His face grew suddenly white, as he said, "Do you love him, Claire?"

She did not look away from him. "If I did, would it concern you?"

He took one step toward her, then stopped.

"Yes, it would," he answered.

Her anger almost mastered her, but she controlled herself.

"Philip, are we two irrational animals going to spoil everything? I had hoped you might at least allow our companionship to live."

He looked at her without answering. Finally, he choked, "Don't—don't, Claire, I have the right to know."

"If I promise to tell you when there is anything to tell, will you be satisfied?" She felt no scruple of conscience at her pretense of indifference to Lawrence, only a sense of protection for him. She did not know from what she was protecting him, but the feeling gave her a strange pleasure.

"I will," Philip returned, simply.

"And in the mean time will you help me pull him out of his slough of despond?" she asked, smiling with the old, frank, intimate manner.

"Surely I will, though I confess I do not see the way."

"Then shall we go at once and begin our cheering process, my friend?" she said, as though she were conferring a favor by the use of the word.

He winced at her immediate application of his promise.

"Perhaps we would better," he answered sadly, and turned toward the cabin.

As she walked by his side she had already dismissed him from her attention and was busy planning what she might do to make Lawrence happy.

When they entered the cabin, Claire looked eagerly about the room. As she glanced around, her face clouded. Lawrence was gone. His coat and hat were not on the rack, and the cane which he had carved one day from a stick which she had brought him from the woods was also missing.

Claire walked slowly into the room, her mind filled with an unaccountable apprehension.

"Why, how abandoned the place seems without Lawrence! Where is he, I wonder?" She tried to appear casual.

Philip followed her in and placed a chair for her. His mind, already touched with the potential jealousy that Claire's talk had begun, leaped ahead at her words and he felt more than ever doubtful of her attitude toward Lawrence. Though he quickly dispelled his fear, the thought left behind, as such things do, the readier soil for a stronger weed to spring up in.

"He has gone out for a walk, I suppose. Doubtless, he will be back soon." His voice was indifferent. "Will you not sit down, Claire? You stand there looking about you as though you had lost something."

She was on the point of saying she had, but checked herself, and accepted the chair.

"It's so unusual. He never did this before." Claire forced a smile.

"Well, he will be the better for it; I am glad that he has gone out," Philip answered.

"I know, but it is so difficult for him to find his way through the snow," she said. "He told me it muffles sounds until he is almost helpless in it. His feet can't feel the ground, and he doesn't know which way to turn."

"He cannot possibly go far, and he cannot get lost." Philip's tone was becoming a little edged.

"All the same, it worries me to have him out this way."

Philip started toward the door.

"Shall I go search for him?" His voice, unknown to himself, was heavy.

Claire glanced at him quickly. Her intuition told her he was jealous, and she saw he was angry. She wanted to shout at him, "Go find Lawrence!" and she was surprised at the sudden panicky nervousness that seized her. But she rose calmly and crossed to the fireplace, saying as she sat down, "No, thank you; I think he is able to take care of himself."

Philip also seated himself.

"I think he is," he said. "Certainly he thinks so, and comes near enough to proving his assertion."

She was both angry and pleased with his words.

"I never saw a man less handicapped by misfortune," she remarked.

"He does do very well."

"Lawrence seems all capable sense-nerves, and he is so very efficient with his touch. What a keen appreciation of beauty he has!"

"I think he does remarkably well."

"In the hills he used to describe scenes to me, and do it accurately just from their sound; running water and wind in the trees," she went on, not noticing Philip's short replies.

"Yes, that is quite surprising."

"He certainly has taught me a great deal about blindness."

"Association with him does do that."

"Do you know, I believe he is one of the most unusual men I have ever known."

Philip rose quickly.

"Doubtless. He is not the only topic of conversation our friendship permits, is he, Claire?"

She looked up at him, and rose immediately, her eyes flashing.

"I think you are more selfish with your theories of altruism than he with his egoism."

Philip looked quietly back at her.

"Perhaps I am where the woman I love is concerned."

Claire turned away and walked angrily toward her room.

"I see you can't maintain a friendship," she exclaimed.

"Meaning, you cannot." Philip's voice was bitter.

She turned quickly and looked at him.

"What do you mean?" she asked him, fearing.

"I mean that you are unfair. You ask me not to talk of my love, you wish to talk friendship, while you are forcing me by your every word and act to think of my own misery."

Claire stood aghast before him. His words seemed to her to be an accusation so grossly false that she was stunned beyond anger.

"I don't understand," she said anxiously.

"You ought to understand. I love you, I cannot help but love you, fight it as I will. You say you cannot love me because of your husband. Yet your talk is not of your husband, but of this blind man. You say you desire friendship, yet you allow me all that a woman allows her accepted suitor."

Claire was appalled. She stared at him in amazement, faltering.

"Why, Philip, I—what is the matter? I don't do any such thing."

He laughed.

"Of course not," he replied. "You look at me with that warm light in your eyes, because you think I am not human. I am a mere duenna, a chaperon, perhaps."

She sank into a chair and covered her face. "I didn't think," she moaned, and could say no more. A thousand memories of her intimate treatment of Philip swept through her mind. She had considered him as one of her own family, without thought, without intent, because she had believed so strongly in his assurance of friendship. After a pause, she gathered her thoughts.

"Philip, I may have done as you say," she spoke slowly, "but it was not because I was not conscious of your manhood. It was because I thought you stronger than you are. I believed you could be my friend and not ask more."

He stood quietly looking at her where she sat.

"And what of him?" he asked, steadily.

"I am worried about him because he is blind, nothing more." She lied, looking straight into his eyes, then rose and stepped behind the curtain.

"Claire," he almost sang. "I am deeply, humbly, a thousand times sorry. You cannot know how your talk of Lawrence made me wild. I am a fool, I will admit, but I cannot think of your loving him, blind, selfish, egoistic, intolerant of other people, I cannot."

"You needn't," she returned, coldly. Her whole soul was filled with rage. She was recalling that he had said her eyes were alight when she looked at him, and she told herself that it was not true.

"Won't you give me a chance to show myself as I am, Claire? I want to prove to you that I am not a selfish beast."

She thought of Lawrence's cynical view of Philip's sentiments, and she laughed.

Philip groaned, and then said again, "Aren't you fair enough to do that, Claire?"

"And what will you read in my eyes next?" she inquired icily.

"Whatever is there?" he answered.

"But your imagination spoils your sight," she returned.

"Perhaps. I will not deny that I am not myself where you are concerned. But I ask only for one more trial. And I will do my best."

Claire was growing more and more worried about Lawrence. What could have happened to him?

"Then go and find Lawrence," she said suddenly.



CHAPTER XIII.

FAINT HEART AND FAIR LADY.

Claire heard Philip leave the house, and she sat down on her bed to wait and think. It seemed ages that she sat there, her imagination busy with a hundred possible calamities. When she finally heard the door open she was almost afraid to look.

"Lawrence!" Her voice was full of warm gladness.

He was hanging his hat in its place.

"Hello, Claire. Back, are you?" His voice held the impersonal, sullen note that he used of late. "Where is Philip?"

"Why, didn't he find you?"

Lawrence was immediately angry. He thought, "Why should Philip be hunting for me? I don't need his care. Can't I even go out without a guardian?"

"I didn't see him," he returned, aloud.

"I sent him to find you." She was standing looking at him, her whole figure expressing love and relief at his return.

He was too angry to catch the fine warmth of her voice, and his inability to see handicapped him more at that moment than at any time in his life.

"I sent him to find you," she said again.

"He didn't. I came back as I went, alone."

"Lawrence, what is the matter with you?" she asked, pleadingly, with tears in her voice.

He felt the emotion in her words, and was suddenly contrite. If he had known it, he was acting like the sentimentalists whom he ridiculed, but he suffered from the egotist's fate, he did not recognize his own failing.

"I don't know that there is anything the matter, Claire. It angered me to think that you still imagine that because I am blind I need a guardian," he said, dropping into a chair.

She came over toward him, impulsively.

"That isn't the idea at all," she said, still very worried. "It was simply that you told me yourself that you were helpless in the snow."

"I didn't ask to be cared for," he snapped.

"I wasn't caring for you—nor about you," she retorted, in sudden irritation. "I didn't want you to be lost, that's all."

"I should think you'd be glad to see me gone." He was a little ashamed of his own words, but he did not try to remedy the speech.

"What do you mean?"

He smiled ironically. "Even a blind man sometimes sees too much of lovers."

Claire sank into a chair and struggled against the starting sobs. It seemed to her that her whole life was becoming one continual argument wherein she was accused and in return forced to demand explanations.

