smiled a little bitterly as she promised to hurry, realizing how little she had to select from as compared to the days when the choice from many gowns demanded due consideration. A flood of recollections came to her as she made her hasty toilet, and she appreciated, from the cheer and life which Tom Livingston's brief presence had brought into the studio, how terribly lonely her life had been for the past few months. Before that there had been the companionship of her fellow students in the art school, many of the women struggling along like herself, living on the bare necessities of life and oftentimes knowing what it meant to lack for them, but stimulated and kept at their work by the hope of ultimate success in their painting.

The small glass told her that her face was still very attractive, although it had lost much of the girlish prettiness it possessed in the days when Tom had known and loved her; but then—thank Heaven!—she had never cared for such things, and all she wanted was success in her chosen profession, the one thing which she loved in life.

And Tom, on the other side of the door, was also thinking of her career and the visible results of her work since he had seen her; the small, cheap studio in the dilapidated old house and the lack of comfort in her mode of living, and he contrasted it with the home he had known her in and the things he could have surrounded her with, had she accepted his offer when the crash came which threw her on her own resources. She had elected to remain independent, to devote what little money had been saved from the wreck of her fortunes to pursuing her studies in painting; encouraged in her decision by the praise which her amateurish efforts had gained from sympathetic friends. But while the studies of the daughter of John Thornton, one of the most influential men of the city where they lived, might be praised by the good-natured reporters of the home papers at local exhibitions, the works of Elizabeth Thornton, of whose parentage and social position the critics neither knew nor cared, were judged on their merits when she asked that they be taken seriously, and they were found sadly wanting.

Tom could imagine the girl's latter history from what he knew of the artists' colony in New York; the years in the art school, where she had worked hard and no one had been sufficiently ill-natured or had cared enough for her to tell her to give it up, and then the misguided judgment which had led her to take a studio for herself. He had tactfully said nothing when he had looked over the sketches; but he knew that they were bad, and his sharp eyes had not missed the traces of tears on her face; so he easily made two, by the old process of putting one and one together, and formed a pretty accurate guess as to what had happened.

Elizabeth was all smiles when she joined him, and they went down the long stairs together. The dinner was a delight to her; the well-cooked and daintily served food, the pretty table appointments, and the music from the balcony, all seemed like a breath from the past—from the time before she became absorbed in what she called her "life work."

"It is so long since I have been in such a delightful place as this, with the prospect of such a dinner, that you must not expect me to talk," she said, when he had given the order, after due consultation with her over the menu. "But I am a good listener, and you can tell me about what you have been doing."

"It is neither a very long nor a very exciting narration," he replied, laughing. "You gave me such a very decided answer, three years ago, that I haven't had the courage to look at a woman since, and if you can't find a woman in three years of a man's life, it is safe to say that it has been uneventful." She looked at him apprehensively, for there was one topic which she had determined to avoid, and here he was rushing into it before the oysters were served.

"No, no. It isn't that which I wish to know about," she said, hastily. "But tell me what you have been doing; what you are doing now."

"This evening I am dining with some one whom I have thought of every day since I saw her last," he answered, gallantly. "During the day I spend most of my time in a disagreeable office, working for money which I do not need, because that seems to be the custom of American men. That has been my life for half of each of these three years; the alternate six months I have spent in Florence with my mother."

"I envy you the Florentine portion of the year," she said, looking at him a little wistfully. "Some day, when my ship comes in, I hope to spend a long time there."

"I go back in two months," he said, eagerly. "My mother would be delighted to see you, if you would come over with me."

"Ah, but my ship may be delayed longer than that and——"

"There is a ship always at your disposal, now as it was three years ago," he interrupted, but she made a gesture of protest.

"It is good to see you again, Tom; it is nice to be with you. Please don't make it necessary for me to send you away again. Let's just be friends, and let me feel that I have your sympathy and affection in the struggle I am having with my life work."

