"Do sit there!" She pointed a slim white forefinger at the chair at the opposite side of the table—the side nearer him. "I'll be generous and work the dictionary to-day." And she opened a fat, black, dull-looking book beside the Vergil.

"Where's the Johnnie?" he asked, reluctantly dropping into the chair.

She laid Dryden's translation of the Aeneid on his side of the table. They always read the poetical version before they began to translate for the class-room—Dryden was near enough to the original to give them its spirit, far enough to quiet their consciences. "Find the place yourself," said she. "I'm not going to do everything."

He opened the Dryden and languidly turned the pages. "'At length rebuff'd, they leave their mangled——'" he began.

"No—two or three lines farther down," she interrupted. "That was in the last lesson."

He pushed back the rebellious lock that insisted on falling down the middle of his forehead, plunged his elbows fiercely upon the table, put his fists against his temples, and began again:

"'High on a craggy cliff Celaeno sate And thus her dismal errand did relate—'

Have you got the place in the Latin?" he interrupted himself.

Fortunately he did not look up, for she was watching the waving boughs. "Yes," she replied, hastily returning to the book. "You do your part and I'll do mine."

He read a few lines in an absent-minded sing-song, then interrupted himself once more: "Did you ever smell anything like that breeze?"

"Never. 'Bellum etiam pro caede bovum'—go on—I'm listening—or trying to."

He read:

"'But know that ere your promised walls you build, My curse shall severely be fulfilled. Fierce famine is your lot—for this misdeed, Reduced to grind the plates on which you feed.'"

He glanced at her. She was leaning on her elbow, obviously weaving day-dreams round those boughs as they trembled with the ecstasy of spring.

"You are happy to-day?" he said.

"Yes—happier than I have been for a year." She smiled mysteriously. "I've had good news." She turned abruptly, looked him in the eyes with that frank, clear expression—his favorite among his memory-pictures of her had it. "There's one thing that worries me—it's never off my mind longer than a few minutes. And when I'm blue, as I usually am on rainy days, it makes me—horribly uncomfortable. I've often almost asked your advice about it."

"If you'd be sorry afterward that you told me," said he, "I hope you won't. But if I can help you, you know how glad I'd be."

"It's no use to tell Olivia," Pauline went on. "She's bitterly prejudiced. But ever since the first month I knew you, I felt that I could trust you, that you were a real friend. And you're so fair in judging people and things."

His eyes twinkled.

"I'm afraid I'd tilt the scales—just a little—where you were concerned."

"Oh, I want you to do that," she answered with a smile. "Last fall I did something—well, it was foolish, though I wouldn't admit that to any one else. I was carried away by an impulse. Not that I regret. In the only really important way, I wouldn't undo it if I could—I think." Those last two words came absently, as if she were debating the matter with herself.

"If it's done and can't be undone," he said cheerfully, "I don't see that advice is needed."

"But—you don't understand." She seemed to be casting about for words. "As I said, it was last fall—here. In Saint X there was a man—and he and I—we'd cared for each other ever since we were children. And then he went away to college. He did several things father didn't like. You know how older people are—they don't make allowances. And though father's the gentlest, best—at any rate, he turned against Jack, and—"

Scarborough abruptly went to the window and stood with his back to her.

After a pause Pauline said, in a rush, "And he came here last fall and we got married."

There was a long silence.

"It was DREADFUL, wasn't it?" she said in the tone of one who has just made a shocking discovery.

Scarborough did not answer.

"I never realized till this minute," she went on after a while. "Not that I'm sorry or that I don't—don't CARE—just as I always did. But somehow, telling it out loud to some one else has made me see it in a different light. It didn't seem like treachery to them—to father and mother—then. It hasn't seemed like a—a marriage REALLY marriage—until now."

Another long silence. Then she burst out appealingly: "Oh, I don't see how I'm ever going to tell them!"

Scarborough came back to his chair and seated himself. His face was curiously white. It was in an unnatural voice that he said: "How old is he?"

"Twenty-five," she replied, then instantly flared up, as if he had attacked Dumont: "But it wasn't his fault—not in the least. I knew what I was doing—and I wanted to do it. You mustn't get a false impression of him, Hampden. You'd admire and respect him. You—any one—would have done as he did in the same circumstances." She blushed slightly. "You and he are ever so much alike—even in looks. It was that that made me tell you, that made me like you as I have—and trust you."

Scarborough winced. Presently he began: "Yet you regret——"

"No—no!" she protested—too vehemently. "I do NOT regret marrying him. That was certain to be sooner or later. All I regret is that I did something that seems underhanded. Perhaps I'm really only sorry I didn't tell them as soon as I'd done it."

She waited until she saw he was not going to speak. "And now," she said, "I don't know HOW to tell them." Again she waited, but he did not speak, continued to look steadily out into the sky. "What do you think?" she asked nervously. "But I can see without your saying. Only I—wish you'd SAY it."

"No, I don't condemn you," he said slowly. "I know you. YOU couldn't possibly do anything underhanded. If you'd been where you'd have had to conceal it directly, face to face, from some one who had the right to know—you'd never have done it." He rested his arms on the table and looked straight at her. "I feel I must tell you what I think. And I feel, too, it wouldn't be fair and honest if I didn't let you see why you might not want to take my advice."

She returned his gaze inquiringly.

"I love you," he went on calmly. "I've known it ever since I missed you so at the Christmas holidays. I love you for what you are, and for what you're as certain to be as—as a rosebud is certain to be a full-blown rose. I love you as my father loved my mother. I shall love you always." His manner was calm, matter-of-fact; but there was in his musical, magical voice a certain quality which set her nerves and her blood suddenly to vibrating. She felt as if she were struggling in a great sea—the sea of his love for her—struggling to reach the safety of the shore.

"Oh—I WISH you hadn't told me!" she exclaimed.

"Suppose I hadn't; suppose you had taken my advice? No"—he shook his head slowly—"I couldn't do that, Pauline—not even to win you."

"I'm sorry I said anything to you about it."

"You needn't be. You haven't harmed yourself. And maybe I can help you."

"No—we won't talk of it," she said—she was pressing her hand on her bosom where she could feel her wedding ring. "It wouldn't be right, now. I don't wish your advice."

"But I must give it. I'm years and years older than you—many, many years more than the six between us. And——"

"I don't wish to hear."

"For his sake, for your own sake, Pauline, tell them! And they'll surely help you to wait till you're older before you do anything—irrevocable."

"But I care for him," she said—angrily, though it could not have been what he was saying so gently that angered her. "You forget that I care for him. It IS irrevocable now. And I'm glad it is!"

"You LIKE him. You don't LOVE him. And—he's not worthy of your love. I'm sure it isn't prejudice that makes me say it. If he were, he'd have waited——"

She was on her feet, her eyes blazing.

"I asked for advice, not a lecture. I DESPISE you! Attacking the man I love and behind his back! I wish to be alone."

He rose but met her look without flinching.

"You can send ME away," he said gently, "but you can't send away my words. And if they're true you'll feel them when you get over your anger. You'll do what you think right. But—be SURE, Pauline. Be SURE!" In his eyes there was a look—the secret altar with the never-to-be-extinguished flame upon it. "Be SURE!, Pauline. Be SURE."

Her anger fell; she sank, forlorn, into a chair. For both, the day had shriveled and shadowed. And as he turned and left the room the warmth and joy died from air and sky and earth; both of them felt the latent chill—it seemed not a reminiscence of winter past but the icy foreboding of winter closing in.

When Olivia came back that evening from shopping in Indianapolis she found her cousin packing.

"Is it something from home?" she asked, alarmed.

Pauline did not look up as she answered:

"No—but I'm going home—to stay—going in the morning. I've telegraphed them."

"To stay!"

"Yes—I was married to Jack—here—last fall."

"You—married! To JOHN DUMONT—you, only seventeen—oh, Pauline—" And Olivia gave way to tears for the first time since she was a baby.

Scarborough was neither at supper nor at breakfast—Pauline left without seeing him again.



VIII.

THE DECISION.

When the sign-board on a station platform said "5.2 miles to St. X," Pauline sank back in her chair in the parlor-car with blanched face. And almost immediately, so it seemed to her, Saint X came into view—home! She fancied she could see the very house as she looked down on the mass of green in which the town was embowered. The train slid into the station, slowed down—there were people waiting on the platform—her father! He was glancing from window to window, trying to catch a glimpse of her; and his expression of almost agonized eagerness made her heartsick. She had been away from him for nearly seven months—long enough to break the habit which makes it impossible for members of a family to know how they really look to each other. How gray and thin his beard seemed! What was the meaning of that gaunt look about his shoulders? What was the strange, terrifying shadow over him? "Why, he's OLD!" The tears welled into her eyes—"He's gliding away from me!" She remembered what she had to tell him and her knees almost refused to support her.

He was at the step as she sprang down. She flew into his arms. He held her away from him and scanned her face with anxious eyes.

"Is my little girl ill?" he asked. "The telegram made me uneasy."