"What in the world do you mean?" she faltered. "Are you saying that Philip and I are lovers?"

"Aren't you?"

"Of course not! It isn't like you to say that. And what if we were?"

"It wouldn't be any of my business, would it?" He was bitter.

"I suppose not," she said, weakly.

"You needn't be hesitant about admitting it. It's true," he went on. "Why shouldn't it be? I am a mere piece of excess baggage which you are too kind-hearted to eliminate. I know that, too. Why shouldn't you eliminate me?" He smiled, satirically. "If I were Philip Ortez, loving you and loved in return, I would feel like killing the blind man, whose presence hampered."

She stared at him, wondering if he were in earnest.

"Then it's fortunate that you haven't the opportunity to feel that way."

"Obviously." He laughed, sullenly. "I sha'n't, because you couldn't love a blind man."

Claire only sat and looked at him, thrilled with the knowledge that he was about to tell her he loved her. She was trembling and desperately afraid of herself. She moved uneasily, and against her will; her lips said, "I could love a blind man, Lawrence."

He sat up and clenched his hands together quickly. The tone of her voice in itself was a direct confession. But his deep skepticism of blindness would not let him believe that he was right.

"Do you mean that you do love me?" he demanded.

She wanted to say "Yes," but she thought of Philip and was afraid of what he might do, should he learn of her lie. Then, too, there was her resolution to go back to Howard. Strange that her long-planned friendly explanation of her own attitude did not occur to her, but it did not.

Lawrence rose and came toward her, his hands out. He was determined to know, once and for all. The gathering emotion in his breast was growing into an unbearable pain.

"Claire," he said, coming nearer and nearer. "Could you love me?"

His hands were almost to her. She saw them coming; terror, love, happiness, anguish, and the desire to be his paralyzed her will. She did not move.

"Yes," she whispered, "I could."

He put his arms around her and lifted her until she was crushed against him.

"Do you love me, Claire?" he asked, tensely.

She did not answer, but her head sank against his shoulder.

Outside the cabin, she heard Philip's step in the snow.

"No!" she cried frantically, filled with dread. "No, no! Let me go!"

Lawrence, too, heard, and released her, stepping back indifferently, as though just going toward a chair.

The door opened, and Philip entered.

"Oh, you're back, I see." The artist was coldly cordial in his greeting.

"And I see you, which is more important," Philip laughed.

"I suppose so." Lawrence sat down, thoughtfully. "Claire has just scolded me for going out. She doesn't like to have me add to the bother I am already."

Claire was still under the spell of her own emotion, and she resented Lawrence's sang-froid. He was as cold as a block of stone. Her heart cried out against him because he could not see why she had said "No" to him, because he believed her! She wanted to cry, but did not dare.

"I told him we were worried," she said, indifferently.

"So we were." Philip was cheerful and friendly.

Lawrence buried himself from them both, and sat brooding, clothed in the blackness that blindness brought when it suddenly loomed before him as the wall between him and his life's desires. The brief instant Claire had been in his arms had made him feel that his life was intolerable without her, and that blindness was the curse of a double living death. She had told him that she did not love him. She had struggled to be free.

Lawrence failed to read Claire aright because he had not seen her, and because his blindness made him uncertain of himself.

That was the truth of it all, the awful truth of his life.

He was always uncertain of himself because he was afraid of blindness. He strutted, boasted, lied, and above all pretended to himself that he believed his hard philosophy because he was afraid, afraid of failing to do the things he wanted to do. He saw himself clearly now, he was a coward, a deceiving ape, a monkey caught in the terror of tangling roots, and denying it. He barked like a frightened dog, at the thing that was his master. He was gripped by life, tortured by life, denied death by life, and cheated by life of living. His imagination, fired by his passion, leaped into play, and he felt himself a thousand times a slave, a chained prisoner in the hand of circumstance.

Philip was laughing gaily, and talking to Claire, who listened, answered, and was all the while lost in her own thought. When he had entered, Philip had looked quickly at the two to see if there was aught between them, and had found Lawrence colder, more despondent than ever. He told himself that Lawrence had evidently pleaded with Claire for her love and been denied. At least, this blind man had not been successful, and Philip could afford to be good-humored. The more agreeable he was, the more Claire would turn to him from that dark, ungracious form yonder. His would be the victory of pleasant manners. Therefore he talked, gladly, smilingly, while Claire listened, or seemed to listen.

She was rebellious at the fear which had made her cry "No" to Lawrence, and at the same time glad that she had done so, afraid of the future, exasperated with Philip for coming in at the supreme moment, and angry with Lawrence for his stupidity.

Perhaps these tangled relations might have been cleared had it not been for a piece of folly more stupendous than any they had yet experienced. This event occurred the day after Lawrence's walk in the snow.

Philip had stepped out for a few minutes to look at a near-by trap, and Claire and the artist were left alone for the first time since her denial. She wanted him to renew his suit, feared that he would, and sat waiting for him to speak.

But he remained silent, and at last she said, "Lawrence."

"Well?" He did not move.

The psychology of woman has been too often commented upon and attempted by those who thought they could explain. Why Claire was doing and saying what she did, she herself could not tell.

"Lawrence, don't you ever, ever act as you did yesterday again."

He smiled. "It would be dangerous if your gallant should come in less slowly." He was filled with a desire to hurt her.

Claire was angry with him for saying what was so utterly far from her mind and so different from what she wanted him to say.

"If my gallant should come in," she thrust coldly, "he would scarcely appreciate the melodrama you are playing."

Lawrence sat up with a jerk, his rage near the boiling point.

"What do you mean?" he demanded. "I have not interfered with your delightful episode, have I?"

"No, and you couldn't. I mean that my husband—he is my lover—for I know that is what you intend by 'gallant'—would scarcely appreciate the type of man who mopes and abuses the woman who does not care to lie in his arms."

Lawrence sat still, while a fierce, uncontrollable rage consumed him. He felt that to take this woman and whip her into submission would be a pleasure. He thought of the lash he had in his studio at home and wished it were in his hand. With the thought he rose and stepped swiftly toward Claire, his teeth set.

She saw him, and rose.

"I have one way of showing you who is master," he began, and stopped.

She had stepped forward and was standing almost against him.

"Even blindness does not allow you the freedom to threaten."

He shrank back and dropped once more into his chair.

Claire was talking rapidly, savagely. Later she was to be thrown into a despairing self-hate that kept her many a night in tears, but now she went on.

"Do you think I will overlook everything in you because I pity you? There have been times when your impositions, so carelessly thrust upon me, because you were selfish, because you knew I must accept them from you, were almost unbearable. The touch of your thief-trained hands to steal from everything its beauty and self-respect has galled me beyond all endurance. My body has received its last vile grasp from you."

She stopped, appalled at his expression. She did not know, neither of them knew, that love, the ever-changing impulse of creation within men and women, speaks its desire through bitter scorn and abuse, when softer words are too slow in finding their way.

He was sitting there, white, anguished, cowering under her tongue, his whole life shaken. Her words made him feel that the thing she said was true. He had always feared it, realizing that in a measure it was inevitable, and his great strength was now turned against himself, against his bitter handicap, and he was in that tremendous upheaval that requires a rebuilding of one's faith. His belief in himself was broken. His belief in his power was gone. Coming after weeks of thought and fear about blindness, Claire's words tore him asunder and made him feel that there was nothing for him but abject misery and dependence upon charity.

Instinctively, his hand went up as if to shield him from a blow, and he murmured, "For God's sake, Claire!"

There was to come a time, later, when experience would have taught him that there is a wild strain in the nature of human hearts which abuses out of a desire to be conquered. He did not yet realize that he had spoken truly when he said that this woman had hidden in her the savage warring sexed tumult of all the struggling ages.

She saw him there, his hand up, and suddenly her emotion changed. It was love, still love crying out for expression, but now she was all compassion, tenderness, and fear. She read in his face what she had done, and her heart was gray with the pain at her own failure.

Now all love for her was buried, perhaps dead, under his shattered selfhood, slain in the wrecking earthquake that she had brought to pass with the ardor of her passion. She had meant to sting him into taking her in his arms and forcing her to love him, and instead—"Oh, God!" she whispered, and slipped behind the curtain to throw herself on her bed and weep with heart wrung by self-condemnation and loving pity for the man whom she had clubbed with his own dread weakness. She had shattered into chaos the strong soul of the man she loved, with the only weapon he would have felt, and she realized now that it was her love, her desire to be his, to be his utterly, that had led her to do it.