"You have both, always, little girl; but is it worth it, this 'life work'? Is it enough to repay you for sacrificing all that other women find good in life? I wish that you would tell me about your troubles in it; your struggles and disappointments and what you hope for." It was no easy recital which the girl entered upon, and her pride made her conceal a great deal; but from what Tom knew of her circumstances before she started in, and the conclusions he had drawn from what he had seen, he was able to read between the lines of her story.

"And so, you see, I am not able to do as good work as I should," she faltered over the coffee. "I am 'faking' it all, because I cannot afford to use models, and what talent I may have is in the line of portraiture. But sitters don't flock to South Washington Square, and it is hard to get a start."

"Have you ever done portraits?" he asked, anxious to find a way to help her.

"No—that is, no paying ones. I have painted only two, and, like the country storekeeper, taken my pay in kind; but they were good, Tom—really they were, and I feel that if I could get such work to do I could make a name for myself."

"Why not paint my portrait?" he asked, suddenly. "I have always longed to have my phiz, labeled 'Portrait of a Gent,' staring from the wall at an exhibition."

"I'm afraid it would be from near the skyline, if my signature were on it," she answered, laughing. "That is, if it were accepted at all; but you must understand, Tom, old boy, that I can't accept your offers of help, even under the thickest of veils."

"That is the beastly part of the conventions of this miserable world," he answered, irritably. "Here am I, strong, healthy and with more of its goods than I can use, and yet you can't accept from my surplus enough to tide you over a lean year or two, because Mrs. Grundy forbids."

"But she is a very real and very terrible person; even to bachelor maids, Tom. If, like a sensible boy, you had married a sensible girl, whom you could send to me for her portrait, it would be different, for you would receive full value, and at the same time assist a struggling young artist."

"By Jove, I have it!" he exploded. "I have not committed matrimony myself, but a lot of my friends have, and I am going to demand payment for all the teething rings, caudle cups and other baby truck I have been distributing, and make 'em all send their kids to you for their portraits."

"Oh, Tom, you are a dear, but remember the size of my studio, and let them come one at a time," she answered, laughing at his enthusiasm. "Remember that two babies would crowd it dreadfully, and I wouldn't know how to get on with even one."

"Never fear, you will pick that up fast enough, Betsy, and if you can deliver the goods, your fortune is made. What do you charge for the life-sized portrait of a baby?"

"Why, really, I haven't a fixed price," she answered, realizing that he was in earnest. "As I told you, I have painted but two portraits, and the payment for the last was the making of this gown. It was my dressmaker's picture." He looked her over critically.

"Well, it's mighty becoming. I suppose that is equivalent to about five hundred dollars, isn't it?"

"Oh, Tom! You are a greater baby than the sitters whom you propose to send to me," she exclaimed. "If I become famous, I may ask that much years and years from now."

"Young woman, you are to understand that you are 'personally conducted' in your new field, and I am your manager. It won't do to cheapen your work by putting a small price on it. Make 'em pay, and they will think that you are great."

"Not when they see my studio," she answered, but his enthusiasm was comforting to her.

The little studio was not satisfying to Elizabeth as she transformed it into a bedroom by the simple process of bringing the bedclothes out from their place of concealment and sliding back the curtain. The unaccustomed luxury of the dinner had awakened old memories of the comfort and daintiness which had been unknown to her in her later life, and the rejection of her sketches had shattered the dreams of acquiring them again, which had comforted her when she sent them out. And Tom, bowling up the avenue in a hansom, felt uncomfortable at the thought of her being in such a place alone and unprotected, for the dinner had awakened memories in his mind, too, and renewed the old longing for Elizabeth which he thought the years of separation had conquered.

"But she is not the kind of a woman to come to me because she has made a failure, and, if she were, she would not be worth the winning," he thought, bitterly, as he lighted his cigar. "A little more of the life she is leading now, a few more disappointments, and the woman that is in her, the part of herself which she has crushed back for the past three years, will be annihilated. I must find some way to rescue it, to rouse it, and when she has achieved, at least, a semblance of success, trust to my own good fortune to make her look at things as I want her to see them."

