Aloud the elder girl said casually, "It is so quaint living down here in the Square, isn't it?"

"But it is too far away from everything," replied Stephen hurriedly. "It must be very different from what it was when you came to balls here, Mother."

"Very," answered Mrs. Culpeper stiffly because the cold hard smile was still on her lips.

"It doesn't seem far away when you are used to it," remarked Patty in a spiritless tone. The vague heaviness, like a black cloud covered her heart again. She was jealous of Margaret, jealous of her sweet, pale face, of her trusting blue eyes, of the delicate distinction that showed in the turn of her head, in her fragile hands, in the lovely liquid sound of her voice.

"Cousin Corinna has promised to bring me to see you," said Margaret in her kind and gentle way.

"I hope you'll come," replied Patty politely; but in her thoughts she added, "I hope you won't. I hope I'll never see you again." She couldn't be natural; she couldn't be anything but stiff and awkward; and she was aware all the time that Stephen was as embarrassed as she was. All the things that she must fight against, that she must triumph over, were embodied in that small black figure with the ivory face, so inelastic, so unbending, so secure in its inherited authority. There was war between her and Stephen's mother; and she stood alone, with only her undaunted spirit to support her, while on the opposite side were entrenched all the immovable dead ranks of the generations. "I shall fight it out," thought the girl bitterly. "I don't care what she thinks of me. I shall fight it out to the end."

With her hand on Stephen's arm, Mrs. Culpeper turned slowly away. "I feel a little tired," she explained politely to Patty, "so I am sure that you won't mind yielding to an infirm old woman, and will let my son help me back to the car."

"Oh, I don't mind," replied Patty, with gay indifference.

"I'll see you very soon," said Stephen; and it seemed to the girl as she watched him walking toward the Washington monument that he looked as old and as tired as his mother.

Of course he was obliged to go. There wasn't anything else that he could do, and yet—and yet—as Patty gazed after the three slowly moving figures, she felt that a cold hand had reached out of the sunshine and clutched her heart.



CHAPTER XVI

THE FEAR OF LIFE

Stephen had intended to go back as soon as he had put his mother into the car; but she clung so tightly to his arm, and there was something so appealing in her fragile dependence, that, almost without realizing it, he found that he was sitting in front of her, and that she was taking him down to his office.

"We will leave you and go back, Stephen," she said, while a look of faintness spread over her features. "I feel as if one of my heart attacks might be coming on."

"Wouldn't you rather I went home with you?" he inquired solicitously.

His mother shook her head and reached feebly for Margaret's hand. "Margaret will take care of me," she replied in the weak voice before which her husband and her children had learned to tremble.

As he sat there uneasily in the stuffy car, which smelt of camphor and reminded him of a hearse, he was threatened by that familiar sensation of oppression, of closing walls. Would he ever again be free from this impalpable terror, from this dread of being shut within a space so small that he must smother if he did not escape? And not only places but persons, as he had found long ago, persons with closed souls, with narrow minds, produced in him this feeling of physical suffocation. Margaret, with her serenity, her changeless sweetness, affected him precisely as he was affected by the stained glass windows of a church. He felt that he should stifle unless he could break away into a place where there were winds and blown shadows and pure sunshine. He admired her; he might have loved her; but she smothered him like that rich and heavy wave of the past from which he was still struggling to free himself. For he knew now that it was not the past he wanted; it was the future. Above all things he needed release, he needed deliverance; and yet he knew, more surely at this moment than ever before, that he was not free, that he was still in chains, still the servant, not the master, of tradition. He lacked the courage of life, the will to feel and to live. Only through emotion, only through some courageous adventure of the spirit, only through daring to be human, could he reach liberation; and yet he could not dare; he could not let himself go; he could not lose his life in order that he might find it. Corinna was right, he felt, when she called him a prig. She was right though he hated priggishness, though he longed to be natural and human, to let himself be swept away on the tide of some irresistible impulse. He longed to dare, and yet he had never dared. He longed to take risks, and yet he studied every step of the road. He longed to be unconventional, and yet he would have died rather than wear a red flower in his buttonhole. The thought of Patty rushed over him like the wind at dawn or the light of the sunrise. There was deliverance; there was freedom of spirit! She was the impulse he dared not follow, the risk he dared not take, the red flower he dared not wear.

"What lovely eyes Miss Vetch has," Margaret was saying. "Don't you think so, Cousin Harriet?"

Mrs. Culpeper sniffed at her bottle of smelling-salts. "She seemed to me very ordinary," she answered stiffly. "How could Gideon Vetch's daughter be anything else?"

"Yes, it's a pity about her father," admitted Margaret placidly. "If what Mr. Benham thinks is true, I suppose the Governor has agreed not to interfere in this dreadful strike."

Again Mrs. Culpeper sniffed. "Every one knows he is merely a tool in the hands of those people," she said.

In the weeks that followed Stephen heard his mother's opinion repeated wherever he went. Everywhere the strike was discussed, and everywhere, in the Culpeper's circle, Gideon Vetch and his policies were repudiated. It was generally believed that the strike would be called, and that the Governor had been, as old General Plummer neatly put it, "bought off by the riff-raff." There were those, and the General was among them, who thought that Vetch had been definitely threatened by the labour leaders. There were open charges of "shady dealings" in the newspapers; hints that he had got the office of Governor "by striking a bargain" with the faction whose tool he had become. "Don't tell me, sir, that they didn't put him there because they knew they could count on him!" roared old Powhatan, with the accumulated truculence of eighty quarrelsome years. Of course the General was intemperate; but, as the Judge observed facetiously, "it was refreshing, in these days when there was nothing for decent people to drink, to find that intemperance was still possible. With the General fuming over corruption and Benham preaching morality, there is no need," he added, "for us to despair of virtue."

For the people who condemned Vetch were quite as emphatic in praise of John Benham; and in these weeks of unrest and anxiety, Corinna's face was glowing with pride and pleasure. That Benham, in his unselfish service, was leading the way, no one doubted. Tireless, unrewarded,—for it was admitted by those who esteemed him most that he was never really in touch with the crowd, that his zeal awakened no human response,—he had sacrificed his private practice in order to devote himself day and night to averting the strike. Stephen, inspired to hero worship, asked himself again what the difference was, beyond simple personal rectitude, between Vetch and Benham? Vetch, lacking, so far as the young man knew, every public virtue except the human touch which enkindles either the souls or the imaginations of men, could overturn Benham's argument with a dramatic gesture, an emotional phrase. Why was it that Benham, possessing both the character of the patriot and the graces of the orator, should fall short in the one indefinable attribute which makes a man the natural leader of men?

"People admire him, but they won't follow him," Stephen thought in perplexity. "Vetch has something that Benham lacks; and it is this something that makes people believe in him in spite of themselves."

This idea was in his mind when he met Benham one day on the steps of his club, and stopped to congratulate him on the great speech he had made the evening before.

"By Jove, it makes me want to throw my hat into the ring!" he exclaimed, half in jest, half in earnest.

"I wish you would," replied the other gravely. "We need young men. It is youth that turns the world."

Never, Stephen thought, had Benham, appeared more impressive, more perfectly finished and turned out; never had he appeared so near to his tailor and so far from his audience. He was a handsome man in his rather colourless fashion, a man who would look any part with distinction from policeman to President. His sleek iron-gray hair had as usual the rich sheen of velvet; his thin, sharp profile was like the face on a Roman coin. A man of power, of intellect, of character; and yet a man who had missed, in some inexplicable way, greatness, achievement. On the whole Stephen was glad that Corinna had announced her engagement. She and Benham seemed so perfectly suited to each other—and, of course, there was nothing in that old story about Alice Rokeby. A friendship, nothing more! Only the other day Benham had spoken casually of his "friendship" for Mrs. Rokeby; he always called her "Mrs. Rokeby"; and Stephen had accepted the phrase as a satisfactory explanation of their past association.

"I'd like to go into some public work," said the young man. "To tell the truth I can't settle down."

"I know," Benham responded sympathetically. "I went through it all myself; but there is nothing like throwing oneself into some outside work. I wish you would come into this fight. If we can avert this strike it will be worth any sacrifice."

That Benham was making tremendous personal sacrifices, Stephen knew, and the young man's voice was tinged with emotion as he answered, "I'm afraid I'm not much of a speaker."

"Oh, you would be, if you would only let yourself go." There it was again! Even Benham recognized his weakness; even Benham knew that he was afraid of life.

"Besides we need men of every type," Benham was saying smoothly. "We need especially good organizers. The fight won't be over to-morrow. Even if we win this time, we must organize against Vetch and defeat him once and for all in the next elections."

"Then you think he is really as dangerous as the papers are trying to make him appear?"

"I think," Benham replied shortly, "that he is in it for what he can get out of it."

"Well, call on me when I can help you," said Stephen, as they parted; and a minute later when he reached the pavement, he found occasion to repeat his impulsive offer to Judge Horatio Lancaster Page.

"I've promised Benham that I'll do all I can to help him defeat Vetch."

"You're right," returned the Judge, with his smile of discerning irony. "I suppose we're obliged to fight him."

"If we don't what will happen?"

"That's what I'd like to see, my boy. I'd give ten years full measure and running over to see exactly what would happen."

"Benham is afraid his crowd may send him to the Senate."

"Perhaps, but there is always a chance of their sending him to Jericho instead."

Stephen nodded. "Yes, there's trouble already, I believe, over this strike."

