"About Miss Elton? In the Chatterer? I haven't the least idea of what you are talking," said Mrs. Lenox in a dazed way.

"It's over there," returned the lady, with a comprehensive wave of the thumb. "You can read it. Lena said it couldn't be anybody else." Mrs. Lenox rose and took the magazine from the table. She walked over to the window and deliberately turned her back on her hostess. Her hands shook a little as she turned page after page till her eyes fell on this little paragraph.

"In a certain western city which is famous for its flour and lumber interests, there lives a bachelor who has made it still more illustrious in the realms of art and literature. It is a standing insult to feminine humanity that a man both famous and wealthy should remain single, but, so far, all attacks upon the citadel of his heart have proved futile. Rumor now has it that a capitulation is imminent, but the besieging force has been driven to unusual measures to secure it. A college training gives a girl the advantage over her fellows, both in expedients and in determination. Not content with the extraordinary attractions conferred on her by her own beauty, the young lady who is ahead in the race for the gay bachelor's heart has been carrying the war into Egypt. Gossip saith that there are quiet hours spent by these two in the seclusion of the bachelor's stately home, when, doubtless, his masculine heart melteth within him, and the bonds of his servitude are tightened. Still, it is a dangerous game for a supposedly reputable girl to play, isn't it? and a little—well, let us call it unconventional."

Mrs. Lenox shut the magazine and her own teeth.

"It is inconceivable that such stuff should be printed, and that people should buy it," she said. "But you see it is so vague that it might refer to any one at any place, and even if we knew who was meant, it is too insignificant a piece of small malice to receive anything but contempt. And now good-by, Mrs. Quincy. I hope these coming spring days are going to help you to better health."

"Good-by. I always appreciate your visits," whined Mrs. Quincy. "I'm sure, with all you have to do, I don't wonder you don't come oftener. I know there's nothin' to draw you."

Mrs. Lenox went away with a deep breath and a longing for fresh air. She shook her head at the waiting coachman and said, "I am going to walk, Emil."

She moved along in a cloud of conjectures, not that the small paragraph seemed to her very important, but she was a little sickened by the sudden glimpse of petty minds, who, being rich, stay by preference in the slums.

"Mrs. Quincy, like Mrs. Percival, makes me feel that life is not a big thing to be lived for some big reason, but an affair to be scrambled through day by day, grabbing everything you can, and hating those who have grabbed more. What a way to worry through seventy or eighty years!" she groaned to herself.

Almost at her own door she met Ram Juna, who turned with her to make one of his ponderous calls, while she sat and talked with him of emptiness and philosophy, with that vivacious patience that becomes a habit with women of the world; but when the door opened and her husband appeared, accompanied by Dick Percival and Ellery Norris she heaved a distinct sigh of relief.

"We know that the dinner hour is looming on the horizon, and we're not going to stay," said Dick. "But your husband has some civic reform monographs that I thought I would borrow while he was in the lending mood."

"You needn't apologize, Dick," she laughed. "You are more than tolerated in this house."

There came a sharp noise, and Madeline Elton, with pale face and eyes big, stood in the doorway. Every one knew that something had happened, and Mrs. Lenox, who saw the rolled magazine in the nervous hand, guessed its purport in a flash.

"My dear girl!" she cried, running forward, "you are not going to let such a pin-prick hurt you!"

"Oh, Vera," exclaimed the girl, putting her face down on her friend's shoulder, "you know! It does hurt. I can't help it," and she sobbed.

The three men looked on in puzzled helpless masculinity, and the Swami surveyed the scene as the two women clung to each other.

"Vera," said Mr. Lenox, "are we permitted to know what this means?" Mrs. Lenox kept her arm around Madeline's shoulder as she turned.

"It's only an ugly little fling in the Chatterer, Frank," she said, "and it sounds as though it might refer to Madeline. It is nothing, but I dare say my dear girl does not enjoy a bit of dirt even on her outer garment. And, Madeline, very likely it is not meant for you."

"Oh, yes, it is," cried the girl. "Some one sent me this marked copy. And I went there once when I thought he had invited a crowd to see some tapestries. There was no one else there. There is just so much truth in it."

"Would you rather that we should not see it?" asked Mr. Lenox.

"I'm afraid every one will see it," said Madeline shamefacedly, as she held out the guilty pages. The three men leaned their heads over the table with a curiosity that would have done credit to women, while Ram Juna still looked on.

"I have already beheld the writing," he said suavely. "Mr. Early gave way to unwonted anger when he saw. The lady must have an enemy."

"That is it," cried Madeline, turning upon him swiftly. "I think I am not so much hurt by the scandal—every one who knows me will believe better of me—but what cuts is that there should be some one who wants to hurt me. I—I've always thought of the world as a friendly place. Who is it that hates me?"

"Bah, it is a very small enemy who seeks small revenge," said the Swami, whose own heart was filled with contempt and irritation. This was not according to his plan. "In India, we do not so revenge."

Mr. Lenox stepped back to the fireplace, from which point a man always surveys the world at an advantage.

"It isn't worth an extra heart-beat, Miss Elton," he said. "Ignore it and your world will promptly forget it."

"But, Mr. Lenox, you do not understand. It is not the question of the truth or falsehood of the story that shakes me. As you say, that is too absurd. But I shall always wonder who is my enemy, and why."

Norris was looking at her with awakened terror. With the intuition of love, he had read the processes of her self-conquest at the time of Dick's marriage. But here was a new possibility. Could it be that this fair and delicate creature was now to be enwoofed by Sebastian Early, whom at this juncture Ellery characterized to himself as a "fat toad"? He made up his mind that it would not do to trust, as he had been doing, to time to stand his friend. He must also bestir himself.

"I wonder," he said aloud, "I wonder if Miss Huntress knows anything about it. I have a dim idea that some one told me that she wrote things for the Chatterer. Our society editor, you know."

"But even if she did dislike me—and I don't know her from Adam—how could she know?" said Madeline, turning on him. "You see I was alone with Mr. Early, and I am sure, for certain reasons," here Ellery was horrified to see a little flush creeping over her face, "that he would not be guilty of any attempt to besmirch me. And no one else knew that I was there—except—" A sudden startled look came over her face and she looked involuntarily at Dick. "Except—" she said, and her voice trailed off.

"Besides, these small acts are those of women," said the Swami placidly. Dick had caught Madeline's look of astonished comprehension and he turned pale as he saw. Now, with Ram Juna's words, conviction flashed upon him. He remembered Lena's dislike for Madeline, of which he had made light; he remembered the little insignificant woman whom he had met in his wife's boudoir; the fact that he was Mr. Early's nearest neighbor clapped assurance on suspicion, and his muddled mind was capable of only one idea. No one else, least of all, Madeline, must suspect her little meanness.

"Dick, you have an inkling," said Mr. Lenox abruptly, but in all innocence.

"Not in the least," said Dick hurriedly. "I assure you that if I had the slightest reason to suspect any one, I would be the first to speak. I—you know I think everything of you, Madeline." He went toward her in a futile way, with outstretched hand, but Madeline's eyes were down, and apparently she did not see the friendly overture. His face looked pale, strained and old as he stood for a moment before her, and the others surveyed them in silence.

"As you say," said Dick, in sprightly fashion, "the best thing is to forget the whole incident. Lenox, if you will give me those papers, I must be off."

"Our lines lie parallel," said the Swami. "Will you permit that I walk with you?"

The four who remained stood awkwardly during the departure, and with the closing of the door, Mr. Lenox gave an inarticulate ejaculation.

"Miss Elton," he said, "I think your problem is solved."

"You mean it was Mrs. Percival?"

"You are as sure as I."

"And Dick knew," said Ellery. He blushed as he spoke.

"Oh no, Mr. Norris!" cried Madeline in sharp distress. "That would he unendurable. And besides, he said he didn't."

"Dick lied," Ellery stated calmly.

"I will never believe that Dick would lie."

"He certainly lied," Ellery persisted. "Any man would lie to protect the woman he loves."

"Never!" exploded Mrs. Lenox. "Frank, you would not lie for me!"

"Assuredly I would," her husband answered quietly, "if you needed lying for."

She looked at him with speechless dismay.

"Therefore," Ellery went on, "it behooves a man to love a woman who demands truth and not untruth as her reasonable service. The responsibility rests with you women. You can not only make men lie, but you can make them believe that there is no such thing as truth in the universe. Isn't it so, Lenox?"

Mr. Lenox smiled and nodded, Jove-like.

"Oh, yes, they pull some strings," he said; "but don't cocker them up too much. Don't make them think we are nothing but clay in their hands."

"You couldn't, because, to our sorrow, we know better," retorted his wife.

