CHAPTER II

MORENA'S WIFE

Betty Morena was sitting in a rustic chair before an open fire, smoking a cigarette. She was a short woman, so slenderly, even narrowly built, as to appear overgrown, and she was a mature woman so immaturely shaped and featured as to appear hardly more than a child. Her curly, russet hair was parted at the side, her wide, long-lashed eyes were set far apart, her nose was really a finely modeled snub,—more, a boy's nose even to a light sprinkling of freckles,—and her mouth was provokingly the soft, red mouth of a sorrowful child. She lounged far down in her chair, her slight legs, clad in riding-breeches of perfect cut, stretched out straight, her limber arms along the arms of the chair, her chin sunk on her flat chest, and her big, clear eyes staring into the fire. It was an odd figure of a wife for Jasper Morena, a Jew of thirty-eight, producer and manager of plays.

When Betty Kane had run away with him, there had been lamentation and rage in the houses of Kane and of Morena. To the pride of an old Hebrew family, the marriage even of this wandering son with a Gentile was fully as degrading as to the pride of the old Tory family was the marriage with a Jew. Her perverse Gaelic blood on fire with the insults heaped upon her lover, Betty, seventeen years old, romantic, clever, would have walked over flint to give her hand to him. That was ten years ago. Now, when Jasper came into her room, she drew her quick brows together, puffed at her cigarette, and blinked as though she was looking at something distasteful and at the same time rather alarming.

"Have they stopped dancing, Jasper?" she asked in a voice that was at once brusque and soft.

Jasper rubbed his hands delightedly. He was still merry, and came to stand near the fire, looking down at her with eyes entirely kind and admiring.

"Have you ever noticed Jane, who cooks for the outfit, Betty?"

"Yes. She's horrible."

"She's extraordinary, and I mean to get hold of her for Luck's play. Did you read it?"

"Yes."

"The play is absolutely dependent on the leading part and I have found it simply impossible to fill. Now, here's a woman of extraordinary grace and beauty—"

Betty lifted skeptical eyebrows, twisted her limber mouth, but forbore to contradict.

"And with a magical voice—a woman who not only looks the part, but is it. You remember Luck's heroine?"

Betty flicked off the ash of her cigarette and looked away. "A savage, isn't she? The man has her tamed, takes her back to London, and there gives her cause for jealousy and she springs on him—yes, I remember. This woman, Jane, is absolutely without education and hasn't a notion of acting, I suppose."

Jasper rubbed his hands with increased delight. "Not a notion and she murders the King's English. But she is Luck's savage and—in spite of your eyebrows, Betty—she is beautiful. I can school her. It will take money, no end of patience, but I can do it. It's one of the things I can do. But, of course, there's the initial difficulty of persuading her to try it."

"That oughtn't to be any difficulty at all. Of course she'll jump at the chance."

"I'm not so sure. She was ready to throw me out of the kitchen to-night. She is really a virago. Do you know what one of the men said about her?" Jasper laughed and imitated the gentle Western drawl. "Jane's plumb movin' to me. She's about halfway between 'You go to hell' and 'You take me in your arms to rest.'"

Betty smiled. Her smile was vastly more mature than her appearance. It was clever and cynical and cold. The Oriental, looking down at her, lost his merriment.

"Do you feel better, dear?" he asked timidly. "Do you think you will be able to go back next week?"

She stood up as he came nearer and walked over to the little table that played the part of dressing-table under a wavy mirror. "Oh, yes. I am quite well. I don't think the doctors have much sense. I'm sure I hadn't anything like a nervous breakdown. I was just tired out."

Jasper drew back the hand whose touch she had eluded, and nervously, his long supple fingers a little unsteady, lighted a cigarette. At that moment he did not look like a spider, but like a lover who has been hurt. Betty could see in the mirror a distorted image of his dejected gracefulness, but, entirely unmoved, she put up her thin, brown hands and began to take the pins out of her hair.

"I like your Jane experiment," she said. "Let me know how you get on with it and whether I can help. I shall have to turn in now. I'm dead beat. Yarnall took me halfway up the mountain and back. Good-night."

Jasper looked at her, then pressed his lips into a straight line and went to the door which led from her bedroom to his. He said "Good-night" in a low tone, glanced at her over his shoulder, and went out.

Betty waited an instant, then slowly unlaced her heavy, knee-high boots, took them off, and began to walk to and fro on stocking feet, hands clasped behind her back. With her curly hair all about her face and shoulders, she looked like a wild, extravagantly naughty school-girl, a girl in a wicked temper, a rebel against authority. In fact, she was rejoicing that this horrible enforced visit to the West was all but over. One week more! She was almost at an end of her endurance. How she hated the beautiful white night outside, those mountain peaks, the sound of that rapid river, the stillness of sagebrush, the voice of the big pines! And she hated the log room, its simplicity now all littered with incongruous luxuries; ivory toilet articles on the board table; lacy, beribboned underwear thrown over the rustic chair; silver-framed photographs; an exquisite, gold-mounted crystal vase full of wild flowers on the pine shelf; satin bedroom slippers on the clay hearth; a gorgeous, fur-trimmed dressing-gown over the foot of her narrow, iron cot; all the ridiculous necessities that Betty's maid had put into her trunk. Yes, Betty hated it all because it was what she had always thirsted for. What a malevolent trick of fate that Jasper should have brought her to Wyoming, that the doctor had insisted upon at least a month of just this life. "Take her West," he had said, and Betty, lying limp and white in her bed, her small head sunk into the pillow, had jerked from head to foot. "Take her West. I know a ranch in Wyoming—Yarnall's. She'll get outdoor exercise, tonic air, sound sleep, release from all these pestiferous details, like a cloud of flies, that sting women's nerves to death. Don't pay any attention to whether she likes it or not. Let her behave like a naughty child, let her kick and scream and cry. Pick her up, Morena, and carry her off. Do you hear? Don't let her make you change your plans." The doctor had seen his patient's convulsive jerk. "Pack her up. Make your reservations and go straight to 'Buck' Yarnall's ranch, Lazy-Y,—that's his brand, I believe,—Middle Fork, Wyoming. I'll send him a wire. He knows me. She needs all outdoors to run about in. She needs joggin' around all day through the sagebrush on a cow-pony in that sun; she needs the smell of a camp-fire—Gad! wish I could get back to it myself."

Betty, having heard this out, began to laugh. She laughed till they gave her something to keep her quiet. But, except for that laughter, she had made no protest whatever; she did not "kick and scream and cry." In fact, though she looked like a child, she was not at all inclined to such exhibitions. This doctor had not seen her through her recent ordeal. Two years before her breakdown, Jasper had been terribly hurt in an automobile accident, and Betty had come to him at the hospital, had waited, as white as a snow-image, for the result of the examination. They had told her emphatically that there was no hope. Jasper Morena could not live for more than a few days. She must not allow herself to hope. He might or might not regain consciousness. If he did, it would be for a few minutes before the end. Betty had listened with her white, rigid, child face, had thanked them, had gone home. There in her exquisite, little sitting room above Central Park, she had sat at her desk and written a few lines on square, gray note paper.

"Jasper is dying," she had written. "By the time you get this, he will be dead. If you can forgive me for having failed in courage last year, come back. What I have been to you before I will be again, only, this time we can love openly. Come back."

Then she had dropped her head on the desk and cried. Afterwards she had addressed her letter to a certain Prosper Gael. The letter went to Wyoming. When it reached its destination, it was taken over a mountain-range by a patient Chinaman.

Three days later Jasper regained consciousness and began slowly to return to health. He had the tenacious vitality of his race, and, in his own spirit, an iron will to live. He kept Betty beside his bed for hours, and held her cold hand in his long, sensitive one, and he stared at her under his lashes till she thought she must go mad. But she did not. She nursed him through an interminable convalescence. She received Prosper, very early in this convalescence, by her husband's bed, and Jasper had murmured gratitude for the emotion that threatened to overwhelm his friend. It was not till some time—an extraordinarily long time—after Morena's complete recovery that she had snapped like a broken icicle. And then, forsooth, they had sent her to Wyoming to get back her health!

Having paced away some of her restlessness, Betty stopped by the cabin window and pushed aside one of the short, calico curtains. She looked out on the court. A tall woman had just pulled up a bucket of water from the well and had emptied it into a pitcher. She finished, let the bucket drop with a whirr and a clash, and raised her head. For a second she and Jasper Morena's wife looked at each other. Betty nodded, smiled, and drew the curtain close.



CHAPTER III

JANE

After that night, there began a sort of persecution, skillfully conducted by Jasper and Betty, against the ferocity of Jane. It was a persecution impossible to imagine in any other setting, even the social simplicity of Lazy-Y found itself a trifle amused. For Jasper, the stately Jewish figure, would carry pails of water for Jane from the well to the kitchen, would help her in the vegetable garden, and to straighten out her recalcitrant stove-pipe; Betty would put on an apron a mile too large, to wash dishes and shell peas. She would sit on the kitchen table swinging her long, childlike legs and chatter amiably. Jasper talked, too, to the virago, talked delightfully, about horses and dogs,—he had a charming gift of humorous observation,—talked about hunting and big-game shooting, about trapping, about travel, and, at last, about plays. Undoubtedly Jane listened. Sometimes she laughed. Once in a while she ejaculated, musically, "Well!" Occasionally she swore.

One afternoon he met her riding home from an errand to a neighboring ranch, and, turning his horse, rode with her. In worn corduroy skirt, flannel shirt, and gray sombrero, she looked like a handsome, haggard boy, and, that afternoon, there was a certain unusual wistfulness in her eyes, and her mouth had relaxed a little from its bitterness. Perhaps it was the beauty of a clear, keen summer day; without doubt, also, she was touched by the courteous pleasure of his greeting and by his giving up his ride in order to accompany her. She even unbent from her silence and, for the first time, really talked to him. And she spoke, too, in a new manner, using her beautiful voice with beautiful carefulness. It was like a master-musician who, after a long illness, takes up his beloved instrument and tentatively tests his shaken powers. Jasper had much ado to keep his surprise to himself, for the rough ranch girl could speak pure enough English if she would.