It was a new proposition to him, and he racked his brain to find a way out, and by the time he reached his club he was in a mood to resort to physical violence, if necessary, to make any one of his married friends promise to deliver up a child for portrait purposes. But the club was deserted, and he went to bed to spend a wakeful night in seeking a solution of his problem.

Elizabeth smiled grimly the next day as she was preparing her frugal luncheon. A bunch of violets, whose value represented a half month's rent of her tiny studio, was diffusing fragrance through it, and a basket of fruit, which would last a month, was on the table; but the necessaries were represented by a pot of tea, a package of biscuits and a small pat of butter. Even the last was an unwonted extravagance at midday, but, after the dinner of the night before, she could not descend too suddenly to dry biscuits, and, after all, Tom's confidence had given her more courage for the future. She had even tried to work over the rejected sketches with a certain degree of hopefulness, but her heart was not in it, and she was gazing at one of them disconsolately, when there was a sharp knock at the door, and Tom, disregarding all studio ethics, burst in before she could open it. He seized both of her hands and whirled her about the room, to the grave peril of her modest bric-a-brac, his face beaming and his eyes sparkling with pleasure.

"Betsy, things are coming your way; I've caught one for you," he almost shouted, and she implored him to be quiet and tell her what he meant.

"Why, a subject—a victim, or whatever you call people who have their portraits painted. No end of money and fame undying—but I haven't time to tell you about it all now. Just let me know when you can commence, and I will have her here."

"Are you in earnest, Tom?" she asked, incredulously; for the sudden realization of his prophecies of the night before seemed too good to be true.

"In earnest? Well, rather. Young woman, your foot is on the first rung of the ladder of fame, and the day is coming when I shall be proud to know you."

"But who is it?" she persisted.

"Her name wouldn't mean anything to you, and I haven't time to tell you the story, but I will take you out to dinner to-night and tell you all about it."

"But how old is she, Tom? I must know what to prepare for."

"I wasn't indiscreet enough to ask the lady's age, but I should say about four years. I can see that there is no chance of getting anything but questions out of you; but I will make the appointment for ten to-morrow morning, and call for you at six-thirty tonight for dinner. Please be ready, so that I will not have to camp on those confounded stairs."

Tom's story at dinner was as delightful as a fairy tale to her, and if the first one had been made pleasant by anticipation, the feast of realization transported her to the realm of air castles. The arrival of the Italian family which had come from Florence to settle in New York, bearing letters of introduction to Tom from his mother, just in time to fit into his plans to make her a painter of children, seemed a harbinger of good fortune. The father had been most enthusiastic when Tom mentioned the "rising young artist" to him, and was anxious that the sittings should commence immediately, before her time was all taken up.

"There is only one drawback, Betsy," said Tom, as he finished his story. "Little Carlotta speaks only Italian, so I will have to be there a lot to translate."

"But won't the mother, or some one, come with her?" she asked, in surprise.

"You would be no better off, for they can't any of 'em speak English. I have promised to bring her and fetch her away, anyway."

"Tom, I don't know how to thank you for what you are doing for me; but it is awful to be under such an obligation to anyone," she said, the tears coming to her eyes.

"If you think it's any hardship to ride around in a cab with the young lady, just wait until you see her. She is a raving, tearing beauty," he answered, laughing, but Elizabeth was none the less grateful.

Tom's enthusiastic description of the child was borne out by the facts, and it was a very beautiful and very dainty little lady whom he carried into the studio the next morning. She was typically Italian, and the dark hair, warm, brown skin and large, soft eyes, gave her almost an Oriental expression, in spite of the conventional frills and furbelows in which she was dressed.

"Here she is, Betsy," said Tom, gayly, as he sat down with the youngster on his lap. "Now tell me what you want her to do, and I will translate for you, for I must leave her with you while I go to the office." Elizabeth looked at the child, who was gravely inspecting the studio with wise-looking eyes.

"But, Tom, suppose she should cry or anything; what am I to do? She can't understand me, and I shouldn't know what to say, anyway."

