"From the hour Berene disappeared, to this very day, no word or message ever came from her," the invalid said. "I have never known whether she was dead or alive, married, or, terrible thought, perhaps driven into a reckless life by her one false step with me. This last fear has been a constant torture to me all these years.

"The world is cruel in its judgment of woman. And yet I know that it is woman herself who has shaped the opinions of the world regarding these matters. If men had had their way since the world began, there would be no virtuous women. Woman has realised this fact, and she has in consequence walled herself about with rules and conventions which have in a measure protected her from man. When any woman breaks through these conventions and errs, she suffers the scorn of others who have kept these self-protecting and society-protecting laws; and, conscious of their scorn, she believes all hope is lost for ever.

"The fear that Berene took this view of her one mistake, and plunged into a desperate life, has embittered my whole existence. Never before did a man suffer such a mental hell as I have endured for this one act of sin and weakness. Yet the world, looking at my life of success, would say if it knew the story, 'Behold how the man goes free.' Free! Great God! there is no bondage so terrible as that of the mind. I have loved Berene Dumont with a changeless passion for twenty-three years, and there has not been a day in all that time that I have not during some hours endured the agonies of the damned, thinking of all the disasters and misery that might have come into her life through me. Heaven knows I would have married her if she had remained. Strange and intricate as the net was which the devil wove about me when I had furnished the cords, I could and would have broken through it after that strange night—at once the heaven and the hell of my memory—if Berene had remained. As it was—I married Mabel, and you know what a farce, ending in a tragedy, our married life has been. God grant that no worse woes befell Berene; God grant that I may meet her in the spirit world and tell her how I loved her and longed for her companionship."

The young rector's eyes were streaming with tears, as he reached over and clasped the sick man's hands in his. "You will meet her," he said with a choked voice. "I heard this same story, but without names, from Berene Dumont's dying lips more than two years ago. And just as Berene disappeared from you—so her daughter disappeared from me; and, God help me, dear father—doubly now my father, I crushed out my great passion for the glorious natural child of your love, to marry the loveless, wretched and UNNATURAL child of your marriage."

The sick man started up on his couch, his eyes flaming, his cheeks glowing with sudden lustre.

"My child—the natural child of Berene's love and mine, you say; oh, my God, speak and tell me what you mean; speak before I die of joy so terrible it is like anguish."

So then it became the rector's turn to take the part of narrator. When the story was ended, Preston Cheney lay weeping like a woman on his couch; the first tears he had shed since his mother died and left him an orphan of ten.

"Berene living and dying almost within reach of my arms—almost within sound of my voice!" he cried. "Oh, why did I not find her before the grave closed between us?—and why did no voice speak from that grave to tell me when I held my daughter's hand in mine?—my beautiful child, no wonder my heart went out to her with such a gush of tenderness; no wonder I was fired with unaccountable anger and indignation when Mabel and Alice spoke unkindly of her. Do you remember how her music stirred me? It was her mother's heart speaking to mine through the genius of our child.

"Arthur, you must find her—you must find her for me! If it takes my whole fortune I must see my daughter, and clasp her in my arms before I die."

But this happiness was not to be granted to the dying man. Overcome by the excitement of this new emotion, he grew weaker and weaker as the next few days passed, and at the end of the fifth day his spirit took its flight, let us hope to join its true mate.

It had been one of his dying requests to have his body taken to Beryngford and placed beside that of Judge Lawrence.

The funeral services took place in the new and imposing church edifice which had been constructed recently in Beryngford. The quiet interior village had taken a leap forward during the last few years, and was now a thriving city, owing to the discovery of valuable stone quarries in its borders.

The Baroness and Mabel had never been in Beryngford since the death of Judge Lawrence many years before; and it was with sad and bitter hearts that both women recalled the past and realised anew the disasters which had wrecked their dearest hopes and ambitions.

The Baroness, broken in spirit and crushed by the insanity of her beloved Alice, now saw the form of the man whom she had hopelessly loved for so many years, laid away to crumble back to dust; and yet, the sorrows which should have softened her soul, and made her heart tender toward all suffering humanity, rendered her pitiless as the grave toward one lonely and desolate being before the shadows of night had fallen upon the grave of Preston Cheney.

When the funeral march pealed out from the grand new organ during the ceremonies in the church, both the Baroness and the rector, absorbed as they were in mournful sorrow, started with surprise. Both gazed at the organ loft; and there, before the great instrument, sat the graceful figure of Joy Irving. The rector's face grew pale as the corpse in the casket; the withered cheek of the Baroness turned a sickly yellow, and a spark of anger dried the moisture in her eyes.

Before the night had settled over the thriving city of Beryngford, the Baroness dropped a point of virus from the lancet of her tongue to poison the social atmosphere where Joy Irving had by the merest accident of fate made her new home, and where in the office of organist she had, without dreaming of her dramatic situation, played the requiem at the funeral of her own father.



CHAPTER XVIII



Joy Irving had come to Beryngford at the time when the discoveries of the quarries caused that village to spring into sudden prominence as a growing city. Newspaper accounts of the building of the new church, and the purchase of a large pipe organ, chanced to fall under her eye just as she was planning to leave the scene of her unhappiness.