"You and your wife are leaving soon?" she asked him, and, when he nodded, she gave a sigh. "I'll be missing you," she said, throwing away her brusquerie like a rag with which she was done. "You've been company for me. You've made use of lots of patience and courage, but I have really liked it. I've not got the ways of being sociable and I don't know that I want ever to get them. I am not seeking for friends. There isn't another person on the ranch that would dare talk to me as you and Mrs. Morena have talked. They don't know anything about me here and I don't mean that they should know." She paused, then gave way to an impulse of confidence. "One of the boys asked me to marry him. He came and shouted it through the window and I caught him with a pan of water." She sighed. "I don't know rightly if he meant it for a joke or not, but the laugh wasn't on me."

Jasper controlled his laughter, then saw the dry humor of her eyes and lips and let out his mirth.

"Why, sir," said Jane, "you'd be surprised at the foolishness of men. Sometimes it seems that, just for pure contrariness, they want to marry her that least wants them about. The day I came tramping into this valley, I stopped for food at the ranch of an old bachelor down yonder at the ford. And he invited me to be his wife while I was drinking a glass of water from his well. He told me how much money he had and said he'd start my stove for me winter mornings. There's a good husband! And he was sure kind to me even when I told him 'no.' 'T was that same evening that the boy from Lazy-Y rode in and claimed me for a cook. Mr. Yarnall is a trusting man. He took me and didn't ask any questions. I told him I was 'Jane' and that I wasn't planning to let him know more. He hasn't asked me another question since. He's a gentleman, I figure it, and he's kind of quiet himself about what he was before he came to this country. He's a man of fifty and he has lots back of him only he's taken a fresh start." She sighed, "Folks like you and Betty seem awfully open-hearted. It's living in cities, I suppose, where every one knows every one else so well."

This astonishing picture of the candid simplicity of New York's social life absorbed Jasper's attention for some time.

"Wouldn't you like to live in a city, Jane?"

She laughed her short, boyish "Hoo!" "It isn't what I would like, Mr. Morena," she said. "Why, I'd like to see the world. I would like to be that fellow who was condemned to wander all over the earth and never to die. He was a Jew, too, wasn't he?"

Jasper flushed. People were not in the habit of making direct reference to his nationality, and, being an Israelite who had early cut himself off with dislike from his own people and cultivated the society of Gentiles, "a man without a country," he was acutely sensitive.

"The Wandering Jew? Yes. Where did you ever hear of him?"

"I read his story," she answered absently; "an awful long one, but interesting, about lots of people, by Eugene Sue."

Jasper's lips fell apart and he stared. She had spoken unwittingly and he could see that she was not thinking of him, that she was far away, staring beyond her horse's head into the broad, sunset-brightened west.

"Where were you schooled?" he asked her.

He had brought her back and her face stiffened. She gave him a startled, almost angry look, dug her heels into her horse and broke into a gallop; nor could he win from her another word.

A few days before he left, he took Yarnall into his confidence. At first the rancher would do nothing but laugh. "Jane on the boards! That's a notion!" followed by explosion after explosion of mirth. The Jew waited, patient, pliant, smiling, and then enumerated his reasons. He talked to Yarnall for an hour, at the end of which time, Yarnall, his eyes still twinkling, sent for Jane.

The two men sat in a log-walled room, known as the office. Yarnall's big desk crowded a stove. There was no other furniture except shelves and a box seat beneath a window. Jasper sat on the end of the desk, swinging his slim, well-booted leg; Yarnall, stocky, gray, shabby, weather-beaten, leaned back in his wicker chair. The door which Jasper faced was directly behind Yarnall. When Jane opened it, he turned.

The girl looked grim and a little pale. She was evidently frightened. This summons from Yarnall suggested dismissal or reproof. She came around to face him and stood there, looking fierce and graceful, her head lowered, staring gloomily at him from under her brows. To Jasper she gave not so much as a glance.

"Well, Jane, I fancy I shall have to let you go," said Yarnall. He was not above tormenting the wild-cat. Female ferocity always excites the teasing boy in a man. "You're getting too ambitious for us. You see, once these rich New Yorkers take you up, you're no more use to a plain ranchman like me."

"What are you drivin' at?" asked Jane.

"Do let me explain it to her, Yarnall!" Jasper snapped his elastic fingers, color had risen to his face, and he looked annoyed. "Miss Jane, won't you sit down?"

Jane turned her deep, indignant eyes upon him. "Are you and your wife the rich New Yorkers he says are takin' me up?"

"No, no. He's joking. This is a serious business. It's of vital importance to me and it ought to be of vital importance to you. Please do sit down!"

Jane took a long step back and sat down on the settle under the long, horizontal window. She folded her hands on her knee and looked up at Morena. She had transferred her attention completely to him. Yarnall watched them. He was an Englishman of much experience and this picture of the skillful, cultivated, handsome Jew angling deftly for the gaunt, young savage diverted him hugely. He screwed up his eyes to get a picture of it.

"I am a producer and manager of plays," said Jasper, "which means that I take a play written by a more gifted man and arrange it for the stage. Have you ever seen a play?"

"No, sir."

"But you have some idea what they are?"

"Yes. I have read them. Shakespeare wrote quite a lot of that kind of talking pieces, didn't he?"

Jasper was less surprised than Yarnall. "At present I have a play on my hands which is a very brilliant and promising piece of work, but which I have been unable to produce for lack of a heroine. There isn't an actress on my list that can take the part and do it justice. Now, Miss Jane, I believe that with some training you could take it to perfection. My wife and I would like to take you to New York, paying all your expenses, of course, and put you into training at once. It would take a year's hard work to get you fitted for the part. Then next fall we could bring out the play and I think I can promise you success and fame and wealth in no small measure. I don't know you very well; I don't know whether or not you are ambitious; but I do know that every woman must love beauty and ease and knowledge and experience. For what else," he smiled, "did Eve eat the apple? All these you can have if you will let us take you East. Of course, if I find you cannot take this part, I will hold myself accountable for you. I will not let you be a loser in any way by the experiment. With your beauty"—Yarnall fell back in his chair and gaped from the excited speaker to the silent listener—"and your extraordinary voice, and your magnetism, you must be especially fitted for a career of some kind. I promise to find you your career."

Every drop of blood had fallen from Jane's face and the rough hands on her knee were locked together.

"What part," she asked in a quick, low voice, "is this that you think I could learn to do?"

Jasper changed his position. He came nearer and spoke more rapidly. "It is the story of a girl, a savage girl, whom a man takes up and trains. He trains her as a professional might train a lioness. It is a passion with him to break spirits and shape them to his will. He trains her with coaxing and lashing—not actual lashing, though I believe in one place he does come near to beating her—and he gets her broken so that she lies at his feet and eats out of his hand. All this, you understand, while he's an exile from his own world. Then, in the second act,—that is the second part of the play,—he takes his tamed lioness back to civilization. They go to London and there the woman does his training infinite credit. She is extraordinarily beautiful; she is civilized, successful, courted. Her eccentricities only add to her charm. So it goes on very prettily for a while. Then he makes a mistake. He blunders very badly. He gives his lioness cause for jealousy and—to come to the point—she flies at his throat. You see, he hadn't really tamed her. She was under the skin, a lioness, a beast, at heart."

Jasper had been absorbed in the plot and had not noticed Jane, but Yarnall for several minutes had been leaning forward, his hands tightened on the arms of his chair. The instant Jasper stopped he held up his hand.

"Quiet, Jane," he said softly as a man might speak to a plunging horse. "Steady!"

Jane got to her feet. She was very white. She put up her hand and pressed the back of it against her forehead and from under this hand she looked at the two men with eyes of such astonished pain and beauty as they could never forget.

"Yes," she said presently; "that's something I could do."

At once Jasper hastened to retrieve his error. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I've been horribly clumsy. Do forgive me. Do let me explain. I didn't mean that you were a wild—"

She let the hand fall and held it up to stop his speech. "I'm not taking offense, Mr. Morena," she said. "You say you arrange plays and that you have been seeking for some one to play that girl, that lioness-girl who wasn't rightly tamed, though the man had done his worst to break her?"

Jasper nodded with a puzzled, anxious air. For all his skill and subtlety, he could not interpret her tone.

"And you think I'm beautiful?"

"My dear child, I know you are," said he. "You try to disguise it. And I know that in many other ways you disguise yourself. I think you make a great mistake. Your work is hard and rough—"

She smiled. "I'm not complaining of my work," she said. "It's rough and so am I. Oh, yes, I'm real, true rough. I was born to roughness and raised to it. I'm not anything I don't seem, Mr. Morena. I've had rough travel all my days, only—only—" She sat down again, twisting her hands painfully in her apron and bending her face down from the sight of the two men. The line of her long, bent neck was a beautiful thing to see. She spoke low and rapidly, holding down her emotion, though she could not control all the exquisite modulations of her voice. "There's only one part of my travel that I want to forget and that's the one smooth bit. And it's hateful to me and you've been reminding me of it. I must tell you now that I'd rather be burnt by a white-hot iron"—here she gave him a wide and horrified look like a child who speaks of some dreadful remembered punishment—"than do that thing you've asked of me. I hate everything you've been telling me about. I don't want to be beautiful. I don't want any one to be telling me such things. I don't want to be any different from what I am now. This is my real self. It is. I hate beauty. I hate it. I'm not good enough to love it. Beauty and learning and—and music—"

Her head had been bending lower and lower, her voice rocking under its weight of restrained anguish. On the word "music" she dropped her head to her knees and was silent.

"I can't talk no more," she said, after a moment, and she stood up and ran out of the room.

"I'll be d——d!" swore Yarnall.

But Jasper stood, his face pale, smiting one hand into the other.

"I feel that I, at least, deserve to be," he said.



CHAPTER IV

FLIGHT

There was a girl named Joan who followed Pierre Landis because he laid his hand upon her wrist, and there was another Joan who fled up the mountain-side at sight of him, as though the fire that had once touched her shoulder had burnt its way into her heart. Then there was a third Joan, a Joan astray. It was this Joan that had come to Lazy-Y Ranch and had cooked for and bullied "the outfit"—a Joan of set face and bitter tongue, whose two years' lonely battle with life had twisted her youth out of its first comely straightness. In Joan's brief code of moral law there was one sin—the dealings of a married woman with another man. When Pierre's living and seeking face looked up toward her where she stood on the mountain-side above Prosper's cabin, she felt for the first time that she had sinned, and so, for the first time, she was a sinner, and the inevitable agony of soul began.