The Judge laughed with a note of cynical humour. "I can understand why he should feel that the chief obstacle to loving humanity is human nature."

"He's dead right, too. It is so easy to be a philosopher—or a philanthropist—in a desert. I've felt like that ever since I came home."

But the Judge had grown serious, and there was no merriment in his voice when he answered: "I may be wrong, of course, and, thank God, my mind hasn't yet got too stiff with age to change; but I've a reluctant belief deep down in me that this fellow Vetch has got hold of something that is going to count. I don't pretend to know what it is; an idea, a feeling, merely an undeveloped instinct for truth, or expediency, if you like it better. Of course it is all crude and raw. It needs cultivation and direction; but it's there—the vital principle, even if we don't recognize it when we see it. All the same," he concluded in a lighter tone, "I'm glad you are going into the fight. We can't hurt a principle by fighting it, you know."

Then he passed on his way; and the transient enthusiasm which had illuminated Stephen's mind drifted away like clouds of blown smoke. How could he fight with any heart when there seemed to him nothing on either side that was worth fighting for—nothing except the unselfish patriotism of John Benham? He remembered the fervour, the exaltation with which he had gone to France that first year of the war. The belief in a righteous cause which would bring peace on earth and good will toward men; the belief in a human fellowship which would grow out of sacrifice; the belief in a fairer social order which would flower from the bloodstained memories of the battlefields,—what was there left of these romantic illusions to-day? Was it true, as Vetch had once said, that organized killing, even in a just cause, must bring its spiritual punishment? Could the lust of blood be changed by a document into the love of one's brother? "I gave my youth in that war," he thought, "and I won from it—what? Disillusionment." With the reflection he felt again the exhaustion of the nerves, the infirmity of purpose against which he had struggled ever since his return. "If there were only something worth fighting for, worth believing in! If I could only believe earnestly, or desire passionately—anything!"

Just as Corinna had longed for perfection, for something to worship, he found himself longing now for a cause, for any cause, even a lost one, to which he could give himself. He wanted facts, deeds, certainties. He was suffocated by shams and insincerities—and phrases.

Then suddenly, this was one of the symptoms of his nervous malady, the reaction swept over him in a wave of energy which receded almost immediately. If he could only find deliverance from himself and his own subjective processes! If he could only be borne away by the passion he felt and yet could not feel completely! He wanted Patty, he knew, but did he want her enough to justify the effort that he must make to win her? Would she be worth to him the break with his mother, with his traditions, with his inherited ideals? He saw her small, slight figure in the dappled sunlight under the budding trees. He saw her vivid flower-like face, her romantic eyes, and the arch and charming smile with which she watched his approach. Yes, he wanted her, he wanted her, and she was the only thing on God's earth, he told himself rhetorically, that he did want with the whole of his nature!

Quickening his steps, he turned in the direction of the Capitol Square, which stretched, like the painted curtain of a theatre, across the end of the street. A singular intuition, a presentiment, had come to him that if he could sustain this impulse, this tide of energy until he saw Patty, he should be cured—he should find freedom of spirit. Only through love, he had discovered, could there be resurrection from this spiritual death of the last two or three years. Only through some tremendous rush of desire could he overcome the partial paralysis of his will. His instinct, he knew, was right, but would his resolution last until he had found Patty?

It was early afternoon, and the faintly tinted shadows, as smooth as silk, were falling straight across the bright green grass on the hillside. The Square was almost deserted at this hour, except for the old men on the benches and the squirrels that were preparing to return to their nests in the trees. The breath of spring was over all, roving, fragrant, provocative.

He shrank from going straight to the house; but Patty was not in the walks, and he realized that if he found her at all it would be within doors. Perhaps it was better so. After all, he must become accustomed to the mansion and all that it contained, including Gideon Vetch, if he really loved Patty! And did he really love her? Oh, was it all to begin over again after the days and nights when he had threshed it out alone in desperation of mind? Had he lost not only all that was vital, but all that was stable, that was positive and affirmative in his life?

He stood for a moment with his eyes on the fresh young leaves which stirred softly. Then, as if hope and courage had passed into him with the air of spring, he turned away and walked rapidly to the gate of the Governor's house. His hand was on the iron fence, and he was about to enter the yard, when the door opened and Patty came out on the porch with Julius Gershom. Stepping quickly back under the trees, Stephen watched the girl descend the steps, pass the fountain, and go swiftly out of the gate into the broad drive of the Square. She was talking eagerly to her companion; and, though she had told him that she disliked the man, she was smiling up at him while she talked. Her face was like a pink flower under the dark brim of her sailor hat, and in her eyes, beneath the inquiring eyebrows, there was the expression of charming archness that he had imagined so vividly. If she saw him, she made no sign; and for a moment after she had gone by, he stood vaguely wondering if she had seen him and if she had chosen this way to punish him for his neglect of the past two or three weeks? But even then, accepting that charitable interpretation, what explained the objectionable presence of Gershom? Was there anything that could explain or excuse the presence of Gershom?

The fire in his heart died down to cinders, while the light faded not only from that hidden country of the endless roads, but from the green hill and the blue sky and the little shining leaves of the branches overhead.

In the distance, he could see the two figures moving onward toward the gate of the Square; and beyond them there was only the long straight street filled with gray dust and the empty shadows of human beings.



CHAPTER XVII

MRS. GREEN

As Patty went by so quickly, she saw Stephen without appearing to glance in his direction. For the last few weeks a flame had run over her whenever she remembered, and there was scarcely a moment when it was out of her mind, that she had shown her heart so openly and that, as she expressed it bitterly, "he had hidden behind his mother." "If he comes back again," she told herself recklessly, and she felt scorched when she thought that he might never come back, "I'll let him see that I can trifle as well as, or better, than he can. I'll let him see that two can play at that kind of game." A hundred times Corinna's warning returned to her. The words, which had made so slight an impression when she heard them, were burned now into her memory. Oh, Mrs. Page had known all along what it meant! She had understood from the beginning; and she had tried, without hurting her, to make her see the blind folly of such an infatuation. As she thought of this to-day, Patty's heart ached with injured pride and resentment, not only against Stephen, but against the unfairness of life. Why was it that men and circumstances would never let one be natural and generous? Was there a conspiracy of events, as Mrs. Page had once said, to prevent the finest impulses from coming to flower? "I'd have done anything on earth for him," thought the girl with passionate indignation. "I'd have made any sacrifice. I could have been anything that he wanted." And she felt bitterly that the best in her soul, the sacred places of her life had been invaded and destroyed. The blighted sensation which accompanies the recoil of an emotion seemed to suspend not only the energy of her spirit, but the very breath in her body. A change had passed over her heart and the world around her and the persons and events which had so recently composed her universe. She felt now that she cared for none of them, that, one and all, they had ceased to interest her; and that the things which filled their lives were all vacant and meaningless forms. It was as if the vitality of existence had been drained away, leaving an empty shell. Nothing was real, nothing was alive but the aching core of her own wounded heart.

"I don't care. I won't let it spoil my life," she resolved while she bit back a sob. "Whatever happens, I am not going to let my life be ruined." She had repeated this so often that it had begun to drone in her mind like a line out of a hymn-book; and she was still repeating it when she swept by Stephen without so much as a word or a look. A dangerous mood was upon her. Nothing mattered, she felt, if she could only prove to him that she also had been trifling; that his kiss had meant as little to her as to him; that from the beginning to the end she had been as indifferent as he was.

Her step quickened into a run; and Gershom, striding, in order to keep up with her, looked at her with the jovial laugh that she hated. "You're in a powerful hurry to-day, ain't you?" he remarked.

"I'm always in a hurry. You have to hurry to get anything out of life." As she glanced up into his admiring eyes, she found herself wondering what Stephen had thought while he watched her? She wished that it had been anybody but Gershom. He seemed an unworthy instrument of revenge, though, she reflected, with a touch of her father's sagacity, one couldn't always choose the tools one would like best. Most people would admit that he was good-looking in a common way, she supposed; and it was only of late that she had realized how essentially vulgar he was.

"I'm sorry you haven't time to listen," he said. "I have news for you." Then, as she fell into a slower step, he added, with an abrupt change to a slightly hectoring tone: "We passed that young Culpeper just now. Did you see him?"

She shook her head disdainfully. "I wasn't looking at him."

"He may have been on his way to the mansion." There was a taunting note in his voice, as if he were trying deliberately to work her into a temper.

"It doesn't matter." She spoke flippantly. "I don't care whether he was or not."

Gershom laughed. "That sounds good to me even if I take it with a grain of salt. I was beginning to be afraid that you liked him."

She turned on him angrily. "What business is that of yours?"

His amiability, as soon as he had struck fire, became imperturbable. "Well, I've known you a long time, Patty, and I take an interest in you, you see. Now, I don't fancy this young Culpeper. He is a conceited sort of ass like his father before him, the sort that thinks all clover is his fodder."

Though Gershom would have scorned philosophy had he ever heard of it, he was well grounded in that practical knowledge of human perversity from which all philosophers and most philosophic systems have sprung. Had his next words been barbed with steel they could not have pierced Patty's girlish pride more sharply. "I reckon he imagines all he's got to do is to look sweet at a girl, and she'll fall at his feet."

Patty's eyes flashed with anger. "He is not unusual in that, is he?" she asked mockingly.

"Well, you can't accuse me of that, Patty," said Gershom, with a sincerity which made him appear less offensively oily. "I never looked long at but one girl in my life, not since I first saw you, anyway—and I don't seem ever to have had an idea that she would fall at my feet. But I didn't bring you out here to begin kidding. I want to talk to you about the Governor, and I was afraid he would catch on to something if we stayed indoors."