"And this is what comes of being an independent woman," he said, looking at her in disapproval. "Well, you will have to take a chance, and get on the best you know how, but I shall have luncheon sent in here, and come back to eat it with you, for I can't trust the child's diet to a bachelor maid."

Carlotta was frightened when Tom left, and Elizabeth began, rather timidly, to comfort her; but she found it an easier task than she had imagined. The feeling of the warm young body against her breast, the sweet perfume of the child's hair and the caressing touch of the little hands as they crept about her neck, were grateful to the lonely artist, and somewhere in the womanhood within her, she found words which Carlotta could understand, although they belonged to no language known to grownups. After the first feeling of strangeness had worn off, the child was quite contented with her, and so comfortable and comforting in her arms that but little progress had been made with the portrait when a waiter brought in the luncheon which Tom had ordered from a neighboring restaurant. Tom came back to eat it with them, and he was entirely satisfied with the friendship which had sprung up between the woman and the child.

"I was asked to give you this; it seems that it is an Italian custom to pay part in advance," he said, handing her an envelope as he left her, and when she opened it she found a crisp and substantial bank note. He took the little girl home that night, and when he returned to take Elizabeth out to dinner, she was so elated that she seemed to be walking on air; but she insisted that they go to a little Italian restaurant, where she had been in the habit of dining.

"I was getting awfully tired of it, Tom, but Carlotta has given me a liking for everything Italian," she said, merrily, and Tom, in the happiness which the change in her brought to him, ate the indifferent food and drank the doubtful wine contentedly. A few days later he heard singing when he knocked on Elizabeth's door for luncheon, and recognized an old nursery rhyme, which he had not heard since his childhood, and when he came in he found her seated on the floor with Carlotta, in the midst of a collection of toys, which must have made a decided hole in her advance payment.

"Is this the way you attend to your 'life work,' young woman?" he asked, with mock severity, and she seemed a little shamefaced; but when the waiter brought the luncheon, he found all three of them on the floor, and Elizabeth not at all pleased with the fickle Carlotta's preference for the house which Tom had built with the blocks. But nothing could disturb Tom's good nature these days, for he realized that Elizabeth was growing fonder of the child each day, and with it all she seemed happier and more feminine. About a week after the sittings commenced, he noticed that her hair was arranged in the fluffy, loose way he had admired so much three years before, giving her face more of the girlish expression it had lost, and a bright ribbon at the throat relieved the somberness of her working gown.

"Why, Betsy, you are growing younger," he said, looking at her in admiration, and she blushed in confusion.

"You mean my hair and the ribbon," she replied, with a little trace of self-consciousness in her manner. "Well, you see, Carlotta is of a race which likes bright colors, so I thought it would please her."

"And incidentally you have given me great pleasure," he said, smiling at her, approvingly, and a song was in his heart as he went down the stairs.

Sunshine is not abundant in a New York winter, and none of it enters the northern windows of a studio; but Elizabeth's tiny apartment came to have an entirely different atmosphere while the child spent her days in it. The program remained the same as on the first day; but Elizabeth employed so much of her time in petting and playing with the child, that the portrait did not advance rapidly, although enough had been accomplished to show that it promised to be, by far, the best thing which she had ever done. The jolly luncheons were a joy to both of them, and Carlotta always gave a crow of delight, which Elizabeth's heart was beginning to echo, when Tom's merry whistle heralded his arrival.

But on the day he had noticed the change in Elizabeth's hair, there was a marked restraint in her manner when he came in for luncheon, and Carlotta, with the sensitiveness which makes children so quick to recognize the moods of their elders, was sitting on the couch, finger in mouth, and with widely opened eyes, which threatened tears.

"Tom, I must have a talk with you," said Elizabeth, her voice trembling a little as he looked inquiringly from one to the other.

"Have you two had a falling out?" he asked, laughing, but Elizabeth's expression checked his merriment.

"No, but I will tell you just what has happened, and then I want an explanation. Let me speak without interruption, and then I will hear what you have to say." He took off his coat and sat down without speaking, and Elizabeth faced him.