She fled and hid till dark, then prowled about till she knew that Wen Ho was alone in the house. She came like a spirit from hell and questioned him.

"What did the men ask? What did you tell them?"

The men had asked for a lady. He had told them, as Prosper had once instructed him, that no lady was living there, that the man had just gone. They had been satisfied and had left. But Joan was still in terror. Pierre must never find her now. She had accepted the lie of a stranger, had left her husband for dead, had made no effort to ascertain the truth, and had "dealings with another man." Joan sat in judgment and condemned herself to loneliness. She turned herself out from all her old life as though she had been Cain, and, following Wen Ho's trail over the mountains, had gone into strange lands to work for her bread. She called herself "Jane" and her ferocity was the armor for her beauty. Always she worked in fear of Pierre's arrival, and, as soon as she had saved money enough for further traveling, she moved on. She worked by preference on lonely ranches as cook or harvester, and it was after two years of such life that she had drifted into Yarnall's kitchen. She was then greatly changed, as a woman who works to the full stretch of her strength, who suffers privation and hardship, who gives no thought to her own youth and beauty, and who, moreover, suffers under a scourge of self-scorn and fear, is bound to change. Of all the people that had seen her after months of such living, Jasper Morena was the only one to find her beautiful. But with his sensitive observation he had seen through the shell to the sweetness underneath; for surely Joan was sweet, a Friday's child. It was good that Jasper had torn the skin from her wound, good that he had broken up the hardness of her heart. She left him and Yarnall that afternoon and went away to her cabin in the trees and lay face down on the bare boards of the floor and was young again. Waves of longing for love and beauty and adventure flooded her. For a while she had been very beautiful and had been very passionately loved; for a while she had been surrounded by beauty and taught its meanings. She had fled from it all. She hated it, yes, but she longed for it with every fiber of her being. The last two years were scalded away. She was Joan, who had loved Pierre; Joan, whom Prosper Gael had loved.

Toward morning, dawn feeling with white fingers through the pine boughs into her uncurtained window, Joan stopped her weeping and stood up. She was very tired and felt as though all the hardness and strength had been beaten from her heart. She opened her door and looked at pale stars and a still, slowly brightening world. In a hollow below the pines a stream ran and poured its hoarse, hurrying voice into the silence. Joan bent under the branches, undressed and bathed. The icy water shocked life back into her spirit. She began to tingle and to glow. In spite of herself she felt happier. She had been stony for so long, neither sorrowful nor glad; now, after the night of sharp pain, she was aware of the gladness of morning. She came up from her plunge, glowing and beautiful, with loose, wet hair.

In the corral the men were watering their teams; above them on the edge of a mesa, against the rosy sky, the other ponies, out all night on the range, were trooping, driven by a cowboy who darted here and there on his nimble pony, giving shrill cries. In the clear air every syllable was sharp to the ear, every tint and line sharp to the eye. It was beautiful, very beautiful, and it was near and dear to her, native to her—this loveliness of quick action, of inarticulate calling to dumb beasts, of work, of simple, often repeated beginnings. She was glad that she was working with her hands. She twisted up her hair and went over to the ranch-house where she began soberly and thankfully to light her kitchen fire.

It was after breakfast, two or three mornings later, when a stranger on a chestnut pony rode into Yarnall's ranch, tied his pony to a tree, and, striding across the cobbled square, came to knock at the office door. At the moment, Yarnall, on the other side of the house, was saying farewell to his guests, and helping the men pile the baggage into the two-seated wagon, so this other visitor, getting no answer to his knock, turned and looked about the court. He did not, it was evident, mind waiting. It was to be surmised from the look of him that he was used to it; patient and not to be discouraged by delay. He was a very brown young man of quite astounding beauty and his face had been schooled to keenness and restraint. He was well-dressed, very clean, an outdoor man, a rider, but a man who had, in some sense, arrived. He had the inimitable stamp of achievement. He had been hard driven—the look of that, too, was there; he had been driven to more than ordinary effort. One of the men, seeing him, walked over and spoke respectfully.

"You want to see Mr. Yarnall?"

"Yes, sir." The man's eyes were searching the ranch-house wistfully again. "I would like to see him if I can. I have some questions to ask him."

"He's round the house, gettin' rid of a bunch of dudes. Some job. Both hands tied up. Will you go round or wait?"

The stranger dropped to his heels, squatted, and rolled a cigarette.

"I'll wait," he murmured. "You can let him know when the dudes make their get-away. He'll get round to me. My name? It won't mean anything to him—Pierre Landis."

He did not go round the house, and Yarnall, being very busy and perturbed for some time after the departure of his guests, did not get round to him till nearly noon. By that time he was sitting on the step, his back against the wall, still smoking and still wistfully observant of his surroundings.

He stood up when Yarnall came.

"Sorry," said the latter; "that fool boy didn't tell me you were here till ten minutes ago. Come in. You'll stop for dinner—if we get any to-day."

"Thank you," said Pierre.

He came in and talked and stayed for dinner. Yarnall was used to the Western fashion of doing business. He knew that it would be a long time before the young man would come to his point. But the Englishman was in no hurry, for he liked his visitor and found his talk diverting enough. Landis had been in Alaska—a lumber camp. He had risen to be foreman and now he was off for a vacation, but had to go back soon. He had been everywhere. It seemed to Yarnall that the stranger had visited every ranch in the Rocky Mountain belt.

After dinner, strolling beside his host toward his horse, Pierre spoke, and before Yarnall had heard a word he knew that the long delay had been caused by suppressed emotion. Pierre, when he did ask his question, was white to the lips.

"I've taken a lot of your time," he said slowly. "I came to ask you about someone. I heard that you had a woman on your ranch, a woman who came in and didn't give you any history. I want to see her if I may." He was actually fighting an unevenness of breath, and Yarnall, unemotional as he was, was gripped with sympathetic suspense. "I want," stammered the young man, "to know her name."

Yarnall swore. "Her name, as she gave it," said he, "is Jane. But, my boy, you can't see her. She left this morning."

Pierre raised a white, tense face.

"Left?" He turned as if he would run after her.

"Yes, sir. These people I've had here took her away with them. That is, they've been urging her to go, but she'd refused. Then, suddenly, this morning, just as they were putting the trunks in, up came Jane, white as chalk, asking them to take her with them, said she must go. Well, sir, they rigged her up with some traveling clothes and drove away with her. That was six hours ago. By now they're in the train, bound for New York."

Yarnall's guest looked at him without speaking, and Yarnall nervously went on, "She's been with us about six months, Landis, and I don't know anything about her. She was tall, gray eyes, black hair, slow speaking, and with the kind of voice you'd be apt to notice ... yes, I see she's the girl you've been looking for. I can give you the New York people's address, but first, for Jane's sake,—I'm a pretty good friend of hers, I think a lot of Jane,—I'll have to know what you want with her—what she is to you."

Pierre's pupils widened till they all but swallowed the smoke-colored iris.

"She is my wife," he said.

Again Yarnall swore. But he lit a cigarette and took his time about answering. "Well, sir," he said, "you must excuse me, but—it was because she saw you, I take it, that Jane cut off this morning. That's clear. Now, I don't know what would make a girl run off from her husband. She might have any number of reasons, bad and good, but it seems to me that it would be a pretty strong one that would make a girl run off, with a look such as she wore, from a man like you. Did you treat her well, Landis?"

It had the effect of a lash taken by a penitent. The man shrank a little, whitened, endured. "I can't tell you how I treated her," he said in a dangerous voice; "it don't bear tellin'. But—I want her back. I was—I was—that was three years ago; I am more like a man now. You'll give me the people's name, their address?..."

Pierre laid his hand on the older man's wrist and gave it a queer urgent and beseeching shake.

After a moment of searching scrutiny, Yarnall bent his head.

"Very well," said he shortly; "come in."



CHAPTER V

LUCK'S PLAY

A young man who had just landed in New York from one of the big, adventurous transatlantic liners hailed a taxicab and was quickly drawn away into the glitter and gayety of a bright winter morning. He sat forward eagerly, looking at everything with the air of a lad on a holiday. He was a young man, but he was not in his first youth, and under a heavy sunburn he was pale and a trifle worn, but there was about him a look of being hard and very much alive. Under a broad brow there were hawk eyes of greenish gray, a delicate beak, a mouth and chin of cleverness. It was an interesting face and looked as though it had seen interesting things. In fact, Prosper Gael had just returned from his three months of ambulance service in France, and it was the extraordinary success of his play, "The Leopardess," that had chiefly brought him back.

"Dear Luck," his manager had written, using the college title which Prosper's name and unvarying good fortune suggested, "you'd better come back and gather up some of these laurels that are smothering us all. The time is very favorable for the disappearance of your anonymity. I, for one, find it more and more difficult to keep the secret. So far, not even your star knows it. She calls you 'Mr. Luck' ... to that extent I have been indiscreet...."

Prosper had another letter in his pocket, a letter that he had re-read many times, always with an uneasy conflict of emotions. He was in a sort of hot-cold humor over it, in a fever-fit that had a way of turning into lassitude. He postponed analysis indefinitely. Meanwhile his eyes searched the bright, cold city, its crowds, its traffics, its windows—most of all, its placards, and, not far to seek, there were the posters of "The Leopardess." He leaned out to study one of them; a tall, wild-eyed woman crouched to spring upon a man who stared at her in fear. Prosper dropped back with a gleaming smile of amused excitement. "They've made it look like cheap melodrama," he said to himself; "and yet it's a good thing, the best thing I've ever done. Yet they will vulgarize the whole idea with their infernal notions of 'what the public wants.' Morena is as bad as the rest of them!" He expressed disgust, but underneath he was aglow with pride and interest. "There's a performance to-night. I'll dine with Jasper. I'll have to see Betty first...." His thoughts trailed off and he fell into that hot-cold confusion, that uncomfortable scorching fog of mood. The cab turned into Fifth Avenue and became a scale in the creeping serpent of vehicles that glided, paused, and glided again past the thronged pavements. Prosper contrasted everything with the grim courage and high-pitched tragedy of France. He could not but wonder at the detached frivolity of these money-spenders, these spinners in the sun. How soon would the shadow fall upon them too and with what change of countenance would they look up! To him the joyousness seemed almost childish and yet he bathed his fagged spirit in it. How high the white clouds sailed, how blue was the midwinter sky! How the buildings towered, how quickly the people stepped! Here were the pretty painted faces, the absurd silk stockings, the tripping, exquisitely booted feet, the swinging walk, the tall, up-springing bodies of the women he remembered. He regarded them with impersonal delight, untinged by any of his usual cynicism.