"About Father?" She looked at him in alarm. "Is there anything the matter with Father?"

Without turning his head, he glanced at her keenly out of the corner of his eye. It was a trick of his which always irritated her because it reminded her of the sly and furtive side of his character.

"You've a pretty good opinion of the old man, haven't you, Patty?"

"I think he is the greatest man in the world."

"And you wouldn't like him to run against a snag, would you?"

"What do you mean? Has anything happened to worry him?"

He had stopped just beyond the nearest side entrance to the Square, and he stood now, with his eyes on the automobiles before the City Hall, while he fingered thoughtfully the ornamental scarf-pin in his green and purple tie. "There's always more or less to worry him, ain't there?"

She frowned impatiently. "Not Father. He is hardly ever anything but cheerful. Please tell me what you are hinting."

"I wasn't hinting. But, if you don't mind talking to me a minute, suppose we get away from these confounded cars."

He turned east, following the iron fence of the Square until they reached the high grass bank and the old box hedge which surrounded the garden at the back of the Governor's house. At the corner of the street, which sank far below the garden terrace, he stopped again and laid a restraining hand on her arm.

"He thinks a great deal of you too."

She shook his hand from her sleeve. "Why shouldn't he? I am his only child." Then her voice hardened, and she glanced at him suspiciously. "I wish for once you would try to be honest."

"Honest?" His amusement was perfectly sincere. "I am as honest as the day, and I've always been. That's why I'm in politics."

"Then tell me what you are trying to say about Father. If there's anything wrong, I'd rather be told at once."

They were still standing on the deserted corner below the garden, and while she waited for his answer, she glanced away from him up the side street, which rose in a steep ascent from the business quarter of the town. The sun was still high over the distant housetops and the light turned the brick pavement to a rich red and shot the clouds of gray dust with silver. The neighbourhood was one which had seen better days, and some well-built old houses, with red walls and white porches, lent an air of hospitality and comfortable living to the numerous cheap boarding places that filled the street. Crowds of children were playing games or skating on roller skates over the sidewalk; and on the porches a few listless women gossiped idly; or gazed out over newspapers which they did not read.

"Well, there ain't anything wrong exactly—yet," replied Gershom.

"But there may be, you think?"

"That depends upon him. If he keeps headed the way he's going, and he's as stubborn as a mule, there'll be trouble as sure as my name is Julius."

"Is that what you've quarrelled about of late—the way he's going?"

"Bless your heart, honey, we ain't quarrelled! Has it sounded like that to you? I've just been trying to make him see reason, that's all. He ain't got a right, you know, to turn against his best friends the way he's doing. Friends are friends whether you are in office or out, and there's a lot that a man owes to the folks that have stood by him. I tell you I know politics from the bottom up, and there ain't no room in 'em for the man—I don't give a darn who he is—that don't stand by his friends. If he's the President of the United States, he'll find that he can't afford not to stand by the people who put him there!"

So this was the trouble! He had let out his grievance at last, and from the smouldering resentment in his eyes, she understood that some real or imaginary injustice had put him, for the moment at least, in an ugly temper. If he had not met her when he left the house, if he had waited to grow cool, to reflect, he would probably never have taken her into his confidence. Chance again, she thought, not without bitterness. How much of the happiness or unhappiness of life depended upon chance!

"I don't believe it," she returned emphatically. "He always stands by people."

"He used to," he replied sullenly, "but that was in the old days when he needed 'em. The truth is he's got his head turned by his election. He thinks he's so strong that he can go on alone and keep the crowd at his back; but he'll find he's mistaken, and that the crowd, when it ain't worked right from the inside, is a poor thing to depend on. The crowd does the shouting, but it's a man's friends that start the tune."

"Are you talking about the strike?" she asked. "I thought he was in sympathy with the strikers."

"Oh, he says he is, but he won't prove it."

She faced him squarely, with her head held high and her eyes cold and determined. "What do you want me to do? Please don't beat about the bush any longer."

He hesitated a moment, and she inferred that he was trying to decide how far he might venture with safety. "Well, I thought you might speak a word to him," he said. "He sets such store by what you would like. I thought you might drop a hint that he ought to stand by his friends."

"To stand by his friends—that means you," she rejoined.

"Oh, he'll know quick enough what it means! You must be smart about it, of course, but I don't mind his knowing that I've been speaking to you. It's for his own good that I'm talking—for the very minute that the fellows find out he ain't been on the square with 'em, it will be 'nothing doing' for the Governor."

"It is a threat, then?" she asked sharply.

"I'd call it something else if I were you. Look here," he continued briskly. "You'd like to see the old man go to the Senate, and maybe higher up, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, of course. What has that to do with it?"

He winked and laughed knowingly. "Well, you just take my advice and drop a hint to him about this business. Then, perhaps, you'll see."

"If he doesn't take the hint, what will you do?"

"Ask me that in the sweet bye and bye, honey!" His tone had become offensively familiar. "It's for his good, you know. If it's the last word I ever speak I'm trying to save him from the biggest snag he ever met in his life."

She had drawn disdainfully away from him; but at his last words she came a step nearer. "I'll tell him exactly what you say," she answered; and then she asked suddenly in a firmer tone: "Have you heard anything more of my aunt?"

He looked at her intently. "Why, yes. You hadn't mentioned her again, so I thought you'd ceased to be interested. Would you like to see her?" he demanded abruptly after a pause.

"How can I? I don't know where she is."

For a minute or two before replying he studied her closely. "I wish you would let your hair grow out, Patty," he remarked at the end of his examination, and there was a note of genuine feeling in his bantering. "I remember how pretty you used to look as a little girl, with your hair flying behind you like the mane of a pony."

"Let my hair alone. Do you know where my aunt is?"

He appeared to yield reluctantly to her insistence. "If you're so bent on knowing—and, mind you, I tell you only because you make me—she ain't so very far from where we are standing. I could take you to her in ten minutes."

She looked at him as if she scarcely believed his words. "You mean that she is in town?"

"Haven't you known me long enough to find out that I always mean what I say?"

"Then you can take me to her now?"

He laughed shortly, and dug the end of his walking stick between the pavement and the edge of the curbstone. "What do you reckon the Governor would say to it?"

"I needn't tell him—not just yet, anyhow. But are you really and truly sure that she is my mother's sister?"

"Well, they had the same parents, and I reckon that makes 'em sisters if anything does. I knew 'em both out yonder in California, and I never heard anybody suggest they weren't related."

"Why did she come here? Was it to see me?"

"Partly that, and partly—well, she's been pretty sick. I reckon she's likely to go off at any time, and she wanted to be back where she was born. She had pneumonia two years ago, and then again last winter. Her lungs are about used up."

"Then, if I went to see her, I'd better go now, hadn't I?"

"It would be surer. Something may happen almost any day. That's why I spoke to you."

"I am glad you did. If it isn't far, will you take me now?"

But instead of walking on with her, he dug the end of his stick more firmly between the pavement and the curbstone. "I don't want to do you any harm, Patty," he said gently at last. "It may give you a shock to see her, you know. She's been through some hard times, and she's about come to the end of her rope. Good Lord, the way life is! When I first saw her out in California she was one of the prettiest pieces of flesh I ever laid eyes on. She had something of your look, too, though you wouldn't believe it now."

But the girl had already started to cross the street. "Don't let's waste any time talking. Which way do we go?"

At her decision his hesitation vanished, and he joined her with a laugh and a flourish of the diamond ring on the little finger of his left hand. "Well, you are a sport, Patty! You always were, even when you weren't much more than knee high to a duck. If you've made up your mind to go, you won't be blaming me afterward?"

"Oh, I shan't blame you, of course. Do we turn up this street?"

"Yes, go ahead. It ain't far—just a little way up Leigh Street."

They walked on rapidly, and presently, so swift and determined was Patty's step, Gershom ceased to speak, and only glanced at her now and then in a furtive and anxious way. There was a look of tragic resolution on her small face—oh, she was meeting life in earnest, she reflected—and even to the coarse mind and the dull imagination of the man beside her, she assumed gradually the appearance of some ethereal messenger. At the moment she was thinking of Stephen, but this he did not suspect. He saw only that there was something almost unearthly in her expression; and he felt the kind of awe that came over him on Sunday when he entered a church. He wouldn't hurt the girl, he told himself, with a twinge, for a pocketful of money.

They had turned into Leigh Street, and had walked some distance in silence, when Patty asked suddenly without looking round, "Then she doesn't know I am coming?"

"I told her I'd bring you whenever I could; but she ain't looking for you this evening. There, that's the house—the one in the middle, with that wooden swing and all those kids in the yard."

He pointed to what had once been a fine old house of stuccoed brick, with a square front porch and green shutters which were sagging on loosened hinges. On the walls where the stucco had peeled away, the red brick showed in splotches, and the pillars of the porch, which had been white, were now speckled with yellow stains. Over the whole place, with its air of fallen respectability, there hung the depressing smell of mingled dust, stale cooking, and bad tobacco. A number of imposing and well-preserved houses stood on the block, for of the whole neighbourhood, it appeared to the girl, they had chosen the most dilapidated dwelling and the one which was most crowded with children.