"I can at least only fail if I try for the position of organist there," she said, "and if I succeed in this interior town, I can hide myself from all the world without incurring heavy expense."

So all unconsciously Joy fled from the metropolis to the very place from which her mother had vanished twenty-two years before.

She had been the organist in the grand new Episcopalian Church now for three years; and she had made many cordial acquaintances who would have become near friends, if she had encouraged them. But Joy's sweet and trustful nature had received a great shock in the knowledge of the shadow which hung about her birth. Where formerly she had expected love and appreciation from everyone she met, she now shrank from forming new ties, lest new hurts should await her.

She was like a flower in whose perfect heart a worm had coiled. Her entire feeling about life had undergone a change. For many weeks after her self-imposed exile, she had been unable to think of her mother without a mingled sense of shame and resentment; the adoring love she had borne this being seemed to die with her respect. After a time the bitterness of this sentiment wore away, and a pitying tenderness and sorrow took its place; but from her heart the twin angels, Love and Forgiveness, were absent. She read her mother's manuscript over, and tried to argue herself into the philosophy which had sustained the author of her being through all these years.

But her mind was shaped far more after the conventional pattern of her paternal ancestors, who had been New England Puritans, and she could not view the subject as Berene had viewed it.

In spite of the ideality which her mother had woven about him, Joy entertained the most bitter contempt for the unknown man who was her father, and the whole tide of her affections turned lavishly upon the memory of Mr Irving, whom she felt now more than ever so worthy of her regard.

Reason as she would on the supremacy of love over law, yet the bold, unpleasant fact remained that she was the child of an unwedded mother. She shrank in sensitive pain from having this story follow her, and the very consciousness that her mother's experience had been an exceptional one, caused her the greater dread of having it known and talked of as a common vulgar liaison.

There are two things regarding which the world at large never asks any questions—namely, How a rich man made his money, and how an erring woman came to fall. It is enough for the world to know that he is rich—that fact alone opens all doors to him, as the fact that the woman has erred closes them to her.

There was a common vulgar creature in Beryngford, whose many amours and bold defiance of law and order rendered her name a synonym for indecency. This woman had begun her career in early girlhood as a mercenary intriguer; and yet Joy Irving knew that the majority of people would make small distinctions between the conduct of this creature and that of her mother, were the facts of Berene's life and her own birth to be made public.

The fear that the story would follow her wherever she went became an absolute dread with her, and caused her to live alone and without companions, in the midst of people who would gladly have become her warm friends, had she permitted.

Her book of "Impressions" reflected the changes which had taken place in the complexion of her mind during these years. Among its entries were the following:-

People talk about following a divine law of love, when they wish to excuse their brute impulses and break social and civil codes.

No love is sanctioned by God, which shatters human hearts.

Fathers are only distantly related to their children; love for the male parent is a matter of education.

The devil macadamises all his pavements.

A natural child has no place in an unnatural world.

When we cannot respect our parents, it is difficult to keep our ideal of God.

Love is a mushroom, and lust is its poisonous counterpart.

It is a pity that people who despise civilisation should be so uncivil as to stay in it. There is always darkest Africa.

The extent of a man's gallantry depends on the goal. He follows the good woman to the borders of Paradise and leaves her with a polite bow; but he follows the bad woman to the depths of hell.

It is easy to trust in God until he permits us to suffer. The dentist seems a skilled benefactor to mankind when we look at his sign from the street. When we sit in his chair he seems a brute, armed with devil's implements.

An anonymous letter is the bastard of a diseased mind.

An envious woman is a spark from Purgatory.

The consciousness that we have anything to hide from the world stretches a veil between our souls and heaven. We cannot reach up to meet the gaze of God, when we are afraid to meet the eyes of men.

It may be all very well for two people to make their own laws, but they have no right to force a third to live by them.

Virtue is very secretive about her payments, but the whole world hears of it when vice settles up.

We have a sublime contempt for public opinion theoretically so long as it favours us. When it turns against us we suffer intensely from the loss of what we claimed to despise.

When the fruit must apologise for the tree, we do not care to save the seed.

It is only when God and man have formed a syndicate and agreed upon their laws, that marriage is a safe investment.

The love that does not protect its object would better change its name.

When we say OF people what we would not say TO them, we are either liars or cowards.

The enmity of some people is the greatest compliment they can pay us.

It was in thoughts like these that Joy relieved her heart of some of the bitterness and sorrow which weighed upon it. And day after day she bore about with her the dread of having the story of her mother's sin known in her new home.

As our fears, like our wishes, when strong and unremitting, prove to be magnets, the result of Joy's despondent fears came in the scandal which the Baroness had planted and left to flourish and grow in Beryngford after her departure. An hour before the services began, on the day of Preston Cheney's burial, Joy learned at whose rites she was to officiate as organist. A pang of mingled emotions shot through her heart at the sound of his name. She had seen this man but a few times, and spoken with him but once; yet he had left a strong impression upon her memory. She had felt drawn to him by his sympathetic face and atmosphere, the sorrow of his kind eyes, and the keen appreciation he had shown in her art; and just in the measure that she had been attracted by him, she had been repelled by the three women to whom she was presented at the same time. She saw them all again mentally, as she had seen them on that and many other days. Mrs Cheney and Alice, with their fretful, plain, dissatisfied faces, and their over-burdened costumes, and the Baroness, with her cruel heart gazing through her worn mask of defaced beauty.