It was late afternoon when Prosper, obedient to a telephone call from Betty, presented himself at the door of Morena's house, just east of the Park, off Fifth Avenue; a very beautiful house where the wealthy Jew had indulged his passion for exquisite things. Prosper entered its rich dimness with a feeling of oppression—that unanalyzed mood of hot and cold feeling intensified to an almost unbearable degree. In the large carved and curtained drawing-room he waited for Betty. The tea-things were prepared; there would be no further need of service until Betty should ring. Everything was arranged for an uninterrupted tete-a-tete. Prosper stood near an ebony table, his shoulder brushed by tall, red roses, and felt his nerves tighten and his pulses hasten in their beat. "The tall child ... the tall child ..." he had called her by that name so often and never without a swift and stabbing memory of Joan, and of Joan's laughter which he had silenced.

He took out the letter he had lately received from Betty and re-read it and, as he read, a deep line cut between his eyes. "You say you will not come back unless I can give you more than I have ever given you in the past. You say you intend to cut yourself free, that I have failed you too often, that you are starved on hope. I'm not going to ask much more patience of you. I failed you that first time because I lost courage; the second time, fate failed us. How could I think that Jasper would get well when the doctors told me that I mustn't allow myself even a shadow of hope! Now, I think that Jasper, himself, is preparing my release. This all sounds like something in a book. That's because you've hurt me. I feel frozen up. I couldn't bear it if now, just when the door is opening, you failed me. Prosper, you are my lover for always, aren't you? I have to believe that to go on living. You are the one thing in my wretched life that hasn't lost its value. Now, read this carefully; I am going to be brutal. Jasper has been unfaithful to me. I know it. I have sufficient evidence to prove it in a law court and I shall not hesitate to get a divorce. Tear this up, please. Now, of all times, we must be extraordinarily careful. There has never been a whisper against us and there mustn't be. Jasper must not suspect. A counter-suit would ruin my life. I must talk it over with you. I'll see you once alone—just once—before I leave Jasper and begin the suit. We must have patience for just this last bit. It will seem very long...."

Prosper folded the letter. He was conscious of a faint feeling of sickness, of fear. Then he heard Betty's step across the marble pavement of the hall. She parted the heavy curtains, drew them together behind her, and stood, pale with joy, opening and shutting her big eyes. Then she came to meet him, held him back, listening for any sound that might predict interruption, and gave herself to his arms. She was no longer pale when he let her go. She went a few steps away and stood with her hands before her face, then she went to sit by the tea-table. They were both flushed. Betty's eyes were shining under their fluttering lids. Prosper rejoiced in his own emotion. The mental fog had lifted and the feeling of faintness was gone.

"You've decided not to break away altogether, then?" she asked, giving him a quick glance.

He shook his head. "Not if what you have written me is true. I've had such letters from you before and I've grown very suspicious. Are you sure this time?" He laid stress upon his bitterness. It was his one weapon against her and he had been sharpening it with a vague purpose.

"Oh," said Betty, speaking low and furtively, "Jasper is fairly caught. I have a reliable witness in the girl's maid. There is no doubt of his guilt, Prosper, none. Everyone is talking of it. He has been perfectly open in his attentions."

Every minute Betty looked younger and prettier, more provoking. Her child-mouth with its clever smile was bright as though his kiss had painted it.

"Who is the girl?" asked Prosper. He was deeply flushed. Being capable of simultaneous points of view, he had been stung by that cool phrase of Betty's concerning "Jasper's guilt."

"I'll tell you in a moment. Did you destroy my letter?"

He shook his head.

"Oh, Prosper, please!"

He took it out, tore it up, and walking over to the open fire, burned the papers. He came back to his tea. "Well, Betty?"

"The girl," said Betty, "is the star in your play, 'The Leopardess,' the girl that Jasper picked up two Septembers ago out West. He has written to you about her. She was a cook, if you please, a hideous creature, but Jasper saw at once what there was in her. She has made the play. You'll have to acknowledge that yourself when you see her. She is wonderful. And, partly owing to the trouble I've taken with her, the girl is beautiful. One wouldn't have thought it possible. She is not charming to me, she's not in the least subtle. It's odd that she should have had such an effect upon Jasper, of all men...."

Prosper sipped his tea and listened. He looked at her and was bitterly conscious that the excitement which had pleased and surprised him was dying out. That faintness again assailed his spirit. He was feeling stifled, ashamed, bored. Yes, that was it, bored. That life of service and battle-danger in France had changed him more than he had realized till now. He was more simple, more serious, more moral, in a certain sense. He was like a man who, having denied the existence of Apollyon, has come upon him face to face and has been burnt by his breath. Such a man is inevitably moral. All this long, intricate intrigue with the wife of a man who called him friend, seemed to him horribly unworthy. If Betty had been a great lover, if she had not lost courage at the eleventh hour and left him to face that terrible winter in Wyoming, then their passion might have justified itself: but now there was a staleness in their relationship. He hated the thought of the long divorce proceedings, of the decent interval, of the wedding, of the married life. He had never really wanted that. And now, in the ebb of his passion, how could he force himself to take her when he had learned to live more keenly, more completely without her! He would have to take her, to spend his days and nights with her, to travel with her. She would want to visit that gay, little forsaken house in a Wyoming canyon. With vividness he saw a girl lying prone on a black rug before a dancing fire, her hair all fallen about her face, her secret eyes lifted impatiently from the book—"You had ought to be writin', Mr. Gael...."

"What are you smiling for, Prosper?" Betty asked sharply.

He looked up, startled and confused. "Sorry. I've got into beastly absent-minded habits. Is that Morena?"

Jasper opened the curtains and came in, greeting Prosper in his stately, charming fashion. "To-night," he said, "we'll show you a leopardess worth looking at, won't we, Betty? But first you must tell us about your own experience. You look wonderfully fit, doesn't he, Betty? And changed. They say the life out there stamps a man, and they're right. It's taken some of that winged-demon look out of your face, Prosper, put some soul into it."

He talked and Betty laughed, showing not the slightest evidence of effort, though the soul Jasper had seen in Prosper's face felt shriveled for her treachery. Prosper wondered if she could be right in her surmise about Jasper. The Jew was infinitely capable of dissimulation, but there was a clarity of look and smile that filled Prosper with doubts. And the eyes he turned upon his wife were quite as apparently as ever the eyes of a disappointed man.

So absorbed was he in such observations that he found it intolerably difficult to fix his attention on the talk. Jasper's fluency seemed to ripple senselessly about his brain.

"You must consent to one thing, Luck: you must allow me to choose my own time for announcing the authorship." This found its way partially to his intelligence and he gave careless assent.

"Oh, whenever you like, as soon as I've had my fun."

"Of course—" Morena was thoughtful for an instant. "How would it do for me to leave it with Melton, the business manager? Eh? Suppose I phone him and talk it over a little. He'll want to wait till toward the end of the run. He's keen; has just the commercial sense of the born advertiser. Let him choose the moment. Then we can feel sure of getting the right one. Will you, Luck?"

"If you advise it. You ought to know."

"You see, I'm so confoundedly busy, so many irons in the fire, I might just miss the psychic moment. I think Melton's the man—I'll call him up to-night before we leave. Then I won't forget it and I'll be sure to catch him too."

Again Prosper vaguely agreed and promptly forgot that he had given his permission. Later, there came an agonizing moment when he would have given the world to recall his absent, careless words.

With an effort Prosper kept his poise, with an effort, always increasing, he talked to Jasper while Betty dressed, and kept up his end at dinner. The muscles round his mouth felt tight and drawn, his throat was dry. He was glad when they got into the limousine and started theaterwards. It had been a long time since he had been put through this particular ordeal and he was out of practice.

They reached the house just as the lights went out. Prosper was amused at his own intense excitement. "I didn't know I was still such a kid," he said, flashing a smile, the first spontaneous one he had given her, upon Betty who sat beside him in the proscenium box.

The success of his novel had had no such effect upon him as this. It was entrancing to think that in a few moments the words he had written would come to him clothed in various voices, the people his brain had pictured would move before him in flesh and blood, doing what he had ordained that they should do. When the curtain rose, he had forgotten his personal problem, had forgotten Betty. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hand.

The scene was of a tropical island, palms, a strip of turquoise sea. A girl pushed aside the great fronds of ferns and stepped down to the beach. At her appearance the audience broke into applause. She was a tall girl, her stained legs and arms bare below her ragged dress, her black hair hung wild and free about her face and neck. As the daughter of a native mother and an English father, her beauty had been made to seem both Saxon and savage. Stained and painted, darkened below the great gray eyes, Joan with her brows and her classic chin and throat, Joan with her secret, dangerous eyes and lithe, long body, made an arresting picture enough against the setting of vivid green and blue. She moved slowly, deliberately, naturally, and stood, hands on hips, to watch a ship sail into the turquoise harbor. It was not like acting, she seemed really to look. She threw back her head and gave a call. It was the name of her stage brother, but it came from her deep chest and through her long column of a throat like music. Prosper brought down his hands on the railing before him, half pushed himself up, turned a blind look upon Betty, who laid a restraining hand upon his arm.

He whispered a name, which Betty could not make out, then he sat down, moistened his lips with his tongue, and sat through the entire first act and neither moved nor spoke. As the curtain went down he stood up.

"I must go out," he said, and hesitated in the back of the box till Jasper came over to him with an anxious question. Then he began to stammer nervously. "Don't tell her, Jasper, don't tell her."

"Tell her what, man? Tell whom?" Jasper gave him a shake. "Don't you like Jane? Isn't she wonderful?"