"We're here all right. Don't go so fast," remarked Gershom, as they ascended the steps. "It ain't going to run away from you." Bending down he picked up a crying urchin from the steps. "Lost your ball, have you? Well, I expect if you dig deep enough in my pocket, you can find it again. Hello! You've got a punch, ain't you, sonny? A regular John L., I reckon." Putting the child down, he continued sheepishly to Patty: "I always had a soft spot for the kids. Never could pass one in the street without stopping."

On the porch, beside a broken perambulator, which contained a black-eyed baby with a bottle of milk, a stout man sat reading the afternoon paper, while with one hand he patiently pushed the rickety carriage back and forth. As they reached the porch, he laid aside his paper, and rose with his hand still on the perambulator.

"Oh, it's you," he said, "Mr. Gershom."

"I've brought this lady to see Mrs. Green," returned Gershom. "How is she?"

The stout man shook his head and surveyed Patty curiously but not discourteously. He had a kindly, humorous look, and she felt at once that she preferred his blunt frankness to Gershom's facetious insincerity. There was something in his face that suggested the black-eyed baby sucking placidly at the rubber nipple on the bottle of milk.

"She's worse if anything. The doctor came this morning." The baby, having dropped the bottle, lifted a despairing wail, and the father bent over and replaced the nipple gently between the quivering lips. "The rent was due yesterday," he added, "I understood that there was to be no trouble about it."

"Oh, there's no trouble about that. I'm responsible," replied Gershom quickly. He was about to pass on; but changing his mind, he stopped and drew out his pocket book. "I'll settle it now. Are there any extras?"

"Yes, she's had to have eggs and milk, and there have been medicines. It comes to twelve dollars in all. I'll show you the account."

"Very well. Get anything that she needs." Then, as Gershom followed Patty into the hall, he pointed to the fine old staircase. "It's the back room. Go straight up. You ain't timid, are you?"

"Timid? Oh, no." Running lightly up the stairs, the girl hesitated a moment before the half-open door of the room at the back of the house. Then, in obedience to a gesture from Gershom as he pushed the door wider, she crossed the threshold, and went rapidly toward a couch in front of the window. As she went forward there floated to her a heavy, sweetish scent which seemed to her to be the very breath of despair. Her first thought was that the sun had gone under a cloud; the next instant she perceived that the window was shaded by a ragged ailantus tree and that beyond the tree there was a high brick wall which shut out the daylight. Then she looked at the woman lying under a ragged blanket on the couch; and she felt vaguely that the haggard features framed in coarse black hair awakened a troubled sense of familiarity or recognition. The next instant there returned to her the memory of her walk in the Square with Corinna a few weeks before, and of the strange woman who had looked at them so curiously.

"I have come to see you," she began gently, "Mr. Gershom brought me."

Raising her head, the woman stared at her without replying. Her eyes were dull and heavy, with drooping lids beneath which a sombre glow flickered and died down. There was a wan yellow tinge over her face; and yet now that the approach of death had refined and purified her features, she was not without a gravity of expression which made her strangely impressive, like some wax mask of an avenging Fate. With a sensation of relief, Patty's eyes wandered from the haggard face to a calla lily in a pot on the window-sill, and she noticed that it bore a single perfect blossom. While she waited, overcome by a dumbness which seemed to invade her from head to foot, her eyes clung to that calla lily as if it were her one connection with reality. All the rest, the close, dingy room, with the ailantus tree and the high wall beyond, the sickening sweetish odour with which she was unfamiliar, the waxen mask and the blank, drooping eyes of the woman; all these things seemed to exist not in her actual surroundings, but in some hideous dream from which she was struggling to awake. Somewhere long ago, in a dreadful nightmare, she had smelled that cloying scent and seen those half-shut eyes looking back at her. Somewhere—and yet it was impossible. She could only have imagined it all.

Suddenly the woman spoke in a thick voice. "You are the Governor's daughter? Gideon Vetch's daughter?"

"Yes. Mr. Gershom told me you wanted to see me."

"Mr. Gershom?" The woman's eyelids flickered and then fell heavily over her expressionless eyes. "Oh, you mean Julius. Yes, I told him I wanted to see you." A quiver of animation passed like a spasm over her features, and she inquired eagerly, "Where is he? Did he come?"

"I'm here all right," said Gershom, stepping briskly into the range of her vision.

She gazed up at him as he approached her with the look of a famished animal, a look so little human and so full of physical hunger that Patty turned her eyes again to the calla lily on the window-sill, and then to the young green on the ailantus tree and the brick wall beyond. To the girl it seemed that minutes must have gone by before the next words came. "You brought the medicine?"

"Yes, I brought it. The doctor gave it to me; but it is hard to get, and he said you were to have it only on condition that you do everything that we tell you."

"Oh, I will, I will." She reached out her hand eagerly for the package he had taken from his coat pocket; and when Patty looked at her again a curious change had passed over her face, revivifying it with the colour of happiness. "I have been in such pain—such pain," she whispered. "I was afraid it would come back before you came. Oh, I was so afraid." Then she added hurriedly: "Is that all? Did you bring nothing else?"

Though a look of embarrassment crossed his face, he carried off the difficult situation with his characteristic assurance. "The doctor sent you a little stimulant. Perhaps I'd better give you a dose now. It might pick you up." Taking a bottle from his pocket, he poured some whiskey into a glass and added a little water from a pitcher on the table. "There, now," he remarked, with genuine sympathy as he held the glass to her lips. "You'll begin to feel better in a minute. This young lady can't stay but a little while, so you'd better try to buck up."

"I'll try," answered the woman obediently. "I'll try—but it isn't easy to come back out of hell." Lifting her head from the pillow, as if it were a dead weight that did not belong to her, she stared at Patty while her tormented mind made an effort to remember. In a minute her mouth worked pathetically, and she burst into tears. "I can't come back now, I can't come back now," she repeated in a whimpering tone. "But I'll be better before long, and then I want to see you. There are things I want to tell you when I get the strength. I can't think of them now, but they are things about Gideon Vetch."

"About Father?" asked the girl, and her voice trembled.

The woman stopped crying, and looked up appealingly, while she wiped her eyes on the ragged edge of the blanket. "Yes, about Gideon Vetch. That's his name, ain't it?"

"I wouldn't talk any more now, if I were you," said Gershom, putting his hand gently on her pillow. "We'll come again when you're feeling spryer."

The woman nodded. "Yes, come again. Bring her again."

"I'll come whenever you send for me," said Patty reassuringly; but instead of looking at the woman, she stooped over and touched the calla lily with her lips, as if it were human and could respond to her. "I want you to tell me about my mother—everything. I remember her just once, the night before they took her to the asylum. She was in spangled skirts that stood out like a ballet dancer's, and there was a crown of stars on her hair and a star on the end of the wand she carried. I remember it all just as plainly as if it were yesterday—though they tell me I was too little—"

She broke off because the woman was gazing at her so strangely. "You were too little," she cried, and burst into hysterical weeping. "I can't stand it," she said wildly. "I never had a chance, and I can't stand it."

"I think we'd better go," said Gershom. It amazed Patty to find how gentle he could be when his sympathy was touched. "I oughtn't to have brought you to-day." Turning away, he left the room hurriedly, as if the scene were too much for him.

At this the woman controlled herself with a convulsive effort. "No, I wanted to see you," she said. "You are pretty, but you aren't prettier than your mother was at your age."

For a moment the girl looked pityingly down on her. "I hope you will soon be better," she responded in a tone which she tried to make sympathetic in spite of the physical shrinking she felt. "Let me know when you wish to see me, and I will come back."

The woman shivered. "Do you mean that?" she asked. "Will you come when I send for you? I want to see you again—once—before I die."

"I promise you that I will come. I'll send you something, too, and so will Father."

"Gideon Vetch," said the woman very slowly, as if she were trying to hold the name in her consciousness before it slipped away from her. "Gideon Vetch."

As the girl broke away and ran out of the room that expressionless repetition followed her into the hall and down the staircase, growing fainter and fainter like the voice of one who is falling asleep: "Gideon Vetch. Gideon Vetch."

On the porch, where the stout man had returned to his newspaper, Patty found Gershom standing beside the perambulator, with the black-eyed baby in his arms. He was gazing gravely over the round bald head, and his face wore a funereal expression which contrasted ludicrously with the clucking sounds he was making to the attentive and interested baby. When Patty joined him he put the child back into the carriage, carefully tucking the crocheted robe about the tiny shoulders. "I kind of thought the little one might like a chance to get out of that buggy," he observed, while he straightened himself briskly, and adjusted his tie.

"She must be very ill," said the girl, as they went out of the gate and turned down the street.

"A sure thing," replied Gershom concisely. Then he whistled sharply, and added, "Rotten, that's what I call it."

"She said she'd never had a chance," remarked Patty thoughtfully, "I wonder what she meant."

The funereal expression spread like a pall over Gershom's features, but his intermittent whistle sounded as sprightly as ever. "Well, how many folks in this world have ever had what you might call a decent chance?" he asked.

"I don't know. I hadn't thought." The girl looked depressed and puzzled. "It's a dreadful thing to think that nobody cares when you're dying." Then her tone grew more hopeful. "Do you suppose anybody thinks that Father never had a chance?" she asked.

Gershom broke into a laugh. "Well, if he had it, you may be pretty sure that he made it himself," he retorted.

"Then I wish he could make some for other people."

"He says he's trying to, doesn't he? But between us, Patty, my child, you won't forget what you have to say to the old man, will you?"

"What have I to say? Oh, you mean about standing by his friends?"