She had been conscious of a feeling of overwhelming pity for the kind, attractive man who made the fourth of that quartette. She knew that he had obtained honours and riches from life, but she pitied him for his home environment. She had felt so thankful for her own happy home life at the time; and she remembered, too, the sweet hope that lay like a closed-up bud in the bottom of her heart that day, as the quartette moved away and left her standing alone with Arthur Stuart.

It was only a few weeks later that the end came to all her dreams, through that terrible anonymous letter.

It was the Baroness who had sent it, she knew—the Baroness whose early hatred for her mother had descended to the child. "And now I must sit in the same house with her again," she said, "and perhaps meet her face to face; and she may tell the story here of my mother's shame, even as I have felt and feared it must yet be told. How strange that a 'love child' should inspire so much hatred!"

Joy had carefully refrained from reading New York papers ever since she left the city; and she had no correspondents. It was her wish and desire to utterly sink and forget the past life there. Therefore she knew nothing of Arthur Stuart's marriage to the daughter of Preston Cheney. She thought of the rector as dead to her. She believed he had given her up because of the stain upon her birth, and, bitter as the pain had been, she never blamed him. She had fought with her love for him and believed that it was buried in the grave of all other happy memories.

But as the earth is wrenched open by volcanic eruptions and long buried corpses are revealed again to the light of day, so the unexpected sight of Arthur Stuart, as he took his place beside Mabel and the Baroness during the funeral services, revealed all the pent- up passion of her heart to her own frightened soul.

To strong natures, the greater the inward excitement the more quiet the exterior; and Jay passed through the services, and performed her duties, without betraying to those about her the violent emotions under which she laboured.

The rector of Beryngford Church requested her to remain for a few moments, and consult with him on a matter concerning the next week's musical services. It was from him Joy learned the relation which Arthur Stuart bore to the dead man, and that Beryngford was the former home of the Baroness.

Her mother's manuscript had carefully avoided all mention of names of people or places. Yet Joy realised now that she must be living in the very scene of her mother's early life; she longed to make inquiries, but was prevented by the fear that she might hear her mother's name mentioned disrespectfully.

The days that followed were full of sharp agony for her. It was not until long afterward that she was able to write her "impressions" of that experience. In the extreme hour of joy or agony we formulate no impressions; we only feel. We neither analyse nor describe our friends or enemies when face to face with them, but after we leave their presence. When the day came that she could write, some of her reflections were thus epitomised:

Love which rises from the grave to comfort us, possesses more of the demons' than the angels' power. It terrifies us with its supernatural qualities and deprives us temporarily of our reason.

Suppressed steam and suppressed emotion are dangerous things to deal with.

The infant who wants its mother's breast, and the woman who wants her lover's arms, are poor subjects to reason with. Though you tell the former that fever has poisoned the mother's milk, or the latter that destruction lies in the lover's embrace, one heeds you no more than the other.

The accumulated knowledge of ages is sometimes revealed by a kiss. Where wisdom is bliss, it is folly to be ignorant.

Some of us have to crucify our hearts before we find our souls.

A woman cannot fully know charity until she has met passion; but too intimate an acquaintance with the latter destroys her appreciation of all the virtues.

To feel temptation and resist it, renders us liberal in our judgment of all our kind. To yield to it, fills us with suspicion of all.

There is an ecstatic note in pain which is never reached in happiness.

The death of a great passion is a terrible thing, unless the dawn of a greater truth shines on the grave.

Love ought to have no past tense.

Love partakes of the feline nature. It has nine lives.

It seems to be difficult for some of us to distinguish between looseness of views, and charitable judgments. To be sorry for people's sins and follies and to refuse harsh criticism is right; to accept them as a matter of course is wrong.

Love and sorrow are twins, and knowledge is their nurse.

The pathway of the soul is not a steady ascent, but hilly and broken. We must sometimes go lower, in order to get higher.

That which is to-day, and will be to-morrow, must have been yesterday. I know that I live, I believe that I shall live again, and have lived before.

Earth life is the middle rung of a long ladder which we climb in the dark. Though we cannot see the steps below, or above, they exist all the same.

The materialist denying spirit is like the burr of the chestnut denying the meat within.

The inevitable is always right.

Prayer is a skeleton key that opens unexpected doors. We may not find the things we came to seek, but we find other treasures.

The pessimist belongs to God's misfit counter.

Art, when divorced from Religion, always becomes a wanton.

To forget benefits we have received is a crime. To remember benefits we have bestowed is a greater one.

To some men a woman is a valuable book, carefully studied and choicely guarded behind glass doors. To others, she is a daily paper, idly scanned and tossed aside.



CHAPTER XIX



While Joy battled with her sorrow during the days following Preston Cheney's burial, she woke to the consciousness that her history was known in Beryngford. The indescribable change in the manner of her acquaintances, the curiosity in the eyes of some, the insolence or familiarity of others, all told her that her fears were realised; and then there came a letter from the church authorities requesting her to resign her position as organist.