"Oh, no!" she said with a reassuring hug. "Where's mother?"

"She—she's got a—a—surprise for you. We must hurry—she'll be impatient, though she's seen you since I have."

At the curbstone stood the familiar surrey, with Mordecai humped upon the front seat. "I don't see how the colonel ever knowed you," said he, as she shook hands with him. "I never seen the like for growin'."

"But YOU look just the same, Mordecai—you and the surrey and the horses. And how's Amanda?"

"Poorly," replied Mordecai—his invariable answer to inquiries about his wife. She patterned after the old school, which held that for a woman to confess to good health was for her to confess to lack of refinement, if not of delicacy.

"You think I've changed, father?" asked Pauline, when the horses were whirling them home. She was so busily greeting the familiar streets and houses and trees and faces that she hardly heard his reply.

"'I never seen the like for growin','" he quoted, his eyes shining with pride in her. He was a reticent man by nature as well as by training; he could not have SAID how beautiful, how wonderful he thought her, or how intensely he loved her. The most he could do to express himself to her was, a little shyly, to pat her hand—and to LOOK it into Mordecai's back.

She was about to snuggle up to him as a wave of delight at being home again swept over her; but her secret rushed from the background of her mind. "How could I have done it? How can I tell them?" Then, the serene and beautiful kindness of her father's face reassured her.

Her mother was waiting in the open front door as the surrey came up the drive—still the same dear old-young mother, with the same sweet dignity and gentleness.

"Oh, mother, mother!" exclaimed Pauline, leaping from the carriage into her arms. And as they closed about her she felt that sorrow and evil could not touch her; felt just as when she, a little girl, fleeing from some frightful phantom of her own imagining, had rushed there for safety. She choked, she sobbed, she led her mother to the big sofa opposite the stairway; and, sitting there, they held each the other tightly, Pauline kissing her, smoothing her hair, she caressing Pauline and crying softly.

"We've got a surprise for you, Polly," said she, when they were calmer.

"I don't want anything but you and father," replied Pauline.

Her father turned away—and so she did not see the shadow deepen in his face. Her mother shook her head, mischief in her eyes that were young as a girl's—younger far than her daughter's at that moment. "Go into the sitting-room and see," she said.

Pauline opened the sitting-room door. John Dumont caught her in his arms. "Polly!" he exclaimed. "It's all right. They've come round and—and—here I am!"

Pauline pushed him away from her and sank to the floor in a faint.

When she came to herself she was lying on the divan in the sitting-room. Her mother was kneeling beside her, bathing her temples with cold water; her father and her husband were standing, helplessly looking at her. "Send him away," she murmured, closing her eyes.

Only her mother heard. She motioned to the two men to leave the room. When the door closed Pauline sat up.

"He said it was all right," she began feverishly. "What did he mean, mother?" She was hoping she was to be spared the worst part of her ordeal.

But her mother's reply dashed her hopes, made her settle back among the cushions and hide her face. "It IS all right, Polly. You're to have your own way, and it's your father's way. John has convinced him that he really has changed. We knew—that is, I suspected why you were coming, and we thought we'd give you a surprise—give you what your heart was set on, before you had to ask for it. I'm so sorry, dear, that the shock was—"

Pauline lay perfectly still, her face hidden. After a pause: "I don't feel well enough to see him now. I want this day with you and father. To-morrow—to-morrow, we'll—to-day I want to be as I was when I was—just you and father, and the house and the garden."

Her mother left her for a moment and, when she came back, said: "He's gone."

Pauline gave a quick sigh of relief. Soon she rose. "I'm going for father, and we'll walk in the garden and forget there's anybody else in the world but just us three."

At half-past eight they had family prayers in the sitting-room; Pauline kneeling near her mother, her father kneeling beside his arm-chair and in a tremulous voice pouring out his gratitude to God for keeping them all "safe from the snares and temptations of the world," for leading them thus far on the journey.

"And, God, our Father, we pray Thee, have this daughter of ours, this handmaiden of Thine, ever in Thy keeping. And these things we ask in the name of Thy Son—Amen." The serene quiet, the beloved old room, the evening scene familiar to her from her earliest childhood, her father's reverent, earnest voice, halting and almost breaking after every word of the petition for her; her mother's soft echo of his "Amen"—Pauline's eyes were swimming as she rose from her knees.

Her mother went with her to her bedroom, hovered about her as she undressed, helped her now and then with fingers that trembled with happiness, and, when she was in bed, put out the light and "tucked her in" and kissed her—as in the old days. "Good night—God bless my little daughter—my HAPPY little daughter."

Pauline waited until she knew that they were sleeping. Then she put on a dressing-gown and went to the open window—how many springtimes had she sat there in the moonlight to watch, as now, the tulips and the hyacinths standing like fairies and bombarding the stars with the most delicious perfumes.

She sat hour after hour, giving no outward sign of battle within. In every lull came Scarborough's "Be SURE, Pauline!" to start the tumult afresh. When the stars began to pale in the dawn she rose—she WAS sure. Far from sure that she was doing the best for herself; but sure, sure without a doubt, that she was doing her duty to her parents.

"I must not punish THEM for MY sin," she said.

Late the next morning she went to the farthest corner of the garden, to the small summer-house where she had played with her dolls and her dishes, where she had worked with slate and spelling-book, where she had read her favorite school-girl romances, where she had dreamed her own school-girl romance. She was waiting under the friendly old canopy of bark—the posts supporting it were bark-clad, too; up and around and between them clambered the morning-glories in whose gorgeous, velvet-soft trumpets the sun-jewels glittered.

And presently he came down the path, his keen face and insolent eyes triumphant. He was too absorbed in his own emotion especially to note hers. Besides, she had always been receptive rather than demonstrative with him.

"We'll be married again, and do the gossips out of a sensation," he said. Though she was not looking at him, his eyes shifted from her face as he added in a voice which at another time she might have thought strained: "Then, too, your father and mother and mine are so strait-laced—it'd give 'em a terrible jar to find out. You're a good deal like them, Polly—only in a modern sort of way."

Pauline flushed scarlet and compressed her lips. She said presently: "You're sure you wish it?"

"Wish what?"

"To marry me. Sometimes I've thought we're both too young, that we might wait——"

He put his arm round her with an air of proud possession. "What'd be the sense in that?" he demanded gaily. "Aren't you MINE?"

And again she flushed and lowered her eyes and compressed her lips. Then she astonished him by flinging her arms round his neck and kissing him hysterically. "But I DO love you!" she exclaimed. "I do! I DO!"



IX.

A THOROUGHBRED RUNS AWAY.

It was midday six weeks later, and Pauline and Dumont were landing at Liverpool, when Scarborough read in the college-news column of the Battle Field Banner that she had "married the only son of Henry Dumont, of Saint Christopher, one of the richest men in our state, and has departed for an extended foreign tour." Olivia—and Pierson naturally—had known, but neither had had the courage to tell him.

Scarborough was in Pierson's room. He lowered the paper from in front of his face after a few minutes.

"I see Pauline has married and gone abroad," he said.

"Yes, so I heard from Olivia," replied Pierson, avoiding Scarborough's eyes.

"Why didn't you tell me?" continued Scarborough, tranquil so far as Pierson could judge. "I'd have liked to send her a note."

Pierson was silent.

"I thought it would cut him horribly," he was thinking. "And he's taking it as if he had only a friendly interest." Scarborough's face was again behind the newspaper. When he had finished it he sauntered toward the door. He paused there to glance idly at the titles of the top row in the book-case. Pierson was watching him. "No—it's all right," he concluded. Scarborough was too straight and calm just to have received such a blow as that news would have been had HE cared for Pauline. Pierson liked his look better than ever before—the tall, powerful figure; the fair hair growing above his wide and lofty brow, with the one defiant lock; and in his aquiline nose and blue-gray eyes and almost perfect mouth and chin the stamp of one who would move forward irresistibly, moving others to his will.

"How old are you, Scarborough?" he asked.

"Twenty-three-nearly twenty-four. I ought to be ashamed to be only a freshman, oughtn't I?" He shrugged his shoulders. "I'm tired of it all." And he strolled out.

He avoided Pierson and Olivia and all his friends for several days, went much into the woods alone, took long walks at night. Olivia would have it that he had been hard hit, and almost convinced Pierson.

"He's the sort of person that suffers the most," she said. "I've a brother like him—won't have sympathy, keeps a wound covered up so that it can't heal."

"But what shall I do for him?" asked Pierson.

"Don't do anything—he'd hate you if you did."

After a week or ten days he called on Pierson and, seating himself at the table, began to shuffle a pack of cards. He looked tired.

"I never saw cards until I was fifteen," he said.

"At home they thought them one of the devil's worst devices—we had a real devil in our house."

"So did we," said Pierson.

"But not a rip-snorter like ours—they don't have him in cities, or even in towns, any more. I've seen ours lots of times after the lights were out—saw him long after I'd convinced myself in daylight that he didn't exist. But I never saw him so close as the night of the day I learned to play casino."