"That's just it. You tell him from yours truly that the best thing he can do all round is to stick fast to his friends."

"And that means the strikers?"

"It means what I tell you."

"Well, I'll repeat exactly what you say; it won't make any difference if his mind is made up."

"Maybe so. Are you going to tell him where you've been?"

"I don't know. I hate to worry him; but that poor woman must need help."

"Oh, she needs it. We all need it," remarked Gershom flippantly. Then, as they reached the entrance to the Square, he held out his hand. "Well, I'm off now, and I hope you aren't feeling any worse because of your visit. The world ain't made of honeycomb, you know, and there's no use pretending it is. But you're a darn good sport, Patty. You're as good a sport as I ever struck up with in this little affair of life."



CHAPTER XVIII

MYSTIFICATION

Walking slowly home across the Square, Patty told herself that the future had been taken out of her hands. She seemed to have been moved mentally, if not bodily, into another world, into a world where the sleepy old Square, wrapped in a soft afternoon haze, still existed, but from which Stephen Culpeper had vanished in a rosy cloud. She did not know why she had relinquished the thought of Stephen since her visit to the house in East Leigh Street; but some deep instinct warned her that she had widened the gulf between them by her excursion with Gershom. "I can't help it," she thought sensibly enough. "There wasn't anything in it before that, and I might as well go ahead and stop thinking about it." Her anger at Stephen's neglect had melted into a vague and impersonal resentment, a resentment, rather for the dying woman than for herself, against all the needless cruelties of life. Even Gershom, even the unspeakable Gershom, had had discernment enough to see that something good in that poor woman had been blighted and crushed. Was it true that no one was ever given the chance to be one's best? Was this true, not only of that dying woman, but of her father and Stephen and Corinna and herself and all human beings everywhere?

Lingering a moment near the Washington monument, she stood watching the straggling groups that were crossing the Square. Bit by bit, snatches of conversation drifted into her mind and then blew out again, leaving scarcely the shadow of an impression. "They tell me it's going up. I don't know, but I'll find out to-morrow." "I wouldn't wear one of those things for a million dollars, and he says—" "Yes, I've arranged to go unless the strike should be called next week."

The strike? Oh, she had almost forgotten it! She had almost forgotten the message she had promised to deliver to her father. With a gesture that appeared to sweep her last remaining illusion behind her, she started resolutely up the drive to the house. After all, whatever came, she would not let them think that she was either afraid of life or disappointed in love. She would not mope, and she would not show the white feather. On one point she was passionately determined—no man, by any method known to the drama of sex, was going to break her heart!

She had quickened her steps while she made her resolve; and, a minute later, she broke into a run when she saw that Corinna's car stood at the door and that Corinna waited for her in the hall. Had the girl only realized it, Corinna's heart also was troubled; and the visit was one result of the discouraging talk she had had recently with Stephen.

"I had to go down town, so I stopped on the way back to speak to you." Though she said no word of her anxiety, Patty could hear it in every note of her expressive voice and feel it in the protective pressure of her arm. "I want you to go with me to the Harrisons' dance Wednesday night, and I want you to look your very prettiest."

"But I'm not even asked."

"Oh, you are. Mrs. Harrison has just told me she was sending your invitation with a number that had not gone out." How like Corinna it was to put it that way! "They are giving it for that English girl who is staying with them. She is pretty, but you must look ever so much prettier. I want you to wear that green and silver dress that makes you look like a mermaid." The kind voice, so full of sympathy, so forgetful of self, flooded Patty's heart like sunshine after darkness.

"I will go, if you wish me to," she answered, raising Corinna's hand to her cheek. And the thought flashed through her mind, "Stephen will be there. Even if everything is over, I'd like him to see me."

"I'll come for you a little before ten," said Corinna; and then, as the door of the library opened and Vetch came out, she added hurriedly: "I must go now. Remember to look your prettiest."

"No, don't go," begged Patty. "Father will be so disappointed." She had remembered the message, and she felt that Corinna, whose wisdom was infallible, might help her to understand it. Though it had sounded so casual on the surface, her natural sagacity detected both a warning and a menace; and the very touch of Corinna's hand, in her long white glove, was reassuring and helpful.

Whatever may have threatened Vetch, he seemed oblivious of it as he came forward with his hearty greeting. "It's queer," he said, "but something told me you were here. I looked out to make sure." His simple pleasure touched Corinna like the artless joy of a child. It was impossible to resist his magnetism, she thought, as she looked up into his sanguine face, for what was it, after all, except an unaffected enjoyment of little things, an unconquerable belief in life?

"I stopped to ask Patty about a dance," she explained. "I must go on immediately."

He glanced at the girl a little anxiously. "Is she going to a party with you? I am glad."

In spite of his buoyant manner, there was an abstracted look in his eyes, as if his mind were working at a distance while he talked. After the first minute or two Patty observed this and it helped her to make her decision. "Are you busy, Father?" she asked. "I promised Mr. Gershom that I would give you a message—such a silly message it is too."

"Gershom?" He repeated, and his face darkened. "What did he say to you? No, don't go, Mrs. Page. Come into the library, and let us have the message."

Corinna glanced uncertainly over her shoulder. "I really must be going," she murmured, and then yielding suddenly either to inclination or to the pressure of Patty's hand, she crossed the threshold of the library and walked over to the front window. Outside, beyond the yard and the grotesque fountain, she saw the splendid outline of Washington, and beyond this the faint afternoon haze above the spires and chimneys of the city. "The sun will go down soon. I must hurry," she thought; yet she stood there, without moving, looking out on the monument and the sky. For a moment she gazed in silence; then turning quickly, she glanced with smiling eyes about the small, stiffly furnished room, with the leather chairs and couch and the business looking writing-table in the centre of the floor.

"How comfortable you look here," she observed lightly, "and how business-like."

"Yes, I work here a good deal in the evenings." He turned a chair toward the window, and when she sat down, he remained for a minute still standing, with his hand on the back of the chair, smiling thoughtfully not at her, but at the disarray on his desk. The glow of pleasure which the sight of her had brought was still in his face; and she thought that she had never seen him so nearly good-looking. It occurred to her now, as it had done so often before, that in the hour of trouble he would be like a rock to lean on. However else he might fail, she surmised that in human relations he would be for ever dependable. And what was life, after all, except a complex and intricate blend of human relations? She decided suddenly and positively that she had always liked Gideon Vetch. She liked the way his broad bulging forehead swept back into his sandy hair, which was quite gray on the temples; she liked the contrast between the quizzical humour in his eyes and the earnest expression of his generous mouth with its deep corners. He stood in her mind for the straight and simple things of life, and she had lost her way so often among the bewildering ramification of human motives. He had no trivial words, she knew. He was incapable of "making conversation"; and she, who had been bred in a community of ceaseless chatter, was mentally refreshed by the sincerity of his interest. It was as restful, she said to herself now, as a visit to the country.

"So Gershom asked you to give me a message?" remarked Vetch abruptly to Patty. "Where did you see him?"

"He joined me when I went out," replied Patty, speaking slowly and carefully with her eyes on Corinna. "I tried to slip away, but he wouldn't let me. He asked me to speak to you about something that was worrying him, and a great many others, he said. He didn't put it into words, but I think he meant the strike—"

Vetch looked up quickly. "Oh, that is worrying him, is it?"

"What is it all about, Father? Why are they going to strike?"

"Can you answer that, Mrs. Page?" The Governor turned to Corinna with a sportive gesture, as if he were casting upon her the burden of a reply. His smile was sketched so faintly about his mouth that it seemed merely to emphasize the gravity of his expression.

"I?" Corinna looked round with a start of surprise. "Why, what should I know of it?"

"Then they don't talk about it where you are?"

"Oh, yes, they talk about it a great deal." She appeared to hesitate, and then added with deliberate audacity, "but they think that you know more about it than any one else."

He did not smile as he answered her. "Do they expect the men to strike?"

Though she made a graceful gesture of evasion, she met his question frankly. "They expect them to, I gather—unless you prevent it."

A shade of irritation crossed his features. "How can I prevent it? They have a right to stop work."

"They seem to think, the people I know, that it depends upon how safe the leaders think it will be."

"How safe? I can't tie their hands, can I?"

"Of course I am only repeating what I hear." She gazed at him with friendly eyes. "No one could know less about it than I do."

"People are saying, I suppose," he continued in a tone of exasperation, "that these men had an understanding with me before I came into office. They seem to think that I can make the strike a success by standing aside and holding my hands. That, of course, is pure nonsense. If the men want to stop work, nobody has a right to interfere with them. Certainly I haven't. But have they the right—the question hangs on this point—to interfere with the farmers who want to get their crops to market as badly as the strikers want to quit work? The kind of general strike these people have in mind bears less relation to industry than it does to war; and you know what I think about war and the rights of non-combatants. They want to tie up the whole system of transportation until they starve their opponents into submission. The old damnable Prussian theory again, you see, that crops up wherever men take the stand, which they do everywhere they have the power, that might is a law unto itself. Now, I am with these men exactly half way, and no further. As long as their method of striking doesn't interfere with the rights of the public, they seem to me fair enough. But when it comes to raising the price of food still higher and cutting off the city milk supply—well, when they talk of that, then I begin to think of the human side of it." He broke off abruptly, and concluded in a less serious tone, "that's the only thing in the whole business I care about—the human side of it all—"

A phrase of Benham's floated suddenly into her mind, and she found herself repeating it aloud: "There are no human rights where a principle is involved."