This letter came to the young girl on one of those dreary autumn nights when all the desolation of the dying summer, and none of the exhilaration of the approaching winter, is in the air. She had been labouring all day under a cloud of depression which hovered over her heart and brain and threatened to wholly envelop her; and the letter from the church committee cut her heart like a poniard stroke. Sometimes we are able to bear a series of great disasters with courage and equanimity, while we utterly collapse under some slight misfortune. Joy had been a heroine in her great sorrows, but now in the undeserved loss of her position as church organist, she felt herself unable longer to cope with Fate.

"There's no place for me anywhere," she said to herself. Had she known the truth, that the Baroness had represented her to the committee as a fallen woman of the metropolis, who had left the city for the city's good, the letter would not have seemed to her so cruelly unjust and unjustifiable.

Bitter as had been her suffering at the loss of Arthur Stuart from her life, she had found it possible to understand his hesitation to make her his wife. With his fine sense of family pride, and his reverence for the estate of matrimony, his belief in heredity, it seemed quite natural to her that he should be shocked at the knowledge of the conditions under which she was born; and the thought that her disappearance from his life was helping him to solve a painful problem, had at times, before this unexpected sight of him, rendered her almost happy in her lonely exile. She had grown strangely fond of Beryngford—of the old streets and homes which she knew must have been familiar to her mother's eyes, of the new church whose glorious voiced organ gave her so many hours of comfort and relief of soul, of the tiny apartment where she and her heart communed together. She was catlike in her love of places, and now she must tear herself away from all these surroundings and seek some new spot wherein to hide herself and her sorrows.

It was like tearing up a half-rooted flower, already drooping from one transplanting. She said to herself that she could never survive another change. She read the letter over which lay in her hand, and tears began to slowly well from her eyes. Joy seldom wept; but now it seemed to her she was some other person, who stood apart and wept tears of sympathy for this poor girl, Joy Irving, whose life was so hemmed about with troubles, none of which were of her own making; and then, like a dam which suddenly gives way and allows a river to overflow, a great storm of sobs shook her frame, and she wept as she had never wept before; and with her tears there came rushing back to her heart all the old love and sorrow for the dead mother which had so long been hidden under her burden of shame; and all the old passion and longing for the man whose insane wife she knew to be a more hopeless obstacle between them than this mother's history had proven.

"Mother, Arthur, pity me, pity me!" she cried. "I am all alone, and the strife is so terrible. I have never meant to harm any living thing! Mother Arthur, GOD, how can you all desert me so?"

At last, exhausted, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

She awoke the following morning with an aching head, and a heart wherein all emotions seemed dead save a dull despair. She was conscious of only one wish, one desire—a longing to sit again in the organ loft, and pour forth her soul in one last farewell to that instrument which had grown to seem her friend, confidant and lover.

She battled with her impulse as unreasonable and unwise, till the day was well advanced. But it grew stronger with each hour; and at last she set forth under a leaden sky and through a dreary November rain to the church.

Her head throbbed with pain, and her hands were hot and feverish, as she seated herself before the organ and began to play. But with the first sounds responding to her touch, she ceased to think of bodily discomfort.

The music was the voice of her own soul, uttering to God all its desolation, its anguish and its despair. Then suddenly, with no seeming volition of her own, it changed to a passion of human love, human desire; the sorrow of separation, the strife with the emotions, the agony of renunciation were all there; and the November rain, beating in wild gusts against the window-panes behind the musician, lent a fitting accompaniment to the strains.

She had been playing for perhaps an hour, when a sudden exhaustion seized upon her, and her hands fell nerveless and inert upon her lap; she dropped her chin upon her breast and closed her eyes. She was drunken with her own music.

When she opened them again a few moments later, they fell upon the face of Arthur Stuart, who stood a few feet distant regarding her with haggard eyes. Unexpected and strange as his presence was, Joy felt neither surprise nor wonder. She had been thinking of him so intensely, he had been so interwoven with the music she had been playing, that his bodily presence appeared to her as a natural result. He was the first to speak; and when he spoke she noticed that his voice sounded hoarse and broken, and that his face was drawn and pale.

"I came to Beryngford this morning expressly to see you, Joy," he said. "I have many things to say to you. I went to your residence and was told by the maid that I would find you here. I followed, as you see. We have had many meetings in church edifices, in organ lofts. It seems natural to find you in such a place, but I fear it will be unnatural and unfitting to say to you here, what I came to say. Shall we return to your home?"

His eyes shone strangely from dusky caverns, and there were deep lines about his mouth.

"He, too, has suffered," thought Joy; "I have not borne it all alone." Then she said aloud:

"We are quite undisturbed here; I know of nothing I could listen to in my room which I could not hear you say in this place. Go on."

He looked at her silently for a moment, his cheeks pale, his breast heaving. Before he came to Beryngford, he had fought his battle between religion and human passion, and passion had won. He had cast under his feet every principle and tradition in which he had been reared, and resolved to live alone henceforth for the love and companionship of one human being, could he obtain her consent to go with him.