"Did you learn in the stable?" asked Pierson.

"That's where I learned, and mother slipped up behind me—I didn't know what was coming till I saw the look in the other boy's face. Then—" Pierson left the rest to imagination.

"I learned in the hay-loft—my sister and my cousin Ed and I. One of the farm-hands taught us. The cards were so stained we could hardly see the faces. That made them look the more devilish. And a thunder-storm came up and the lightning struck a tree a few rods from the barn."

"Horrible!" exclaimed Pierson. "I'll bet you fell to praying."

"Not I. I'd just finished Tom Paine's Age of Reason—a preacher's son down the pike stole it from a locked closet in his father's library and loaned it to me. But I'll admit the thunderbolt staggered me. I said to them—pretty shakily, I guess: 'Come on, let's begin again.' But the farm-hand said: 'I reckon I'll get on the safe side,' and began to pray—how he roared! And I laughed—how wicked and reckless and brave that laugh did sound to me. 'Bella and Ed didn't know which to be more afraid of—my ridicule or the lightning. They compromised—they didn't pray and they didn't play."

"And so you've never touched a card since."

"We played again the next afternoon—let's have a game of poker. I'm bored to death today."

This was Scarborough's first move toward the fast set of which Pierson was leader. It was a small fast set—there were not many spoiled sons at Battle Field. But its pace was rapid; for every member of it had a constitution that was a huge reservoir of animal spirits and western energy. They "cribbed" their way through recitations and examinations—as the faculty did not put the students on honor but watched them, they reasoned that cribbing was not dishonorable provided one did barely enough of it to pull him through. They drank a great deal—usually whisky, which they disliked but poured down raw, because it was the "manly" drink and to take it undiluted was the "manly" way. They made brief excursions to Indianapolis and Chicago for the sort of carousals that appeal to the strong appetites and undiscriminating tastes of robust and curious youth.

Scarborough at once began to reap the reward of his advantages—a naturally bold spirit, an unnaturally reckless mood. In two weeks he won three hundred dollars, half of it from Pierson. He went to Chicago and in three nights' play increased this to twenty-nine hundred. The noise of the unprecedented achievement echoed through the college. In its constellation of bad examples a new star had blazed out, a star of the first magnitude.

Bladen Scarborough had used his surplus to improve and extend his original farm. But farms were now practically unsalable, and Hampden and Arabella were glad to let their cousin Ed—Ed Warfield—stay on, rent free, because with him there they were certain that the place would be well kept up. Hampden, poor in cash, had intended to spend the summer as a book agent. Instead, he put by a thousand dollars of his winnings to insure next year's expenses and visited Pierson at his family's cottage in the summer colony at Mackinac. He won at poker there and went on East, taking Pierson. He lost all he had with him, all Pierson could lend him, telegraphed to Battle Field for half his thousand dollars, won back all he had lost and two thousand besides.

When he reappeared at Battle Field in September he was dazzling to behold. His clothes were many and had been imported for him by the Chicago agent of a London tailor. His shirts and ties were in patterns and styles that startled Battle Field. He had taken on manners and personal habits befitting a "man of the world"—but he had not lost that simplicity and directness which were as unchangeably a part of him as the outlines of his face or the force which forbade him to be idle for a moment. He and Pierson—Pierson was pupil, now—took a suite of rooms over a shop in the town and furnished them luxuriously. They had brought from New York to look after them and their belongings the first English manservant Battle Field had seen.

Scarborough kept up his college work; he continued regularly to attend the Literary Society and to be its most promising orator and debater; he committed no overt act—others might break the college rules, might be publicly intoxicated and noisy, but he was always master of himself and of the situation. Some of the fanatical among the religious students believed and said that he had sold himself to the devil. He would have been expelled summarily but for Pierson—Pierson's father was one of the two large contributors to the support of the college, and it was expected that he would will it a generous endowment. To entrap Scarborough was to entrap Pierson. To entrap Pierson— The faculty strove to hear and see as little as possible of their doings.

In the college Y.M.C.A. prayers were offered for Scarborough—his name was not spoken, but every one understood. A delegation of the religious among his faithful fellow barbs called upon him to pray and to exhort. They came away more charmed than ever with their champion, and convinced that he was the victim of slander and envy. Not that he had deliberately deceived them, for he hadn't; he was simply courteous and respectful of their sincerity.

"The fraternities are in this somewhere," the barbs decided. "They're trying to destroy him by lying about him." And they liked it that their leader was the brilliant, the talked-about, the sought-after person in the college. When he stood up to speak in the assembly hall or the Literary Society they always greeted him with several rounds of applause.

To the chagrin of the faculty and the irritation of the fraternities a jury of alumni selected him to represent Battle Field at the oratorical contest among the colleges of the state. And he not only won there but also at the interstate contest—a victory over the orators of the colleges of seven western states in which public speaking was, and is, an essential part of higher education. His oratory lacked style, they thought at Battle Field. It was the same then, essentially, as it was a few years later when the whole western country was discussing it. He seemed to depend entirely upon the inherent carrying power of his ably constructed sentences—like so many arrows, some flying gracefully, others straight and swift, all reaching the mark at which they were aimed. In those days, as afterward, he stood upon the platform almost motionless; his voice was clear and sweet, never noisy, but subtly penetrating and, when the sense demanded it, full of that mysterious quality which makes the blood run more swiftly and the nerves tingle. "Merely a talker, not an orator," declared the professor of elocution, and few of those who saw him every day appreciated his genius then. It was on the subject-matter of his oration, not on his "delivery," that the judges decided for him—so they said and thought.

In February of this resplendent sophomore year there came in his mail a letter postmarked Battle Field and addressed in printed handwriting. The envelope contained only a newspaper cutting—from the St. Christopher Republic:

At four o'clock yesterday afternoon a boy was born to Mr. and Mrs. John Dumont. It is their first child, the first grandchild of the Dumont and Gardiner families. Mother and son are reported as doing well.

Scarborough spent little time in the futile effort to guess what coward enemy had sped this anonymous shaft on the chance of its hitting him. His only enemies that interested him were those within himself. He destroyed envelope and clipping, then said to Pierson: "I neglected to celebrate an important event not long ago." He paused to laugh—so queerly that Pierson looked at him uneasily. "We must go to Chicago to celebrate it."

"Very good," said Fred. "We'll get Chalmers to go with us to-morrow."

"No-to-day—the four-o'clock train—we've got an hour and a half. And we'll have four clear days."

"But there's the ball to-night and I'm down for several dances."

"We'll dance them in Chicago. I've never been really free to dance before." He poured out a huge drink. "I'm impatient for the ball to begin." He lifted his glass. "To our ancestors," he said, "who repressed themselves, denied themselves, who hoarded health and strength and capacity for joy, and transmitted them in great oceans to us—to drown our sorrows in!"

He won six hundred dollars at faro in a club not far from the Auditorium, Pierson won two hundred at roulette, Chalmers lost seventy—they had about fourteen hundred dollars for their four days' "dance." When they took the train for Battle Field they had spent all they had with them—had flung it away for dinners, for drives, for theaters, for suppers, for champagne. All the return journey Scarborough stared moodily out of the car window. And at every movement that disturbed his clothing there rose to nauseate him, to fill him with self-loathing, the odors of strong, sickening-sweet perfumes.

The next day but one, as he was in the woods near Indian Rock, he saw Olivia coming toward him. They had hardly spoken for several months. He turned to avoid her but she came on after him.

"I wish to talk with you a few minutes, Mr. Scarborough," she said coldly, storm in her brave eyes.

"At your service," he answered with strained courtesy. And he walked beside her.

"I happen to know," she began, "that they're going to expel you and Fred Pierson the next time you leave here without permission."

"Indeed! You are very kind to warn me of my awful danger." He looked down at her with a quizzical smile.

"And I wish to say I think it's a disgrace that they didn't do it long ago," she went on, her anger rising to the bait of his expression.

"Your opinions are always interesting," he replied. "If you have nothing further I'll ask your permission to relieve you of——"

"No," she interrupted. "I've not said what I wished to say. You're making it hard for me. I can't get accustomed to the change in you since last year. There used to be a good side to you, a side one could appeal to. And I want to talk about—Fred. You're RUINING him."

"You flatter me." He bowed mockingly. "But I doubt if HE'D feel flattered."

"I've told him the same thing, but you're too strong for me." Her voice trembled; she steadied it with a frown. "I can't influence him any longer."

"Really, Miss Shrewsbury——"

"Please!" she said. "Fred and I were engaged. I broke it last night. I broke it because—you know why."

Scarborough flushed crimson.

"Oh," he said. "I didn't know he was engaged."

"I know you, Hampden Scarborough," Olivia continued. "I've understood why you've been degrading yourself. And I haven't blamed you—though I've wondered at your lack of manhood."

"You are imposing on my courtesy," he said haughtily.