"Nevertheless, you've unsettled everything," said Madeline dejectedly.

"But, Miss Elton," Norris put in, "you must not think that I believe that a man is without responsibility for the kind of woman he loves. That is where the first turning up or down comes in. He's no right to give his soul to the thing that is mean or base. He has the right to choose his road, but after he's chosen, he has to travel wherever the road leads. Dick's disintegration began from the moment that he met Miss Quincy. I've known it for a long time."

"Poor little thing!" said Madeline. "She is so small. I hope she will grow to be something like a mate for Dick."

"Do not flatter yourself with wishes," cried Mrs. Lenox. "There's only one soil in which the soul can grow, and that is love. Unless I misread her, there is no room in her for anything but Lena Quincy Percival."

"And yet," objected Ellery, "she is certainly not a person weighted with intellect. I should say she is all impulse and emotion."

"Anomalous but by no means uncommon, Mr. Norris," she rejoined. "All emotion, yet without emotion of the heart. In her little world, self lies at the equator, and every one else is pushed off to the frozen poles."

The others looked at her doubtfully.

"Don't you think I have studied her? She has been a bald revelation to me of things I have only half understood in better-bred women. She's like a weed transplanted from her lean ground to a garden and grown more luxuriant in her weediness. Do you know what I think? I believe that when the last judgment shall strip her of her sweet pink flesh, there will be nothing found inside but a little dry kernel, too hard to bite, and labeled 'self'."

"You are positively vicious, Vera," said her husband gravely.

The tears came to her eyes as she turned to him.

"I really loved Dick, and she has stung him."

"But all this does not explain her hatred for Madeline."

"Do you not understand that even petty people can see how dreary and stupid their lives are when a person like Madeline comes along? So they hate her."

"It's good of you to consider my feelings how they grow, and to try to bolster them up," Madeline smiled. "But I am fearfully tired. I must go home. I hope that my father and mother will never hear of this."

"Why should they?" said Mr. Lenox. "It's only a trifle after all, though, to be true to her nature, Vera must needs philosophize about it. It's only a trifle."

"Except for Dick," Ellery exploded.

"Except for Dick," Mr. Lenox echoed.

"It's a great pity," Mrs. Lenox meditated, "that Dick can't knock her down and then they could start again on a proper basis."

"It is a disadvantage to be a gentleman," laughed her husband.

"Vera," said Madeline impulsively, "you won't let this make any difference between us and Mrs. Percival? If she is a little twisted, poor child, she has had a cruel training; and she needs decent women all the more. I—I really have quite got over my anger with her—and don't let us lose Dick. Dick is like my brother. I mustn't break with him. We must all be good to him."

"I do not know that I feel any large philanthropy," answered Mrs. Lenox, with something between a laugh and a wry face. "But as I have invited them as well as you to spend Easter with us in the country, I suppose the ordinary laws of society will require me to behave myself." The older woman kissed Madeline warmly, and Ellery moved out with her. He had so entirely made up his mind to walk home with her that he quite forgot to ask her permission.

He began to talk to her about himself, for almost the first time in his reticent intimacy, and she forgot her own affairs, as he meant she should, in listening.

Afterward she could not remember his words because parallel with them she was reading her own interpretation. Already in a vague way she understood him, but his little story gave her the crystallized impression.

She had a picture of a lonely childhood, fatherless and motherless and pervaded with a longing for love that early learned to keep silence. That had been the first step in his self-possession. Education had been hard to get, and yet he had got what to the sons of rich men comes easily, and because to him it meant struggle, it had been the more treasured. Knowledge came hard because his mind worked slowly and painfully; therefore his grip was the tighter, and the habits of thought wrought out by exercise were now giving him a facility that cleverer men might envy. He could not know how the simple history gave her an impression of slow irresistible manhood, always, without drifting, moving toward its chosen end.

When they halted at her door, she had a feeling that she could not let him go, just yet.

"You'll come in and dine with us, will you not?" she asked impulsively.

"I wish I might," he answered with that longing tone one falls into when surveying an impossible and alluring temptation. "I simply have to work to-night. I'm already late for my engagement. May I come sometime soon?"

"I wish you would. Father is really very fond of you," she went on, defending her warmth. "He likes young men. He has a sneaking longing for them that no mere girl satisfies. Dick used to be a great deal to him, but—Dick has drifted away. You have not been to see us for a long time."

"Not since the day that Dick's engagement was announced," he answered, looking her boldly in the face. "I couldn't. You made me feel then that you despised me."

"I despised you?" she spoke with bland innocence but rising color.

"Yes."

Madeline hesitated and looked down. She was scarlet.

"I'm not going to pretend to misunderstand you," she said, and turned laughing eyes toward him. "I knew all the time that it was Dick who had done some shabby thing, and you were trying to shield him."

"You knew?"

"Of course I knew."

"But you told me I ought to get a mask," Ellery fumbled.

"I meant when you try to tell lies. You don't do it with the grace and conviction of an accomplished hand. Pooh, I can read you like an open book."

"I am very glad you can," he said deliberately. "I thank God you can, because on every page you will read the truth—that I love you—I love you. I'm wanting you to read it in your own way, but some time I am going to let the passion of it loosen this slow tongue of mine and tell you in my own fashion how much it is."

He turned and strode abruptly away. Madeline went in to the firelight of home.

"Why, you look as bright as though you'd heard good news," exclaimed Mr. Elton, peering over his newspaper in welcome.

"Do I, father?" Madeline stooped to rub her cheek softly against his and laughed to herself. "Why, I believe I have. That shows what a whirligig I am. I went out thinking life was a tragedy, and I come back thinking it—"

"What, little girl?"

"A divine comedy," said Madeline and laughed again. "Just see what a walk in the open air will do for a body."



CHAPTER XVIII

EASTER

Easter came late in April, when, to match man's mood, it should come; for the world was alive with new vitality. The south winds were infusing their wonder-working heats, and the bluebirds flashing their streaks of color through branches that felt the stir of sap, amid buds that strained to burst. There was the smell of growth where bits of "secret greenness" hid behind the dead leaves of last fall.

On Saturday evening Mrs. Lenox welcomed the same circle that had met at her home the November before, and Lena's little heart glowed with the soul-satisfying sense of the difference to her. Then she had been a social waif, received on sufferance. Now she was one of them. She could even afford to have her own opinions. The very memory of past discomforts doubled the present blessedness, and Mr. Lenox looked only half the size that he had six months before. It was a long stride to have taken in half a year, and with reason she congratulated herself on her cleverness. In Mr. Lenox's gravity of manner as he took her in to dinner, she perceived only respect for Mrs. Percival, not knowing that he had in mind the small episode of the Chatterer, which his wife and Miss Elton had agreed to ignore.

"What very sensible people we are!" exclaimed Mrs. Lenox as she surveyed her small table party. "We shall spend to-morrow in hunting for anemones instead of looking at our neighbors' spring fineries; we shall catch the first robin at his love song, instead of listening to the cut and dried, much-practised church music; and we shall find rest to our souls. Dick, I am sure you need it. You look worn out. I'm afraid politics is proving a hard mistress."

"I wonder if it is possible to do too much," said Dick, rousing himself, with manifest languor. "It's only the way he does it that plays a man out. Here's Ellery, now, who works like a galley slave and looks as fresh as the proverbial daisy."

"Well, come, you are criticizing yourself even more severely," Mr. Lenox said. "You'll have to learn the secret, Dick, of letting your arms and legs and brain work for you, while your inner man remains at peace. That's the only way an American man can live in these hustling days; and if you don't master it, the young men will come in and carry you out by the time that you are fifty."

"And there are worse things than that," rejoined Dick. "I suppose it is the universal experience that when one gets out of the freedom of extreme youth and settles down to the jog-trot, harnessed life, the way looks rather long and monotonous. A fellow can't help feeling tired to think how tired he'll be before he gets to the end. To-night I feel as old and dry as a mummy. If you touch me, I'll crumble."

"Mrs. Lenox and I have been longer in the game than you, Dick," answered his host whimsically. "We are getting dangerously near the equator; and we do not find ourselves exhausted. On the contrary, I rather think the scenery improves, in some respects, as we go along."

"You are hardly capable of measuring the common fate. You have had the touchstone of success, and the world has opened up before you. But what depress me and impress me are the sodden people whom I meet by the hundred; and I can't help reading my fate in the light of theirs. There are such millions of us, obscure and uncounted except on the census."

"If you will persist in talking serious things," said Ellery, "isn't obscurity, after all, an internal and not an external quality? You've got to believe that you are a creature that is worth while. There is no bitterness in belonging to the myriads if the myriads are themselves dignified by nature."