"Yes, yes, extraordinary!"

"Made for the part?"

"No." Prosper's face twisted into a smile. "No. The part came second, she was there first. Morena, promise me you won't tell her who wrote the play."

"Look here, Prosper, suppose you tell me what's wrong. Have you seen a ghost?"

Prosper laughed; then, seeing Betty, her face a rigid question, he struggled to lay hands upon his self-control.

"Something very astonishing has happened, Morena,—one of those 'things not dreamt of in a man's philosophy.' I can't tell you. Have you arranged for me to meet Jane West?"

"After the show, yes, at supper."

"But not as the author?"

"No. I was waiting for you to tell her that."

"She mustn't know. And—and I can't meet her that way, at supper." Again he made visible efforts at self-control. "Don't tell Betty what a fool I am. I'll go out a minute. I'll be all right."

Betty was coming toward them. He gave a painful smile and fled.



CHAPTER VI

JOAN AND PROSPER

The situation was no doubt an extraordinary, an unimaginable one, but it had to be met. When he returned to the box, Prosper had himself in hand, and, sitting a little farther back than before, he watched the second act with a sufficiency of outward calm.

This part was the most severe test of his composure, for he had fashioned it almost in detail upon that idyll in a canyon. There were even speeches of Joan's that he had used. To sit here and watch Joan herself go through it, while he looked on, was an exciting form of torment. The setting was different, tropical instead of Northern, and the half-native heroine was more passionate, more emotional, more animal than Joan. Nevertheless, the drama was a repetition. As Prosper had laid his trap for Joan, silently, subtly undermining her whole mental structure, using her loneliness, playing upon the artist soul of her, so did this Englishman lay his trap for Zona. He was more cruel than Prosper, rougher, necessarily more dramatic, but there was all the essence of the original drama, the ensnarement of a simple, direct mind by a complex and skillful one. Joan's surrender, Prosper's victory, were there. He wondered how Joan could act it, play the part in cold blood. Now he was condemned to live in his own imagination through Joan's tragedy. There was that first pitifulness of a tamed and broken spirit; then later, in London, the agony of loneliness, of separation, of gradual awakening to the change in her master's heart. Prosper had written the words, but it was Joan who, with her voice, the music of memory-shaken heart-strings, made the words alive and meaningful. Others in the audience might wonder over the girl's ability to interpret this unusual experience, to make it natural, human, inevitable. But Prosper did not wonder. He knew that simply she forced herself to re-live this most painful part of her own life and to re-live it articulately. What, in God's name, had induced her to do it? Necessity? Poverty? Morena? All at once he remembered Betty's belief, that Joan was the manager's mistress—his wild, beautiful Joan, Joan the creation of his own wizardry. This thought gave him such pain that he whitened.

"Prosper," murmured Betty, "you must tell me what is wrong. Evidently your nerves are in bad shape. Is the excitement too much for you?"

"I believe it is," he said, avoiding her eyes and moving stiff, white lips; "I've never seen such acting. I—I—Morena says he'll let me see her in her dressing-room afterwards. You see, Betty, I'm badly shaken up."

"Ye-es," drawled Betty, and looked at him through narrowed lids, and she sat with this look on her face and with her fingers locked, when Prosper, not giving her further notice, followed Morena out.

"Jasper,"—Prosper held his friend back in the middle of a passage that led to the dressing-rooms,—"I want very particularly to see Miss West alone. I am very much moved by her performance and I want to tell her so. Also, I want her to express herself naturally with no idea of my being the author of the play and without the presence of her manager. Will you just ask if she will see a friend of yours—alone?"

Jasper smiled his subtle smile. "Of course, Prosper. It's all as clear as daylight."

Prosper did not notice the Jew's intelligent expression. He was too much absorbed in his own excitement. In a moment he would be with Joan—Joan, his love of winter nights!

Morena tapped upon a door. A maid half-opened it.

"Ask Miss West, please, if she will see a friend of Mr. Morena's. Tell her I particularly wish her to give him a private interview." He scribbled a line on a card and the maid took it in.

In five minutes, during which the two men waited silently, she came back.

"Miss West will see your friend, sir."

"Ah! Then I'll take myself off. Prosper, will you join Betty and me at supper?"

"No, thanks. I'll have my brief interview with Miss West and then go home, if you'll forgive me. I'm about all in. New York's too much for a man just home from the front."

Jasper laid his hand for a moment on Prosper's shoulder, smiled, shrugged, and turned away. Prosper waited till his friend was out of sight and hearing, then knocked and was admitted to the dressing-room of Miss Jane West.

She had not changed from the evening dress she had worn in the last scene nor had she yet got rid of her make-up. She was sitting in a narrow-backed chair that had been turned away from the dressing-table. The maid was putting away some costumes.

Prosper walked half across the room and stopped.

"Miss West," he said quietly.

She stood up. The natural color left her face ghastly with patches of paint and daubs of black. She threw back her head and said, "Prosper!" just above her breath.

"Go out, Henrietta." This was spoken to the maid in the voice of Jane the virago and Henrietta fled.

At sight of Joan, Prosper had won back instantly his old poise, his old feeling of ascendancy.

"Joan, Joan," he said gently; "was ever anything so strange? Why didn't you let me know? Why didn't you answer my letters? Why didn't you take my money? I have suffered greatly on your account."

Joan laughed. Four years ago she would not have been capable of this laugh, and Prosper started.

"I wrote again and again," he said passionately. "Wen Ho told me that you had gone, that he didn't know anything about your plans. I went out to Wyoming, to our house. I scoured the country for you. Did you know that?"

"No," said Joan slowly, "I didn't know that But it makes no difference to me."

They were still standing a few paces apart, too intent upon their inner tumult to heed any outward situation. She lowered her head in that dangerous way of hers, looking up at him from under her brows. Her color had returned and the make-up had a more natural look.

"Maybe you did write, maybe you did send money, maybe you did come back—I don't care anything for all that." She made a gesture as if to sweep something away. "The day after you left me in that house, Pierre, my husband, came up the trail. He was taking after me. He meant to fetch me home. You told me"—she began to tremble so violently that the jewels on her neck clicked softly—"you told me he was dead."

Prosper came closer, she moving back, till, striking the chair, she sat down on it and looked up at him with her changed and embittered eyes.

"Would you have gone back to him, Joan Landis, after he had tied you up and branded your shoulder with his cattlebrand?"

"What has that got to do with it?" she asked, her voice lifting on a wave of anger. "That was between my man and me. That was not for you to judge. He loved me. It was through loving me too much, too ignorantly, that he hurt me so." She choked. "But you—"

"Joan," said Prosper, and he laid his hand on her cold and rigid fingers, "I loved you too."

She was still and stiff. After a long silence she seemed to select one question from a tide of them.

"Why did you leave me?"

"I wrote you a full explanation. The letter came back to me unread."

Again Joan gave the laugh and the gesture of disdain.

"That doesn't matter ... your loving or not loving. You made use of me for your own ends, and when you saw fit, you left me. But that's not my complaint. I don't say I didn't deserve that. I was easy to use. But it was all based on what wasn't true. I was married, my man was living, and I had dealings with you. That was sin. That was horrible. That was what my mother did. She was a ——" Joan used the coarse and ugly word her father had taught her, and Prosper laid a hand over her mouth.

"Joan! No! Never say it, never think it. You are clean."

Joan twisted herself free, stood up, and walked away. "I am that!" she said grimly; "and it was you that made me. You took lots of trouble to make me see things in a way where nothing a person wants is either right or wrong. You made me thirsty with your talk and your books and your music, and when I was tormented with thirst, you came and offered me a drink of water. That was it. I don't care about your not marrying me. I still don't see that that has much to do with it except, perhaps, that a man would be caring to give any woman he rightly loves whatever help or cherishing or gifts the world has decided to give her. But, you see, Prosper, we didn't start fair. You knew that Pierre was alive."

"But, Joan, you say yourself that marrying—"

She stopped him with so fierce a gesture that he flinched. "Yes. Pierre did rightly love me. He gave me his best as he knew it. Oh, he was ignorant, a savage, I guess, like I was. But he did rightly love me. He was not trying to break my spirit nor to tame me, nor to amuse himself with me, nor to give me a longing for beauty and easiness and then leave me to fight through my own rough life without any of those things. Did you really think, Prosper Gael, that I would stay in your house and live on your money till you should be caring to come back to me—if ever you would care? Did you honestly think that you would be coming back—as—as my lover? No. Whatever it was that took you away, it was likely to keep you from me for always, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Prosper in a muffled voice, "it was likely to. But, Joan, Fate was on your side. Since I have been yours, I haven't belonged to any one but you. You've put your brand on me."

"I don't want to hear about you," Joan broke in. "I am done with you. Have you seen this play?"

"Yes." He found that in telling her so he could not meet her eyes.

"Well, the man who wrote that knew what you are, and, if he didn't, every one that has seen me act in it, knows what you are." She paused, breathing fast and trembling. "Good-bye," she said.

He went vaguely toward the door, then threw up his head defiantly. "No," he said, "it's not going to be good-bye. I've found you. You must let me tell you the truth about myself. Come, Joan, you're as just as Heaven. You never read my explanations. You've never heard my side of it. You'll let me come to see you and you'll hear me out. Don't do me an injustice. I'll leave the whole thing in your hands after that. But you must give me that one chance."

"Chance?" repeated Joan. "Chance for what?"

"Oh,"—Prosper flung up his lithe, long hands—"oh, for nothing but a cleansing in your sight. I want what forgiveness I can wring from you. I want what understanding I can force from you. That's all."

She thought, standing there, still and tall, her arms hanging, her eyes wide and secret, as he had remembered them in her thin, changed, so much more expressive face.

"Very well," she said, "you may come. I'll hear you out." She gave him the address and named an afternoon hour. "Good-night."

It was a graceful and dignified dismissal. Prosper bit his lip, bowed and left her.

As the door closed upon her, he knew that it had closed upon the only real and vivid presence in his life. War had burnt away his glittering, clever frivolity. Betty was the adventure, Betty was the tinsel; Joan was the grave, predestined woman of his man. For the first time in his life he found himself face to face with the cleanness of despair.