"I can't help it. You and I must talk this thing to the end. You're robbing me of the man I love. Worse than that, you're destroying him, dragging him down to a level at which HE may stay, while YOU are sure to rise again. You've got your living to make—I don't agree with those who think you'll become a professional gambler. But he his father's rich and indulgent, and—God only knows how low he'll sink if you keep on pushing him."

"You are excited, hysterical. You misjudge him, believe me," said Scarborough, gently.

"No—I know he's not depraved—yet. Do you think I could care for him if he were?"

"I hope so. That's when he'd need it most."

Olivia grew red. "Well, perhaps I should. I'm a fool, like all women. But I ask you to let him alone, to give his better self a chance."

"Why not ask him to let ME alone—to give MY better nature a chance?"

"You—laughing at me in these circumstances! You who pretended to be a man, pretended to love Pauline Gardiner——"

He started and his eyes blazed, as if she had cut him across the face with a whip. Then he drew himself up with an expression of insolent fury. His lips, his sharp white teeth, were cruel.

She bore his look without flinching.

"Yes," she went on, "you think you love her. Yet you act as if her love were a degrading influence in your life, as if she were a bad woman instead of one who ought to inspire a man to do and be his best. How ashamed she'd be of you, of your love, if she could see you as you are now—the tempter of all the bad impulses in this college."

He could not trust himself to reply. He was suffocating with rage and shame. He lifted his hat, walked rapidly away from her and went home. Pierson had never seen him in an ugly mood before. And he, too, was in an ugly mood—disgusted with his own conduct, angry at Scarborough, whom he held responsible for the unprecedented excesses of this last trip to Chicago and for their consequences.

"What's happened?" he asked sourly. "What's the matter with YOU?"

"Your Olivia," replied Scarborough, with a vicious sneer, "has been insulting me for your sins. She is a shrew! I don't wonder you dropped her."

Pierson rose slowly and faced him.

"You astonish me," he said. "I shouldn't have believed you capable of a speech which no gentleman could possibly utter."

"YOU, sitting as a court of honor to decide what's becoming a gentleman!" Scarborough looked amused contempt. "My dear Pierson, you're worse than offensive—you are ridiculous."

"No man shall say such things to me especially a man who notoriously lives by his wits."

Scarborough caught him up as if he had been a child and pinned him against the wall. "Take that back," he said, "or I'll kill you." His tone was as colorless as his face.

"Kill and be damned," replied Pierson, cool and disdainful. "You're a coward."

Scarborough's fingers closed on Pierson's throat. Then flashed into his mind that warning which demands and gets a hearing in the wildest tempest of passion before an irrevocable act can be done. It came to him in the form of a reminder of his laughing remark to Pauline when he told her of the traditions of murder in his family. He released Pierson and fled from the apartment.

Half an hour later Pierson was reading a note from him:

"I've invited some friends this evening. I trust it will be convenient for you to absent yourself. They'll be out by eleven, and then, if you return, we can decide which is to stay in the apartment and which to leave."

Pierson went away to his fraternity house and at half-past eight Scarborough, Chalmers, Jack Wilton and Brigham sat down to a game of poker. They had played about an hour, the cards steadily against Chalmers and Brigham—the cards were usually against Brigham. He was a mere boy, with passionate aspirations to be considered a sport. He had been going a rapid gait for a year. He had lost to Scarborough alone as much as he had expected to spend on the year's education.

Toward ten o'clock there was a jack-pot with forty-three dollars in it and Brigham was betting wildly, his hands and his voice trembling, his lips shriveled. With a sudden gesture Chalmers caught the ends of the table and jerked it back. There—in Brigham's lap—were two cards.

"I thought so!" exclaimed Chalmers. "You dirty little cheat! I've been watching you."

The boy looked piteously at Chalmers' sneering face, at the faces of the others. The tears rolled down his cheeks. "For God's sake, boys," he moaned, "don't be hard on me. I was desperate. I've lost everything, and my father can't give me any more. He's a poor man, and he and mother have been economizing and sacrificing to send me here. And when I saw I was ruined—God knows, I didn't think what I was doing." He buried his face in his hands. "Don't be hard on me," he sobbed. "Any one of you might have done the same if he was in my fix."

"You sniveling cur," said Chalmers, high and virtuous, "how dare you say such a thing! You forget you're among gentlemen——"

"None of that, Chalmers," interrupted Scarborough. "The boy's telling the truth. And nobody knows it better than YOU." This with a significant look into Chalmers' eyes. They shifted and he colored.

"I agree with Scarborough," said Wilton. "We oughtn't to have let the boy into our games. We must never mention what has happened here this evening."

"But we can't allow a card sharp to masquerade as a gentleman," objected Chalmers. "I confess, Scarborough, I don't understand how you can be so easy-going in a matter of honor."

"You think I must have a fellow-feeling for dishonor, eh?" Scarborough smiled satirically. "I suppose because I was sympathetic enough with you to overlook the fact that you were shy on your share of our Chicago trip."

"What do you mean?"

"The three hundred you borrowed of Pierson when you thought he was too far gone to know what he was doing. My back was turned—but there was the mirror."

Chalmers' sullen, red face confirmed Scarborough's charge.

"No," continued Scarborough, "we GENTLEMEN ought to be charitable toward one another's DISCOVERED lapses." He seated himself at his desk and wrote rapidly:

We, the undersigned, exonerate Edwin Brigham of cheating in the poker game in Hampden Scarborough's rooms on Saturday evening, February 20, 18—. And we pledge ourselves never to speak of the matter either to each other or to any one else.

"I've signed first," said Scarborough, rising and holding the pen toward Chalmers. "Now, you fellows sign. Chalmers!"

Chalmers signed, and then Wilton.

"Take Chalmers away with you," said Scarborough to Wilton in an undertone. "I've something to say to Brigham."

When they were gone he again seated himself at his desk and, taking his check-book, wrote a check and tore it out.

"Now, listen to me, Brig," he said friendlily to Brigham, who seemed to be in a stupor. "I've won about six hundred dollars from you, first and last—more, rather than less. Will that amount put you in the way of getting straight?"

"Yes," said Brigham, dully.

"Then here's a check for it. And here's the paper exonerating you. And—I guess you won't play again soon."

The boy choked back his sobs.

"I don't know how I ever came to do it, Scarborough. Oh, I'm a dog, a dog! When I started to come here my mother took me up to her bedroom and opened the drawer of her bureau and took out a savings-bank book—it had a credit of twelve hundred dollars. 'Do you see that?' she said. 'When you were born I began to put by as soon as I was able—every cent I could from the butter and the eggs—to educate my boy. And now it's all coming true,' she said, Scarborough, and we cried together. And——" Brigham burst into a storm of tears and sobs. "Oh, how could I do it!" he said. "How COULD I!"

"You've done wrong," said Scarborough, shakily, "but I've done much worse, Eddie. And it's over now, and everything'll be all right."

"But I can't take your money, Scarborough. I must pay for what I've done."

"You mean, make your mother pay. No, you must take it back, Brigham. I owe it to you—I owe it to your mother. This, is the butter and egg money that I—I stole from her."

He put the papers into the boy's pocket. "You and I are going to be friends," he went on.

"Come round and see me to-morrow—no, I'll look you up." He put out his hand and held Brigham's hand in a courage-giving grasp. "And—I hope I'll have the honor of meeting your mother some day."

Brigham could only look his feelings. Soon after he left Pierson came. His anger had evaporated and his chief emotion was dread lest Scarborough might still be angry. "I want to take back——" he began eagerly, as soon as his head was inside the door.

"I know you do, but you shan't," replied Scarborough. "What you said was true, what Olivia said was true. I've been acting like a blackguard."

"No," said Pierson, "what I said was a disgraceful lie. Will you try to forget it, Scarborough?"

"FORGET it?" Scarborough looked at his friend with brilliant eyes. "Never! So help me God, never! It's one of three things that have occurred to-day that I must never forget."

"Then we can go on as before. You'll still be my friend?"

"Not STILL, Fred, but for the first time."

He looked round the luxurious study with a laugh and a sigh. "It'll be a ghastly job, getting used to the sort of surroundings I can earn for myself. But I've got to grin and bear it. We'll stay on here together to the end of the term—my share's paid, and besides, I'm not going to do anything sensational. Next year—we'll see."

While Pierson was having his final cigarette before going to bed he looked up from his book to see before him Scarborough, even more tremendous and handsome in his gaudy pajamas.

"I wish to register a solemn vow," said he, with mock solemnity that did not hide the seriousness beneath. "Hear me, ye immortal gods! Never again, never again, will I engage in any game with a friend where there is a stake. I don't wish to tempt. I don't wish to be tempted."

"What nonsense!" said Pierson. "You're simply cutting yourself off from a lot of fun."

"I have spoken," said Scarborough, and he withdrew to his bedroom. When the door was closed and the light out he paused at the edge of the bed and said: "And never again, so long as he wishes to retain his title to the name man, will Hampden Scarborough take from anybody anything which he hasn't honestly earned."