"But are they?" cried Dick, now rousing himself. "I look at every face I pass on the street. I'm always on the search for some ideal quality; and what do I see? Egotism and greed answer me from all their eyes. The ninety and nine have gone astray."

"Then it belongs to you to be the hundredth who does not go astray; and who gives a satisfactory answer to the same eternal questioning that meets you in the eyes of other men. It's not given to any man to play a neutral part in the world conflict. In all the magnificent interplay of forces, I doubt if there is any force strong enough to keep one standing still."

"Yes, my dear Ellery. And it is just that eternal motion that I am complaining about. It is burdensome to the flesh and wearisome to the imagination to look forward to a future of eternal rushing and striving. I have a multitude of experiences every year, and I straightway forget them; and that deepens the impression that all these little affairs of ours, about which we make such an infernal racket at the time, are matters of very small importance in the march of the centuries. The march of the centuries may be majestic, but the waddle of this little ant of a man is not. It's insignificant."

"That's a dangerous state of mind to be in, Dick," said Lenox.

"And after all, you can't help being a very important thing to yourself," said Madeline. "And it must be of eternal significance to you whether your soul is walking with the centuries or against them."

"My dear Madeline," answered Dick, "when I am with you and such as you who live on a little remote mountain, eternity seems a very important matter; but when I am with most people, next Wednesday, when taxes are due, looms up and shuts out eternity. And you will permit me to think that you women who are sheltered and who sit with the good things of life heaped about you, don't know very much about practical conditions."

"But why isn't my conscience as practical as my clothes?" persisted Madeline. "And why is the fortune made to-day in Montana mines and lost to-morrow in Wall Street any more practical than this same majestic march of the centuries and the great thoughts that circle about it? 'Practical' is such a foolish word, Dick."

"Undoubtedly, to you," said Dick with a little sneer. "But to most of the race to which we have the honor to belong it is the word that makes the dictionary heavy. It is because you do not know its meaning that you women, or perhaps I ought to use the despised term, 'ladies,' become the very beautiful and useless articles that you are—works of art, which may thrill and charm a man for a moment, when he has time to look at them, but which bear little relation to the stress of life which you can not comprehend."

"Dick!" Madeline spoke almost with tears in her eyes. "It is not like you to have a fling at women."

"You see I'm gathering wisdom as I go along."

"Gathering idiocy, you mean," interposed Mr. Lenox. "Dick, you young fool, the ideal woman is the goal toward which the rest of humanity must run; and the sooner you bend all your practical faculties in that direction, and there abase the knee, the better for you."

He nodded down the table toward his wife, and she pursed up her lips and said, "You nice goose! That's the way to keep us sweet-tempered."

"I hope you're not going to turn cynic, Dick," said Ellery. "The role does not fit you."

"A cynic," interposed Mrs. Lenox, "always thinks that he has discovered the sourness of the world. In reality all he has found is his own bad digestion. I should hate to think there was anything on my table to cause acute indigestion, Dick."

"Perhaps there is a cog loose in his brain so that his wheels do not work together," added Ellery.

"At any rate, cynicism is self-confessed failure; so don't give way to it," Mr. Lenox concluded.

"Oh, I give up. Spare me," cried Dick.

Mrs. Lenox rose with a little nod, and as Madeline swept past him towards the door, Dick turned for an instant and stopped her laughingly.

"Forgive me," he said. "I did not mean it. I felt like saying something obnoxious."

"But you always used to want to be nice, Dick," she answered.

"Miss Elton," Mrs. Percival spoke severely, as a matron to a heedless girl, "perhaps the gentlemen would prefer to have their smoke alone. Are you coming to the drawing-room with us?"

Later, much later, Lena, in the privacy of her own room, awaited the coming of her husband who seemed to her to prolong outrageously the game of billiards which made his excuse for sitting up a little longer than herself. She shook out her fluff of hair, and arrayed herself in a bewildering pink dressing-gown from beneath which she toasted some very pink toes before the fire. She knew what arguments told on the masculine intellect. And at last Dick came.

"Sit down over there," she commanded. "No, you shan't come near me, Dick, until I've said my say. I'm really much displeased, and you need not act as though you thought it was a trifling matter."

Dick sat humbly in the spot appointed.

"Dick, I don't want you to say any more horrid little things about women. You've done it several times lately. The other day you said something to Mr. Early about his 'glorious freedom'; and you made a sneering remark to Mr. Preston about women's small dishonesties."

"Only jokes, I assure you."

"Everybody knows that women are a great deal better than men."

"They must be," said Dick. "Literature is full of statements to that effect."

"And marriage is far more desirable than 'glorious freedom'."

"It is," answered Dick. "So long as there are things to disagree about, marriage will not lose its savor."

"You say that in a perfectly mean way, as though you did not really believe anything nice. But whether you believe it or not, I am going to ask you not to talk so any more," Mrs. Percival went on with dignity, "because it sounds exactly like a criticism of me, and I think you owe it to me to treat me with respect. What must people think of me when you fling in—what do you call them—innuendoes like that around?"

Mr. Percival looked at his wife in silence; then he picked her up, chair and all, and whirled her around in front of a long pier glass.

"Do you see that?" he demanded.

Lena saw and dimpled.

"Now I propose," Dick went on, "to carry you down stairs, just as you are! I shall then arouse the whole household by my shouts and gather them around you; and when every man jack of them is there, I shall say 'Ladies and gentlemen, is it possible for a man whose wife looks like this to utter any serious accusation against femininity?'"

"Dick, don't be silly," said Lena, pouting with pleasure, and she glanced again at herself in the glass. "I am nice, am I not?"

"Nice!" ejaculated Dick, "Huyler and Maillard and Whitman and Lowney, all rolled into one big candy man, never dreamed of anything so sweet. Did you really think I was disrespectful? Why, little Lena!"

Easter morning dawned, a God-given splendor of blue and spring softness, and the six stood, after breakfast, on the veranda and looked at the day.

"Time and the world are before you. Choose how you will spend the forenoon," said Mrs. Lenox.

"I should like to drive," Lena promptly replied. "Mr. Lenox was telling me last night about his new pair of horses. I know he is pining to show them off."

She cast one of her most fascinating glances at her unmoved host.

"Just the thing. How shall we divide up?" And Mrs. Lenox looked vaguely around.

"Miss Elton and I," said Norris boldly, "are going to row, just as we used last summer."

Madeline glanced sidewise at him with some astonishment, as he made this radical statement, but although she pondered a moment, she offered no objection. Dick also glanced at him longingly as he said "last summer". Our lives seem made of little bits that have small relation with each other. Things just happen. And yet, when we look back over a long stretch we realize that life is a coherent whole, that it leads somewhere, and Dick's life had led a long way in the past year. So he too became grave but said nothing, as he resigned himself to a back seat beside Mrs. Lenox and watched Lena perched airily beside her host.

"Now I hope that matter will be amicably settled," Mrs. Lenox began, looking with a satisfied air at the two unmarried people who were starting toward the boat-house.

"What!" Dick exclaimed with a sudden start.

"Are you a bat that you can not see daylight facts?" she cried, turning upon him.

"I dare say I am." And he looked very sober. "Yes, I suppose it is all right. Norris is one of those fellows who always knows what he wants, and just plods along until he gets it."

* * * * *

"I said 'row'," Ellery remarked as he pushed the boat out from shore, "but I meant 'loaf and invite the soul'. The sunlight is too delectable for anything strenuous."

"But inviting the soul is always a solitary experience," objected Madeline.

"Perhaps. But it is delightful to know that there is a sister soul also inviting herself close at hand. I hope yours will accept the invitation. 'At home—the soul of Mr. Ellery Norris, to meet the soul of Miss Madeline Elton'."

A soft flush rose over Madeline's face and she devoted herself to the tiller ropes.

"P.S. Please come," Ellery went on with a laugh. "R.S.V.P."

"Aren't you 'flouting old ends'?" she smiled.

"I hoped I was flouting new beginnings," he answered soberly, and he rowed languidly in a silence which Madeline rushed to fill.

"I've been thinking ever since last night about Dick," she said. "He is so different from the buoyant creature of last summer. And it is only a year."

"Well, perhaps this is a phase." He rested on his oars and looked at her. "Dick is healthy, and joy is his normal state. He ought to be able to recover from his malady."

"Sometimes I think it is permanent."

"I am almost afraid, too. But you see you can not get any bargains in the department store of this world. You have to pay full price for everything. If you want self-indulgence, you have to pay your health; if you want health, you have to pay self-control. You never pay less than the value of what you get, and you are often horribly over-charged for a very inferior article. Now Dick wanted Lena Quincy. He bought a little gratification, and paid—"

"What?"