Lawrence was too hurt to move. His mind repeated again and again the words she had spoken. He kept saying to himself: "Blindness has made me that, an egotist beggar." He did not reproach Claire. She had swept him too far from his habitual moorings for that. There was no rebellion against her, none, indeed, against life. Over him rolled wave after wave of self-contempt, distrust, and anguish that shook him with an agony that only the assured man knows when the one he loves most of all on earth strikes dead his faith in himself. He thought of a multitude of things that stabbed anew, but not once did he move in the interminable period that passed before Philip returned.

When he did come, the Spaniard was amazed at the crouching, white-faced man whom he found before a dying fire. There was something so sad in the blind face that Philip felt no suspicion and no anger. He looked for Claire, but she was not visible. He stirred the fire and set about preparing supper while his mind began digging at the problem which he saw in the attitude of the man there in the chair. Claire did not come out to help. She was too exhausted from the storm that had swept over her. In her bed she could hardly smother the scream that kept rising to her lips. She wanted to spring up and cry aloud to Lawrence for forgiveness. She was scarcely aware of Philip as he moved about.

She could have thrown herself at Lawrence's feet and pleaded with him. She was discovering that her whole wild outbreak was a strange expression of her physical desire for this man whom she loved, and the discovery made her as self-detesting as she had been violent in her outbreak. It seemed to her that there was nothing, nothing she would not do to make amends to Lawrence for what she had said. She wanted to tell him what it had been that prompted her, but she dared not lest in revulsion at her viciousness he turn on her and kill her.

"God, God," she muttered, "what have I done!"

Philip was calling her to supper. She steadied her voice, and said humbly: "I can't come out. I'm not feeling very well. Go on without me, please."

She heard him speak to Lawrence, and she strained her ears to catch the answering movement toward the table, but there was none. At last Philip spoke again in a voice that was full of anxiety: "Lawrence, what in God's name has happened?"

Lawrence was moving now, and she waited with bated breath for his answer. He walked to the table and sat down. His voice was heavy. "I've found myself out, Philip. That's all. I know what I am."

There was a moment of silence. Claire covered her mouth with her hand to suppress a cry. She wanted to shout: "No, no, no, not that, but what I am, my beloved, my adored one."

"What do you mean?" Philip's voice seemed stern.

"I mean that I am indebted to you and Claire for the truth I needed."

Behind the curtain Claire turned on her face and burst into sobs.

Philip arose abruptly. "Lawrence," he said quietly, "I do not know what has happened to you this afternoon; I do not know what you mean; but this I do know: I am deeply sorry if anything I have done or said has made you feel that you are an unwelcome guest in my home."

Lawrence stood up and gathered his scattered senses.

"Philip, I beg your pardon, old man. It isn't that at all. The truth is"—and his voice broke—"I have lied to myself and to the world these many years. Much of it hasn't been my fault, but I must pay the price just the same. I am blind. That has led me to a sort of clamorous egoism which carried me on and on until I came to feel that I was really doing something. At last, I know that I am a narrow human parasite, worthless, utterly worthless. A blind, clinging, grasping, vagrant beast, fed upon the mercy of too kind-hearted humanity. I am sorry. It isn't my fault, but it is so."

Philip stood for a few minutes in silence. "You're ill, Lawrence," he said finally. "Get back to yourself if you can. Things do not stay at this point in human abasement. I know of what I speak. I have been through that myself. I cannot say anything comforting. No one can."

They went to bed with but a few commonplace remarks, and the cabin became silent. Lawrence lay awake through that night. Claire, unknown to him, spent her vigil in a great readjustment of her life.



CHAPTER XIV.

PHILIP TO THE RESCUE.

It is always the little things in human relations that have the most far-reaching results. Claire might have avoided much trouble with a few well-chosen words to Lawrence, but her own mental state prevented her from speaking.

On his part, Lawrence was so shaken by her outburst that his love for her was driven deep into his subconscious self, and for the time it lay there dormant. After the sudden volcanic upheaval of his entire universe, he was utterly absorbed in the immediate task of reconstructing his faith in himself. The primitive stages of his thinking did not allow for any relation between himself and the woman who had released the dam of self-abasement. She was unavoidably at hand, reminding him of her speech, and that alone delayed what otherwise would have been an unconscious process.

Claire was not able to forget the intense desire which, she now realized, had prompted her terrible diatribe. Humiliation held her in its throes, and she was reserved, distant, and unnatural toward him.

Philip saw it all, and his mind was filled with conjectures which made him less and less charitable toward Lawrence, more jealous, and more hopeful of a happy issue of his love for Claire. She turned to him eagerly for companionship. Instinctively she sought refuge from her own thoughts—and from Lawrence—by talking to Philip.

The morning after the incident between Lawrence and Claire there had been an austere reserve in the cabin. Claire had fled from the oppressive gloom into the open. Outside Philip joined her, and they walked together in silence. He was determined not to ask Claire what had happened, although he was extending her a silent sympathy which she felt and a little resented.

Lawrence, left alone in the cabin, gave small heed to their departure. He had risen with a frightful headache and a fever. He lay on the bed and thought of his situation, his past life, and his future chances, in bitter, heartrending, self-condemnatory sarcasm which made his condition even less tolerable than it would have been otherwise.

"I am a miserable groveler at the feet of humanity," he thought, "clutching at shrinking shoestrings for a piece of bread in pity's name. If I could see, God, if I only could!"

He thought of all the little things which his blindness made it absolutely necessary for others to do for him, and his excited mind magnified them into colossal proportions. If his landlady in New York had removed a spot from his clothes, as she had often done, that was a proof of his despised state. He fell to imagining that he was unkempt, dirty, disgustingly unclean, and that people had tolerated it because they had pitied him. At last, with a cry of anguish, he thought: "And my work, too, it is a botched mess which they are amused at and do not dare to tell me the truth about. It, too, is a jest that the world is having at my expense." He remembered praise and prizes that he had won in contests with other students, and he was too excited to see the folly of his answer: "That was charity, the award of kindness to me. I know now what they thought—that for a blind man the thing was nearly enough correct to be interesting and quite amusing."

His body felt hot, and he went outside to prowl about in the wind and snow, like a despairing beast. His mind kept up its terrible work, and he did not notice the continual drop in temperature. Round and round the cabin he walked, instead of going into the forest, as he would have done the day before. In his mind was a sudden doubt of his own ability, and he said that Claire had been right to keep him in. She was more aware of his pitiable weakness than he. At last, however, from sheer weariness he went inside. He was chilled through, but instead of rebuilding the fire and warming himself, he rolled up in a blanket and lay on the bed, chilling and burning by turns.

In the mean time Claire and Philip were discussing the man in the cabin. Philip had finally broken the silence by saying: "Claire, you needn't feel so about whatever has happened. Remember he is blind and must be treated less critically than other men."

She knew that that was just what had made Lawrence so deadly white when she had spoken, and it filled her with sickening pain. She answered unsteadily: "That isn't true. It isn't Lawrence, anyway, it's myself who should be condemned."

Philip was thoughtful. "It is like you to take the blame on yourself. You are so kind-hearted that way."

In her present state, his words seemed like a reproach. "Philip, don't," she said sadly. "I know better than that."

He persisted. "No, you do not. You are too sympathetic, and you let your heart get the better of you."

"I wish you wouldn't talk that way," she repeated. "You wouldn't, if you knew the truth."

"Of course, I do not know what happened," he said, "but I do know you—even better than you know yourself."

"Do you know what I've done?"

"No, and I do not care. It was right, I am sure. The queen can do no wrong." He was intensely serious.

"Isn't there any common sense left in you, Philip?" she railed. "Have you gone clear back into medieval nonsense in your feeling toward me? I tell you, you are indulging in foolishness."

"Am I?" He smiled. "Well, if that is the best I have to give—"

"I don't want you to give me anything."

"But I cannot help it, neither can you."

"I have killed a man's love before this," she answered bitterly.

"But you cannot kill mine. I love you, whether you love me or not. I am proud to acknowledge my unreturned love."

"As you please." Claire stopped suddenly. "Are we apt to get anywhere with this subject?" she asked ironically.

"I don't know. I earnestly hope so."

She looked at Philip thoughtfully. Perhaps the truth about her own weakness might cure him.

"Suppose I allowed you to love me, and you found that you had won a woman whose passions were her whole life. Suppose she should prove to be a mere bundle of sex, all polished over with other people's ideas, a social manner, and a set of morals which she did not really feel, which were deceiving ornaments hiding her soul. What would you think of your prize?"

"I should not love such a woman. I could not."

"But suppose you were deceived and thought her other than she was."

"I hardly expect such a thing to happen. Why suppose?"

"Because if I were your wife you might find it to be true."