And when he was in bed he muttered: "I shall be alone, and I may stay poor and obscure, but I'll get back my self-respect—and keep it—Pauline!"



X.

MRS. JOHN DUMONT.

And Pauline?—She was now looking back upon the first year of her married life.

She had been so brought up that at seventeen, within a few weeks of eighteen, she had only the vaguest notion of the meaning of the step she was about to take in "really marrying" John Dumont. Also, it had never occurred to her as possible for a properly constituted woman not to love her husband. It was clearly her duty to marry Jack; therefore, the doubting thoughts and the ache at the heart which would not ease were merely more outcroppings of the same evil part of her nature that had tempted her into deceiving her parents, and into entangling herself and Scarborough. She knew that, if she were absolutely free, she would not marry Jack. But she felt that she had bartered away her birthright of freedom; and now, being herself, the daughter of HER father and HER mother, she would honorably keep her bargain, would love where she ought to love—at seventeen "I will" means "I shall." And so—they were "really married."

But the days passed, and there was no sign of the miracle she had confidently expected. The magic of the marriage vow failed to transform her; Pauline Dumont was still Pauline Gardiner in mind and in heart. There was, however, a miracle, undreamed of, mysterious, overwhelming—John Dumont, the lover, became John Dumont, the husband. Beside this transformation, the revelation that the world she loved and lived in did not exist for him, or his world for her, seemed of slight importance. She had not then experience enough to enable her to see that transformation and revelation were as intimately related as a lock and its key.

"It's all my fault," she told herself. "It must be my fault." And Dumont, unanalytic and self-absorbed, was amused whenever Pauline's gentleness reminded him of his mother's half-believed warnings that his wife had "a will of her own, and a mighty strong one."

They were back at Saint X in August and lived at the Frobisher place in Indiana Street—almost as pretentious as the Dumont homestead and in better taste. Old Mrs. Dumont had gone to Chicago alone for the furnishings for her own house; when she went for the furnishings for her son's house, she got Mrs. Gardiner to go along—and Pauline's mother gave another of her many charming illustrations of the valuable truth that tact can always have its own way. Saint X was too keen-eyed and too interested in the new Mrs. Dumont to fail to note a change in her. It was satisfied with the surface explanation that Europe in general and Paris in particular were responsible. And it did not note that, while she had always been full of life and fond of company, she was now feverish in her restlessness, incessantly seeking distraction, never alone when she could either go somewhere or induce some one to come to her.

"You MUST be careful, my dear," said her mother-in-law, as soon as she learned that she had a grandmotherly interest in her daughter-in-law's health. "You'll wear yourself out with all this running about."

Pauline laughed carelessly, recklessly.

"Oh, I'm disgustingly healthy. Nothing hurts me. Besides, if I were quiet, I think I should—EXPLODE!"

Late in September Dumont had to go to New York. He asked her to go with him, assuming that she would decline, as she had visitors coming. But she was only too glad of the chance to give her increasing restlessness wider range. They went to the Waldorf—Scarborough and Pierson had been stopping there not a week before, making ready for that sensational descent upon Battle Field which has already been recorded. The first evening Dumont took her to the play. The next morning he left her early for a busy day down-town—"and I may not be able to return for dinner. I warned you before we left Saint X," he said, as he rose from breakfast in their sitting-room.

"I understand," she answered. "You needn't bother to send word even, if you don't wish. I'll be tired from shopping and shan't care to go out this evening, anyhow."

In the afternoon she drove with Mrs. Fanshaw, wife of one of Jack's business acquaintances—they had dined at the Fanshaws' when they paused in New York on the way home from Europe. Pauline was at the hotel again at five; while she and Mrs. Fanshaw were having tea together in the palm garden a telegram was handed to her. She read it, then said to Mrs. Fanshaw: "I was going to ask you and your husband to dine with us. Jack sends word he can't be here, but—why shouldn't you come just the same?"

"No you must go with us," Mrs. Fanshaw replied. "We've got a box at Weber and Fields', and two men asked, and we need another woman. I'd have asked you before, but there wouldn't be room for any more men."

Mrs. Fanshaw had to insist until she had proved that the invitation was sincere; then, Pauline accepted—a distraction was always agreeable, never so agreeable as when it offered itself unannounced. It was toward the end of the dinner that Mrs. Fanshaw happened to say: "I see your husband's like all of them. I don't believe there ever was a woman an American man wouldn't desert for business."

"Oh, I don't in the least mind," replied Pauline. "I like him to show that he feels free. Why, when we were in Paris on the return trip and had been married only two months, he got tangled up in business and used to leave me for a day—for two days, once."

At Pauline's right sat a carefully dressed young man whose name she had not caught—she learned afterward that he was Mowbray Langdon. He was now giving her a stare of amused mock-admiration. When he saw that he had her attention, he said: "Really, Mrs. Dumont, I can't decide which to admire most—YOUR trust or your husband's."

Pauline laughed—it struck her as ridiculous that either she or Jack should distrust the other. Indeed, she only hazily knew what distrust meant, and hadn't any real belief that "such things" actually existed.

Half an hour later the party was driving up to Weber and Fields'. Pauline, glancing across the thronged sidewalk and along the empty, brilliantly lighted passage leading into the theater, saw a striking, peculiar-looking woman standing at the box-office while her escort parleyed with the clerk within. "How much that man looks like Jack," she said to herself—and then she saw that it was indeed Jack. Not the Jack she thought she knew, but quite another person, the one he tried to hide from her—too carelessly, because he made the common mistake of underestimating the sagacity of simplicity. A glance at the woman, a second glance at Dumont, his flushed, insolent face now turned full front—and she KNEW this unfamiliar and hitherto-only-hinted Jack.

The omnibus was caught in a jam of cars and carriages; there were several moments of confusion and excitement. When the Fanshaw party was finally able to descend, she saw that Jack and his companion were gone—the danger of a scene was over for the moment. She lingered and made the others linger, wishing to give him time to get to his seats. When they entered the theater it was dark and the curtain was up. But her eyes, searching the few boxes visible from the rear aisle, found the woman, or, at least, enough of her for recognition—the huge black hat with its vast pale blue feather. Pauline drew a long breath of relief when the Fanshaws' box proved to be almost directly beneath, the box.

If she had been a few years older, she would have given its proper significance to the curious fact that this sudden revelation of the truth about her husband did not start a tempest of anger or jealousy, but set her instantly to sacrificing at the shrine of the great god Appearances. It is notorious that of all the household gods he alone erects his altar only upon the hearth where the ashes are cold.

As she sat there through the two acts, she seemed to be watching the stage and taking part in the conversation of the Fanshaws and their friends; yet afterward she could not recall a single thing that had occurred, a single word that had been said. At the end of the last act she again made them linger so that they were the last to emerge into the passage. In the outside doorway, she saw the woman—just a glimpse of a pretty, empty, laughing face with a mouth made to utter impertinences and eyes that invited them.

Mrs. Fanshaw was speaking—"You're very tired, aren't you?"

"Very," replied Pauline, with a struggle to smile.

"What a child you look! It seems absurd that you are a married woman. Why, you haven't your full growth yet." And on an impulse of intuitive sympathy Mrs. Fanshaw pressed her arm, and Pauline was suddenly filled with gratitude, and liked her from that moment.

Alone in her sitting-room at the hotel, she went up to the mirror over the mantel, and, staring absently at herself, put her hands up mechanically to take out her hat-pins. "No, I'll keep my hat on," she thought, without knowing why. And she sat, hat and wrap on, and looked at a book. Half an hour, and she took off her hat and wrap, put them in a chair near where she was sitting. The watched hands of the clock crawled wearily round to half-past one, to two, to half-past two, to three—each half-hour an interminable stage. She wandered to the window and looked down into empty Fifth Avenue. When she felt that at least an hour had passed, she turned to look at the clock again—twenty-five minutes to four. Her eyes were heavy.

"He is not coming," she said aloud, and, leaving the lights on in the sitting-room, locked herself in the bedroom.

At five o'clock she started up and seized the dressing-gown on the chair near the head of the bed. She listened—heard him muttering in the sitting-room. She knew now that a crash of some kind had roused her. Several minutes of profound silence, then through the door came a steady, heavy snore.

The dressing-gown dropped from her hand. She slid from the bed, slowly crossed the room, softly opened the door, looked into the sitting-room. A table and a chair lay upset in the middle of the floor. He was on a sofa, sprawling, disheveled, snoring.

Slowly she advanced toward him—she was barefooted, and the white nightgown clinging to her slender figure and the long braid down her back made her look as young as her soul—the soul that gazed from her fixed, fascinated eyes, the soul of a girl of eighteen, full as much child as woman still. She sat down before him in a low chair, her elbows on her knees, her chin supported by her hands, her eyes never leaving his swollen, dark red, brutish face—a cigar stump, much chewed, lay upon his cheek near his open mouth. He was as absurd and as repulsive as a gorged pig asleep in a wallow.