"Everything he had," answered Norris abruptly. "Do you think I have not watched his courage and ideals wither as if they had been frosted? He is numb. 'Heavy as frost,' Wordsworth said, and that's the weightiest figure he could find. It did not take her a month to begin to change him. In three months she has him well started. Isn't it a pity that the worse one of the two should have the controlling force? But Dick's very volatility that we love has laid him open to this thing."

"I'm glad," said Madeline slowly, "that he has his political interest."

"Yes, he's going into it with a kind of fury."

"Won't that give him a big outlet?"

"He may get a lot of satisfaction and do a really creditable thing."

"Your tone does not sound very hopeful."

"A single interest in life may accomplish more for the world, but I don't believe it is very satisfactory for one's self."

Madeline looked at him inquiringly.

"God gives us of His own creative power," he said reverently, and there came into his very practical face that dreamy look which she had seen there once or twice before. "He supplies us with the raw materials of the universe, gold and beauty and food and desire—and love—and He bids us out of these things to build a man. We can't build a successful man if we use only one ingredient. We get a complete man only when we use them all."

Madeline stared off across the waters, and Ellery watched her over shipped oars. At last he said, "But are you going to think only of Dick, and Dick, and Dick for ever?"

She turned on him a face flushed but utterly frank.

"I know what you are thinking," she said. "But you are mistaken, quite mistaken." And she met his eyes squarely in spite of her heightened color. "At this very moment I was thinking more of you than of him," she added.

"And what of me?"

"I was thinking how I misread you at first. I thought you a kind of grub."

"And now?"

"That you are dogged and persistent; and that therefore you stick to your ideals better than he."

"Do you know how comparatively easy that is, even for a plodder, when his ideals are set up before him in visible form, so that he can not forget them by day or by night? I wonder if you can realize what it means to have a face like yours looking up from every dirty strip of galley-proof, and a voice like yours sounding under the rumble of the big presses. It's something of a possession for an every-day man." A soft glow that might have been a trick of the spring sun spread over Madeline's face. There is no thought more intoxicating to a girl than to feel that she stands to a man for his ideals. A long sweet silence fell between them, while she mused on this thing, and he watched her in tense anxiety.

"Madeline!" he cried, suddenly leaning forward and catching her hands. "I must tell you! You must know, and I must know!"

With the grasp of his fingers, the first physical touch of love, an electric pang seemed to leap through the girl's body; and in the flash were shown to her new heights and depths in herself, and a thousand dim things in the future. She felt, in the man, the revelation of that mystery by which the body's passion slips into passion of the soul—that soul-love, which by its very nature can never know lassitude nor revulsion. And what was actual in him, grew radiant with possibility in herself.

She looked up to meet his eager face and his eyes like lamps. "No, no!" she cried. "Don't tell me."

"But do you know without telling?"

"I must think."

"But surely you must have read it long ago."

"I only glanced at it. I never looked it in the face."

"Don't examine it too closely now, or I'm afraid you will find it a poor thing," he said whimsically. "Take it on impulse, Madeline."

But she waved him away with her hand, turning her face to one side, and leaned back in her cushions, while Ellery waited, hardly breathing. There was a deep hush on the opal waters under the April morning sky, and no sound but the far-off note of a wood-thrush.

"Madeline!" he cried at last. "Be merciful, and speak to me."

She gathered her self-possession and turned to face him with smiles and dimples, and one swift look full in the face.

"Mr. Norris," she said airily, and then laughed as his face fell at the title, "we are in the middle of a big sheet of water, and I do not want you to upset the boat; we are visible from many miles of shore, and the world and his wife are driving and motoring on this most beautiful of days; but over on our right there is a lovely little beach, and a clump of willows that have forced the season a bit. Perhaps, if we went there, I might listen to what you have to say."

"Oh, Madeline, my Madeline," he said, "I can never tell you because the words are not made that will hold it, and it will take a lifetime to tell it all. But, if you are willing, we will make a beginning over there by the dipping willows." He shot a stormy glance at her as he caught the oars, and she met it bravely. "Please don't trail your fingers in the water," he said. "You are delaying the progress of the boat."

"Heaven forbid delay!" she cried in mock horror, and showered him with the drops from her lifted hand.

The keel grated, and Ellery sprang ashore and held out his arms to help her.

"Madeline," he said, sternly holding her at arm's length, "this spot is so evidently created for a lovers' bower, that I suspect you of having had your eye on it for a long time. How did you come to direct me here?"

"Instinct," she laughed. "That wonderful instinct of woman."

"Shall we stay here for ever and let the world wag?"

"And live on locusts and wild honey?" she asked.

"Yes, if you will be my wild honey. I'm going to begin to devour you right away." And he caught her at last.

"Who gave you permission?" she whispered with cheek close to his.

"Who? Haven't you heard the universe shouting aloud? The sky, and the sun and the lake and the woods. They've been crying 'Mine! Mine! Mine!' for the last ten minutes. You'll never contradict them, sweetheart?"

"Never," said she.

For a long moment they looked into each other's eyes, and she read in his that mastery without tyranny which for some inexplicable reason sets a woman's heart beating with unimagined bliss.

Ten minutes later, or so it seemed, Madeline pulled his watch from his pocket and started in dismay.

"Ellery," she cried, "do you know that we have been sitting here for four hours? What will Mrs. Lenox and all the others think?"

"Who cares what they think? Let them think the truth, if their imaginations can soar to that height."

"We must hurry back."

"Don't you think it is a little brutal to invite a man to leave Heaven and go back to earth?"

"Perhaps we need a dose of the world. Medicine is good for one."

"Not unless he is ill; and I was never well till now."

"Come, Ellery, we really must go," she said with severity.

"Well, there's lunch," he meditated. "I confess that I can view the prospect of luncheon with something like equanimity. There are certain advantages about the world, Madeline."

It was long after the driving party had returned when Miss Elton and Mr. Norris strolled up the path from the boat-house, quite indifferent to the fact of their lateness. Dick on the piazza watched their coming and needed no handwriting on the wall. The girl glowed and Ellery reflected her light.

"It would be a perfect woman who should unite her spirit with Lena's soul-delighting body," Percival said to himself. "And Ellery chooses the spirit, and I, God help me, love and choose the body. But I can not bear to meet them."

He was turning to slip away when he met his wife face to face, and stopped half in curiosity to see what she would notice and hear what she would say. Lena, too, gazed at the oblivious advancing pair.

"Well, of all things!" exclaimed Mrs. Percival. "I should think she'd feel pretty cheap."

"Why?" asked Dick, startled.

"Coming down to a nobody like that!" Lena retorted in scorn. "But I think she has been going off in her looks lately, and I dare say she knows it, and is glad to get even him."

The billiard room was empty, and Dick went in and shut the door.



CHAPTER XIX

ORIENTAL RUBIES

As the months drifted into summer, young Mrs. Percival often felt very dull. She had not even the excitement of envy left her for, with the engagement of Miss Elton and Mr. Norris, much of her old enmity for Madeline faded. Ellery looked to her like a fate so inferior to her own that she could afford to drop her jealousy; and since Mr. Early and Dick were now wholly released from thrall, she considered Madeline a creature too inoffensive to be reckoned an enemy. She could even share the tolerant and amused pleasure with which the world surveys a love match. This pair was so evidently and rapturously content that they diffused their own atmosphere. Lena could not understand that variety of love, but its presence was patent to her.

Most of the "real people" as Mrs. Appleton called them, in improvement on their Maker's classification, were leaving town either for the lake or for some more distant breathing place, but she was tied at home, first because Mrs. Percival the elder, whom Dick refused to desert, preferred the wide quiet of her rooms, and second because Dick himself grew daily more absorbed in his political labors.

Lena went to say good-by for the summer to Mrs. Appleton and was bidden to come up stairs to a disordered little room where that matron superintended a flushed maid busy with packing.

"I am really quite played out with all this turmoil," Mrs. Appleton sighed. "Truly, dear Mrs. Percival, I think you are to be congratulated on staying at home. The game is not worth the candle."

"I think, if Madame is tired, I could finish alone." Marie lifted a face that manifested hope from the bottom of a trunk, but Madame shook her head. It was one of her principles to see to everything herself and so gain the proud consciousness of utter exhaustion in doing her duty.

Lena glanced enviously about the heaped up gowns and lacy lingerie. It made her own stock seem mean.

"Perhaps it will amuse you to look these over while I am busy," Mrs. Appleton went on good-humoredly, pushing a leather-bound case across the table toward Lena's arm. Mrs. Percival lifted out one little tray after another with growing sullenness. The profusion of jewels gave her no pleasure. She slammed the trays back in place.

"Did Mr. Appleton give you all of these?" she demanded.