Yet for the moment, he hesitated to speak the words he had resolved to utter, under the roof of a house of God, so strong were the influences of his early training and his habits of thought. But as his eyes feasted upon the face before him, his hesitation vanished, and he leaned toward her and spoke. "Joy," he said, "three years ago I went away and left you in sorrow, alone, because I was afraid to brave public opinion, afraid to displease my mother and ask you to be my wife. The story your mother told me of your birth, a story she left in manuscript for you to read, made a social coward of me. I was afraid to take a girl born out of wedlock to be my life companion, the mother of my children. Well, I married a girl born in wedlock; and where is my companion?" He paused and laughed recklessly. Then he went on hurriedly: "She is in an asylum for the insane. I am chained to a corpse for life. I had not enough moral courage three-years ago to make you my wife. But I have moral courage enough now to come here and ask you to go with me to Australia, and begin a new life together. My mother died a year ago. I donned the surplice at her bidding. I will abandon it at the bidding of Love. I sinned against heaven in marrying a woman I did not love. I am willing to sin against the laws of man by living with the woman I do love; will you go with me, Joy?" There was silence save for the beating of the rain against the stained window, and the wailing of the wind.

Joy was in a peculiarly overwrought condition of mind and body. Her hours of extravagant weeping the previous night, followed by a day of fasting, left her nervous system in a state to be easily excited by the music she had been playing. She was virtually intoxicated with sorrow and harmony. She was incapable of reasoning, and conscious only of two things—that she must leave Beryngford, and that the man whom she had loved with her whole heart for five years, was asking her to go with him; to be no more homeless, unloved, and alone, but his companion while life should last.

"Answer me, Joy," he was pleading. "Answer me."

She moved toward the stairway that led down to the street door; and as she flitted by him, she said, looking him full in the eyes with a slow, grave smile, "Yes, Arthur, I will go with you."

He sprang toward her with a wild cry of joy, but she was already flying down the stairs and out upon the street.

When he joined her, they walked in silence through the rain to her door, neither speaking a word, until he would have followed her within. Then she laid her hand upon his shoulder and said gently but firmly: "Not now, Arthur; we must not see each other again until we go away. Write me where to meet you, and I will join you within twenty-four hours. Do not urge me—you must obey me this once— afterward I will obey you. Good-night."

As she closed the door upon him, he said, "Oh, Joy, I have so much to tell you. I promised your father when he was dying that I would find you; I swore to myself that when I found you I would never leave you, save at your own command. I go now, only because you bid me go. When we meet again, there must be no more parting; and you shall hear a story stranger than the wildest fiction—the story of your father's life. Despite your mother's secretiveness regarding this portion of her history, the knowledge has come to me in the most unexpected manner, from the lips of the man himself."

Joy listened dreamily to the words he was saying. Her father—she was to know who her father was? Well, it did not matter much to her now—father, mother, what were they, what was anything save the fact that he had come back to her and that he loved her?

She smiled silently into his eyes. Glance became entangled with glance, and would not be separated.

He pushed open the almost closed door and she felt herself enveloped with arms and lips.

A second later she stood alone, leaning dizzily against the door; heart, brain and blood in a mad riot of emotion.

Then she fell into a chair and covered her burning face with her hands as she whispered, "Mother, mother, forgive me—I understand—I understand."



CHAPTER XX



The first shock of the awakened emotions brings recklessness to some women, and to others fear.

The more frivolous plunge forward like the drunken man who leaps from the open window believing space is water.

The more intense draw back, startled at the unknown world before them.

The woman who thinks love is all ideality is more liable to follow into undreamed-of chasms than she who, through the complexity of her own emotions, realises its grosser elements.

It was long after midnight when Joy fell into a heavy sleep, the night of Arthur Stuart's visit. She heard the drip of the dreary November rain upon the roof, and all the light and warmth seemed stricken from the universe save the fierce fire in her own heart.

When she woke in the late morning, great splashes of sunlight were leaping and quivering like living things across the foot of her bed; she sprang up, dazed for a moment by the flood of light in the room, and went to the window and looked out upon a sun-kissed world smiling in the arms of a perfect Indian summer day.

A happy little sparrow chirped upon the window sill, and some children ran across the street bare-headed, exulting in the soft air. All was innocence and sweetness. Mind and morals are greatly influenced by weather. Many things seem right in the fog and gloom, which we know to be wrong in the clear light of a sunny morning. The events of the previous day came back to Joy's mind as she stood by the window, and stirred her with a sense of strangeness and terror. The thought of the step she had resolved to take brought a sudden trembling to her limbs. It seemed to her the eyes of God were piercing into her heart, and she was afraid.

Joy had from her early girlhood been an earnest and sincere follower of the Christian religion. The embodiment of love and sympathy herself, it was natural for her to believe in the God of Love and to worship Him in outward forms, as well as in her secret soul. It was the deep and earnest fervour of religion in her heart, which rendered her music so unusual and so inspiring. There never was, is not and never can be greatness in any art where religious feeling is lacking.

There must be the consciousness of the Infinite, in the mind which produces infinite results.

Though the artist be gifted beyond all other men, though he toil unremittingly, so long as he says, "Behold what I, the gifted and tireless toiler, can achieve," he shall produce but mediocre and ephemeral results. It is when he says reverently, "Behold what powers greater than I shall achieve through me, the instrument," that he becomes great and men marvel at his power.

Joy's religious nature found expression in her music, and so something more than a harmony of beautiful sounds impressed her hearers.

The first severe blow to her faith in the church as a divine institution, was when her rector and her lover left her alone in the hour of her darkest trials, because he knew the story of her mother's life. His hesitancy to make her his wife she understood, but his absolute desertion of her at such a time, seemed inconsistent with his calling as a disciple of the Christ.