The dawn burst into broad day, but she sat on motionless until the clock struck the half-hour after six. Then she returned to the bedroom and locked herself in again.

Toward noon she dressed and went into the sitting-room. He was gone and it had been put to rights. When he came, at twenty minutes to one, she was standing at the window, but she did not turn.

"Did you get my note?" he asked, in a carefully careless tone. He went on to answer himself: "No, there it is on the floor just where I put it, under the bedroom door. No matter—it was only to say I had to go out but would be back to lunch. Sorry I was kept so late last night. Glad you didn't wait up for me—but you might have left the bedroom door open—it'd have been perfectly safe." He laughed good-naturedly. "As it was, I was so kind-hearted that I didn't disturb you, but slept on the sofa."

As he advanced toward her with the obvious intention of kissing her, she slowly turned and faced him. Their eyes met and he stopped short—her look was like the eternal ice that guards the pole.

"I saw you at the theater last night," she said evenly. "And this morning, I sat and watched you as you lay on the sofa over there."

He was taken completely off his guard. With a gasp that was a kind of groan he dropped into a chair, the surface of his mind strewn with the wreckage of the lying excuses he had got ready.

"Please don't try to explain," she went on in the same even tone. "I understand now about—about Paris and—everything. I know that—father was right."

He gave her a terrified glance—no tears, no trace of excitement, only calmness and all the strength he knew was in her nature and, in addition, a strength he had not dreamed was there.

"What do you intend to do?" he asked after a long silence.

She did not answer immediately. When she did, she was not looking at him.

"When I married you—across the river from Battle Field," she said, "I committed a crime against my father and mother. This is—my punishment—the beginning of it. And now—there'll be the—the—baby—" A pause, then: "I must bear the consequences—if I can. But I shall not be your wife—never—never again. If you wish me to stay on that condition, I'll try. If not—"

"You MUST stay, Pauline," he interrupted. "I don't care what terms you make, you must stay. It's no use for me to try to defend myself when you're in this mood. You wouldn't listen. But you're right about not going. If you did, it'd break your father's and mother's hearts. I admit I did drink too much last night, and made a fool of myself. But if you were more experienced, you'd—"

He thought he had worked his courage up to the point where he could meet her eyes. He tried it. Her look froze his flow of words. "I KNOW that you were false from the beginning," she said.

"The man I thought you were never existed—and I know it. We won't speak of this—ever—after now. Surely you can't wish me to stay?" And into her voice surged all her longing to go, all her hope that he would reject the only terms on which self-respect would let her stay.

"Wish you to stay?" he repeated. And he faced her, looking at her, his chest heaving under the tempest of hate and passion that was raging in him—hate because she was defying and dictating to him, passion because she was so beautiful as she stood there, like a delicate, fine hot-house rose poised on a long, graceful stem. "No wonder I LOVE you!" he exclaimed between his clenched teeth.

A bright spot burned in each of her cheeks and her look made him redden and lower his eyes.

"Now that I understand these last five months," she said, "that from you is an insult."

His veins and muscles swelled with the fury he dared not show; for he saw and felt how dangerous her mood was.

"I'll agree to whatever you like, Pauline," he said humbly. "Only, we mustn't have a flare-up and a scandal. I'll never speak to you again about—about anything you don't want to hear."

She went into her bedroom. When, after half an hour, she reappeared, she was ready to go down to lunch. In the elevator he stole a glance at her—there was no color in her face, not even in her lips. His rage had subsided; he was ashamed of himself—before her. But he felt triumphant too.

"I thought she'd go, sure, in spite of her fear of hurting her father and mother," he said to himself. "A mighty close squeak. I was stepping round in a powder magazine, with every word a lit match."

In January she sank into a profound lassitude. Nothing interested her, everything wearied her. As the time drew near, her mother came to stay with her; and day after day the two women sat silent, Mrs. Gardiner knitting, Pauline motionless, hands idle in her lap, mind vacant. If she had any emotion, it was a hope that she would die and take her child with her.

"That would settle everything, settle it right," she reflected, with youth's morbid fondness for finalities.

When it was all over and she came out from under the opiate, she lay for a while, open-eyed but unseeing, too inert to grope for the lost thread of memory. She felt a stirring in the bed beside her, the movement of some living thing. She looked and there, squeezed into the edge of the pillow was a miniature head of a little old man—wrinkled, copperish. Yet the face was fat—ludicrously fat. A painfully homely face with tears running from the closed eyes, with an open mouth that driveled and drooled.

"What is it?" she thought, looking with faint curiosity. "And why is it here?"

Two small fists now rose aimlessly in the air above the face and flapped about; and a very tempest of noise issued from the sagging mouth.

"A baby," she reflected. Then memory came—"MY baby!"

She put her finger in the way of the wandering fists. First one of them, then the other, awkwardly unclosed and as awkwardly closed upon it. She smiled. The grip tightened and tightened and tightened until she wondered how hands so small and new could cling so close and hard. Then that electric clasp suddenly tightened about her heart. She burst into tears and drew the child against her breast. The pulse of its current of life was beating against her own—and she felt it. She sobbed, laughed softly, sobbed again.

Her mother was bending anxiously over her.

"What's the matter, dearest?" she asked. "What do you wish?"

"Nothing!" Pauline was smiling through her tears. "Oh, mother, I am SO happy!" she murmured.

And her happiness lasted with not a break, with hardly a pause, all that spring and all that summer—or, so long as her baby's helplessness absorbed the whole of her time and thought.



XI.

YOUNG AMERICA.

When Pierson, laggard as usual, returned to Battle Field a week after the end of the long vacation, he found Scarborough just establishing himself. He had taken two small and severely plain rooms in a quaint old frame cottage, one story high, but perched importantly upon a bank at the intersection of two much-traveled streets.

"What luck?" asked Pierson, lounging in on him.

"A hundred days' campaign; a thousand dollars net," replied the book agent. "And I'm hard as oak from tramping those roads, and I've learned—you ought to have been along, Pierson. I know people as I never could have come to know them by any other means—what they think, what they want, how they can be reached."

There was still much of the boy in Pierson's face. But Scarborough looked the man, developed, ready.

Pierson wandered into the bedroom to complete his survey. "I see you're going to live by the clock," he called out presently. He had found, pasted to the wall, Scarborough's schedule of the daily division of his time; just above it, upon a shelf, was a new alarm clock, the bell so big that it overhung like a canopy. "You don't mean you're going to get up at four?"

"Every morning—all winter," replied Scarborough, without stopping his unpacking. "You see, I'm going to finish this year—take the two years in one. Then I've registered in a law office—Judge Holcombe's. And there's my speaking—I must practise that every day."

Pierson came back to the sitting-room and collapsed into a chair. "I see you allow yourself five hours for sleep," he said. "It's too much, old man. You're self-indulgent."

"That's a mistake," replied Scarborough. "Since making out the schedule I've decided to cut sleep down to four hours and a half."

"That's more like it!"

"We all sleep too much," he continued. "And as I shan't smoke, or drink, or worry, I'll need even less than the average man. I'm going to do nothing but work. A man doesn't need much rest from mere work."

"What! No play?"

"Play all the time. I've simply changed my playthings."

Pierson seated himself at the table and stared gloomily at his friend.

"Look here, old man. For heaven's sake, don't let Olivia find out about this program."

But Olivia did hear of it, and Pierson was compelled to leave his luxury in the main street and to take the two remaining available rooms at Scarborough's place. His bed was against the wall of Scarborough's bedroom—the wall where the alarm clock was. At four o'clock on his first morning he started from a profound sleep.

"My bed must be moved into my sitting-room to-day," he said to himself as soon as the clamor of Scarborough's gong died away and he could collect his thoughts. But at four o'clock the next morning the gong penetrated the two walls as if they had not been there. "I see my finish," he groaned, sitting up and tearing at his hair.

He tried to sleep again, but the joint pressure of Olivia's memory-mirrored gray eyes and of disordered nerves from the racking gong forced him to make an effort to bestir himself. Groaning and muttering, he rose and in the starlight looked from his window. Scarborough was going up the deserted street on his way to the woods for his morning exercise. His head was thrown back and his chest extended, and his long legs were covering four feet at a stride. "You old devil!" said Pierson, his tone suggesting admiration and affection rather than anger. "But I'll outwit you."

By a subterfuge in which a sympathetic doctor was the main factor, he had himself permanently excused from chapel. Then he said to Scarborough: "You get up too late, old man. My grandfather used to say that only a drone lies abed after two in the morning, wasting the best part of the day. You ought to turn in, say, at half-past nine and rise in time to get your hardest work out of the way before the college day begins."

"That sounds reasonable," replied Scarborough, after a moment's consideration. "I'll try it."

And so it came to pass that Pierson went to bed at the sound of Scarborough's two-o'clock rising gong and pieced out his sleep with an occasional nap in recitations and lectures and for an hour or two late in the afternoon. He was able once more to play poker as late as he liked, and often had time for reading before the gong sounded. And Scarborough was equally delighted with the new plan. "I gain at least one hour a day, perhaps two," he said. "Your grandfather was a wise man."