"Yes. Isn't he generous? But he says that my type of beauty is one that can stand lavish decoration."

"He's certainly more free than Dick," Lena said with bald envy, reviewing her own small store that a few short months ago had seemed to her like the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.

"My dear," Mrs. Appleton exclaimed with a self-conscious laugh, "you can hardly expect Dick Percival to rival Humphrey."

Mrs. Percival felt bitterly her friend's loftiness of position. It was of course impossible for a woman to feel superior to what she owns and Mrs. Appleton owned more and always would own more than Lena Percival. "Do you know, my love," Mrs. Appleton pursued, "I think your husband is making a great mistake in going in for petty politics. With his pull, and his fair amount of capital to start with, he ought to be able to make a fortune. He's just throwing his life away."

"Don't you suppose I know it?" Lena cried tearfully. "I've told him so a hundred times. He's just crazy over these nasty little things. He's willing to sacrifice anything to get the place of ward alderman away from some miserable Swede. Think of me tied in town all summer!"

"I wouldn't stand it," Mrs. Appleton answered absently, her eyes on Marie, stuffing tissue paper in a sleeve. "A woman has such influence on her husband. Take matters in your own hands, my dear."

Lena, rebellious at heart, found her only diversion in occasional week-ends at other people's country houses, or in long flights by evening in Dick's motor. Her husband was self-absorbed and often silent, another person, as she frequently and querulously rubbed into him, from the ardent creature of a few months before.

Sometimes he made attempts to open to her his subjects of thought, but Lena never attempted to understand things that did not interest her, and now that she was safely married, it was too much trouble to make much pretense at it; so she was often alone, and frequently bored.

Even Mr. Early was away most of the time, and the great blank eyes of closed windows blinked down at her from his closed house beyond the dividing hedge that flanked the garden. His place stood on a corner, and on the two sides that fronted the streets, Sebastian had hidden the wonders of his terraces and trimmed trees by high walls, but toward the Percivals he had been less exclusive. Most of the houses in St. Etienne, like their own, had no property dividing line, but lawn melted into lawn with a park-like openness that hinted at communistic kindliness. This had its disadvantages in lack of privacy, and hence it was that in spite of quite an extensive demesne, Lena found in her own garden no spot absolutely hidden from curious eyes of passers, except in one thicket of trees and shrubbery over near the Early boundary. Here there was seclusion, and here, therefore, young Mrs. Percival had her hammock and her group of chairs and tables; and here she spent long indolent afternoons in sleepy reading and sleepier dreaming, which was only less agreeable than the social triumphs of which she dreamed. And yet she often found herself weary of nothing, and wished she had some one exactly to her taste to keep her company and talk to her about little things in that "fool's paradise of laziness" where, it is said, Satan is entertainer in chief. Once in a while, on his brief home-stays, Mr. Early illuminated her retreat with his presence.

Toward the middle of the summer, certain business interests called Dick to North Dakota, and then life was duller than ever.

Therefore it was a not wholly unwelcome diversion when, late on an August afternoon, she saw the thick laurels of the hedge near her part a little and the form of Ram Juna stand in the cleft, snowy white from turban to slippers save for the gleaming ruby and the polished bronze face. He looked like the day itself, glowing, sultry, indolent.

"Pardon me, dear lady," he said, "that through the bush I spied you. I was solitary. You are solitary. The heat suits not with the severer thought. The weak body refuses to yield to the commands of mind. I fail to write; and perhaps you fail to read."

"I guess your thinking is harder work than my reading. Won't you come over and sit down?" said Lena cordially.

"Then you, like me, would welcome companionship?"

"Yes. Isn't this a nice shady place?" Lena answered. "The maid is just bringing me some iced drinks, and I dare say they'll taste good to you if you have been trying to write that wonderful book of yours in all this blaze."

The Hindu pushed the hedge still farther asunder and swept with a sigh of content over to a cushioned reclining chair.

"If one's heart were set on the things that fade, what greater satisfaction? Shadow, deep shadow from the heat, cool drafts, the voice of a fair woman."

"You must not count me among the things that fade, though," laughed Lena, as she handed him a tall glass of clinking fragrance. "I shan't like you a bit if you do."

"Everything fades, the rose, the lady, even thought, which is after all but a grub on the tree of truth. All, all fade."

"I wish you wouldn't talk that way," objected Lena. "You make me feel quite creepy."

"Ah," said Ram Juna, "you love the things of to-day. To me the thought that all is transitory is bliss. Is it not so?"

"Yes," said Lena, "I'm sure I like roses and jewels and iced minty stuff to drink. And Ram Juna, I wish you would tell me the really-truly history of your ruby. I've heard so many stories about it." He put up his hand, detached the great jewel from its place and laid it in her small outstretched palm.

"That is a mark of my confiding," he said. "There are few to whom I would give to handle my treasure. It may truly be called a stone of blood. Such angry storms of greed and passion, such murders of father by son and husband by wife link their story to it. And now it rests at last on the head of a man of peace. For how long? For how long?" Lena looked at it with the eyes of fascination as it lay in her open hand.

"It charms you like a serpent?" asked her companion, leaning forward with indolent amusement. "You are true woman. You love the glitter. Would you like to see others?"

"Have you others?" cried Lena. "Oh—oh, I should like to see them!" He rose, made her a salaam of grace, parted the hedge once more and disappeared only to return bringing in his hands a curious box of carven ivory, which he set on the table between them and proceeded to unlock with a key of quaint device.

Lena gave a cry of rapture and astonishment as the lid fell back. Ram Juna laid his hand on her arm.

"Silence!" he commanded, "would it be well that the flippant public who pass near at hand on the pavement should know that there are such treasures in this thicket?"

"I did not know that there was so much splendor in the world," whispered Lena in admiration.

"Rubies—all rubies! They were the stones beloved of my ancestors. This dangled once on the neck of a maha-ranee, more beautiful than itself, only, unfortunately, she lost her neck, murdered by a rival queen."

He twisted the string of gems about her arm, bare to the elbow, and Lena gasped with pleasure.

"Let me add this bracelet—a serpent. See of curious carved gold the scales, and the eyes again two wicked rubies to beguile men's souls. Yet it becomes the arm, does it not? Look, at your pleasure, at the rest of the box."

He pushed the case toward her and Lena began to finger its profuse contents with occasional sighs of envious delight and glances at her white flesh enhanced by its ornaments. Ram Juna sat in silence.

"How do you dare to carry such things around with you?" she asked.

"Not much longer," he answered with a shrug. "To me they are delusions inappropriate. I see that is your thought. Is it not so? What have I to do with necklaces and rings of princesses? I had forgotten that I had them, until a chance thought recalled it. I had long since meant to sell them and give the money to the great cause for which I labor. That is my treasure, is it not? I shall never take them back to India. I must hasten to get rid of them, for I purpose to return there at once."

"Why, are you going away?"

"To-morrow I leave this city. My work here is done. It is the last of work. Hereafter I shall find some solitary spot and end my life in meditations. And the rubies—I might give them away; but perhaps the trifle I should receive for them would help the Brothers in their service. I shall not expect or wish their value."

"Oh, I wish I might buy some of them!"

"Why not? No lady could wear them with greater dignity. Young, beautiful, beloved, and clothed with jewels. It is the frame for the picture, Madame."

"Oh!" said Lena.

"To you, whom I reverence, they should cost but a trifle."

"How much?" gasped Lena.

"The necklace, now," said Ram Juna, and he leaned over and twisted it about her arm as he seemed to hesitate, "I would give you that for five thousand dollars—and you can see that it is worth—ah, I know not how many times that sum. I do not understand these things."

"But my husband is away, and I have not any thing like that sum. Besides, I could not buy it without asking him, you know. Oh, I should like it!"

"Bah, it is a trifle to a lady in your position. You could in many ways raise so paltry an amount. I can not, unfortunately, give you time to deliberate." He was speaking very rapidly with many gestures, quite unlike his usual calm. "I tell you I return to India without delay. If you would wish those beautiful things you must hasten—to-day. Any person, I think, would lend you such money. Mr. Early—ah, yes—Mr. Early."

"Mr. Early is away, isn't he?"

Lena was growing confused. She turned the glittering string around and around on her arm, and her heart was big with foolish longing. The necklace seemed the only thing in life worth while. Ram Juna's quick movements and urgent words quite took away her powers of reasoning.

"Mr. Early? Yes. He returned this morning. Shall I tell you a great secret, Madame? A man loves the one for whom he does a favor. Would it not be wise to let Mr. Early do this thing for you? I know he will lend you without question. It will hereafter bind him to you. See. I make the arrangements with him myself. Ladies know nothing of business, and I not much. But I talk with him, he understands, and I make all smooth. Will you? Shall I? Yes or no? Do not lose such a treasure by hesitancy. Your husband shall thank you when he comes again. Yes? See the sunlight comes through the trees and makes the rubies like itself."