The second blow came in her dismissal from the position of organist at the Beryngford Church, after the presence of the Baroness in the town.

A disgust for human laws, and a bitter resentment towards society took possession of her. When a gentle and loving nature is roused to anger and indignation, it is often capable of extremes of action; and Arthur Stuart had made his proposition of flight to Joy Irving in an hour when her high-wrought emotions and intensely strung nerves made any desperate act possible to her. The sight of his face, with its evidences of severe suffering, awoke all her smouldering passion for the man; and the thought that he was ready to tread his creed under his feet and to defy society for her sake, stirred her with a wild joy. God had seemed very far away, and human love was very precious; too precious to be thrown away in obedience to any man-made law.

But somehow this morning God seemed nearer, and the consciousness of what she had promised to do terrified her. Disturbed by her thoughts, she turned towards her toilet-table and caught sight of the letter of dismissal from the church committee. It acted upon her like an electric shock. Resentment and indignation re-enthroned themselves in her bosom.

"Is it to cater to the opinions and prejudices of people like THESE that I hesitate to take the happiness offered me?" she cried, as she tore the letter in bits and cast it beneath her feet. Arthur Stuart appeared to her once more, in the light of a delivering angel. Yes, she would go with him to the ends of the earth. It was her inheritance to lead a lawless life. Nothing else was possible for her. God must see how she had been hemmed in by circumstances, how she had been goaded and driven from the paths of peace and purity where she had wished to dwell. God was not a man, and He would be merciful in judging her.

She sent her landlady two months' rent in advance, and notice of her departure, and set hurriedly about her preparations.

Twenty-five years before, when Berene Dumont disappeared from Beryngford, she had, quite unknown to herself, left one devoted though humble friend behind, who sincerely mourned her absence.

Mrs Connor liked to be spoken of as "the wash-lady at the Palace." Yet proud as she was of this appellation, she was not satisfied with being an excellent laundress. She was a person of ambitions. To be the owner of a lodging-house, like the Baroness, was her leading ambition, and to possess a "peany" for her young daughter Kathleen was another.

She kept her mind fixed on these two achievements, and she worked always for those two results. And as mind rules matter, so the laundress became in time the landlady of a comfortable and respectable lodging-house, and in its parlour a piano was the chief object of furniture.

Kathleen Connor learned to play; and at last to the joy of the lodgers, she married and bore her "peany" away with her. During the time when Mrs Connor was the ambitious "wash-lady" at the Palace, Berene Dumont came to live there; and every morning when the young woman carried the tray down to the kitchen after having served the Baroness with her breakfast, she offered Mrs Connor a cup of coffee and a slice of toast.

This simple act of thoughtfulness from the young dependant touched the Irishwoman's tender heart and awoke her lasting gratitude. She had heard Berene's story, and she had been prepared to mete out to her that disdainful dislike which Erin almost invariably feels towards France. Realising that the young widow was by birth and breeding above the station of housemaid, Mrs Connor and the servants had expected her to treat them with the same lofty airs which the Baroness made familiar to her servants. When, instead, Berene toasted the bread for Mrs Connor, and poured the coffee and placed it on the kitchen table with her own hands, the heart of the wash-lady melted in her ample breast. When the heart of the daughter of Erin melts, it permeates her whole being; and Mrs Connor became a secret devotee at the shrine of Miss Dumont.

She had never entertained cordial feelings toward the Baroness. When a society lady—especially a titled one—enters into competition with working people, and yet refuses to associate with them, it always incites their enmity. The working population of Beryngford, from the highest to the lowest grades, felt a sense of resentment toward the Baroness, who in her capacity of landlady still maintained the airs of a grand dame, and succeeded in keeping her footing with some of the most fashionable people in the town.

Added to these causes of dislike, the Baroness was, like many wealthier people, excessively close in her dealings with working folk, haggling over a few cents or a few moments of wasted time, while she was generosity itself in association with her equals.

Mrs Connor, therefore, felt both pity and sympathy for Miss Dumont, whose position in the Palace she knew to be a difficult one; and when Preston Cheney came upon the scene the romantic mind of the motherly Irishwoman fashioned a future for the young couple which would have done credit to the pen of a Mrs Southworth.

Mr Cheney always had a kind word for the laundress, and a tip as well; and when Mrs Connor's dream of seeing him act the part of the Prince and Berene the Cinderella of a modern fairy story, ended in the disappearance of Miss Dumont and the marriage of Mr Cheney to Mabel Lawrence, the unhappy wash-lady mourned unceasingly.

Ten years of hard, unremitting toil and rigid economy passed away before Mrs Connor could realise her ambition of becoming a landlady in the purchase of a small house which contained but four rooms, three of which were rented to lodgers. The increase in the value of her property during the next five years, left the fortunate speculator with a fine profit when she sold her house at the end of that time, and rented a larger one; and as she was an excellent financier, it was not strange that, at the time Joy Irving appeared on the scene, "Mrs Connor's apartments" were as well and favourably known in Beryngford, if not as distinctly fashionable, as the Palace had been more than twenty years ago.