CHAPTER VII

AFTERMATH

Joan waited for Prosper on the appointed afternoon. There was a fire on her hearth and a March snow-squall tapped against the window panes. The crackle of the logs inside and that eerie, light sound outside were so associated with Prosper that, even before he came, Joan, sitting on one side of the hearth, closed her eyes and felt that he must be opposite to her in his red-lacquered chair, his long legs stuck out in front, his amused and greedy eyes veiled by a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Since she had seen him at the theater, she had been suffering from sleeplessness. At night she would go over and over the details of their intercourse, seeing them, feeling them, living them in the light of later knowledge, till the torment was hardly to be borne. Three days and nights of this inner activity had brought back that sharp line between her brows and the bitter tightening of her lips.

This afternoon she was white with suspense. Her dread of the impending interview was like a physical illness. She sat in a high-backed chair, hands along the arms, head resting back, eyes half-closed, in that perfect stillness of which the animal and the savage are alone entirely capable. There were many gifts that Joan had brought from the seventeen years on Lone River. This grave immobility was one. She was very carefully dressed in a gown that accentuated her height and dignity. And she wore a few jewels. She wanted, pitifully enough, to mark every difference between this Joan and the Joan whom Prosper had drawn on his sled up the canyon trail. If he expected to force her back into the position of enchanted leopardess, to see her "lie at his feet and eat out of his hand," as Morena had once described the plight of Zona, he would see at a glance that she was no longer so easily mastered. In fact, sitting there, she looked as proud and perilous as a young Medea, black-haired with long throat and cold, malevolent lips. It was only in the eyes—those gray, unhappy, haunted eyes—that Joan gave away her eternal simplicity of heart. They were unalterably tender and lonely and hurt. It was the look in them that had prompted Shorty's description, "She's plumb movin' to me—looks about halfway between 'You go to hell' and 'You take me in your arms to rest.'"

Prosper was announced, and Joan, keeping her stillness, merely turned her head toward him as he came into the room.

She saw his rapid observation of the room, of her, even before she noticed the very apparent change in him. For he, too, was haggard and utterly serious as she did not remember him. He stood before her fire and asked her jerkily if she would let him smoke. She said "Yes," and those were the only words spoken for five unbearable minutes the seconds of which her heart beat out like a shaky hammer in some worn machine.

Prosper smoked and stood there looking, now at her, now at the fire. At last, with difficulty, he smiled. "You are not going to make it easy for me, are you, Joan?"

For her part she was not looking at him. She kept her eyes on the fire and this averted look distressed and irritated his nerves.

"I am not trying to make it hard," she said; "I want you to say what you came to say and go."

"Did you ever love me, Joan?"

He had said it to force a look from her, but it had the effect only of making her more still, if possible.

"I don't know," she said slowly, answering with her old directness. "I thought you needed me. I was alone. I was scared of the emptiness when I went out and looked down the valley. I thought Pierre had gone out of the world and there was no living thing that wanted me. I came back and you met me and you put your arms round me and you said"—she closed her eyes and repeated his speech as though she had just heard it—"'Don't leave me, Joan.'"

Her voice was more than ever before moving and expressive. Prosper felt that half-forgotten thrill. The muscles of his throat contracted. "Joan, I did want you. I spoke the truth," he pleaded.

She went on with no impatience but very coldly. "You came to tell me your side. Will you tell me, please?"

For the first time she looked into his eyes and he drew in his breath at the misery of hers.

"I built that cabin, Joan," he said, "for another woman."

"Your wife?" asked Joan.

"No."

"For the one I said must have been like a tall child? She wasn't your wife? She was dead?"

Prosper shook his head. "No. Did you think that? She was a woman I loved at that time very dearly and she was already married to another man."

"You built that house for her? I don't understand."

"She had promised to leave her husband and to come away with me. I had everything ready, those rooms, those clothes, those materials, and when I went out to get her, I had a message saying that her courage had failed her, that she wouldn't come."

"She was a better woman than me," said Joan bitterly.

Prosper laughed. "By God, she was not! She sent me down to hell. I couldn't go back to the East again. I had laid very careful and elaborate plans. I was trapped out there in that horrible winter country...."

"It was not horrible," said Joan violently; "it was the most wonderful, beautiful country in all the world." And tears ran suddenly down her face.

But she would not let him come near to comfort her. "Go on," she said presently.

"Before you came, Joan," Prosper went on, "it was horrible. It was like being starved. Every thing in the house reminded me of—her. I had planned it all very carefully and we were to have been—happy. You can fancy what it was to be there alone."

Joan nodded. She was just and she was honestly trying to put herself in his place. "Yes," she said; "if I had gone back and Pierre had been dead, his homestead would have been like that to me."

"It was because I was so miserable that I went out to hunt. I'd scour the country all day and half the night to tire myself out, that I could get some sleep. I was pretty far from home that moonlight night when I heard you scream for help...."

Joan's face grew whiter. "Don't tell about that," she pleaded.

He paused, choosing another opening. "After I had bandaged you and told you that Pierre was dead—and I honestly thought he was—I didn't know what to do with you. You couldn't be left, and there was no neighbor nearer than my own house; besides, I had shot a man, and, perhaps,—I don't know, maybe I was influenced by your beauty, by my own crazy loneliness.... You were very beautiful and very desolate. I was in a fury over the brute's treatment of you...."

"Hush!" said Joan; "you are not to talk about Pierre."

Prosper shrugged. "I decided to take you home with me. I wanted you desperately, just, I believe, to take care of, just to be kind to—truly, Joan, I was lonely to the point of madness. Some one to care for, some one to talk to, was absolutely necessary to save my reason. So when I was leading you out, I—I saw Pierre's hand move—"

Joan stood up. After a moment she controlled herself with an effort and sat down again. "Go on. I can stand it," she said.

"And I thought to myself, 'The devil is alive and he deserves to be dead. This woman can never live with him again. God wouldn't sanction such an act as giving her back to his hands.' And I was half-mad myself, I'd been alone so long ... I stood so you couldn't see him, Joan, and I threw an elk-hide over him and led you out."

"I followed you; I didn't look at Pierre; I left him lying there," gasped Joan.

Prosper went on monotonously. "When I came back a week later, I thought he would be dead. It was dusk, the wind was blowing, the snow was driving in a scud. I came down to the cabin and dropped below the drift by that northern window, and, the second I looked in, I dropped out of sight. There was a light and a fire. Your husband was lying before the fire on a cot. There was another man there, your Mr. Holliwell; they were talking, Holliwell was dressing Pierre's wound. I went away like a ghost, and while I was going back, I thought it all out; and I decided to keep you for myself. I suppose," said Prosper dully, "that that was a horrible sin. I didn't see it that way then. I'm not sure I see it that way now. Pierre had tied you up and pressed a white-hot iron into your bare shoulder. If you went back to him, if he took you back, how was I to know that he might not repeat his drunken deviltry, or do worse, if anything could be worse! It was the act of a fiend. It put him out of court with me. Whatever I gave you, education and beauty, and ease, must be better and happier for you than life with such a brute as Pierre—"

"Stop!" said Joan between her teeth; "you know nothing of Pierre and me; you only know that one dreadful night. You don't know—the rest."

"I don't want to know the rest," he said sharply; "that is enough to justify my action. I thought so then and I think so now. You won't be able to make me change that opinion."

"I shall not try," said Joan.

He accepted this and went on. "When I found you in your bed waiting for news of Pierre, I thought you the most beautiful, pitiful thing I had ever seen. I loved you then, Joan, then. Tell me, did I ever in those days hurt you or give you a moment's anxiety or fear?"

"No," Joan admitted, "you did not. In those days you were wonderful, kind and patient with me. I thought you were more like God than a human then."

Prosper laughed with bitterness. "You thought very wrong, but, according to my own lights, I was very careful of you. I meant to give you all I could and I meant to win you with patience and forbearance. I had respect for you and for your grief and for the horrible thing you had suffered. Joan, by now you know better what the world is. Can you reproach me so very bitterly for our—happiness, even if it was short?"

"You lied to me," said Joan. "It wasn't just. We didn't start even. And—and you knew what you wanted of me. I never guessed."

"You didn't? You never guessed?"

"No. Sometimes, toward the last, I was afraid. I felt that I ought to go away. That day I ran off—you remember—I was afraid of you. I felt you were bad and that I was bad too. Then it seemed to me that I'd been dreadfully ungrateful and unkind. That was what began to make me give way to my feelings. I was sorrowful because I had hurt you and you so kind! The day I came in with that suit and spoke of—her as a 'tall child' and you cried, why, I felt so sorrowful that I'd made you suffer. I wanted to comfort you, to put my hands on you in comfort, like a mother, I felt. And you went out like you were angry and stayed away all night as though you couldn't bear to be seeing me again in your house that you had built for her. So I wrote you my letter and went away. And then—it was all so awful cold and empty. I didn't know Pierre was out there. I came back...."

They were both silent for a long time and in the silence the idyll was re-lived. Spring came again with its crest of green along the canyon and the lake lay like a turquoise drawing the glittering peak down into its heart.

"My book—its success," Prosper began at last, "made me restless. You'll understand that now that you are an artist yourself. And one day there came a letter from that woman I had loved."

"It was a little square gray envelope," said Joan breathlessly. "I can see it now. You never rightly looked at me again."

"Ah!" said Prosper. He turned and hid his face.

"Tell me the rest," said Joan.

He went on without turning back to her, his head bent. "The woman wrote that her husband was dying, that I must come back to her at once."

The snow tapped and the fire crackled.

"And when you—went back?"

"Her husband did not die," said Prosper blankly; "he is still alive."

"And you still love her very much?"

"That's the worst of it, Joan," groaned Prosper. His groan changed into a desperate laugh. "I love you. Now truly I do love you. If I could marry you—if I could have you for my wife—" He waited, breathing fast, then came and stood close before her. "I have never wanted a woman to be my wife till now. I want you. I want you to be the mother of my children."

Then Joan did look at him with all her eyes.

"I am Pierre's wife," she said. The liquid beauty had left her voice. It was hoarse and dry. "I am Pierre's wife and I have already been the mother of your child."