"The Italian woman who cleans this place came in this morning with her mop and pail, and Carlotta commenced chattering with her at once, and the woman laughed, so that I asked her what she was saying. She told me that Carlotta said she looked like her mother, and that she had the same kind of mop and pail. Of course, judging from the appearance and expensive clothing of the child, she thought it was absurd; but I got her to question Carlotta for me, and she persisted in her story, and described their home, which seems to consist of two overcrowded rooms on Mulberry Street." She paused, and Tom looked at her with no trace of embarrassment.

"Well, what of it?" he asked, defiantly. "The child was telling the truth, and there is no reason to punish her."

"Punish her!" exclaimed Elizabeth, taken aback. "It is not a question of what she has said or done; but of your conduct. Rich Italians do not live in two rooms on Mulberry Street, and you have deceived me and humiliated me by using this means to give me money."

"Nothing of the sort," he replied. "I haven't deceived you; although I will admit that you deceived yourself, and I did not set you right. The child's father was one of my mother's gardeners in Florence, and when he decided to bring his large family over here, she gave him a letter to me. He came to my office the morning after we dined together, and I went to see his family, and fell in love with Carlotta at once. The father was delighted to have her portrait painted, and I thought it would be better to get fresh clothes for such an important occasion."

"But immigrants are not making advance payments which are more than I should have charged for a half-dozen portraits, and you have done this simply to cloak an advance of money to me," she said, indignantly. "I suppose that you meant it in kindness, but you have put me under an obligation which I hate and which it will take me years to repay."

"There is no question of obligation," he replied, gently. "If I, as the child's foster father, wish a portrait of her, it is my own business whom I get to paint it, and how much I pay for it. I have made arrangements to care for Carlotta, and I wish you to finish the portrait for me, so that I may have something to remember her and this happy time by, when she grows up and leaves me."

"Oh, Tom, you must not take her away from me!" exclaimed Elizabeth, in dismay. "If you will let me finish this portrait and exhibit it, I am sure that it will bring me other orders, and then I can repay you and keep her with me."

"Do what? Keep the child with you?" asked Tom, in amazement.

"Yes, if you will help that much," she faltered. "I have thought it all out since the woman translated for me. I know that I can get other orders from this portrait, and I will be able to keep her, if the parents will permit it, and they have so many children that I am sure they will. Oh, Tom, it has been so lonely here, and now I can't let you come any more—and I want her so!" She covered her face with her hands, and, although Tom was not a man to be amused by a woman's tears, he smiled and winked solemnly at the frightened looking child, before he took them and held them in his own.

"Elizabeth Thornton," he said, seriously, "I will not relinquish my claim on Carlotta, and if you want her, you must take me, too. It is time to stop this foolishness about 'life work,' and to remember that you are a woman, with all the weaknesses of the sex, which we condone, and with all of its sweetness, which we love."

Carlotta looked at them wonderingly as Elizabeth put her arms around his neck and her head on his breast; but when he raised Elizabeth's face and kissed her lips, she clapped her tiny hands and gave a crow of joy; for she knew that her friends had found happiness.



SONG

Love planted my rose in his garden fair— My rose of heart's delight— And he laughed with joy when he saw it bear A crown of blossoms bright.

But the harsh wind shattered the petals red 'Twixt darkness and the dew; What blossoms were living, what blooms were dead, Ah, Love nor cared nor knew!

CHARLOTTE BECKER.



THE DESPOT

By JOHNSON MORTON

It was the boast of the summer dwellers in Roscoe that they had not spoiled the place. Mr. William Bangs was reiterating this to his wife's niece, who stood regarding his potato patch rather disdainfully through the glamour of a lorgnette.