Philip laughed aloud. "Claire, how preposterous! Are you trying to kill my love for you with such terrifying pictures of depravity?"

"I wasn't trying to do anything. I just wanted to know."

"Have you been answered?"

"Yes, you are like all of your type; you are in love with what your own desire chooses as an ideal, and then you shout, 'Behold, I am not a sensual lover!'"

He stared at her in amazement. "What sort of a thing do you think I am?"

She laughed carelessly. "A man. And what do you think I am?"

"A very strange woman, but a dear one," he said earnestly.

"Why strange, Philip?"

"Because you talk of love as Lawrence might."

She winced. "He would know," she said. "He does know, perhaps." She was talking to herself, and her voice was pathetic.

Philip's eyes grew fierce with anger. "What do you mean?"

"Not what your very ideal mind thinks," she said coldly.

He flamed scarlet, and looked away. "Claire," he said softly, "will you never have done stirring up suspicions no man could avoid, and then condemning them?"

"I didn't stir them up," she mocked.

"Who did, then?"

Claire was undergoing a developing reconstruction, but that she did not know. She thought she was degenerating, and the immediate result was to make her careless and ironical.

"Oh, the devil, perhaps," she hazarded.

"What are you, Claire?" Philip demanded hoarsely.

Suddenly her suffering broke into tears. To his utter amazement, she began to cry unrestrainedly.

Over and over she sobbed: "I don't know, I don't know."

For a moment Philip stood motionless, bewildered, then his love and natural tenderness swept over him, and he said tenderly, "Don't, Claire, please."

She only cried harder, weakened the more by his pity. He took her in his arms as he would a child, and comforted her. She was tempted to struggle, but her need for sympathy prevailed, and she did not resist him. He held her in his arms, pouring out his love, his anxiety, his tenderness, and in her momentary condition she listened and made no protest. In her aching mind she kept repeating, "I have killed Lawrence's love with my bestial talk"—and she wanted love. She did not think of her husband. He was too far away. In her present attitude she exalted Lawrence to the unattainable, and, without formulating the thought, she was willing to lie in Philip's arms and take what he could give. They were two of a kind, she thought scornfully. In her bitterness, the bleak, snow-covered land, with its drooping pines, seemed in its cold monotony a fitting background for two such worthless derelicts.

In the Spaniard's mind was but one thought—to comfort Claire and restore her to her usual self. Vaguely he knew that love was already promised by the unresisting body in his arms, but there was no thought of immediately pressing his suit. He petted and talked until she stopped crying, then he stood her on her feet, and said, with a tender laughter in his words: "There, you are all right again. We would better go in. You are cold."

Silently she walked beside him back to the cabin. She was indifferent, she thought, as to whether he did or did not continue his appeals for love. She was under her own deep, unexplained, emotional control which led her forward. She was finding herself, but before she would be safe she would have to throw off a mass of traditional views, beliefs, and teachings. If Philip chose to press his suit while her knowledge of herself still seemed vile and abnormal, she would be surely his. Claire thought herself lost. She had revealed her terrible state to Lawrence, killed his love, filled him with abhorrence, and struck at his life's source.

With silent turmoil in her brain she entered the cabin beside Philip. When she saw Lawrence, a sharp pain went through her. He was white as death save for the red spots that marked his fever. She took off her coat and snow-cap hurriedly.

"Lawrence," she said softly, going toward him.

He lifted his head slightly.

"What is it, Claire?"

"I want to do something for you. You're ill."

His face clouded. "No, thanks," he said. "You've done too much for me already."

"Won't you do anything for yourself?" she begged.

"I'll be all right. It's just a cold, I guess."

Philip came and stood looking down at Lawrence scrutinizingly, while Claire went to the fire and heated water.

"I am going to fill you up with quinin," he announced. "It is never missing from my medicine-chest."

"All right," Lawrence laughed. "It isn't bitter compared to what I'm filling myself with."

"Are you not making a fool of yourself?" Philip asked plainly.

"Yes. I know it. That doesn't keep me from doing it, though."

Claire turned and looked at them, her eyes sternly reproachful toward Philip.

"One can't help thinking," she said. "I can't."

"I shouldn't want you to," Lawrence returned. "Indeed, I'm grateful to you for making me think, too."

"She started you off, did she?" Philip smiled.

Lawrence did not answer, and Philip sat down by the fire where he could watch Claire as she worked.

After a time Lawrence said thoughtfully: "If one could establish some sort of a relation between himself and the ultimate first cause of all this blind snowstorm we call life, things might get shaped with some measure for perspectives."

"Yes," Philip assented. "I manage to establish one, though I confess it isn't clearly logical."

"What is it?" Lawrence asked.

"Simply having faith; hope, if you prefer it."

"But faith in what, and what do you base it on?"

"Oh, on my experience."

"I wonder if we really matter at all to the rest of the scheme," Claire voiced.

"I am inclined to think not," replied Lawrence. "We matter only to ourselves, and what we can do with the universe around us."

"We matter to God, I think," said Philip. "I don't mean in the old accepted sense; but we must matter to Him in some way, perhaps as your statue here matters to you."

Lawrence chuckled weakly. "It mattered tremendously when I was doing it. Now it doesn't in the least matter. I shouldn't care if you burned it as firewood."

"But you must care," Claire protested, feeling that he was losing interest in his work because of her.

"I don't see why. I haven't any real assurance as to its value. It may be good, more likely it isn't; in any case, I have turned it loose to shift for itself. It can survive or not; its doing so is immaterial. Perhaps as immaterial as my existence is to the Great Artist who conceived the botched job called me."

"But, Lawrence, why insist that you don't matter to Him?"

"Oh, because I am scarcely aware of Him at all; indeed, I am not aware of Him, and I am sure He isn't aware of me."

"You have not any way to prove that," declared Philip.

"True, except that I can imaginatively comprehend the size of time and space, and all that is therein. I know my own size, and I can readily imagine that the creator of the whole is no more aware of me than I am, say, of a small worm that may be in the heart of my cherub there."

"We do seem pretty small in the face of the stars," said Claire.

"Yes, and so impossible," added Lawrence. "I didn't realize until to-day how utterly impossible I really am."

"But, impossible or not, here you are," Philip laughed.

"Yes, here I am and there I may be, but in either place I am not especially possible. You are; you can go out and make a definite, independent impression on life; that makes you possible in that you are forcing recognition of power and capability. I can't do that. The impression I make is one of incapability. For myself I am impossible, and for others more so."

"Which has nothing to do with God," said Philip, in his tone a touch of distaste.

Lawrence recognized it and became silent.

Claire made him take the quinin and heated bricks for his feet. Philip went out to cut wood for the fire, leaving her alone with the sick man. She was so full of her own wickedness, as she conceived it, that she dared not tell him her thoughts. She wanted to explain that she loved him, that she had loved him all along, but she could not. She looked at him, and felt sure that he had now no love for her.

Lawrence was trying to follow out in his mind a searching inquiry as to his relation to life. "If I could only establish that," he thought, "I could get myself straight and there would be something to start from. If I knew which way to move!" But he was unable to do any coherent thinking. His head ached, his lips burned with fever, and his body kept him busy with the sensation of pain. It seemed to him that illness made his state more detestable, but it also offered him a chance of escape from the whole drab business. He was quite sure that he wanted to escape, and he would not have believed it if any one had told him that he would resist death to the uttermost; yet deep within him was that will to live which had made him the creative artist. It was working, unknown to him, now, toward the reconstruction he so needed.

He turned restlessly, and muttered something about his foolishness. Claire came and sat beside him silently. She was wondering what would happen if she should tell him of her discovery of herself.

"Claire!" Lawrence spoke. "Is it possible for any one to get his life platform built so that it will stand without that first great plank?"

"What plank?"

"God."

"I don't know."

"It seems to me that you couldn't have shaken me so yesterday if I had been built up right."

"Lawrence," she said piteously, "I didn't mean to do that, to say that."

He waved her words aside. "Never mind, Claire, it did me good. I was not realizing, quite, just what I was. I'm finding it out, and when I get right I'll be all the better for it."

"But you don't know why I did it."

"Yes, I do, but it doesn't matter, anyway. What was behind your words doesn't count so long as you told the truth."

"But it does count, and I didn't tell the truth."

"I'm afraid you did. Please don't try to cover it with kind fibs now."

"I sha'n't, but you don't understand."

"Well, Claire, it doesn't matter, as I said. What is it to me what you do or don't do, so long as you bring me face to face with more truth?"

She thought he was telling her that he cared nothing for her. She did not blame him, yet there was a tiny streak of pride that said, "At least Philip finds me worth while."