Toward spring, Mills, western manager of the publishing house for which Scarborough had sold Peaks of Progress through Michigan, came to Battle Field to see him.

"You were far and away the best man we had out last year," said he. "You're a born book agent."

"Thank you," said Scarborough, sincerely. He appreciated that a man can pay no higher compliment than to say that another is master of his own trade.

"We got about fifty orders from people who thought it over after you'd tried to land them and failed—that shows the impression you made. And you sold as many books as our best agent in our best field."

"I'll never go as agent again," said Scarborough. "The experience was invaluable—but sufficient."

"We don't want you to go as agent. Our proposition is for much easier and more dignified work."

At the word dignified, Scarborough could not restrain a smile. "I've practically made my plans for the summer," he said.

"I think we've got something worth your while, Mr. Scarborough. Our idea is for you to select about a hundred of the young fellows who're working their way through here, and train them in your methods of approaching people. Then you'll take them to Wisconsin and Minnesota and send them out, each man to a district you select for him. In that way you'll help a hundred young men to earn a year at college and you'll make a good sum for yourself—two or three times what you made last summer."

Scarborough had intended to get admitted to the bar in June, to spend the summer at an apprenticeship in a law office and to set up for himself in the fall. But this plan was most attractive—it would give him a new kind of experience and would put him in funds for the wait for clients. The next day he signed an advantageous contract—his expenses for the summer and a guaranty of not less than three thousand dollars clear.

He selected a hundred young men and twelve young women, the most intelligent of the five hundred self-supporting students at Battle Field. Pierson, having promised to behave himself, was permitted to attend the first lesson. The scholars at the Scarborough, School for Book Agents filled his quarters and overflowed in swarms without the windows and the door. The weather was still cool; but all must hear, and the rooms would hold barely half the brigade.

"I assume that you've read the book," began Scarborough. He was standing at the table with the paraphernalia of a book agent spread upon it. "But you must read it again and again, until you know what's on every page, until you have by heart the passages I'll point out to you." He looked at Drexel—a freshman of twenty-two, with earnest, sleepless eyes and a lofty forehead; in the past winter he had become acquainted with hunger and with that cold which creeps into the room, crawls through the thin covers and closes in, icy as death, about the heart. "What do you think of the book, Drexel?"

The young man—he is high in the national administration to-day—flushed and looked uneasy.

"Speak frankly. I want your candid opinion."

"Well, I must say, Mr. Scarborough, I think it's pretty bad."

"Thank you," said Scarborough; and he glanced round. "Does anybody disagree with Mr. Drexel?"

There was not a murmur. Pierson covered his face to hide his smile at this "jolt" for his friend. In the group round one of the windows a laugh started and spread everywhere except to seven of the twelve young women and to those near Scarborough—THEY looked frightened.

"I expected Mr. Drexel's answer," began Scarborough. "Before you can sell Peaks of Progress each of you must be convinced that it's a book he himself would buy. And I see you've not even read it. You've at most glanced at it with unfriendly eyes. This book is not literature, gentlemen. It is a storehouse of facts. It is an educational work so simply written and so brilliantly illustrated that the very children will hang over its pages with delight. If you attend to your training in our coming three months of preliminary work you'll find during the summer that the book's power to attract the children is its strongest point. I made nearly half my sales last summer by turning from the parents to the children and stirring their interest."

Pierson was now no more inclined to smile than were the pupils.

"When I started out," continued Scarborough, "I, too, had just glanced at the book and had learned a few facts from the prospectus. And I failed to sell, except to an occasional fool whom I was able to overpower. Every one instinctively felt the estimate I myself placed upon my goods. But as I went on the book gradually forced itself upon me. And, long before the summer was over, I felt that I was an ambassador of education to those eager people. And I'm proud that I sold as many books as I did. Each book, I know, is a radiating center of pleasure, of thought, of aspiration to higher things. No, ladies and gentlemen, you must first learn that these eight hundred pages crowded with facts of history, these six hundred illustrations taken from the best sources and flooding the text with light, together constitute a work that should be in all humble households."

Scarborough had his audience with him now.

"Never sneer," he said in conclusion. "Sneering will accomplish nothing. Learn your business. Put yourself, your BEST self, into it. And then you may hope to succeed at it."

He divided his pupils into six classes of about twenty each and dismissed them, asking the first class to come at three the next afternoon. The young men and young women went thoughtfully away; they were revolving their initial lesson in the cardinal principle of success—enthusiasm. When the two friends were alone Pierson said: "Do you know, I'm beginning to get a glimpse of you. And I see there isn't anything beyond your reach. You'll get whatever you want."

Scarborough's reply was a sudden look of dejection, an impatient shrug. Then he straightened himself, lifted his head with a lion-like toss that shook back the obstinate lock of hair from his forehead. He laid his hand on his friend's shoulder. "Yes," he said, "because I'm determined to want whatever I get. Good fortune and bad—everything shall be grist for THIS mill."

Pierson attended next day's class and afterward went to Olivia with an account of it.

"You ought to have seen him put those fellows through, one at a time. I tell you, he'll teach them more in the next three months than they'll learn of the whole faculty. And this summer he'll get every man and woman of them enough to pay their way through college next year."

"What did he do to-day?" asked Olivia. Of the many qualities she loved in Pierson, the one she loved most was his unbounded, unselfish admiration for his friend.

"He took each man separately, the others watching and listening. First he'd play the part of book agent with his pupil as a reluctant customer. Then he'd reverse, and the pupil as agent would try to sell him the book, he pretending to be an ignorant, obstinate, ill-natured, close-fisted farmer or farmer's wife. It was a liberal education in the art of persuasion. If his pupils had his brains and his personality, Peaks of Progress would be on the center-table in half the farm parlors of Wisconsin and Minnesota by September."

"IF they had his personality, and IF they had his brains," said Olivia.

"Well, as it is, he'll make the dumbest ass in the lot bray to some purpose."

In September, when Scarborough closed his headquarters at Milwaukee and set out for Indianapolis, he found that the average earnings of his agents were two hundred and seventy-five dollars, and that he himself had made forty-three hundred. Mills came and offered him a place in the publishing house at ten thousand a year and a commission. He instantly rejected it. He had already arranged to spend a year with one of the best law firms in Indianapolis before opening an office in Saint X, the largest town in the congressional district in which his farm lay.

"But there's no hurry about deciding," said Mills. "Remember we'll make you rich in a few years."

"My road happens not to lie in that direction," replied Scarborough, carelessly. "I've no desire to be rich. It's too easy, if one will consent to give money-making his exclusive attention."

Mills looked amused—had he not known Scarborough's ability, he would have felt derisive.

"Money's power," said he. "And there are only two ambitions for a wide-awake man—money and power."

"Money can't buy the kind of power I'd care for," answered Scarborough. "If I were to seek power, it'd be the power that comes through ability to persuade."

"Money talks," said Mills, laughing.

"Money bellows," retorted Scarborough, "and bribes and browbeats, bully and coward that it is. But it never persuades."

"I'll admit it's a coward."

"And I hope I can always frighten enough of it into my service to satisfy my needs. But I'm not spending my life in its service—no, thank you!"



XII.

AFTER EIGHT YEARS.

While Scarborough was serving his clerkship at Indianapolis, Dumont was engaging in ever larger and more daring speculations with New York as his base. Thus it came about that when Scarborough established himself at Saint X, Dumont and Pauline were living in New York, in a big house in East Sixty-first Street.

And Pauline had welcomed the change. In Saint X she was constantly on guard, always afraid her father and mother would see below that smiling surface of her domestic life which made them happy. In New York she was free from the crushing sense of peril and restraint, as their delusions about her were secure. There, after she and he found their living basis of "let alone," they got on smoothly, rarely meeting except in the presence of servants or guests, never inquiring either into the other's life, carrying on all negotiations about money and other household matters through their secretaries. He thought her cold by nature—therefore absolutely to be trusted. And what other man with the pomp and circumstance of a great and growing fortune to maintain had so admirable an instrument? "An ideal wife," he often said to himself. And he was not the man to speculate as to what was going on in her head. He had no interest in what others thought; how they were filling the places he had assigned them—that was his only concern.

In one of those days of pause which come now and then in the busiest lives she chanced upon his letters from Europe in her winter at Battle Field. She took one of them from its envelope and began to read—carelessly, with a languid curiosity to measure thus exactly the change in herself. But soon she was absorbed, her mind groping through letter after letter for the clue to a mystery. The Dumont she now knew stood out so plainly in those letters that she could not understand how she, inexperienced and infatuated though she then was, had failed to see the perfect full-length portrait. How had she read romance and high-mindedness and intellect into the personality so frankly flaunting itself in all its narrow sordidness, in all its poverty of real thought and real feeling?