Vetch laughed. "That's not you; it's Benham. I recognize it. He's the sort that would believe that, I suppose—the sort that would write a political document in blood if he didn't have ink."

"Oh, don't!" she protested. There was a grain of truth in the epigram, but she resented it the more keenly for this.

"Well, I may have intended it as a compliment," rejoined Vetch gaily. "He would take it that way, I reckon. And, anyhow, you have heard him make worse flings at me."

She coloured, admitting and denying at the same time, the truth of his words. "You could never understand each other. You are so different."

He looked at her gravely; but even gravity could not wholly drive the gleam of humour from his eyes. "At any rate I admire Benham. I have the advantage of him there." The quickness of his wit made her smile. "But, as you say, we are different," he added after a moment. "I reckon I've turned my hand at times to jobs of which Benham would disapprove; but I'd be hanged before I'd write the greatest document ever penned in—well, in the blood of one of those squirrels out yonder in the Square!"

As he finished he turned his face toward the window, and following his gaze, she saw the sunlight sparkling like amber wine on the rich grass and the delicate green of the trees. As she looked back at him, she wondered what his past could have been—how deep, how complex, how varied was his experience of life? She was aware again of that curiously primitive attraction which she had felt the other afternoon in the shop. It was as if he appealed, not to the beliefs and sentiments with which life had obscured and muffled her nature, but to some buried self beneath the self that she and the world knew, to some ancient instinct which was as deep as the oldest forests of earth. After all, was there a hidden self, a buried forest within her soul which she had never discovered?

"But Patty has not given you her message!" she exclaimed, startled and confused by the strangeness of the sensation.

"Oh, there isn't much to tell," answered Patty, wondering if she could ever learn, even if she practised every day, to speak and move like Corinna. "It was only that you ought to stand by your friends."

"To stand by my friends," repeated Vetch; then he drew in his breath with a whistling sound. "Well, I like his impudence!" he exclaimed.

Corinna rose with a laugh. "So do I," she observed, "and he seems to possess it in abundance." Then she folded Patty in a light and fragrant embrace. "You must be the belle of the ball," she said. "I have a genius for being a chaperon."

When she had gone, and they watched her car pass the monument, the girl turned back into the hall, with her hand clinging tightly to Vetch's arm.

"Father, what do you suppose that message meant?"

"Is it obliged to mean anything?"

"Things generally do, don't they?"

Vetch smiled as he looked down at her; but his smile conveyed anxiety rather than amusement to her observant eyes. "Oh, if things are said by Gershom, they generally mean hell," he responded. "Perhaps I'll find out Thursday night; there's to be a meeting then, and it looks as if somebody might make trouble." Then he patted her shoulder. "Don't worry about Gershom, honey," he added in the way he used to speak when she fell and hurt herself as a child. "Don't worry your mind about Gershom. I'll take care of him."

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that she was not worrying about Gershom, but about the woman dying all alone in that dark room in Leigh Street. If he had only looked less disturbed she might have done so; and when she thought of it afterward, she understood that frankness would have been by far the wiser course. However, while she wondered what she ought to say, the opportunity slipped by, and the ringing of the telephone on his desk called him away from her.

Corinna, meanwhile, was rolling down the drive over the slanting shadows of the linden trees. She looked thoughtful, for she was trying to decide what it was about Vetch that made her believe in him so profoundly when she was with him and yet begin to distrust him as soon as she got far enough away to gain a perspective? Gossip probably, she reflected. When she was with him her confidence was the natural response of her own unbiassed perceptions; when she left him she passed immediately into an atmosphere that was charged with the suspicions of other people. She remembered the stories, true or false, which had been hinted and whispered before the last election. Malicious gossip that, and as unfounded no doubt as the rest. She recalled the muttered insinuations of fraudulent political stratagems, of what Benham had called the Governor's weathercock principles. In Vetch's presence, she realized that she invariably lost sight of these structural or surface blemishes, and judged him by some standard which was different from the one she had inherited with the shape of her nose and the colour of her eyes. What troubled her was not so much the riddle of Vetch's personality as the fact that there was another mental world beyond the one she had always inhabited, and that this other world was filled, like her own, with obscure moral and spiritual images.

As she approached the club at the corner she saw Benham come out of the door; and stopping the car she waited, smiling, until he joined her. While she watched him cross the pavement, she rejoiced in the thoroughbred fineness and thinness of his appearance—in his clear-cut Roman features and in the impenetrable reticence of his expression. Yes, she loved him as well as she could love any man; and that, she told herself, with a touch of cynical amusement, was just so much and no more, just enough to bring happiness, but not enough to bring pain.

"I'll take you home," she said, as he reached her, and there seemed to her something delightful and romantic in this accidental meeting.

"What luck!" The severity melted from his features while he took his place beside her. "I was thinking only this morning that I owe a sacrifice to the god of chance. May I tell the man to drop me at my rooms?"

She nodded, watching him contentedly while he spoke to the chauffeur and then turned to look at her with his level impersonal gaze. Happiness had brought the youth back to her face. Her hair swept like burnished wings under her small close hat, and the eyes that she raised to his were dark and splendid. There was about her always in moments of happiness the look of a beauty too bright to last or to grow old; and now, in this last romance of her life, she appeared to be drenched in autumn sunshine.

"One does want to make sacrifices," she answered. "That is the penalty of joy. One can scarcely believe in it before it goes."

"Well, I believe in this. You are very lovely. Where have you been?"

"To the Governor's. I wanted to speak to Patty. I feel sorry for Patty to-day. I feel sorry for almost every one," she added, with an enchanting smile, "except myself."

"And me. Surely you don't waste your pity on me? But what of Miss Vetch? Hasn't she her own particular happiness?"

"I wonder—" Then, without finishing her sentence, she left the subject of Patty because she surmised from Benham's tone that he would not be sympathetic. "I had a long talk with the Governor. John, what do you think will come of the strike?"

He answered her question with another. "What did he tell you?"

"Nothing except that the men have a right to strike if they wish to."

He laughed. "Well, that's safe enough. But don't talk of Vetch. I dislike him so heartily that I have a sneaking feeling I may be unjust to him."

It was so like him, that fine impersonal sense of fairness, that her eyes warmed with admiration. "That is splendid," she responded. "It is just the kind of thing that Vetch could never feel." Suddenly she knew that she was ashamed of having believed in Vetch when she contrasted him with John Benham. How could she have imagined for an instant that the Governor could stand a comparison like this?

He pressed her hand as the car stopped before the apartment house where he lived. "In a few hours I shall see you again," he said; and his voice, in its eagerness, reminded her of the voice of Kent Page when he had made love to her in her girlhood. Ah, she had learned wisdom since then! Just so much and no more, that was the secret of happiness. Give with the mind and the heart; but keep always one inviolable sanctity of the spirit—of the buried self beneath the self.

The streets were almost deserted; and as the car went on, Corinna thought that she had never seen the city look so fresh and charming. Through the long green vista of the trees, there was a shimmer of silver air, and wrapped in this sparkling veil, she saw the bronze statues and the ardent glow of the sunset. Everything at which she looked was steeped in a wonderful golden light; and this light seemed to come, not from the burning horizon, but from the happiness that flooded her thoughts. She saw the world again as she had seen it in her first youth, suffused with joy that was like the vivid freshness of dawn. The long white road, the arching trees, the glittering dust, the spring flowers blooming in gardens along the roadside, the very faces of the people who passed her; all these things at which she looked were illuminated by this radiance which seemed, in some strange way, to shine not without but within her heart. "It is too beautiful to last," she said to herself in a whisper. "It is youth, more beautiful even than the reality, come back again for an hour—for one little hour before it goes out for ever."

Then, because it seemed safer as well as wiser to be practical, to discourage wild dreaming, she tried to direct her thoughts to insignificant details. Yet even here that rare golden light penetrated to the innermost recesses of her mind; and each drab uninteresting fact glittered with a fresh interest and charm. "I forgot to order that cretonne for the porch," she thought disconnectedly, in an endeavour to conciliate the Fates by pretending that life was as commonplace as it had always been. "That black background with the blue larkspur is pretty—and I must have the porch furniture repainted the blue-green that they do so well in Italy. That reminds me that Patty must be the belle of the dance in her green dress. I shall see that she has no lack of partners—at least I can manage that;—if I cannot make her happy. I am sorry for the child—if only Stephen—but, no—I left the book I was reading in the shop. What was the name of it? Silly and sentimental! Why will people always write things they don't mean and know are not true about love? Yes, the black background with the blue larkspur was the best that I saw. I wonder what I did with the sample. Oh, why can't everybody be happy?"

The car turned out of the road into the avenue of elms, which led to the Georgian house of red brick, with its quaint hooded doorway. In front of the door there was a flagged walk edged with box; and after the car had gone, Corinna followed this walk to the back of the house, where rows of white and purple iris were blooming on the garden terrace. For a moment she looked on the garden as one who loved it; then turning reluctantly, she ascended the steps, and entered the door which a coloured servant held open.

"A lady's in there waiting for you," said the man, who having lost the dialect, still retained the dramatic gestures of his race. "She would wait, and she says she can't go without seeing you."

With a faintness of the heart rather than the mind, Corinna looked through the doorway, and saw the face of Alice Rokeby glimmering narcissus white in the dusk of the drawing-room.