"It is simply my own salvation that is involved," Lawrence went on.

"Well, I hope you find it," she said simply.

"I must find it to live," he answered.

"And how do you propose to find it?"

"I don't know. I wish I did."

"You might find it, as you once said, in creative work."

"No, that isn't a salvation. I must have a platform from which to work. Don't you see that, Claire?"

"I don't understand anything about it."

"Pardon me, I didn't intend to force this upon you."

"That isn't what I mean, Lawrence." Her eyes were moist. "What I meant was that you live above me entirely."

"Nonsense," he said wrathfully. "You talk like a silly girl, Claire."

"Do I? Well, I am perhaps less worth while than you think."

"Oh, I guess not," he returned carelessly.

She covered her face with her hands.

"I know you are worth all that I think you are," he continued. "But I am afraid that just now I am too interested in my own salvation to think of you at all correctly."

"Yes," she observed wearily.

She was thinking of Philip as he had comforted her that morning, and his tenderness, compared to this cold statement from Lawrence, seemed attractive beyond measure. She admitted that all hope of Lawrence's loving her was dead, and she said to herself: "It is what I wanted. I can go back to my husband." But she did not want to go back to Howard. She received this discovery calmly. She would never go back. But why shouldn't she? She could not tell for certain. She thought it was because she had found herself unworthy, but deep within her was the knowledge that she no longer loved him. It would be useless to go back to him in any event. He could never be the same to her after hearing of her long months with this blind man in the wilderness.

What months they had been! She thought them over, day by day, and she saw what might have been a great joy sink, after a glimpse, into utter darkness. Before her she saw the endless gray years beside Philip. Yes, she would stay with him. At least he loved her, and she could help him. If she did not love him, what of it? She would be an able wife to him. She could keep him from ever knowing that her heart was away with Lawrence, who would be back in the world at home and have forgotten her.

"Claire!" Lawrence was speaking. "We have certainly reaped a strange harvest from our months of sowing in the wilderness."

"Yes."

"Whatever brought it about?"

"I don't know."

"Perhaps it was fate, that you should teach me where I stand in life."

"Perhaps."

"And perhaps you, too, will find that I have been of some value when we are separated."

"It may be."

"I wish things might have gone differently."

"They didn't."

"No, and they can't. Well, let them be as they are."

"I guess we'll have to, Lawrence."

A few minutes later, when she looked at him, he was asleep.



CHAPTER XV.

UTTER EXHAUSTION.

Claire rose and slipped quietly to her own bed. All the aching pain of her proposed future came over her with its dirty sordidness. She could never stand it, she thought, and clenched her teeth. Well, it was not necessary. When Lawrence was gone, there was the lake. That would be her way out of it all. No one need ever know. The thought of death seemed very sweet to her.

Philip came in, saw Lawrence asleep, and stole across the room to peep in at her. She met his glance.

"I beg your pardon," he murmured.

"Never mind," she answered dully. "Come in if you like."

He hesitated, then stepped through, and let the curtain fall behind him.

"May I sit here?" he asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.

"Why not?" Her voice was colorless. "Only please speak softly. Don't wake Lawrence."

"He'll feel better after his sleep, I think."

"I hope so."

He sat looking down into her dark, clouded eyes. There was something so tragic, so sad, and so submissive in them that he was filled with utter tenderness.

"Claire," he whispered, "what is the matter?"

"Nothing. I'm quite well."

"You look absolutely desolate."

"I don't especially feel so."

"Are you happy?"

"I don't know."

He stooped over her, studying her face. She did not move, only her deep, dark eyes looked up coldly into his. He took the hand which she did not draw away, and whispered: "Claire, let me make you happy."

She did not answer. He bent nearer. Her eyes did not shift from his, she saw that he was going to kiss her, but she did not move. If the whole world had come crashing down upon her, she could not have made the slightest effort to escape.

He pressed his lips against hers. She did not return his kiss, but she did not protest. He slipped his arm around her waist and drew her up. Still she made no objection. He held her more closely, kissing her again and again. She remained impassive, unable to summon sufficient willpower to resist. Besides, had she not decided to be this man's wife?

He was pouring into her ears short, whispered words of endearment, giving his love free rein.

"Claire—Claire," he whispered passionately, "you do love me! Say you love me!"

"Oh, must I say that?" she asked languidly.

He laid her head back on the pillow tenderly.

"Why shouldn't you?" he demanded. "You do, or you wouldn't let me act this way. Oh, Claire, isn't that true?"

"Doesn't your own heart tell you, Philip?" She could not lie easily.

"Yes, of course. I just wanted to hear you say it, dear."

"Why?"

"Because—because it means so much to me."

"How does it mean any more than my unresisting lips?" She wanted to be fair to Philip. Would he want a wife without love?

He looked at her, puzzled by her calm question.

"Because, dear, it would mean that you put your seal on our divine betrothal."

"I gave you my lips, you held me in your arms, doesn't that mean love to you?"

"Claire, why do you talk that way?"

"Why shouldn't I? Isn't it true?"

"Yes, but you—you seem so unlike the woman you are."

"Oh, I see. But you haven't told me fully why you wanted me to say I loved you."

He stood up nervously and moved a few paces away, but the patient, self-reproachful gaze in Claire's eyes brought him back again.

"Why talk of that at all, dearest?" he whispered. "We have each other. Isn't that enough?"

"Perhaps not. You asked me to say it, you know."

"Yes, but I don't care. I won't plague you. I know you do love, me." He kissed her again and then looked at her. Her lips had been cold.

"What is the matter, Claire? Don't you love me? Is that why you wouldn't give me your word?"

It was coming at last. How could she make Philip see, and yet be fair to him, too?

"I don't know what you mean by love." Her voice was carefully toneless.

Philip's eyes lighted. "Don't you want me here beside you? Don't you warm to my kisses? Isn't there an awakened tenderness in you at my touch? Isn't there, dearest?"

Claire's hands moved nervously up and down the edge of the comforter. "If I should stay here with you, that would be the highest proof that I loved you, wouldn't it?"

"What else?" He looked at her, hope giving his face a renewed glow.

Was that all that love meant to him? "Is that what your years of thought have taught you?" she said aloud.

"Why, yes, Claire, the return of passion for passion, of warmth for warmth, of tenderness for tenderness, must be the last test, mustn't it?"

Despite her resolution her eyes narrowed ironically.

Philip started, and stared at her.

"Would you ever be jealous of my husband?" she asked, slowly.

His head dropped. "No—and yes. Of course, I wish he hadn't been your husband, but we can't help what fate has decreed." He raised his eyes, and then suddenly he smiled. "Claire, is it because of him that you are unwilling to tell me you love me?" he asked softly. "I think I can understand. You'll have to be freed from him in some way, and we must be married, of course."

"I am free from him. To him, I am dead. Isn't that enough?"

"Yes," he answered judiciously, "if your own conscience is satisfied."

She smiled a little, her eyebrows lifting in amusement. "Oh, my own conscience dictates my every act, Philip."

"I know it does," he agreed, earnestly. "But your lips were cold to my kiss." He bent over to test the truth of his remark.

"Do you forget Lawrence so easily?" Claire raised a hand over her face. "Certainly I cannot."

"I beg your pardon," Philip said, rising hastily. "Of course he is to be remembered. We will wait until we are alone to talk of our future."

"Yes," she said. "I should prefer that greatly."

He touched his lips to her forehead tenderly, then stepped silently into the room beyond.

She heard him as he moved quietly to replenish the fire, and it seemed to her that he made enough noise to echo from the mountains across the lake. She must think her situation through. She was studying the look she had read on Philip's face, and was angry with herself, yet she could not help thinking of it and its meaning. Suddenly she remembered the same expression on her husband's face, and she shuddered. She had thought it beautiful then, why not now? And why should she be so contemptuous when probably the same look had been in her own eyes when she had raged at Lawrence because he had not taken her in his arms. Philip was sitting out there beyond the curtain dreaming ecstatically of the days when they would be alone in the cabin, and she smiled ironically. After all, there was but one way out. He would find little comfort in her ghost, and her drowned body would scarcely fire him to passion.

She rose and slipped out into the room. Lawrence was still asleep. She did not even glance toward Philip because she foresaw his look of proprietorship. She went straight to Lawrence, and bending over him as if to arrange something about his blanket, she whispered softly: "Beloved, when I am alone with him, I shall be more with you."

Philip came and stood beside her, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder.

"It looks like a serious fever," he said softly.

Claire listened to Lawrence's breathing and felt his temperature. She stood up, gray with anxiety. "I'm afraid for him," she said, and there was that in her voice which Philip did not understand.