So it was under the roof of her mother's devoted and faithful mourner that the unhappy young orphan had found a home when she came to hide herself away from all who had ever known her.

The landlady experienced the same haunting sensation of something past and gone when she looked on the girl's beautiful face, which had so puzzled the Baroness; a something which drew and attracted the warm heart of the Irishwoman, as the magnet draws the steel. Time and experience had taught Mrs Connor to be discreet in her treatment of her tenants; to curb her curiosity and control her inclination to sociability. But in the case of Miss Irving she had found it impossible to refrain from sundry kindly acts which were not included in the terms of the contract. Certain savoury dishes found their way mysteriously to Miss Irving's menage, and flowers appeared in her room as if by magic, and in various other ways the good heart and intentions of Mrs Connor were unobtrusively expressed toward her favourite tenant. Joy had taken a suite of four rooms, where, with her maid, she lived in modest comfort and complete retirement from the social world of Beryngford, save as the close connection of the church with Beryngford society rendered her, in the position of organist, a participant in many of the social features of the town. While Joy was in the midst of her preparations for departure, Mrs Connor made her appearance with swollen eyes and red, blistered face.

"And it's the talk of that ould witch of a Baroness, may the divil run away with her, that is drivin' ye away, is it?" she cried excitedly; "and it's not Mrs Connor as will consist to the daughter of your mother, God rest her soul, lavin' my house like this. To think that I should have had ye here all these years, and never known ye to be her child till now, and now to see ye driven away by the divil's own! But if it's the fear of not being able to pay the rint because ye've lost your position, ye needn't lave for many a long day to come. It's Mrs Connor would only be as happy as the queen herself to work her hands to the bone for ye, remembering your darlint of a mother, and not belavin' one word against her, nor ye."

So soon as Joy could gain possession of her surprised senses, she calmed the weeping woman and began to question her.

"My good woman," she said, "what are you talking about? Did you ever know my mother, and where did you know her?"

"In the Palace, to be sure, as they called the house of that imp of Satan, the Baroness. I was the wash-lady there, for it's not Mrs Conner the landlady as is above spakin' of the days when she wasn't as high in the world as she is now; and many is the cheerin' cup of coffee or tay from your own mother's hand, that I've had in the forenoon, to chirk me up and put me through my washing, bless her sweet face; and niver have I forgotten her; and niver have I ceased to miss her and the fine young man that took such an interest in her and that I'm as sure loved her, in spite of his marrying the Judge's spook of a daughter, as I am that the Holy Virgin loves us all; and it's a foine man that your father must have been, but young Mr Cheney was foiner."

So little by little Joy drew the story from Mrs Connor and learned the name of the mysterious father, so carefully guarded from her in Mrs Irving's manuscript, the father at whose funeral services she had so recently officiated as organist.

And strangest and most startling of all, she learned that Arthur Stuart's insane wife was her half-sister.

Added to all this, Joy was made aware of the nature of the reports which the Baroness had been circulating about her; and her feeling of bitter resentment and anger toward the church committee was modified by the knowledge that it was not owing to the shadow on her birth, but to the false report of her own evil life, that she had been asked to resign.

After Mrs Connor had gone, Joy was for a long time in meditation, and then turned in a mechanical manner to her delayed task. Her book of "Impressions" lay on a table close at hand.

And as she took it up the leaves opened to the sentence she had written three years before, after her talk with the rector about Marah Adams.

"It seems to me I could not love a man who did not seek to lead me higher; the moment he stood below me and asked me to descend, I should realise he was to be pitied, not adored!"

She shut the book and fell on her knees in prayer; and as she prayed a strange thing happened. The room filled with a peculiar mist, like the smoke which is illuminated by the brilliant rays of the morning sun; and in the midst of it a small square of intense rose-coloured light was visible. This square grew larger and larger, until it assumed the size and form of a man, whose face shone with immortal glory. He smiled and laid his hand on Joy's head. "Child, awake," he said, and with these words vast worlds dawned upon the girl's sight. She stood above and apart from her grosser body, untrammelled and free; she saw long vistas of lives in the past through which she had come to the present; she saw long vistas of lives in the future through which she must pass to gain the experience which would lead her back to God. An ineffable peace and serenity enveloped her. The divine Presence seemed to irradiate the place in which she stood—she felt herself illuminated, transfigured, sanctified by the holy flame within her.

When she came back to the kneeling form by the couch, and rose to her feet, all the aspect of life had changed for her.



CHAPTER XXI



Joy Irving had unpacked her trunks and set her small apartment to rights, when the postman's ring sounded, and a moment later a letter was slipped under her door.

She picked it up, and recognised Arthur Stuart's penmanship. She sat down, holding the unopened letter in her hands.

"It is Arthur's message, appointing a time and place for our meeting," she said to herself. "How long ago that strange interview with him seems!—yet it was only yesterday. How utterly the whole of life has changed for me since then! The universe seems larger, God nearer, and life grander. I am as one who slept and dreamed of darkness and sorrow, and awakes to light and joy."

But when she opened the envelope and read the few hastily written lines within, an exclamation of surprise escaped her lips. It was a brief note from Arthur Stuart and began abruptly without an address (a manner more suggestive of strong passion than any endearing words).

"The first item which my eye fell upon in the telegraphic column of the morning paper, was the death of my wife in the Retreat for the Insane. I leave by the first express to bring her body here for burial.