"Oh, if Mr. Early would," said Lena. "I don't see why I shouldn't. And if Mr. Percival thinks I can't afford it, the rubies are worth more than I paid for them anyway."

"You are reasonable. Hold it. I trust you while I go to see Mr. Early, and return. The necklace is yours, beautiful lady."

Ram Juna was awakened from his usual serenity and full of tiger-like restlessness. Again he plunged through the hedge, and Lena saw the white turban flying toward the house. Even Mr. Early looked around startled as his usually torpid guest burst into the little den.

"Hello!" he said. "What's up?"

"Early, I bring you opportunity, the greatest of gifts. The favor I shall confer, is it less than the favor I have received from you?"

"What do you mean?" asked Sebastian.

"Once you say that you will give much to get the young Percival in your power."

"Yes. What of it?"

"It is done."

A look of real interest began to illuminate Mr. Early's face. "Well?" he said sharply.

"I have rubies—rubies to lure the heart of a woman from her bosom. Madame, the young wife would give her soul—if she but had one. That is too hard. Let her give her note." The Swami laughed gently. "You would lend her five thousand dollars, my friend, to buy rubies from me. That is an empty show. She gives you the note. I give her the necklace that she must have. That is all. There is no need to give me money. I return your hospitality thus."

"Well, suppose I did all this. Dick Percival could easily discharge his wife's debt."

"Not so fast. Not so fast. The young wife is a fool as well as a knave. To the note she shall sign her husband's name. That I will bring to pass. But you know nothing of this. Of course not. You suppose that the signature is genuine. You are unaware that Percival is out of town. And I—if I am guilty—I am with my guilty knowledge in the hut in the mountains of India. Do you not think that while you hold that note young Percival will gladly serve you in any fashion that you may choose, rather than that so foolish a piece of wife's knavery should come abroad?"

"Gee whizz!" exclaimed Mr. Early, gazing at the simple seeker after truth, whose face shone with a radiant smile. "Gee whizz! Ram Juna, but you are a business man! But she won't sign her husband's name."

Ram Juna's smile expanded cheerfully.

"Let that remain to me. You have but to play your part," he said.

Mr. Early thought hard for a moment.

"There is need to haste," said the Swami gently. "She is now in the garden where access is easy. Make the note. I will take it to her to sign. Hasten, my friend."

Mr. Early drew toward him pen and ink.

"It's a little flyer, and there may be something in it," he said. "I don't see that I get into trouble any way. But see here, Swami, you deserve something for your work. I'm not going to see you lose that five thousand. When you bring me this I O U with Dick Percival's signature, I'll give you my check for the amount. Understand?"

"Be that as you will," said the Hindu, and he caught the piece of paper and fled toward the thicket where Lena still played with her toy.

"Have I not told you?" he began suavely. "The necklace, less fair than its owner, is yours. But one moment. Will you first do me a favor?"

He lifted the great white turban from his hot forehead and set it on the table before her.

"A simple bit of the skill of my country," he said. "Will you look fixedly into the great ruby that remains mine? And, as you look, will you yield your mind to me, and let me show you a vision? So—even deeper let your eyes penetrate to the heart of the jewel. Deeper and yet deeper."

He made a swift motion or two before her, and her eyes grew fixed.

"What do you see?"

"Myself," she answered.

"Naturally. What else could you ever see? But you are different. You are a thousand times more beautiful. The world lies at your feet. It is a world of adulation. Do you see this?"

"Yes."

"Very well. Now look away. We must not longer see the beautiful picture. You remember we have business. Mr. Early, your friend, and my friend, will lend you money. But how are you to repay him? You have nothing of your own. It must be your husband who secures you. In the front of the book which you are reading it is written 'Richard Percival'. You will copy this with your utmost care, here on this paper. Ah, for you it is not hard to do this thing. For some it would be hard to persuade them. You make but a poor copy. That is of indifference. I will return this to Mr. Early. You will await me here."

The August afternoon was closing, and the shadows grew strong here where vines knit the trees into close brotherhood. Lena lay back in her chair and clutched her treasure in a kind of stupor, until, in an incredibly short time Ram Juna again appeared, tucking a scrap of yellow paper into some inner pouch as he came. The Buddha smile still played about his lips. He seated himself on the ground and stared unblinkingly at the girl, and she gazed almost as fixedly back, except that once in a while her eyes wandered to the big red stone which still hung in the turban on the table. Ten minutes—fifteen minutes—they sat in silence, as though the Swami enjoyed the experience, then the bronze man rose and moved slowly toward her.

"Awake!" he whispered. "You must never forget that you wrote your husband's name when you had not the right. Ah, in India, our knaves are not also fools."

There was a sudden sharp noise and a cry in the garden behind the hedge; and the Swami leaped into attention with the swift motionlessness of a wild animal. Lena roused herself heavily and blinked about. There was no Swami to be seen. His turban lay on the table, but he himself had disappeared in a twinkling. She heard a rush of feet and voices raised in excitement and then a sharp command. Even while she listened, confused, a blue-coated starred man appeared at the opening in the hedge and over his shoulder she saw Mr. Early's face, startled out of its decorum into bewildered anxiety.

"Beg pardon, miss," said the officer. "Have you seen anything of that nigger preacher?"

"The Swami?" asked Lena.

The man nodded.

"He was here a moment ago—at least I think he was. I—I'm not sure. And he seems to have gone away. I don't know where he is." She looked vaguely around.

"Left this in his hurry, I guess," said the man, taking possession of the turban. "He must be hiding somewhere near. With your permission, I will search the house, miss," and he moved off without waiting for the said permission.

"Mrs. Percival," said Mr. Early.

"Beg pardon, Mrs. Percival," the man threw back with an added air of respect. "It is an unpleasant duty, ma'am, but you'll not object, I know." He beckoned sharply to two or three others who stood behind Mr. Early, and turned toward the open door.

"What does all this mean, Mr. Early?" Lena gasped.

He tumbled as if exhausted into the same easy chair that Ram Juna had occupied a few moments before.

"I am completely staggered," he exclaimed. "The police seem to think they have reason to suspect my guest of being implicated with a gang of counterfeiters. In fact they say that it is his extraordinary cunning of hand that produced the bills that have been appearing everywhere. And—great heavens!—he used my house as—as—as a fence! My house! Pardon me, my dear Mrs. Percival, but I am horribly upset. They've found dies and all kinds of queer things in the little room that he kept sacred to his meditations. But of course I can't be suspected of knowing. Why, all my servants can bear testimony to the fact that I know nothing about that room."

"Of course, Mr. Early, no one would think of accusing you."

"Still, my house, you know—and my friend. It's horrible!" In fact Mr. Early was shivering as though he had the ague. "It would drive me mad if any one should think—why, Mrs. Percival, think of the scandal of having him with me for months. Of course, if they catch him, I'll make him clear me at once. But, take it how you will, it is awful. The least I can expect is to be laughed at over the whole civilized world for being his dupe. I've always prided myself on my clean skirts. You think I'm raving, Mrs. Percival. I am nearly mad." Mr. Early suddenly leaped up with horror newly reborn in his eyes. "And I had just given him a large check. That is bound to look bad. There is no knowing how it may be misconstrued. Great heavens, what am I to do?"

Lena flushed.

"I'm afraid that check was for me," she said. "Mr. Early, I want to thank you—for—for being so generous to me; and when Dick comes back from North Dakota, he will repay you at once."

Mr. Early caught himself up and remembered that he had a part to play in the present drama.

"When Dick comes back," he said in a stupefied way, "what do you mean by 'when Dick comes back'? Isn't he here now? Why, he must be. It isn't an hour since he signed—"

"Didn't you know he was away?" asked Lena timidly, her heart sinking, for Mr. Early's tone was sharp.

"I certainly thought he signed a note made out to me. Was it another piece of the Swami's clever forgery?"

"He—I—" cried poor Lena in confusion. "Oh, Mr. Early, do you call it forgery?—my own husband's name? Oh, I—oh, Mr. Early, what are you thinking?" At this moment she was the picture of confused innocence.

Mr. Early looked at her and gave a long-drawn breath of astonishment.

"I understand," he said at last, while Lena hung her head. "You wrote Dick's name for him, and he knows nothing about it. Well, let it go at that. It is a matter of no consequence. And, my dear Mrs. Percival, I would suggest that this matter be kept a secret between you and me. We'll never mention the debt again. I'm sure you will accept the rubies as a little gift from one of the most humble of your admirers." He bent forward and kissed her finger-tips in his most gallant manner.