They ate their supper in silence. Claire glanced at Philip occasionally and found in his eyes the anticipated look of tender ownership. She let him slip out of her mind while she thought again of the afternoon when Lawrence had declared his creative principle. How dearly she would love to help him, to have him model his statue of her. He had said that she was savage and elemental underneath her polish. He had known, then, all the time. What a man he was! If only she knew how to find his love, to reawaken it. But no, he would never forget. Well, he would not have been able to care for her, anyway, she was so utterly sensual despite all her training in culture. He would want a more spiritual woman to fire his imagination to do great work. She tried to imagine what sort of woman would be best for his wife.

Lawrence stirred restlessly. She rose and went quickly to the bed. He was still asleep and she stood looking down at him. In her heart was a great tenderness and a great fear. What if he should die? Memories of their days in the woods swept over her in waves of love.

Abruptly she turned to Philip and said quietly: "Philip, until I am your wife you must not touch me again."

He looked up, startled, then smiled. "I understand, my dear," he said, "I will not."

She sat down at the table to wait for Lawrence's waking. It was late when he did, and immediately they realized that he was worse. Claire gave him some hot soup made from dried meal and helped Philip get him undressed and into bed.

"I'll put some blankets here and sleep on the floor beside him," Philip whispered. "I don't in the least mind, and I can help him if he wants help during the night."

"Thank you," Claire said gratefully. She felt indebted to this man for every kindness shown Lawrence.

Long before morning she was aroused by the sound of movements out there in the room.

"What is it?" she called softly.

"I am looking for something in which to heat water," came Philip's voice.

She scrambled out of bed, drew on a few clothes, and went out. Lawrence was tossing on his bed and breathing heavily. She set to work heating the water herself, and sent Philip back to his blankets. There was a pleasure in doing this nursing for Lawrence. She felt glad that hers was the chance to care for him.

"You're to have the best nursing a sick man ever got, Lawrence," she said, stooping over him tenderly.

He smiled faintly and whispered: "Good, Claire."

"You'll be well so quick you won't remember being ill."

"I know," he murmured huskily.

"What do you know?" she asked eagerly.

"I know, it's natural for you, this kindness."

"Is that all you know, Lawrence?"

"About all, Claire. About all, yet."

"Why do you say 'yet'?"

"I haven't thought it out yet."

"What, Lawrence?"

"My platform, my work-bench for the future."

She laughed, a little sadly. "You would better stop thinking about that for a day or so, wouldn't you?"

"Perhaps. I can't, though."

She drew up a chair and sat beside him. "I'm going to become a regular guard, and if you don't sleep and let thinking wait, I'll scold dreadfully."

He tossed uneasily and turned toward her, his cheeks brilliant with fever.

"I like to hear you scold, Claire," he said. "I shall go my limit."

She rubbed her cool hand across his forehead for answer.

When he at last slept, she continued to watch by his side, rocking slowly in her chair. It was peace for her to sit there and dream. There was rest from her ceaseless questionings, and it was welcome rest.



CHAPTER XVI.

THE QUESTION ANSWERED.

During the days that followed Claire's attitude grew into one of motherhood. She watched over Lawrence for the least thing she might do, the least promise of returning health. There were times when he raved in delirium, and she listened with a swelling heart.

One morning he began suddenly talking of himself. In broken sentences, shapeless phrases, half finished thoughts, he unfolded a strange tale. Claire was glad that Philip was away at work with his traps. She sat beside Lawrence, her hands clasped, and did not miss a word.

"You see," he began one day without preliminaries, "you see, I wasn't just given the best of chances. That was the beginning of it all. I wasn't fairly treated." She tried to comfort him into sleep, but he did not know she was talking to him and went on earnestly with his unconscious revelation.

"The whole business was a squalid sort of thing banked by mountains so grand in their rugged strength that I never got used to the dirty, dusty little half-civilized town there on the plateau. Even as a child I felt the intolerable difference between the place and its surroundings. Men ought to be better up there, but they aren't. They just magnify faults with the bigness of the hills around. Lots of it was romantic, lots of it ought never to be lost, the frank freedom, the vital living, the joy of uncertain victory over the dirt of the mines. It made men wild, wild to the last degree, that ever possible stumbling into gold, pure, glittering gold. Why, I saw it as a kid, shining like stars all over the side of the tunnel. It made even the children mad, I think. When I modeled rude little figures out of the red clay, I was always on the outlook for a possible gold-mine."

He laughed, then went on seriously. "I didn't have the chance to grow up learning things gradually. There was no dividing-line between vice and virtue, all of it spread out there, street behind street, in a glow of abandoned riot. Even virtue flashed with a loose frankness that deceived a growing boy. It was a grand drama. Fifty thousand mad men and women!"

She looked at him in amazement. This was something beyond her knowledge. What was it all that he was talking about?

"There was Josey; she didn't know. I didn't. We saw love played with in hilarious open passion. We thought it was the thing to do. Children oughtn't to see it quite that way."

Claire felt guilty, but he stopped and when he began again he was on a different line of old memories.

"Why, when I sold papers down on the main street I could see the girls of the district standing around, one block below, in their business regalia. I thought at first they were angels."

Claire sat in wonder and listened.

"The first time I ever went down there I was eight. Eight years old, and one of them called me from the open door of her house. When I stepped to the door, she was coming down a stairway, her white dress open and spread like wings at either side of her naked body. I was sure she was an angel out of my Sunday-school book. I could scarcely take the dime she gave me. I never forgot her kissing me and patting my head when I stared so at her."

Claire felt a strangely tender pity for the little chap she was seeing now in her imagination.

"And the fighting, dirty, freckled sons of those women—they kept me hard at it, keeping the money I got. After that day, I went down there often. Traded a paper with a golden-haired angel for a box of cigarettes, the first I ever owned. It was great, wonderful, to have her cigarettes. I smoked them with a sense of reverence.

"Wright and I played hooky, and the girls hid us all day in their shacks, played with us, teased us about sex, and taught us things we oughtn't to have known. Poor old Wright! They sent him to the pen for burglary after I had been gone years and was blind. I wonder if I'd have followed him. Most likely would.

"And, oh, the hills! There was old Pisga, pined to its cone point, and a race-track, with a saloon, at its foot. I ran away out there once at a big Fourth of July barbecue. It rained like the devil and I lounged in the bar with jockeys and sporting girls, listening to their ribald talk.

"I don't know—a street urchin in a camp, that was all I was. If I got licked, and I did, I was a coward for years and had to give up my pennies. I used strategy, cunning, because I was afraid to fight till I whipped Red. That made a difference. If the old fellow I liked so hadn't given Red a quarter to lick me, I'd have been a coward yet. It made me so mad I licked Red."

Lawrence laughed again merrily.

"That started me fighting, and I fought daily without provocation. Dirty, scaly fisted little rat, whose stockings sagged around his shoes, fighting for money in the saloons! The men liked me, too. All of them called me their kid. I used to stand big-eyed and watch the faro-table stacked with gold. There were days, too, when I went out alone over the hills. I was ashamed of my little figures and afraid lest the boys find my mud-pies, as Red had called a tiny dog that fell out of my pocket in a fight.

"One day in an electric storm I saw a man and his horse killed by lightning. I was awed, and electricity became my god. I worshiped it like a little heathen. I even bought penny suckers and stuck them up in the ground where the lightning played in stormy weather.

"It always seemed that the only things about the whole camp that fitted with the hills were that girl in white and an old mountaineer who fought with his fists alone against a gang of drunks. I don't know why. They just belonged."

He stopped and lay a long time in silence. Claire thought over what he had said, and her heart went out to this man as if he were still the little gamin of the hills.

"Poor little chap," she murmured aloud.

Lawrence half raised himself in bed, talking again, and she was obliged to push him back.

"It was all paradise, though, compared to that school where the Women's Club sent me. I didn't want an education. Freedom was taken from me. I was chained with discipline. I had seen too much and I told the other marveling boys. They talked, and I was punished as a degenerate little villain. I couldn't see why. That first winter was hell. They all misunderstood me, and I them. I ached for my mountains again, and when they sent me to the camp for the summer I whooped for joy.

"I must have been thirteen at that time. The men in camp paid the Widow Morgan to keep me through the summer. She had a daughter seventeen or thereabouts. Georgia had curly hair and blue eyes. She didn't pay much attention to me at first. I didn't care.

"Then one night the widow went off to a lodge-meeting and left us alone. Pearly and the gang came around and began throwing rocks at the house and demanding that Georgia let them in. I was furious, and she was nearly scared to death. She got her mother's pistol and asked me to shoot it. I took it and, opening the door, fired into the night. The gang slunk off, but Georgia was still frightened.