There was a long, rigid silence. "Joan—when?—where?" Prosper's throat clicked.

"I knew it before you left. I couldn't tell you because you were so changed. I worked all winter. It—it was born on an awful cold March night. I think the woman let it—made it—die. She wanted me to work for her during the summer and she thought I would be glad if the child didn't live. She used to say I was 'in trouble' and she'd be glad if she could 'help me out.'... It was what I was planning to live for ... that child."

During the heavy stillness following Joan's dreadful, brief account of birth and death, Prosper went through a strange experience. It seemed to him that in his soul something was born and died. Always afterwards there was a ghost in him—the father that might have been.

"I can't talk any more," said Joan faintly. "Won't you please go?"



CHAPTER VIII

AGAINST THE BARS

Jasper Morena had stood for an hour in a drafty passage of that dirty labyrinth known vaguely to the public as "behind the scenes," listening to the wearisome complaints of a long-nosed young actor. It was the sixth of such conversations that he had held that day: to begin with, there had been a difficulty between a director and the leading man. Morena's tact was still complete; he was very gentle to the long-nosed youth; but the latter, had he been capable of seeing anything but himself, must have noticed that his listener's face was pale and faintly lined.

"Yes, my boy, of course, that's reasonable enough. I'll do what I can."

"I don't make extravagant demands, you see," the young man spread down and out his hands, quivering with exaggerated feeling; "I ask only for decent treatment, what my own self-respect ab-so-lute-ly demands."

Morena put a hand on his shoulder and walked beside him.

"Did you ever stop to think," he said with his charming smile, "that the other fellow is thinking and saying just the same thing? Now, this chap that has, as you put it, got your goat, why, he came to me himself this morning, and, word for word, he said of you just precisely what you have just said of him to me. Odd, isn't it?"

Again the young actor stopped for one of his gestures, hands up this time. "But, my God, sir! Is there such a thing as honesty? He couldn't accuse me of—"

"Well, he thought he could. However, I do get your point of view and I think we can fix it up for you so that you'll get off with your self-respect entirely intact. I'll talk to George to-morrow. You're worth the bother. Good-afternoon."

The young man bowed, his air of tragic injury softened to one of tragic self-appreciation. Worth the bother, indeed!

Morena left him at the top of the dingy stairs down which the manager fled to an alley at one side of the theater, where his car was waiting for him. He stood for a while with his foot on the step and his hand on the door, looking rather blankly at the gray, cold wall and the scurrying whirlwinds of dust and paper.

"Drop yourself at the garage, Ned," he said, "and I'll take the car."

He climbed in beside the wheel. He was very tired, but he had remembered that Jane West, when he had last seen her, had worn a look of profound discouragement. She never complained, but when he saw that particular expression he was frightened and the responsibility for her came heavily upon him. This wild thing he had brought to New York must not be allowed to beat its head dumbly against the bars.

When he had got rid of his driver, he turned the car northward, and a few minutes later Mathilde, the French maid chosen by Betty, opened Jane's door to him.

While he took off his coat he looked along the hall and saw its owner sitting, her chin propped on a latticework of fingers. She was gazing out of the window. It was a beautiful, desperate silhouette; something fateful in the long, still pose and the fixed look. She was still dressed in street clothes as when she had left the theater, a blouse and skirt of dark gray, very plain. Her figure, now that it was trained to slight corseting, was less vigorous and more fine-drawn. She was very thin, but she had lost her worn and haggard look; the premature hard lines had almost disappeared; a softer climate, proper care, rest, food, luxury had given back her young, clear skin and the brightness of eyes and lips. Her hair, arranged very simply to frame her face in a broken setting of black, was glossy, and here and there, deeply waved. It was the arrangement chosen for her by Betty and copied from a Du Maurier drawing of the Duchess of Towers. It was hard to believe that this graceful woman was the virago Jane, harder for any one that had seen a heavy, handsome girl stride into Mrs. Upper's hotel and ask for work, to believe that she was here.

Morena clapped his hands in the Eastern fashion of summons, and Jane looked toward him.

"Oh," she said, "I'm glad you came."

He strolled in and stood beside her shaking his head.

"I didn't like the look of you this afternoon, my dear."

"Well, sir," said Jane, "I don't like the look of you either." She smiled her slow, unself-conscious smile. "You sit down and I'll make tea for you."

He knew that thought for some one else was the best tonic for her mood, so he dropped, with his usual limp grace, into the nearest chair, put back his head and half-closed his eyes.

"I'm used up," he said; "I haven't a word—not one to throw at a dog."

"Please don't throw one at me, then. I surely wouldn't take it as a compliment." She made the tea gravely, as absorbed in the work as a little girl who makes tea for her dolls. She brought him his cup and went back to her place and again her face settled into that look. She had evidently forgotten him and her eyes held a vision as of distances.

He put a hand up to break her fixed gaze. "What is it, Jane? What do you see?"

To his astonishment she hid her face in her hands. "It's awful to live like this," she moaned; and it frightened him to see her move her head from side to side like an imprisoned beast, shifting before bars.

He looked about the pretty room and repeated, "Like this?" half-reproachfully.

"I hate it!" She spoke through her teeth. "I hate it! And, oh, the sounds, the noises, grinding into your ears."

Here the hands came to her ears and framed a white, desperate face in which the lids had fallen over sick eyes.

Jasper sat listening to the hum and roar and clatter of the street. To him it was a pleasant sound, and here it was subdued and remote enough. Her face was like that of some one maddened by noise.

"You don't smell anything fresh"—her chest lifted—"you don't get air. I can't breathe. Everything presses in." She opened her eyes, bright and desperate. "What am I doing here, Mr. Morena?"

He had put down his cup quietly, for he was really half-afraid of her. "Why did you come, Jane?"

"Because I was afraid of some one. I was running away, Mr. Morena. There's some one that mustn't ever find me now, and to run away from him—that was the business of my life. And it kept my heart full of him and the dread of his coming. You see, that was my happiness. I hoped he was taking after me so's I could run away." She laughed apologetically. "Does that sound crazy to you?"

"No. I think I understand. And here?"

"He'll never come here. He'll never find me. It's been four years. And I'm so changed. This"—she gave herself a downward look—"this isn't the 'gel' he wants.... Probably by now he's given me up. Maybe he's found another. Everything that's bad and hateful can find me out here. Bad things can find you out and try to clutch after you anywheres. But when something wild and clean comes hunting for you, something out of the big lonely places—why, it would be scared to follow into this city."

"You're lonely, Jane. I've told you a hundred times that you ought to make friends for yourself."

"Oh, I don't care for that. I don't want friends, not many friends. These acting people, they're not real folks. I don't savvy their ways and they don't savvy mine. They always end by disliking me because I'm queer and different from them. You have been my friend, and your wife—that is, she used to be." Suddenly Jane became more her usual self and spoke with childlike wistfulness. "She doesn't come to see me any more, Mr. Morena. And I could love her. She's so like a little girl with those round eyes—" Jane held up two circles made by forefingers and thumbs to represent Betty's round eyes. "Oh, dear!" she said; "isn't she awfully winning? Seems as if you must be taking care of her. She's so small and fine."

Jasper laughed with some bitterness.

"She doesn't like me now," sighed Jane, but the feelings Betty had hurt were connected with a later development so that they turned her mood and brought her to a more normal dejection. She was no longer a caged beast, she had temporarily forgotten her bars.

"I think you're wrong," said Jasper doubtfully. "Betty does like you. She's merely busy and preoccupied. I've been neglected myself."

Jane gave him a far too expressive look. It was as though she had said, "You don't fancy that she cares for you?"

Jasper flushed and blinked his long, Oriental eyes.

"It's a pity you haven't a lover, Jane," he said.

She had walked over to the window, and his speech, purposely a trifle cruel and insulting, did not make her turn.

"You're angry," she said. "You'd better go home. I'm not in good humor myself."

At which he laughed his murmuring, musical laugh and prepared to leave her.

"I have a great deal of courage," he said, getting into his coat, "to bring a wild-cat here, chain her up, and tease her—eh?"

"You think you have me chained?" Her tone was enraged and scornful. "I can snap your flimsy little tether and go."

She wheeled upon him. She looked tall and fierce and free.

"No, no," he cried with deprecating voice and gesture. "You are making Mr. Luck's fortune and mine, not to mention your own. You mustn't break your chains. Get used to them. We all have to, you know. It's much the best method."

"I shall never get used to this life, never. It just—somehow—isn't mine."

"Perhaps when you meet Mr. Luck, he'll be able to reconcile you."

Her expressive face darkened. "When shall I meet Mr. Luck?"

"Soon, I hope. Mr. Melton knows just when to announce the authorship."

"I hate Mr. Luck more than any one in the world," she said in a low, quiet voice.

Jasper stared. "Hate him! Why, in the name of savagery, should you hate him?"

"Oh, I can't explain. But you'd better keep us apart. How came he to write 'The Leopardess'?"

"I shall leave him to tell you that. Good-night."



CHAPTER IX

GRAY ENVELOPES

It was with more than the usual sinking of heart that Jasper let himself that evening into the beautiful house which Betty and he called their home. Joan's too expressive look had stung the old soreness of his disillusionment. He knew that the house was empty of welcome. He took off his hat and coat dejectedly. There were footsteps of his man who came from the far end of the hall.

While he stood waiting, Jasper noticed the absence of a familiar fragrance. For the first time in years Betty had forgotten to order flowers. The red roses which Jasper always caressed with a long, appreciative finger as he went by the table in the hall, were missing. Their absence gave him a faint sensation of alarm.

"Mr. Kane, Mrs. Morena's brother, has called to see you, sir. He is waiting."

Jasper's eyebrows rose. "To see me? Is he with Mrs. Morena now?"

"No, sir. Mrs. Morena went out this morning and has not yet returned. Mr. Kane has been here since five o'clock, sir."

"Very well."

It was a mechanical speech of dismissal. The footman went off. Jasper stood tapping his chin with his finger. Woodward Kane come to see him during Betty's absence! Woodward had not spoken more than three or four icy words of necessity to him since the marriage. After a stiff, ungracious fashion this brother had befriended Betty, but to his Jewish brother-in-law he had shown only a slightly disguised distaste. The Jew was well used to such a manner. He treated it with light bitterness, but he did not love to receive the users of it in his own house. It was with heightened color and bent brows that he pushed apart the long, crimson hangings and came into the immense drawing-room.