"Oh, Mr. Early, you are so good!" Lena's voice expressed manifest relief. The memory came back to her of what Ram Juna had said about the bond created by favor. It flashed into her mind, "He thinks it is sweet and innocent and womanly in me to do such a thing in ignorance. Dick would think so, too. How should I know?"

"But suppose Dick shouldn't like to have me take them from you, such a magnificent gift?"

"I would suggest," Mr. Early's manner was regaining some of its self-possession, "that you speak of the necklace—is that it in your hand? a really wonderful thing, with curious settings, carved by hand—as I was saying, I would suggest that you speak of it as a gift from the Swami, who, as is well known, was much impressed by your charms. A present from such a creature, who hardly comes into the category of ordinary men, would create no such remark as might a gift from me. Do you not see? We will let the truth remain a little secret between us two. I have an idea that we shall not be likely to see Ram Juna again. I fancy he is a fellow of greater cunning than any of us dreamed; and if he has a little start of the detectives, I doubt if they have so much as a glimpse of his heels; though, to be sure, he is rather a marked figure, and difficult to disguise. Now don't forget. The Swami, with oriental profuseness, gave you the rubies."

"You are a dear," gushed Lena. "Oh, I do hope he is gone!" After all, it was a relief that Dick should not know.

"One favor I must ask, my dear Mrs. Percival," Mr. Early went on hesitatingly. "If, by any chance, Dick should ever come to know of this, will you assure him that I supposed his signature to be genuine? I wouldn't have him suspect that I—that I was a party—or at least that I knew that you wrote it for him. For really, little woman, it wasn't strictly honest, you know."

"I'm afraid it wasn't," Lena confessed with charming blushes. "But I didn't think. I don't know much about such things, you know."

"Of course you don't. No nice woman does," said Mr. Early comfortingly. "And now let us forget it."

"Here come the officers," said Lena.

"It ain't no use," said the captain disgustedly. "He's given us the slip, somehow. And we'd watched the house and made sure we'd nab him."

"What are you going to do?" asked Mr. Early.

"Take his kit, and set guards and send telegraph descriptions of him in all directions. 'Taint likely he can get clean away. He'll be a marked man wherever he goes."

"If there is anything I can do to help you," said Mr. Early grandiloquently, "you can command me, though you may imagine that it is very offensive to me to be mixed up in this kind of affair."

"Well, rather," said the officer dryly. Then, seeing the flush rising on Mr. Early's face, he went on with the patronage of the majesty of the law: "You needn't fear that you'll suffer any personal inconvenience. We've had you under surveillance for a long time—ever since we began to suspect your nigger friend; and we know you are all right." But the assurance seemed to add to Mr. Early's discomfiture. "Looks as if it was going to blow up a storm. A dark night would be a good thing for him and a nuisance to us. But we'll catch him sure."

They were gone, and Lena lingered a moment, fastening her dearly-bought bauble around her neck and gathering her books, while a maid came scudding from the house to bundle rugs and cushions away in face of the thunder-heads looming in the southwest. A sudden sibilant sound brought Lena to attention.

"Mrs. Percival!" she heard. "Look up."

Among the branches over her head the leaves were drawn so closely together that only a few faint glimmers of white showed, and the brilliant eyes that glared down at her were the most conspicuous things she saw.

"Listen and reply not," he said. "You will bring a dark and large great-coat, and other dark garments that you can find, and leave them here with swiftness and secrecy. I command you. If you do not obey, I will make it the worse for you."

He snarled suddenly, and Lena jumped back as though a tiger had sprung at her throat.

The face disappeared among the leaves, and Lena sped toward the house, hastened by a crash of thunder and a few great drops, that seemed to her frightened imagination like the servants of the savage creature that she had left in the tree-tops. She slipped out again, in spite of wind and rain, obedient to his command, and as she dropped her bundle at the foot of the tree trunk, she whispered,

"I hope, oh, I hope that you will get away!" But she heard no reply. The storm came down and the night fell, seamed with lightning.

Lena quietly ate her dinner, and listened to the well-bred calm voice of her mother-in-law as she wondered what Dick was doing, and when he would be at home again. But Lena wondered what Ram Juna was doing, and whether she should ever see him again.



CHAPTER XX

A LIGHT FROM THE EAST GOES OUT

To be in the heart of a great country, fifteen hundred miles from the Atlantic, and two thousand miles from the Pacific, to be forbidden the public highway of the train, and to have one's objective point India,—this is by no means an easy problem, even to the oriental mind. And who could know what was going on in the being that crept away into the storm, strong with the instinct of hiding and of cunning. He must have balanced all things. To go westward, where the great steamers plied toward the Orient, this would seem the natural course; and yet that way lay interminable prairies and empty stretches, and again deserts and piled mountains, without shelter and without food. It is easier to hide among people than amid solitudes. On crowded city streets, we jostle without seeing.

It was no great feat to transform the once Swami of the flowing robes and lofty port into a hulking skulking negro tramp, like the sturdy villains of ancient days, sleeping in woody nooks by day, and pursuing his slow journey under the stars, answering the look of such human beings as he met with suspicion, keeping to the hamlets where police officers were scarce and knowledge of the criminal world scarcer, and where solitary house-wives, whose men were in the field, could be persuaded, half through charity and half through fear, to dole out food. Ah, but it was a weary journey. The world, of whose littleness we boast when we think of steam and electricity, grows very sizable again when a man comes back to the elemental means of progress—his own two legs. As for the smaller world in which he had been living—the world of luxury and of worshiping disciples—he laughed silently to think what a mirage it was and always had been.

Down the Mississippi he crept, sometimes peering from between the great trees that flanked its steep banks, as the red Indians did long ago, to see the boats of the white man go serenely up and down that mighty swirling current, and stopping even in his self-absorption to feel a little of the beauty when the great river spread itself into the shimmering expanse of Lake Pipin, or to remember, at Winona, the picturesque legend that he had heard of the deserted Chippewa maiden who here threw herself from the overhanging rocks into the pitiless rush of waters below, and left only her ghost and her sweet-sounding name to the spot. He halted to inspect the great monolith, a hundred feet in height, of Sugar Loaf.

He had an idea that in some little town to the south he might venture to board a straggling cross-country train to Chicago; and, once in the thick of men again, he believed himself safe. He had always been wary enough to keep on his person a certain sum of money. Such as it was, it might serve his purpose. It also tickled his sense of humor to think that—shabby black wayfarer that he was—he had in his pocket a check for five thousand dollars, that he could not cash, and a handful of rubies that were enough to awaken the suspicions of the least suspicious. But still, day after day and night after night, he plodded patiently on his way down the water course, until at last, at Prairie du Chien, two hundred miles from St. Etienne, he felt that he might comfort his inner man with hot food, and his weary legs with a bed and a pillow. He prowled along the streets of the country town looking for some cheap lodging-house where such as he, a humble, cringing, dog-like fellow, might find shelter. He looked through a dusty window and saw a shaggy-bearded, roughly-dressed man shoveling food with a knife, and he felt that he had found the right place.

The proprietor of the establishment sat at a small table absorbed in the perusal of a week-old Sunday newspaper. He growled out a "Guess so. Sausages; baked beans; coffee," to Ram Juna's polite inquiry. It neither looked nor smelled inviting, but the Hindu submitted to fate and swallowed a hasty and unpalatable meal.

"Can you tell me where I can get a bed for the night?" he asked, turning to his host.

The evident refinement in his voice made that worthy look up from his literary occupation in some startled curiosity.

"They ain't many places where they take niggers," he said with an unpleasant grin. "But I guess you might find a berth at Sally Munn's, if you ain't too particular about morals. She's a merlatter herself; keeps a place 'bout six houses down, first street to the left." The man stared impudently as he spoke, but Ram Juna said, "Thank you," with his usual politeness as he went out. The Hindu noted the impudent stare, but he went away with an indifferent air.

"See here!" said the proprietor to his single other customer, "ain't this picture in the paper the very image of that black feller that just skipped?"

"Say, it's him!"

"We'd ought to look this up. There's a big reward offered."

While Ram Juna slept, lying in all his day clothes, some subtle subconsciousness kept watch, became aware of disturbance, and roused his body to attention. He got up, tiptoed to the open window and looked out at the group of men standing below in the darkness.

"Aw, shut up, Sal," one of them was saying to an angry woman in the doorway. "We ain't goin' to raid ye, though Lord knows you wouldn't have no kick comin' if we did. What we want is that black feller that come to-night. We suspect he's one of a gang of counterfeiters that the St. Etienne police are after; and we ain't goin' to lose the chance of the reward. You fellers keep right under the window, and I'll take you six up stairs with me. He's big and he may show fight. Get your guns ready. Don't shoot to kill. We want to deliver him alive. But you needn't be afraid to use a ball on him."