"A merciful providence has saved us the necessity of defying the laws of God or man, and opened the way for me to claim you before all the world as my worshipped wife so soon as propriety will permit.

"I shall see you at any hour you may indicate after to-morrow, for a brief interview.

"ARTHUR EMERSON STUART."

Joy held the letter in her hand a long time, lost in profound reflection. Then she sat down to her desk and wrote three letters; one was to Mrs Lawrence; one to the chairman of the church committee, who had requested her resignation; the third was to Mr Stuart, and read thus:

"My Dear Mr Stuart,—Many strange things have occurred to me since I saw you. I have learned the name of my father, and this knowledge reveals the fact to me that your unfortunate wife was my half-sister. I have learned, too, that the loss of my position here as organist is not due to the narrow prejudice of the committee regarding the shadow on my birth, but to malicious stories put in circulation by Mrs Lawrence, relating to me.

"Infamous and libellous tales regarding my life have been told, and must be refuted. I have written to Mrs Lawrence demanding a letter from her, clearing my personal character, or giving her the alternative of appearing in court to answer the charge of defamation of character. I have also written to the church committee requesting them to meet me here in my apartments to-morrow, and explain their demand for my resignation.

"I now write to you my last letter and my farewell.

"In the overwrought and desperate mood in which you found me, it did not seem a sin for me to go away with the man who loved me and whom I loved, before false ideas of life and false ideas of duty made him the husband of another. Conscious that your wife was a hopeless lunatic whose present or future could in no way be influenced by our actions, I reasoned that we wronged no one in taking the happiness so long denied us.

"The last three years of my life have been full of desolation and sorrow. From the day my mother died, the stars of light which had gemmed the firmament for me, seemed one by one to be obliterated, until I stood in utter darkness. You found me in the very blackest hour of all—and you seemed a shining sun to me.

"Yet so soon as my tired brain and sorrow-worn heart were able to think and reason, I realised that it was not the man I had worshipped as an ideal, who had come to me and asked me to lower my standard of womanhood. It was another and less worthy man—and this other was to be my companion through time, and perhaps eternity. When I learned that your insane wife was my sister, and that knowing this fact you yet planned our flight, an indescribable feeling of repulsion awoke in my heart.

"I confess that this arose more from a sentiment than a principle. The relationship of your wife to me made the contemplated sin no greater, but rendered it more tasteless.

"Had I gone away with you as I consented to do, the world would have said, she but follows her fatal inheritance—like mother like daughter. There were some bitter rebellious hours, when that thought came to me. But to-day light has shone upon me, and I know there is a law of Divine Heredity which is greater and more powerful than any tendency we derive from parents or grandparents. I have believed much in creeds all my life; and in the hour of great trials I found I was leaning on broken reeds. I have now ceased to look to men or books for truth—I have found it in my own soul. I acknowledge no unfortunate tendencies from any earthly inheritance; centuries of sinful or weak ancestors are as nothing beside the God within. The divine and immortal ME is older than my ancestral tree; it is as old as the universe. It is as old as the first great Cause of which it is a part. Strong with this consciousness, I am prepared to meet the world alone, and unafraid from this day onward. When I think of the optimistic temperament, the good brain, and the vigorous body which were naturally mine, and then of the wretched being who was my legitimate sister, I know that I was rightly generated, however unfortunately born, just as she was wrongly generated though legally born.

"My father, I am told, married into a family whose crest is traced back to the tenth century. I carry a coat-of-arms older yet—the Cross; it dates back eighteen hundred years—yes, many thousand years, and so I feel myself the nobler of the two. Had you been more of a disciple of Christ, and less of a disciple of man, you would have realised this truth long ago, as I realise it to-day. No man should dare stand before his fellows as a revealer of divine knowledge until he has penetrated the inmost recesses of his own soul, and found God's holy image there; and until he can show others the way to the same wonderful discovery. The God you worshipped was far away in the heavens, so far that he could not come to you and save you from your baser self in the hour of temptation. But the true God has been miraculously revealed to me. He dwells within; one who has found Him, will never debase His temple.

"Though there is no legal obstacle now in the path to our union, there is a spiritual one which is insurmountable. I NO LONGER LOVE YOU. I am sorry for you, but that is all. You belonged to my yesterday—you can have no part in my to-day. The man who tempted me in my weak hour to go lower, could not help me to go higher. And my face is set toward the heights.

"I must prove to that world that a child born under the shadow of shame, and of two weak, uncontrolled parents, can be virtuous, strong, brave and sensible. That she can conquer passion and impulse, by the use of her divine inheritance of will; and that she can compel the respect of the public by her discreet life and lofty ideals.

"I shall stay in this place until I have vindicated my name and character from every aspersion cast upon them. I shall retain my position of organist, and retain it until I have accumulated sufficient means to go abroad and prepare myself for the musical career in which I know I can excel. I am young, strong and ambitious. My unusual sorrows will give me greater power of character if I accept them as spiritual tonics—bitter but strengthening.

"Farewell, and may God be with you.

"Joy Irving."

When the rector of St Blank's returned from the Beryngford Cemetery, where he had placed the body of his wife beside her father, he found this letter lying on his table in the hotel.

THE END