"We slipped out of our clothes in trembling silence and huddled together in her mother's bed. She was crying, and I felt very brave. I put my arms around her and comforted her. She became quiet by and by and slipped her arms around me. After that we found ourselves.

"She said we were in love, and I guess we were. That night was the beginning of my rebellious manhood. Her mother abused us roundly for immoral little whiffits. I was put out, and after that the county kept me. Georgia hated me, for she said I was to blame.

"I suppose that was all right, too, but it made me bitter against what seemed to me an unjust world. I went back to school, hating. I never stopped hating as long as I was there. It was misunderstanding from first to last. I never ceased rebelling against punishment for rebellion.

"It was a hopeless snarl, but it made me what I was when I entered college, distant, sullen, and ferocious. My only joy was in my work, and I spent all my spare time in the studio. Then the second summer I shot off the gunpowder, and blindness came."

Lawrence lay back silent, then began again.

"After the accident it was a thousand times worse. I thought people didn't like me because I was blind. They only pitied and misunderstood. Misunderstood—that word might be my epitaph. It could certainly be placed over my childhood's grave.

"It was in college that I started thinking. Thought out my plan of militant egoism. It seemed to succeed, but all the time I was afraid it was only pity that sold my work. You know, Claire, as you said, I've got to do it all over again. All of it, building a new platform, a new work-bench. I've got to allow for things. I've got to understand."

In her tension, Claire walked the floor. Would he never stop? That glimpse into his life at the widow's—who was Pearly?—and what a tough little gang he must have grown up with! Poor boy!

He did not talk much for a long time, then he kept repeating: "I must build a new work-bench, Claire. That's the thing to do."

She felt at times that she must scream at him, then she would be all motherly tenderness. "Lawrence," she would whisper, "do it, my man. You can, my laddie."

He tossed, and chided an unseen man or woman for having helped him through charity under the garb of admiration. He was misunderstanding again. He thought everything was charity, pity for his blindness, and he raved. She began to see that this sudden bitterness which poured from his lips was the outcome of years of sorrow, the product of a deep-burning fire to see the beauty his soul craved.

"Lawrence," she cried, "God knows if I could I would give you my eyes!"

She knew that he was consumed with the pain of his struggle to comprehend more beauty. Even exaggerating his hunger for sight, she wept beside him. Her whole soul yearned to help him, to give him more of the beauty which seemed the prime need of his nature.

Sometimes he prayed for it, addressing Fate, Nature, Chance, anything, everything but God.

After a silence that was beginning to frighten Claire, he began again. At first his words were indistinct, but as she leaned closer, they cleared of guttural sounds. She listened spellbound.

"You see, I hadn't done my thinking with allowance for the whole of human character, Claire. That was what was wrong with me. I'm doing that now. I'm finding myself again. It is back with the beginning of things I must start. Back with the first squirm of life in the primordial mud. It's no use trying further back than that. No use at all. Back of that lies only conjecture.

"There was existence, perhaps, inert unconscious existence waiting to become suddenly aware of itself, aware of its parts and its difference from other things. Well, existence struggling, dreaming of self-knowledge, found in a wriggling, oozing spot of protoplasm—that's the start of it all. Feeding without hunger, moving without knowledge to food, reproducing mechanically by division, living without instinct, without emotion, without death. For me, that must be the beginning.

"Whether death came, or what it was—a long period without food, perhaps—that started this stuff to changing, I do not know. Maybe it was existence following the way of greatest pressure toward selfhood. Anyway, it started and began its journey. Up and up, out of the mud and ooze, into light and dry dirt.

"The glory of light must have been a great thing then. Think of it, coming into light, out of wet, dark mud. I know what it would be better than you. Light, the first great discovery of life! It must have hastened growth—warmth, sunrays, heat, cold at night and dark again. The glory of it breaking at dawn over the squirming, groping blind existence of things!

"God said let there be light, and there was light.

"Existence demanding the thing it craved. Was that it, or existence finding light and learning to crave it? No matter—light, a thousand miracles of warmth and wonder! Growth was inevitable, Claire.

"Then the craving learned by experience broke into new form. I don't know what it was; a two-celled bug, perhaps—only that it was craving that did it. Hunger and thirst after light.

"Pain came at the very start of things. Wants unsatisfied drove with the scourge of hell, forcing eyes, ears, stomach, sex into being, and out of the squalor of it all, still goaded by incessant want, there heaved the gigantic scaly carcass of the dinosaur. Still unaware of things, but driven to move, to grow, to expand. Existence demanding more expression of its awareness of self.

"The beast didn't know what it was. He only grew and grew and grew, till he spread his ugly, yearning life over hundreds of feet of ground. Eye and ear and touch and a peace of filled belly lay basking in the light, glorying in what they found. Life was good, riotously good, finding things, finding itself out. They fought, fed, killed, bred, all in the effort of existence to know.

"What a blood-drenched chaotic struggle for self it was, Claire!

"And so, on and on and on. Touch didn't satisfy the incessant taste for more knowledge, more life. Bodies rising like hills out of the marshes couldn't give the keen joy that existence craved for itself.

"New things again: changed, altered products of the old, bearing in their frames the history, the memory of the old—it all came, and out of it at last, hunger-driven for more keen life, sprang a biped, hairy, tusked, savage, bloody, lustful, eager to live, live, live!

"He was a glorious beast. In his flattened head that held the little bloodshot eyes were memory, products of the past, things that harked back for confirmation of present things. He had instincts—that's what they are, instincts, memories of past sufferings—that whipped the organism to go on into keener living. He was sexed, he was hungry, he was vicious, he slept and ate, he bred consciously, carrying on the eager shout within his being for more, more of life. More of existence aware of itself!

"If he killed, he gloried in the hot blood that drenched his hairless nose, and he learned to laugh through the pleasure of a filled belly. He learned to cry when he went hungry. Tears came, and emotions, a more specialized instinct.

"He was learning something else, too. But pain still whipped him on, filled him with fear of non-life, and he grew cowardly. Nature had created a new thing, a brain, a specialized mass of cells that can comment, realize, criticise, warn, appreciate, choose better food, get it easier, help to conquer and promote life; the biped used this new thing to understand why he ran from the fingers that clutched at him in the dark and he became afraid. If it brought him new pain, it also brought him new pleasure. It was a great toy that could be used to enjoy oneself with.

"It can have the joy of bodily sensations and then recall them, study them, comment on them, on its own instincts, its own memories. It can dream of ways for procuring fuller life, and put the dreams into any desired shape. Man struts from his jungle, laughing aloud, with lust for life and joy at his fulness thereof. But all the while, pain, the darkness, the still inert unconsciousness in existence that oppresses and drags back into its own dead inertness, is laughing still more heartily.

"Everywhere it checks, but man in his egotism forgets that he is a slave, bound and hampered, and boasts himself master. Death sweeps in, lightning kills, thunder crashes over him, and filled with fear, with something bigger than he can grasp, he falls upon his knees, and cries, 'God!'

"Then begins the mess, the tangled, detestable, bloody, dirty, riotously glorious, sublime mystery that is me. Me and you, Claire. Here we are."

Claire leaned over him, her breath suspended in her eagerness.

"Me, the man, specialized, sex-specialized, made to record, to enjoy, to remember, to create, and to die at last from sheer wearing out myself seeking life.

"And you, you the woman, deeper, more vitally sexed, more complete in your memory of the past, more true in your record of it, less a sport, more a true seeker and knower of life—you, the embodiment of it all, memory, instinct, fear, passion, tenderness, hate—cunning, strong, wise, far-seeing, and altogether mistress of the whole brute world, mistress of everything in life and destiny save death. You, too, worn out by struggling to live more fully, but not until your lust for life has sent children out to carry on the struggle.

"Oh, Claire, it is you the woman, demanding at any cost that your child live, who gives us our great knowledge, our beauty, our selfishness, and our strident sex, our pain."

Claire caught her breath and sobbed: "Lawrence, Lawrence!"

"Yes," he went on, "that is the end of it all. I see it now. You, unknown to yourself, demanding your child, stung to fear of death without it here in the wilderness, you love me—I know it, you love me. And I—I love you. It was that which drove you to speak as you did. I see. I love you!"

She sank down on the pillow beside him. In her heart was a great relief which carried her away in a flood of tears. Lawrence talked on unheeded by her. He had made everything clear, and she was utterly happy.

When Philip came in he found her sitting quietly, in her eyes a deep, calm peace that filled him with wonder.

He smiled at her, thoughtfully, and remarked: "Well, Claire, you look happier than you have for months."