And there was Hampden Scarborough to contrast him with. With this thought the truth suddenly stared at her, made her drop the letter and visibly shrink. It was just because Scarborough was there that she had been tricked. The slight surface resemblance between the two men, hardly more than the "favor" found in all men of the family of strong and tenacious will, had led her on to deck the absent Dumont with the manhood of the present Scarborough. She had read Scarborough into Dumont's letters. Yes, and—the answers she addressed and mailed to Dumont had really been written to Scarborough.

She tossed the letters back into the box from which they had reappeared after four long years. She seated herself on the white bear-skin before the open fire; and with hands clasped round her knees she rocked herself slowly to and fro like one trying to ease an intolerable pain.

Until custom dulled the edge of that pain, the days and the nights were the cruelest in her apprenticeship up to that time.

When her boy, Gardiner, was five years old, she got her father and mother to keep him at Saint X with them.

"New York's no place, I think, to bring up and educate a boy in the right way," she explained. And it was the truth, though not the whole truth. The concealed part was that she would have made an open break with her husband had there been no other way of safeguarding their all-seeing, all-noting boy from his example.

Before Gardiner went to live with his grandparents she stayed in the East, making six or eight brief visits "home" each year. When he went she resolved to divide her year between her pleasure as a mother and her obligation to her son's father, to her parents' son-in-law—her devotions at the shrine of Appearances.

It was in the fall of the year she was twenty-five—eight years and a half after she left Battle Field—that Hampden Scarborough reappeared upon the surface of her life.

On a September afternoon in that year Olivia, descending from the train at Saint X, was almost as much embarrassed as pleased by her changed young cousin rushing at her with great energy—"Dear, dear Olivia! And hardly any different—how's the baby? No—not Fred, but Fred Junior, I mean. In some ways you positively look younger. You know, you were SO serious at college!"

"But you—I don't quite understand how any one can be so changed, yet—recognizable. I guess it's the plumage. You're in a new edition—an edition deluxe."

Pauline's dressmakers were bringing out the full value of her height and slender, graceful strength. Her eyes, full of the same old frankness and courage, now had experience in them, too. She was wearing her hair so that it fell from her brow in two sweeping curves reflecting the light in sparkles and flashes. Her manner was still simple and genuine—the simplicity and genuineness of knowledge now, not of innocence. Extremes meet—but they remain extremes. Her "plumage" was a fashionable dress of pale blue cloth, a big beplumed hat to match, a chiffon parasol like an azure cloud, at her throat a sapphire pendant, about her neck and swinging far below her waist a chain of sapphires.

"And the plumage just suits her," thought Olivia. For it seemed to her that her cousin had more than ever the quality she most admired—the quality of individuality, of distinction. Even in her way of looking clean and fresh she was different, as if those prime feminine essentials were in her not matters of frequent reacquirement but inherent and inalienable, like her brilliance of eyes and smoothness of skin.

Olivia felt a slight tugging at the bag she was carrying. She looked—an English groom in spotless summer livery was touching his hat in respectful appeal to her to let go. "Give Albert your checks, too," said Pauline, putting her arm around her cousin's waist to escort her down the platform. At the entrance, with a group of station loungers gaping at it, was a phaeton-victoria lined with some cream-colored stuff like silk, the horses and liveried coachman rigid. "She's giving Saint X a good deal to talk about," thought Olivia.

"Home, please, by the long road," said Pauline to the groom, and he sprang to the box beside the coachman, and they were instantly in rapid motion. "That'll let us have twenty minutes more together," she went on to Olivia. "There are several people stopping at the house."

The way led through Munroe Avenue, the main street of Saint X. Olivia was astonished at the changes—the town of nine years before spread and remade into an energetic city of twenty-five thousand.

"Fred told me I'd hardly recognize it," said she, "but I didn't expect this. It's another proof how far-sighted Hampden Scarborough is. Everybody advised him against coming here, but he would come. And the town has grown, and at the same time he's had a clear field to make a big reputation as a lawyer in a few years, not to speak of the power he's got in politics."

"But wouldn't he have won no matter where he was?" suggested Pauline.

"Sooner or later—but not so soon," replied Olivia.

"No—a tree doesn't have to grow so tall among a lot of bushes before it's noticed as it does in a forest."

"And you've never seen him since Battle Field?" As Olivia put this question she watched her cousin narrowly without seeming to do so.

"But," replied Pauline—and Olivia thought that both her face and her tone were a shade off the easy and the natural—"since he came I've been living in New York and haven't stayed here longer than a few days until this summer. And he's been in Europe since April. No," she went on, "I've not seen a soul from Battle Field. It's been like a painting, finished and hanging on the wall one looks toward oftenest, and influencing one's life every day."

They talked on of Battle Field, of the boys and girls they had known—how Thiebaud was dead and Mollie Crittenden had married the man who was governor of California; what Howe was not doing, the novels Chamberlayne was writing; the big women's college in Kansas that Grace Wharton was vice-president of. Then of Pierson—in the state senate and in a fair way to get to Congress the next year. Then Scarborough again—how he had distanced all the others; how he might have the largest practice in the state if he would take the sort of clients most lawyers courted assiduously; how strong he was in politics in spite of the opposition of the professionals—strong because he had a genius for organization and also had the ear and the confidence of the people and the enthusiastic personal devotion of the young men throughout the state. Olivia, more of a politician than Fred even, knew the whole story; and Pauline listened appreciatively. Few indeed are the homes in strenuously political Indiana where politics is not the chief subject of conversation, and Pauline had known about parties and campaigns as early as she had known about dolls and dresses.

"But you must have heard most of this," said Olivia, "from people here in Saint X."

"Some of it—from father and mother," Pauline answered. "They're the only people I've seen really to talk to on my little visits. They know him very well indeed. I think mother admires him almost as much as you do. Here's our place," she added, the warmth fading from her face as from a spring landscape when the shadow of the dusk begins to creep over it.

They were in the grounds of the Eyrie—the elder Dumont was just completing it when he died early in the previous spring. His widow went abroad to live with her daughter and her sister in Paris; so her son and his wife had taken it. It was a great rambling stone house that hung upon and in a lofty bluff. From its windows and verandas and balconies could be seen the panorama of Saint Christopher. To the left lay the town, its ugly part—its factories and railway yards—hidden by the jut of a hill. Beneath and beyond to the right, the shining river wound among fields brown where the harvests had been gathered, green and white where myriads of graceful tassels waved above acres on acres of Indian corn. And the broad leaves sent up through the murmur of the river a rhythmic rustling like a sigh of content. Once in a while a passing steamboat made the sonorous cry of its whistle and the melodious beat of its paddles echo from hill to hill. Between the house and the hilltop, highway lay several hundred acres of lawn and garden and wood.

The rooms of the Eyrie and its well-screened verandas were in a cool twilight, though the September sun was hot.

"They're all out, or asleep," said Pauline, as she and Olivia entered the wide reception hall. "Let's have tea on the east veranda. Its view isn't so good, but we'll be cooler. You'd like to go to your room first?"

Olivia said she was comfortable as she was and needed the tea. So they went on through the splendidly-furnished drawing-room and were going through the library when Olivia paused before a portrait—"Your husband, isn't it?"

"Yes," replied Pauline, standing behind her cousin. "We each had one done in Paris."

"What a masterful face!" said Olivia. "I've never seen a better forehead." And she thought,

"He's of the same type as Scarborough, except—what is it I dislike in his expression?"

"Do you notice a resemblance to any one you know?" asked Pauline.

"Ye-e-s," replied Olivia, coloring. "I think——"

"Scarborough, isn't it?"

"Yes," admitted Olivia.

After a pause Pauline said ambiguously: "The resemblance is stronger there than in life."

Olivia glanced at her and was made vaguely uneasy by the look she was directing at the face of the portrait. But though Pauline must have seen that she was observed, she did not change expression. They went out upon the east veranda and Olivia stood at the railing. She hardly noted the view in the press of thoughts roused by the hints of what was behind the richly embroidered curtain of her cousin's life.

All along the bluff, some exposed, some half hid by dense foliage, were the pretentious houses of the thirty or forty families who had grown rich through the industries developed within the past ten years. Two foreign-looking servants in foreign-looking house-liveries were bringing a table on which was an enormous silver tray with a tea-service of antique silver and artistic china. As Olivia turned to seat herself a young man and a woman of perhaps forty, obviously from the East, came through the doors at the far end of the long porch. Both were in white, carefully dressed and groomed; both suggested a mode of life whose leisure had never been interrupted.

"Who are coming?" asked Olivia. She wished she had gone to her room before tea. These people made her feel dowdy and mussy.

Pauline glanced round, smiled and nodded, turned back to her cousin.

"Mrs. Herron and Mr. Langdon. She's the wife of a New York lawyer, and she takes Mr. Langdon everywhere with her to amuse her, and he goes to amuse himself. He's a socialist, or something like that. He thinks up and says things to shock conservative, conventional people. He's rich and never has worked—couldn't if he would, probably. But he denounces leisure classes and large fortunes and advocates manual labor every day for everybody. He's clever in a queer, cynical way."