"You see, Annie, my house is no better than my neighbors', my land not so good," he went on. "We keep no servants, in the accepted sense, only the girls whom you have seen—farmers' daughters from the mountain road—or, as your aunt Mary will put it, 'We look to the hills whence cometh our help.' And the outside work is done by Paterson Roscoe and myself, with occasional aid in haying time. The Smiths live in quite the same fashion, the Jacksons, with all their money, just as simply, and the Babbits and Thomases follow the lead. As a result"—he dug his hoe into a hill of potatoes and Miss Jenkins drew back a high-heeled slipper from the contact—"we have an ideal community. The villagers haven't lost their proper sense of democracy and equality. And we—the outsiders—have learned much from meeting these plain, simple folk on their own ground. So I don't really approve of this plan of yours. It's a tremendous innovation. We've got on quite well enough for nearly four years without entertainments, save those which are, so to speak, indigenous and natural. I don't at all like the idea of vaudeville, and I abhor a raffle!"

"But the church does need the money so much, Uncle William," the girl interrupted, "and it's a Unitarian church, so the raffle doesn't matter. Mr. Blythe says he sees no objection to it if it's conducted properly, and everyone is so interested. All the Pungville people will come in quite a procession, and Tom Mason is to drive the performers over on his coach."

"Oh, if Tom Mason's the reason"—uncle William's hoe rested helplessly—"there's nothing more to be said." Annie frowned behind a smile. "But we've been thanking Heaven every night of our lives that nineteen stiff miles lay between us and that barbarous Pungville."

He picked up a handful of warm, brown potatoes and threw them into the basket.

"My dear girl, you're a wonder! You've been here five days, and you'll tear down in just that time what it has taken us four years to build up."

"Then have I your blessing?"

The girl showed roguish under her insistence, but uncle William shook his head. "The best you'll get from me, young woman, is a most reluctant sufferance. You are hopeless. I don't see why you asked me at all, with the thing as good as settled. Go on; but don't come back to your old uncle with the demoralization of an entire village on your conscience."

"Nonsense!" laughed the other. "That won't trouble me one bit. Just now I'm much more concerned as to what you're to do for us at the fair—something that will be popular and yet entail no loss of dignity." She regarded him quizzically. "Ah! I have it! Fortunes told by the cards! A magician in gown and fez, behind a curtain. Slight extra charge, flattering and profitable alike." She clapped her hands and Mr. Bangs groaned.

"Don't make me face details yet."

He struck at another potato hill, and Annie turned to the road. "Wait a minute," he called after her; "this is serious. Have you spoken to Miss Pamela yet?"

"Miss Pamela Roscoe, you mean? No, of course not; why should I?"

"Why should you?" Uncle William leaned on his hoe and fixed her with stern eye. "Easier a brick without straw, a law without a legislature, than to foist an idea, a plan, a measure on this village save in one way. My dear Annie, haven't you found out in five days that Miss Pamela is chief of the clan? Sister, aunt, cousin, in varying degrees, to every Roscoe and Collamer in the township—and there are no others worthy the count. Don't you know that she lives in the biggest house, has money in the bank, owns railroad stock, preserves opinions and never goes out of doors? That last is enough to surround her with a wall of mystery, and her own personality does the rest. Her position is almost feudal; the others may be jealous, most of the women are, for she is as acquisitive as she is dogmatic, and somehow she has been able to deflect nearly all the family possessions to her own line of inheritance; but, though they scold behind her back, they bend the knee, every one of them.

"You really must see her and get her consent, or gradually you will have the whole village backing out of its agreements. You'd better go before she hears of the plan from anyone else. I dare say you're too late already. You'll need all your diplomacy, and I wouldn't attempt it till after dinner. Get some points from your aunt Mary. We'll talk it over by and by. Now, speaking of dinner, do you mind taking these potatoes to Cassandra as you go by the kitchen door? They're my very first. They're late enough, but I guess I'm a week ahead of Smith, anyway. Thank you." He turned to his work again.

* * * * *

Miss Pamela Roscoe lived in a large house freshly painted white, with dark green blinds, chronically closed. To the front door wandered a box-bordered gravel path, and up this avenue Annie Jenkins walked in the red radiance of the September afternoon. Like a good soldier, she had donned her brightest armor, and her muslin skirts flicked in a friendly yet business-like way against the green. She raised the heavy brass knocker, its rattle shook the door and echoed through an empty hall.