"I am," she said simply.

They did not carry on the conversation. He was satisfied that it was love for him which made her so distant, and he was content to wait until she should be his wife. He sat by the fire, watching her earnestly, and she was too deep in her new-found joy even to think of him or of her promise to him.

TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT WEEK. Don't forget this magazine is issued weekly, and that you will get the continuation of this story without waiting a month.



Claire

by Leslie Burton Blades

THE BLIND LOVE OF A BLIND HERO

BY A BLIND AUTHOR

This story began in the All-Story Weekly for October 5.



CHAPTER XVII.

ANGLES OF A TRIANGLE.

It was well into April before Lawrence was able to walk again. His convalescence had been slow, and he was still very weak. They had planned to start out by the end of April, but they were compelled to postpone the journey until the middle of May. Philip was fired with impatience. He wanted to get out to a priest and be married to Claire. She, on her part, was glad of the delay. She dreaded the hour when she should have to tell Philip that she would not marry him. Her joy in her love for Lawrence was too great, however, to allow for much thought about the matter.

She looked back upon her yielding to Philip as upon a terrible nightmare, but she still liked him and could not bring herself to limit the intimate ways which had sprung up between them. He did not imagine, therefore, that there had been any change in her.

Claire had never told Lawrence of what he had said during his illness, but her treatment of him was very different from what it had been before. He had come out of his illness with a calm assurance of his future, and he knew that he loved Claire. He did not know her feeling, but as soon as he should be well he meant to tell her of his love once more.

The days passed in quiet serenity. Outside the cabin the plateau flowed under the pines into green and white and gold with dark patches of blue flowers that filled Claire's heart with song. The lake was open and glistened in the warm sun, while fish leaped in it, sending up sparkling rainbow drops. Claire took to wandering along the shore with Lawrence or Philip, or both, talking gaily all the while. She never mentioned her husband, it was only of their return to civilization that she spoke and of the great time the three of them would have in celebration. They laughed agreement with her words.

As Lawrence grew more and more like himself there came a time, however, when Philip could not but see that Claire was giving the artist a tenderness, a sweetness of companionship, and a carefully guarded joy which he had never known. It was impossible for him to say to himself longer that it was only her nursing manner.

He took to watching her eyes, and again and again he caught them filled with a deep light which they had never held for him. He now realized that he had always feared Claire might love Lawrence, that he had feared it even on the day of her confession. A fierce desire of possession gripped him, and he swore to have this woman as his wife, in spite of Lawrence, in spite of herself, if need be. It was this last frame of mind which gained in constancy until he became a danger to Claire's happiness.

She saw it in his dark expression, and her heart cried out against herself for the time of weakness. Then a great doubt would assail her. Lawrence had never spoken of love since he had regained his consciousness, and she wondered if, after all, his talk had been mere delirium, without basis in his normal mind. She determined to find out, and then tell Philip the frank truth. She was sure that he would receive it as a gentleman should, and let her moment of weakness pass forgiven. She went over all their experience together, and she came to feel that, in any case, she could never live with him. Even though Lawrence did not care, she told herself, she could go out into the world and find her place.

One evening she came into the house and found Philip alone, sitting darkly over his book. She felt sorry for him, and, wanting to leave him friendly memories, if she could, she walked quietly over to him and laid her hand on his shoulder.

He looked up and smiled faintly, though his face remained clouded.

"Philip," she said, "you look worried!"

"I dare say I do," he returned quietly, but there came into his eyes a fierce light that frightened her.

"Why should you?" she asked.

"Claire!" He stood up and faced her. "I do not know what you think of Lawrence. I do not know what he thinks of you. I do not care. I will tell you one thing. You lay in my arms yonder and said that you would be my wife. If you did not mean it"—he hesitated—"then you are scarcely the type of woman to be allowed to live. Don't lead me to suspect that such is the case."

Claire gasped, realized her situation, and for the moment was carried beyond all power of speech. She sank in a chair and stared at him. Then, suppressing her rising fear, she said calmly: "Philip, would you have me yours against your will?"

His eyes flashed fire at her.

"Would you say you wanted to be mine and not mean it?"

"No," she faltered, "I—I might have meant it then."

"Does your heart change with the passing breeze?"

She was feeling panicky. Her throat was dry and hot.

"I hope not," she said faintly.

"Bah! Does it?" he demanded.

"No," she said, even more faintly.

"Very well. You lay in my arms there and told me you would be my wife. Years ago, before you came into my life, another woman played with me. You shall not. I do not know what has happened to bring about the change in you. It cannot alter my will. You are mine by your own lips. It is best for us both that I hold you to your promise. When we go out of this place to a priest you shall become my wife. You dare not be untrue to yourself!"

She was afraid to answer him. His dark, threatening face told her that he was beyond reason, and she sank wearily back in her chair. In her heart she was determined never to be his, but her lips played her false. Despite her will they whispered submissively, "Very well, Philip. I understand."

He laughed aloud. "What in Heaven's name made you act like that, Claire?" he asked, once more kindly and agreeable.

"A woman's whim!" she said, and hated herself for saying it.

"I don't understand women," he laughed softly.

"Neither do I." It was Lawrence's voice. He had come in, just in time to hear the last words. "Nor men, either—except in one thing."

"What is the one thing?" asked Claire eagerly.

"That, given a normal, healthy mind, they will sacrifice all their idols for life. Life is the one eternally insistent thing."

Philip chuckled. "You are yourself again, I see."

"Yes, and stronger than ever in my faith," said Lawrence, sitting down. "I know the price I would pay for life. It is the price every human being would pay, if demanded."

"What is that price?" Philip asked.

"The whole of one's faith in God and man!"

"Nonsense!" Philip spoke curtly. "I would die before forfeiting a dozen ideals I hold dear!"

"Would you?" Lawrence looked at him quizzically. "Would you sacrifice your own life before you would the love of your sweetheart, for instance, if you had one?"

The conversation was similar to those which they had had months before, but the fire was nearer the surface now.

"Yes." Philip's answer came swiftly.

"Then you are a sex-maddened mountaineer!"

"And you are talking like the beast you are not. I know you do not believe that."

"I know I do. I would only die for a woman if she were my life."

"But any real love finds her so."

"Folly! I find my work, my future, my dream of a single immortal statue more my life than any woman!" Lawrence exclaimed.

"I wonder if you really do," Claire mused, half to herself.

"Yes," Lawrence insisted, "although she might be necessary to that statue. At least I believe she might—and I would feel sure of it if I wanted her badly enough," he ended amusedly.

"That merely means that you are still utterly selfish!" said Claire.

"Yes, I am." Lawrence was thoughtful. "It is a paradox, I am so selfish that, although I would sacrifice myself to the last degree for a person I loved, yet I would all the time feel that I was a fool, that I was doing an absurd thing when life was so good."

"I see," Claire observed. "And I know I would do the same."

"I would do it," Philip said, "but I would not feel a fool. It would seem to me right."

Claire looked straight into his eyes. "You would not, Philip," she declared softly. "Your own happiness would come first—and you know it."

The Spaniard's gaze shifted, and there was silence in the cabin. When he looked up his eyes had changed their expression.

"Yes," he agreed steadily, "I admit it. Hereafter I mean to have what I want from life at any cost."

"Yet you will go on talking ideals," Lawrence mocked.

"Yes—and thinking them, too."

"While Lawrence will make the sacrifice and go on talking his selfishness," Claire added.

Both men laughed constrainedly.

"And I," Claire continued, "if it is necessary, will lie to preserve my will, and, having it secure, will use it to obtain what I want."

"We are at last three delightfully frank, insufferable, unpleasant, and very natural, likable human beings!" Lawrence laughed.

"And on that basis we will work out our fates," murmured Claire.

"We will do just that," Lawrence answered gaily.

"Be they good or bad, we will meet our futures with perfect self-knowledge," contributed Philip.

"Then most likely they will be bad," Claire added with conviction.

They gave up talking, and each abandoned himself to his own reflections. In the minds of the two men these thoughts assumed widely differing words, though they were the same thoughts.

Philip was garbing his impulses, desires, and determinations in clothes that furnished his habitual mental wardrobe. With their marriage, he thought, Claire would learn the real Philip. He would treat her with such deference, such tender respect, and such devotion that she would see the wisdom of her choice. He would prove to her that sex mattered little, was altogether secondary. It was her great companionship, her dear thoughtfulness, her charming personality that he loved. Respect, first of all: happy married life depended on respect; then, common interest, friendship between two human beings, and, last and least important, that wonderful emotion springing out of the divine God-given reproductive life of both.