It was softly lighted and pleasantly warmed. A fire burned. The tall, fair visitor rose from a seat near the blaze and turned all in one rigid piece toward his advancing host. Jasper was perfectly conscious that his own gesture and speech of greeting were too eager, too ingratiating, that they had a touch of servility. He hated them himself, but they were inherited with his blood, as instinctive as the wagging of a dog's tail. They were met by a precise bow, no smile, no taking of his outstretched hand.

Jasper drew himself up at once, put the slighted hand on the back of a tall, crimson-damask chair, and looked his stateliest and most handsome self.

"Betty hasn't come in yet," he said. "You've been waiting for her?"

Woodward Kane pulled at his short, yellow mustache and stared at Jasper with his large, blank, blue eyes. "As a matter of fact I didn't call to see my sister, but to see you. I have just come from Elizabeth. She is at my house. She came to me this morning."

Jasper's fingers tightened on the chair. "She is sick?"

"No." There was a pause during which the blank, blue eyes staring at him slowly gathered a look of cold pleasure. Jasper was aware that this man who hated him was enjoying his present mission.

"Shall we sit down? I shall have to take a good deal of your time, I am afraid. There is rather a good deal to be gone over."

Jasper sat down in the chair the back of which he had been holding. "Will you smoke?" he asked, and smiled his charming smile.

There was now not a trace of embarrassment, anger, or anxiety about him. His eyes were quiet, his voice flexible. Woodward declined to smoke, crossed his beautifully clothed legs and drew a small gray envelope from his pocket. Jasper's eyes fastened upon it at once. It was Betty's paper and her angular, boyish writing marched across it. Evidently the note was addressed to him. He waited while Woodward turned it about in his long, stiff, white fingers.

"About two months ago Betty came to me one evening in great distress of mind. She asked for my advice and to the best of my ability I gave it to her. I wish that she had asked for it ten years ago. She might have saved herself a great deal. This time she has not only asked for it, but she has been following it, and, in following it, she has now left your house and come to mine. This, of course, will not surprise you."

"It does, however, surprise me greatly." It was still the gentle murmur, but Jasper's cigarette smoke veiled his face.

"I cannot understand that. However, it's not my business. Betty has asked me to interview you to-day so that she may be spared the humiliation. After this, you must address your communications to her lawyers. In a short time Rogers and Daring will serve you with notice of divorce."

Jasper sat perfectly still, leaning slightly forward, his cigarette between his fingers.

"So-o!" he said after a long silence. Then he held out his hand. "I may have Betty's letter?"

Woodward Kane withheld it and again that look of pleasure was visible in his eyes. "Just a moment, please. I should like to have my own say out first. I shall have to be brutal, I am afraid. In these matters there is nothing for it but frankness. Your infidelity has been common talk for some time. The story of it first came to Betty's ears on the evening when she came to me two months ago. Since then there has been but one possible course."

Jasper kept another silence, more difficult, however, than his last. His pallor was noticeable. "You say my—infidelity is common talk. There has been a name used?"

"Your protegee from Wyoming—Jane West."

Jasper was on his feet, and Woodward too rose, jerkily holding up a hand. "No excitement, please," he begged. "Let us conduct this unfortunate interview like gentlemen, if possible."

Jasper laughed. "As you say—if possible. Why, man, it was Betty who helped me bring Miss West to New York, it was Betty who helped me to install her here, it was Betty who chose the furnishings for her apartment, who helped her buy her clothes, who engaged her maid, who gave her most of her training. This is the most preposterous, the most filthy perversion of the truth. Betty must know it better than any one else. Come, now, Woodward, there's something more in it than this?" Jasper had himself in hand, but it was easy now to see the effort it cost him. The veins of his forehead were swollen.

"I shall not discuss the matter with you. Betty has excellent evidence, unimpeachable witnesses. There is no doubt in my mind, nor in the minds of her lawyers, that she will win her suit and get her divorce, her release. Of course, you will not contest—"

Jasper stopped in his pacing which had begun to take the curious, circling, weaving form characteristic of him, and, standing now with his head thrown back, he spoke sonorously.

"Do you imagine for one instant, Kane,—does Betty imagine for one instant,—that I shall not contest?"

This changed the look of cold pleasure in Woodward's eyes, which grew blank again. "Do you mean me to understand—Naturally, I took it for granted that you would act as most gentlemen act under the circumstances."

"Then you have taken too much for granted, you and Betty. Ten years ago your sister gave herself to me. She is mine. I will not for a whim, for a passion, for a temporary alienation, let her go. Neither will I have my good name and the name of a good woman besmirched for the sake of this impertinent desire for a release. I love my wife"—his voice was especially Hebraic and especially abhorrent to the other—"and as a husband I mean to keep her from the ruin this divorce would mean to her—"

"Far from being her ruin, Morena, it would be the saving of her. Her ruin was as nearly as possible brought about ten years ago, when against the advice, against the wishes of every one who loved her, she made her insane marriage with an underbred, commercial, and licentious Jew. She was seventeen and you seized your opportunity."

Jasper had stepped close. He was a head taller and several inches broader of shoulder than his brother-in-law. "As long as you are in my house, don't insult me. I am, as you say, a Jew, and I am, as you say, of a commercial family. But I am not, I have never been licentious. Is it necessary to use such language? You suggested that this interview be conducted by us like gentlemen."

"The man who refuses to give her liberty to a wife that loathes him, scarcely comes under the definition."

"My ideas on the matter are different. We need not discuss them. If you will let me read my wife's letter, I think that we can come to an end of this."

Woodward unwillingly surrendered the small, gray envelope to a quivering, outstretched hand. Jasper turned away and stood near the lamp. But his excitement prevented him from reading. The angular writing jumped before his eyes. At last, the words straightened themselves.

I am glad that you have given me this opportunity to escape from a life that for a long time has been dreadful to me. Ten years ago I made a disaster of my life and yours. Forgive me if you can and let me escape. I will not see you again. Whatever you may have to say, please say it to Woodward. From now on he is my protector. In other matters there are my lawyers. It is absolutely not to be thought of that I should speak to you. I hope never to see you alone. I want you to hate me and this note ought to make it easy for you.

Betty

Jasper stared at the name. He was utterly bewildered, utterly staggered, by the amazing dissimulation practiced by this small, soft-lipped, round-eyed girl who had lived with him for so long, sufficiently pliable, sufficiently agreeable. What was back of it all? Another man, of course. In imagination he was examining the faces of his acquaintances, narrowing his lids as though the real men passed in review before him.

"Perhaps you understand the situation better now?" asked Woodward cruelly.

Jasper's intense pain and humiliation gave him a sort of calm. He seemed entirely cool when he moved back toward his brother-in-law; his eyes were clear, the heat had gone from his temples. He was even smiling a little, though there was a white, even frame to his lips.

"I shall not write to Betty nor attempt to see her," he said quietly. "But I shall ask you to take a message to her."

Woodward assented.

"Tell her she shall have her release, but to get it she will have to walk through the mire and there will be no one waiting for her on the other side. Can you remember that? Not even you will be there." He was entirely self-assured so that Woodward felt a chill of dismay.

"I shall contest the suit," went on Jasper, "and I believe that I shall win it. You may tell Betty so if you like or she can wait to hear it from my lawyer." He put the envelope into his pocket, crossed the room, and held back one of the crimson curtains of the door.

"If you have nothing more to say," he smiled, "neither have I. Good-bye."

He bowed slightly, and Woodward found himself passing before him in silence and some confusion. He stood for a moment in the hall and, having stammered his way to a cold "Good-afternoon," he put on his hat and went out.

Jasper returned to the empty drawing-room and began his weaving march.

Before he could begin his spinning which he hoped would entangle Betty and leave her powerless for him to hold or to release at will, he must go to Jane West and tell her what trick life with his help had played upon her. The prospect was bitterly distasteful. Jasper accused himself of selfishness. Because she cared nothing for the world, was a creature apart, he had let the world think what it would. He knew that an askance look would not hurt her; for himself, secure in innocence, he did not care; for Betty, he had thought her cruelly certain of him.

He went to Jane the day after his interview with Woodward Kane. It was Sunday afternoon. She was out, but came in very soon, and he stood up to meet her with an air of confusion and guilt.

"What's the matter with you?" she asked, pulling her gloves from her long hands.

Her quickly observant eyes swept him. She walked to him and stood near. The frosty air was still about her and her face was lightly stung to color with exercise. Her wild eyes were startling under the brim of her smart, tailored hat.

Jasper put a hand on either of her shoulders and bent his head before her. "My poor child—if I'd only left you in your kitchen!"

Joan tightened her lips, then smiled uncertainly. "You've got me scared," she said, stepped back and sat down, her hands in her muff. "What is it?" she asked; and in that moment of waiting she was sickly reminded of other moments in her life—of the nearing sound of Pierre's webs on a crystal winter night, of the sound of Prosper's footsteps going away from her up the mountain trail on a swordlike, autumn morning.

Jasper began his pacing. Feeling carefully for delicate phrases, he told her Betty's accusation, of her purpose.

Joan took off her hat, pushed back the hair from her forehead; then, as he came to the end, she looked up at him. Her pupils were larger than usual and the light, frosty tint of rose had left her cheeks.

"Would you mind telling me that again?" she asked.

He did so, more explicitly.

"She thinks, Betty thinks, that I have been—that we have been—? She thinks that of me? No wonder she hasn't been coming to see me!" She stopped, staring blindly at him; then, "You must tell her it isn't true," she said pitifully, and the quiver of her lips hurt him.

"Ah! But she doesn't want to believe that, my dear. She wants to believe the worst. It is her opportunity to escape me."

"Haven't you loved her? Have you hurt her?" asked Joan.

"God knows I have loved her. I have never hurt her—consciously. Even she cannot think that I have."

"Why must she blame me? Why do I have to be brought into this, Mr. Morena? Can't she go away from you? Why do the lawyers have to take it up? You are unhappy, and I am so sorry. But you wouldn't want her to stay if—if she doesn't love you?"