Miss Pamela Roscoe heard the sound, and went softly, with no show of haste, to a window that commanded what is, in local parlance, known as a handsome view of the front porch, from which vantage she remarked her visitor through peeping shutters.

But she waited—it is not considered good form in Roscoe to admit a stranger too eagerly—for a decent interval to elapse. Thanks to aunt Mary's coaching, Annie did not knock again, but stood in pretty decision with her eyes straight before her. A leisurely footstep sounded within; the latch lifted with dignity, the door opened a crack at first, then more widely; and, outlined against a blacker background, stood the tall, stern, forbidding figure of Miss Pamela Roscoe herself!

She was a lady of fateful appearance, black-haired and pale, with a marvelous impression of preservation. Her manner was of the nil admirari sort, and her voice what Annie afterward described as mortuary. The girl murmured her name, a wan smile welcomed her.

"Come right in, Miss Jenkins," the gloomy voice began, "only I don't want you should step off that oilcloth. I ain't going to get that carpet all tracked up. You go right on into the front room"—a gaunt arm pushed her toward a darker space—"and I'll open up there in a minute."

Miss Pamela, at the window, threw back the shutter, rolled up a curtain and the western sunlight filled the place. Annie took the chair which her hostess dusted ostentatiously, a stout, wooden rocker with a tidy—Bo-Peep in outline stitch in red—flapping cozily at its back but Miss Roscoe still stood.

"It ain't hospitable, I know," her monotone apologized; "a first visit, too—but I'm going to ask you to excuse me a minute right at the set-off. When you knocked, I was buying some berries of the Collamer twins, and just a-measuring of them. I don't allow no one to measure in my house but myself, if they are my grand-nephews, and I most ought to go back to the summer kitchen to finish and pay 'em—if you don't mind. There's the album and last week's paper, and you just make yourself to home till I get back."

Left alone, in somewhat austere comfort, Miss Jenkins' eyes wandered over the room, from the strips of bunting at the windows—black alternating with red, white and blue, which a card in pale, cramped writing explained: "In Memory of Garfield, 1881"—to two elaborate fly-catchers which did duty as chandeliers from vantage points of the ceiling. The simpler, made of straw tied with bows of red worsted, paled before the glories of the other—a structure of silver cardboard in cubes, the smaller depending from the corners of the larger in diminishing effect, ribbon-bound, with a gleaming pearl bead in the center of each.

A pair of strange tables, laden with still stranger ornaments, filled the larger spaces of the floor and bore testimony to the prowess of some pioneer in the line of industrial adornment.

"Poor soul," thought the girl, "here is the decorative instinct untrammeled by imitation. Individuality inherent! Unkind fate, furnishing no models, has produced originality." She walked toward the larger table for closer scrutiny just as Miss Pamela re-entered the room. A faint accent of gratification colored the latter's voice.

"I see you looking at them stands," she said; "mosaic, I call 'em. I made every stitch of 'em myself. Soft pine they are; my brother Nathan gave me the wood, and I'd been saving the pieces of crockery for years. You cut places in the wood and stick 'em in close in patterns with colors that look pretty together—sometimes you have to use a hammer—and then you sandpaper the rough places—it's terrible on the hands—and put on a couple of coats o' shellac. I call 'em pretty handsome. Cousin Parthenia Roscoe was here the day I was finishing them, and I tell you she admired 'em. Those crackle ware pieces were from an old pitcher of her mother's that came to me—it got broken, and I worked 'em in at the corners. I don't set no great store by that alum cross. They're kind o' common, but it turned out so nice I let it stand there. How did I make it? Why you just take a cross of wood and wind it with yarn and let it hang overnight in a solution of alum and water, and in the morning it's all crystal. 'Tain't no work; but, land's sakes! there's enough to make up in those wax autumn leaves; I call that a likely spray of woodbine. It took me the bigger part of three mornings to get it done, and 'twas in the winter I made it, so I didn't have nothing to go by but my memory."