CHAPTER XIX

THE SIXTH SENSE

As Corinna went forward, with that strange premonitory chill at her heart, it seemed to her that all the fragrance of the garden floated toward her with a piercing sweetness that was the very essence of youth and spring. Through the wide-open French windows she could see the garden terrace, the pale rows of iris, and the straight black cedars rising against the pomegranate-coloured light of the afterglow. A few tall white candles were shining in old silver candlesticks; but it was by the vivid tint in the sky that she saw the large, frightened eyes of the woman who was waiting for her.

"If I had only known you were here, I should have hurried home," began Corinna cordially. Drawing a chair close to her visitor, she sat down with a movement that was protecting and reassuring. Her quick sympathies were already aroused. She surmised that Alice Rokeby had come to her because she was in trouble; and it was not in Corinna's nature to refuse to hear or to help any one who appealed to her.

Alice threw back her lace veil as if she were stifled by the transparent mesh. "In the shop there are so many interruptions," she answered. "I wanted to see you—" Breaking off hurriedly, she hesitated an instant, and then repeated nervously, "I wanted to see you—"

Corinna smiled at her. "Would you like to go out into the garden? May is so lovely there."

"No, it is very pleasant here." Alice made a vague, helpless gesture with her small hands, and said for the third time, "I wanted to see you—"

"I am afraid you are not well." Corinna spoke very gently. "Perhaps it is not too late for tea, or may I get you a glass of wine? All winter I've intended to go and inquire because I heard you'd been ill. It has been so long since we really saw anything of each other; but I remember you quite well as a little girl—such a pretty little girl you were too. You are ever so much younger, at least ten years younger, than I am."

As she rippled on, trying to give the other time to recover herself, she thought how lovely Alice had once been, and how terribly she had broken since her divorce and her illness. She would always be appealing—the kind of woman with whom men easily fell in love—but one so soon reached the end of mere softness and prettiness.

"Yes, you were one of the older girls," answered Alice, "and I admired you so much. I used to sit on the front porch for hours to watch you go by."

"And then I went abroad, and we lost sight of each other."

"We both married, and I got a divorce last year."

"I heard that you did." It seemed futile to offer sympathy.

"My marriage was a mistake. I was very unhappy. I have had a hard life," said Alice, and her lower lip, as soft as a baby's, trembled nervously. How little character there was in her face, how little of anything except that indefinable allurement of sex!

"I know," responded Corinna consolingly. She felt so strong beside this helpless, frightened woman that the old ache to comfort, to heal pain, was like a pang in her heart.

"Everything has failed me," murmured Alice, with the restless volubility of a weak nature. "I thought there was something that would make up for what I had missed—something that would help me to live—but that has failed me like everything else—"

"Things will fail," assented Corinna, with sympathy, "if we lean too hard on them."

A delicate flush had come into Alice's face, bringing back for a moment her old flower-like loveliness. Her fine brown hair drooped in a wave on her forehead, and beneath it her violet eyes were deep and wistful.

"What a beautiful room!" she said in a quivering voice. "And the garden is like one in an old English song."

"Yes, I hardly know which I love best—my garden or my shop."

The words were so far from Corinna's thoughts that they seemed to drift to her from some distant point in space, out of the world beyond the garden and the black brows of the cedars. They were as meaningless as the wind that brought them, or the whirring of the white moth at the window. Beneath her vacant words and expressionless gestures, which were like the words and gestures of an automaton, she was conscious of a profound current of feeling which flowed steadily between Alice Rokeby and herself; and on this current there was borne all the inarticulate burden of womanhood. "Poor thing, she wants me to help her," she thought; but aloud she said only: "The roses are doing so well this year. They will be the finest I have ever had."

Suddenly Alice lowered her veil and rose. "I must go. It is late," she said, and held out her hand. Then, while she stood there, with her hand still outstretched, all that she had left unspoken appeared to rush over her in a torrent, and she asked rapidly, while her lips jerked like the lips of a hurt child, "Is it true, Corinna, that you are going to marry John Benham?"

For an instant Corinna looked at her without speaking. The sympathy in her heart ceased as quickly as a fountain that is stopped; and she was conscious only of that lifeless chill with which she had entered the room. Now that the question had come, she knew that she had dreaded it from the first moment her eyes had rested on the face of her visitor, that she had expected it from the instant when she had heard that a woman awaited her in the house. It was something of which she had been aware, and yet of which she had been scarcely conscious—as if the knowledge had never penetrated below the surface of her perceptions. And it would be so easy, she knew, to evade it now as she had evaded it from the beginning, to push to-day into to-morrow for the rest of her life. Nothing stood in her way; nothing but that deep instinct for truth on which, it seemed to her now, most of her associations with men had been wrecked. Then, because she was obliged to obey the law of her nature, she answered simply, "Yes, we expect to be married."

A strangled sound broke from Alice's lips, but she bit it back before it had formed into a word. The hand that she had thrown out blindly fell on the fringe of her gown, and she began knitting it together with trembling fingers. "Has he—does he care for you?" she asked presently in that hurried voice.

For the second time Corinna hesitated; and in that instant of hesitation, she broke irrevocably with the past and with the iron rule of tradition. She knew how her mother, how her grandmother, how all the strong and quiet women of her race would have borne themselves in a crisis like this—the implications and evasions which would have walled them within the garden that was their world. Her mother, she realized, would have been as incapable of facing the situation as she would have been of creating it.

"Yes, he cares for me," she answered frankly; and then, before the terror that leaped into the eyes of the other woman, as if she longed to turn and run out of the house, Corinna touched her gently on the shoulder. "Don't look like that!" It was unendurable to her compassionate heart that she should have brought that look into the eyes of any living creature.

She led Alice back to the chairs they had left; and when the servant came in to turn on the softly shaded lamps, they sat there, facing each other, in a silence which seemed to Corinna to be louder than any sound. There was the noise of wonder in it, and tragedy, and something vaguely menacing to which she could not give a name. It was fear, and yet it was not fear because it was so much worse. Only the blank terror in Alice's face, the terror of the woman who has lost hope, could express what it meant. And this terror translated into sound asked presently:

"Are—are you sure?"

A wave of pity surged through Corinna's heart. Her strength became to her something on which she could rest—which would not fail her; and she understood why she had had to meet so many disappointments in life, why she had had to bear so much that was almost unbearable. It was because, however strong emotion was in her nature, there was always something deep down in her that was stronger than any emotion. She had been ruled not by passion but by law, by some clear moral discernment of things as they ought to be; and this was why weak persons, or those who were the prey to their own natures, leaned on her with all their weight. In that instant of self-realization she knew that the refuge of the weak would be for ever denied her, that she should always be alone because she was strong enough to rely on her own spirit.

"Before I answer your question," she said, "I must know if you have the right to ask it."

The wistful eyes grew bright again. How graceful she was, thought Corinna as she watched her; and she knew that this woman, with her clinging sweetness, like the sweetness of honeysuckle, and her shallow violence of mood, could win the kind of love that had been denied to her own royal beauty. This other woman was the ephemeral incarnate, the thing for which men gave their lives. She was nothing; and therefore every man would see in her the reflection of what he desired.

"I have the right," she answered desperately, without pride and without shame. "I had the right before I got my divorce—"

"I understand," said Corinna, and her voice was scarcely more than a breath. Though she did not withdraw the hand that the other had taken, she looked away from her through the French window, into the garden where the twilight was like the bloom on a grape. The fragrance became suddenly intolerable. It seemed to her to be the scent not only of spring, but of death also, the ghost of all the sweetness that she had missed. "I shall never be able to bear the smell of spring again in my life," she thought. She had made no movement of surprise or resentment, for there was neither surprise nor resentment in her heart. There was pain, which was less pain than a great sadness; and there was the thought that she was very lonely; that she must always be lonely. Many thoughts passed through her mind; but beyond them, stretching far away into the future, she saw her own life like a deserted road filled with dead leaves and the sound of distant voices that went by. She could never find rest, she knew. Rest was the one thing that had been denied her—rest and love. Her destiny was the destiny of the strong who must give until they have nothing left, until their souls are stripped bare. "He must have cared for you," she said at last. Oh, how empty words were! How empty and futile!

"He could never care again like that for any one else," replied Alice, reaching out her hand as if she were pushing away an object she feared. "Whatever he thinks now, he could never care that much again."

Whatever he thinks now! A smile tinged with bitter knowledge flickered on Corinna's lips for an instant. After all, how little, how very little she knew of John Benham. She had seen the face he turned to the world; she had seen the crude outside armour of his public conscience. A laugh broke from her at the phrase because she remembered that Vetch had first used it. This other woman had entered into the secret chamber, the hidden places, of John Benham's life; she had been a part of the light and darkness of his soul. To Corinna, remembering his reserve, his dignity, his moderation in thought and feeling, there was a shock in the discovery that the perfect balance, the equilibrium of his temperament, had been overthrown. Certainly in their serene and sentimental association she had stumbled on no hidden fires, no reddening embers of that earlier passion. Yet she understood that even in her girlhood, even in the April freshness of her beauty, she had never touched the depths of his nature. It was Alice Rokeby—frightened, shallow, desperate, deserted, whom he had loved.

"What do you want?" she asked quietly. "What do you wish me to do?"

"Oh, I don't know!" replied Alice. "I don't know. I haven't thought—but there ought to be something. There ought to be something more permanent than love for one to live by."