Ram Juna drew away from the window and smiled his old Buddha smile. With clumsy creaking precautions they mounted the stair. The moment for the climax came; there was a rush all together, a breaking down of the shaky door. The crew burst into the room—an empty room—and stared puzzled and stupefied at the walls and at each other.

"Well, if that don't beat all!" ejaculated the sheriff. "Where in —— has that fellow disappeared to?"

"They say," said Josiah Strait, a lank westernized Yankee, "that them Hindu jugglers and lamas, and so forth, has supernatural gifts, and I begin to believe it."

* * * * *

Something over a month later, Mr. Early burst in on Mr. and Mrs. Percival as they dawdled over the breakfast-table.

"It's no time to be paying calls, I know," he apologized, "but I've had such a sensation this morning that I had to come over and share it. Yes, there are times when a man wishes that he had a wife to talk to!"

"What is it, Early?" Dick asked indifferently.

Mr. Early was waving a bit of paper about in a way quite hysterical.

"Do you see that?" he cried exultantly. "I never expected to see it again, but I declare it is worth its price. I was going over my bank accounts the first thing this morning and I found it."

"How do you expect us to know what it is when you're fanning it about that way?" Dick demanded.

"It's a check, man, a check for five thousand that I gave Ram Juna the very day of his unceremonious departure." Lena turned scarlet, and Mr. Early noticed it with fresh glee. "A check I gave Ram Juna," he repeated. "It's been cashed, with four indorsements, in New Orleans. Now how did he manage that, tell me. The Swami is one of the great geniuses of the age. Of course I wanted to see the rascals punished, and it makes me hot to think how they used my house and all that, but, by Jove! I'm glad they haven't Ram Juna. From New Orleans, a seaport, mind you! I am willing to make a good-sized bet that he's well on his way to his favorite Himalayas by this time, ready to meditate on the syllable 'Om' for the rest of his life. Oh, it's too good! How he must laugh in his sleeve at the rest of the world! But how did he get that check cashed?"

"Well, if I were in your place, I should have it traced back," said Dick, the practical.

"Of course I shall," exclaimed Mr. Early. "Of course I shall. I shall put it in the hands of the police at once, for I'm sure of one thing, if it helps to root out any sinners, Swami Ram Juna won't be among them. He's gone for good, take my word for it; and as for the other rascals, I hope with all my heart they may suffer." He nodded jubilantly at Mrs. Percival, and she flushed again.

"It's a very good joke, certainly," said Dick, "but rather an expensive one for you, I should say, Early."

"Oh, I shall get five thousand dollars' worth of satisfaction out of it," Mr. Early went on enthusiastically. "And I'm proud of the Swami, proud of him. And the splendid simplicity of him! I was talking yesterday with the detective that ferreted him out. The plunder they found in my little room was perfectly primitive. He had practically no tools to make the cleverest counterfeits in years. A deft hand and a wonderful thumb had the Swami."

"What are they going to do with the big ruby in his turban?" asked Lena.

"Oh, that is one of the chief things that I came to tell you about. You, my dear Mrs. Percival, have especial reason to be interested in this." He turned, brimming with information, to Lena, "The captain of police took it to Brand's—the jeweler, you know—to be appraised. Now isn't this the crown of the whole story? Brand tells him that it is paste!"

Dick sat back in his chair and laughed with abandon, and laughed again.

"And what about my rubies'?" screamed Lena, springing to her feet.

"I have not the slightest doubt that they are paste, too. Everything he touched was fraud."

"I'm glad of it! I'm glad of it!" cried Dick, with a new access of mirth. "The old rascal! Giving my wife jewels! Why, Lena, you couldn't wear his stuff anyway, after all this fracas. It will do to trim a Christmas tree."

But Lena, with angry face, tapped the floor nervously with her gaudy small slipper, and made no reply to her husband's hilarity.

Even to her slow-working mind it was evident that she had paid a high price for some worthless bits of glass. This conferring of a favor was indeed a bond.

She wondered what Mr. Early thought of her; what Dick would say if he ever discovered.



CHAPTER XXI

A LIGHT IN THE WEST GOES DOWN

The strenuousness of the fall campaign almost wiped these events from Dick's mind. Day after day he spent in bringing home his points to the man on the street and in the workshop. Much of it was dreary and monotonous work, but he kept doggedly at it. It seemed his whole life, now. And night after night Mr. Preston, Dick and Ellery tried to put fire into some dingy little hall-full of men. To Percival's surprise, Norris developed a plain common-sense variety of eloquence that appealed to his audiences quite as much as did Dick's more fervid eloquence. Ellery invariably spoke straight to some well-known condition. But they hammered and pounded and reasoned and explained; they tried emotion, and logic and everything except bribes to win their ground, until their speeches began to sound automatic to themselves, their voices grew hoarse, and they moved like men in a dream.

"If there were one day more of this," Dick said to Norris, as they tramped home late on the night before election, and felt a certain restfulness in the November starlight, "I should send down a wheezing nasal phonograph to grind out my speech. I am played out. Everything I say sounds like tommy-rot."

"It does grow hollow. The worst of it is it robs me of my evenings with Madeline."

"Um!" said Dick. "When are you to be married?"

"About Christmas. The death of Golden, poor fellow, shoves me up a peg on the editorial staff, and justifies me in facing matrimony. Mr. Elton is good enough to give us a little home. They are a family to hang to, Dick. I feel as though I had 'belongings' for the first time since I lost my own father and mother. Madeline and I shall make rather a small beginning, but, as you know, she has not set her heart on luxuries."

"No," said Dick slowly. "You are a lucky fellow, Ellery. You're going to get away ahead of me in the long run. Preston said yesterday that the honors of this campaign were yours. He has been a fine figure-head, and I have hollered loud, but you've hollered deepest, and the public knows it. I guess that's the real reason that you've been shoved ahead on the staff. Here's your boarding-house. Good night, old fellow. To-morrow night our labors will be over."

"I hope yours will have just begun, Mr. Alderman," Norris retorted.

The polls closed in uncertainty and for three days speculation filled the papers, and election bets remained unpaid. Then the decks cleared. Mr. Preston was elected mayor by a narrow plurality; and out of the eighteen aldermen, the reform element had carried seven, Dick Percival among them, to victory. The Municipal Club counted its gains and was jubilant, for this meant that, if the city council passed any objectionable measure, their iniquity could be vetoed by the mayor, and the bad men of the city fathers lacked one of the two-thirds majority which they would need to carry their legislation over the executive's veto.

Dick took Lena and went away for a fortnight's rest, but came back looking old and dissatisfied.

It was understood that the first battle in the new council would be over the lighting franchise, which was about to expire and which the company in power wished to renew. There had been some talk of an attempt to force it through before the old council went out of power, but even Billy Barry's henchmen refused to commit themselves to so unpopular a measure on the very eve of election; for St. Etienne had been paying a notoriously high price for notably bad lighting, and the citizen, usually a meek animal, had been stirred to a realization of his injuries by wholesale exposition of the truth.

But now there were new councils of war, and Billy swore more intricate oaths than he had ever been known to produce in days of yore. He was still in possession of his aldermanic seat, but a little uncertain whether it was a throne or a stool of repentance. Still Billy talked loudly of the things he meant to do; and, as usual in his troubles, went to consult the delphic Mr. Murdock; and Mr. Murdock went to see Mr. Early; and Mr. Early, after very much demur, went to see Mr. Percival. Sebastian did not like to mix himself publicly in politics, and the reformers were his friends.

Still, one evening just before the franchise was introduced, Mr. Early did drop in on Dick in a friendly sort of way. Percival took him to his own sanctum, and settled down with him to the friendly communion of cigars.

Mr. Early hesitated and was manifestly ill at ease, which gave Dick a pleasurable amusement while he waited to hear the discomfort unfolded.

At last Sebastian said: "Dick, you know I am a man of art rather than of politics, and of course I am in entire sympathy with the idea of clean government; but I want to talk to you about this lighting business."

"Well?" said Dick, as he took out his cigar.

"It's a matter of some importance to one or two of my friends, and I may say, to myself, that the old contract should be renewed," said Mr. Early, gaining confidence. "I want to ask you to look at it in a reasonable light. I suppose you fellows had to be a little outrageously virtuous to make your campaign; but now it's time to drop that and get down to business."

Dick resumed his cigar with an air of settling the question.

"Mr. Early," he said, "I do not think it necessary for us even to discuss this matter. This was one of the main issues in the campaign. Some of us were elected on purpose that we might rid the city of this kind of thing; and we propose to carry out our pledges. There is nothing more to be said."