In her anguish she had wrung a profound truth from experience; and as soon as she had uttered it, she lifted her pale face and stared with that mournful interrogation into the twilight. Something permanent to live by! In the mute desperation of her look she appeared to be searching the garden, the world, and the immense darkness of the sky, for an answer. The afterglow had faded slowly into the blue dusk of night; only a faint thread of gold still lingered beyond the cedars on the western horizon. Something permanent and indestructible! Was this what humanity had struggled for—had lived and fought and died for—since man first came up out of the primeval jungle? Where could one find unalterable peace if it were not high above the ebb and flow of desire? She herself might break away from codes and customs; but she could not break away from the strain of honour, of simple rectitude, which was in her blood and had made her what she was.

"Yes, there ought to be something. There is something," she said slowly. Though her hand still clasped Alice Rokeby's, she was gazing beyond her across the terrace into the garden. She thought of many things while she sat there, with that look of clairvoyance, of radiant vision, in her eyes. Of Alice Rokeby as a little girl in a white dress, with a blue hair ribbon that would never stay tied; of John Benham when she had played ball with him in her childhood; of Kent Page and that young love, so poignant while it lasted, so utterly dead when it was over; of her long, long search for perfection, for something that would not pass away; of the brief pleasures and the vain expectations of life; of the gray deserted road filled with dead leaves and the sound of voices far off—Nothing but dead leaves and distant voices that went by! In spite of her beauty, her brilliance, her gallant heart, this was what life had brought to her at the end. Only loneliness and the courage of those who have given always and never received.

"There is something else," she said again. "There is courage." Then, as the other woman made no reply, she went on more rapidly: "I will do what I can. It is very little. I cannot change him. I cannot make him feel again. But you can trust me. You are safe with me."

"I know that," answered Alice in a voice that sounded muffled and husky. "I have always known that." She rose and readjusted her veil. "That means a great deal," she added. "Oh, I think it means that the world has grown better!"

Corinna stooped and kissed her. "No, it only means that some of us have learned to live without happiness."

She went with Alice to the door, and then stood watching her descend the steps and enter the small closed car in the drive. There was a touching grace in the slight, shrinking figure, as if it embodied in a single image all the women in the world who had lost hope. "Yet it is the weak, the passive, who get what they want in the end," thought Corinna, as dispassionately as if she were merely a spectator. "I suppose it is because they need it more. They have never learned to do without. They do not know how to carry a broken heart." Then she smiled as she turned back into the house. "It is very late, and the only certain rules are that one must dine and one must dress for dinner."

A little later, when John Benham was announced and she came down to the drawing-room, her first glance at his face told her that she must be looking her best. She was wearing black, and beneath the white lock in her dark hair, her face was flushed with the colour of happiness. Only her eyes, velvet soft and as deep as a forest pool, had a haunted look.

"I have never," he said, "seen you look better."

She laughed. After all, one might permit a touch of coquetry in the final renouncement! "Perhaps you have never really seen me before."

Though he looked puzzled, he responded gaily: "On the contrary, I have seen little else for the last two or three months."

There was an edge of irony to her smile. "Were you looking at me or my shadow?"

He shook his head. "Are shadows ever as brilliant as that?"

Then before she could answer the Judge came in with his cordial outstretched hand and his air of humorous urbanity, as if he were too much interested in the world to censure it, and yet too little interested to take it seriously. His face, with its thin austere features and its kindly expression, showed the dryness that comes less from age than from quality. Benham, looking at him closely, thought, "He must be well over eighty, but he hasn't changed so much as a hair of his head in the last twenty years."

At dinner Corinna was very gay; and her father, whose habit it was not to inquire too deeply, observed only that she was looking remarkably well. The dining-room was lighted by candles which flickered gently in the breeze that rose and fell on the terrace. In this wavering illumination innumerable little shadows, like ghosts of butterflies, played over the faces of the two men, whose features were so much alike and whose expressions differed so perversely. In both Nature had bred a type; custom and tradition had moulded the plastic substance and refined the edges; but, stronger than either custom or tradition, the individual temperament, the inner spirit of each man, had cast the transforming flame and shadow over the outward form. And now they were alike only in their long, graceful figures, in their thin Roman features, in their general air of urbane distinction.

"We were talking at the club of the strike," said the Judge, who had finished his soup with a manner of detachment, and sat now gazing thoughtfully at his glass of sherry. "The opinion seems to be that it depends upon Vetch."

Benham's voice sounded slightly sardonical. "How can anything depend upon a weathercock?"

"Well, there's a chance, isn't there, that the weather may decide it?"

"Perhaps. In the way that the Governor will find to his advantage." Benham had leaned slightly forward, and his face looked very attractive by the shimmering flame of the candles.

"Isn't that the way most of us decide things," asked Corinna, "if we know what is really to our advantage?"

As Benham looked up he met her eyes. "In this case," he answered, with a note of austerity, as if he were impatient of contradiction, "the advantage to the public would seem to be the only one worth considering."

For an instant a wild impulse, born of suffering nerves, passed through Corinna's mind. She longed to cry out in the tone of Julius Gershom, "Oh, damn the public!"—but instead she remarked in the formal accents her grandmother had employed to smooth over awkward impulses, "Isn't it ridiculous that we can never get away from Gideon Vetch?"

The Judge laughed softly. "He has a pushing manner," he returned; and then, still curiously pursuing the subject: "Perhaps, he may get his revenge at the meeting Thursday night."

"Is there to be a meeting?" retorted Corinna indifferently. She was thinking, "When John is eighty he will look like Father. I shall be seventy-eight when he is eighty. All those years to live, and nothing in them but little pleasures, little kindnesses, little plans and ambitions. Charity boards and committee meetings and bridge. That is what life is—just pretending that little things are important."

"That's the strikers' meeting," the Judge was saying over his glass of sherry. "The next one is John's idea. We hope to arbitrate. If we can get Vetch interested there may be a settlement of some sort."

"So it's Vetch again! Oh, I am getting so tired of the name of Gideon Vetch!" laughed Corinna. And she thought, "If only I didn't have to play on the flute all my life. If I could only stop playing dance music for a little while, and break out into a funeral march!"

"He has already agreed to come," said Benham, "but I expect nothing from him. I have formed the habit of expecting nothing from Vetch."

"Well, I don't know," replied the Judge. "We may persuade him to stand firm, if there hasn't been an understanding between him and those people." The old gentleman always used the expression "those people" for persons of whose opinions he disapproved.

"You know what I think of Vetch," rejoined Benham, with a shrug.

It seemed to Corinna, watching Benham with her thoughtful gaze, that the subject would never change, that they would argue all night over their foolish strike and their tiresome meeting, and over what this Gideon Vetch might or might not do in some problematic situation. What sentimentalists men were! They couldn't understand, after the experience of a million years, that the only things that really counted in life were human relations. They were obliged to go on playing a game of bluff with their consecrated superstitions—playing—playing—playing—and yet hiding behind some graven image of authority which they had built out of stone. Sentimental, yes, and pathetic too, when one thought of it with patience.

When dinner was over, and the Judge had gone to a concert in town, Corinna's mockery fell from her, and she sat in a long silence watching Benham's enjoyment of his cigar. It occurred to her that if he were stripped of everything else, of love, of power, of ambition, he could still find satisfaction in the masculine habit of living—in the simple pleasures of which nothing except physical infirmity or extreme poverty can ever deprive one. Moderate in all things, he was capable of taking a serious pleasure in his meals, in his cigar, in a dip in a swimming pool, or a game of cards at the club. Whatever happened, he would have these things to fall back upon; and they would mean to him, she knew, far more than they could ever, even in direst necessity, mean to a woman.

The long drawing-room, lighted with an amber glow and drenched with the sweetness of honeysuckle, had grown very still. Outside in the garden the twilight was powdered with silver, and above the tops of the cedars a few stars were shining. A breeze came in softly, touching her cheek like the wing of a moth and stirring the iris in a bowl by the window. The flowers in the room were all white and purple, she observed with a tremulous smile, as if the vivid colours had been drained from both her life and her surroundings. "What a foolish fancy," she added, with a nervous force that sent a current of energy through her veins. "My heart isn't broken, and it will never be until I am dead!"

And then, with that natural aptitude for facing facts, for looking at life steadily and fearlessly, which had been born in a recoil from the sentimental habit of mind, she said quietly, "John, Alice Rokeby came to see me this afternoon."

He started, and the ashes dropped from his cigar; but there was no embarrassment in the level glance he raised to her eyes. Surprise there was, and a puzzled interrogation, but of confusion or disquietude she could find no trace.

"Well?" he responded inquiringly, and that was all.

"You used to care for her a great deal—once?"

He appeared to ponder the question. "We were great friends," he answered.

Friends! The single word seemed to her to express not only his attitude to Alice Rokeby, but his temperamental inability to call things by their right names, to face facts, to follow a straight line of thought. Here was the epitome of that evasive idealism which preferred shams to realities.

"Are you still friends?"

He shook his head. "No, we've drifted apart in the last year or so. I used," he said slowly, "to go there a great deal; but I've had so many responsibilities of late that I've fallen into the habit of letting other interests go in a measure."

It was harder even than she had imagined it would be—harder because she realized now that they did not speak the same language. She felt that she had struck against something as dry and cold and impersonal as an abstract principle. A ludicrous premonition assailed her that in a little while he would begin to talk about his public duty. This lack of genuine emotion, which had at first appeared to contradict his sentimental point of view, was revealed to her suddenly as its supreme justification. Because he felt nothing deeply he could afford to play brilliantly with the names of emotions; because he had never suffered his duty would always lie, as Gideon Vetch had once said of him, "in the direction of things he could not hurt."