Bessy's eyes moved again, slowly, inscrutably. She had never asked for her husband.

"Soon?" she whispered.

"He had started on a long journey—to out-of-the-way places—to study something about cotton growing—my message has just overtaken him," Justine explained.

Bessy lay still, her breast straining for breath. She remained so long without speaking that Justine began to think she was falling back into the somnolent state that intervened between her moments of complete consciousness. But at length she lifted her lids again, and her lips stirred.

"He will be...long...coming?"

"Some days."

"How...many?"

"We can't tell yet."

Silence again. Bessy's features seemed to shrink into a kind of waxen quietude—as though her face were seen under clear water, a long way down. And then, as she lay thus, without sound or movement, two tears forced themselves through her lashes and rolled down her cheeks.

Justine, bending close, wiped them away. "Bessy—"

The wet lashes were raised—an anguished look met her gaze.

"I—I can't bear it...."

"What, dear?"

"The pain.... Shan't I die...before?"

"You may get well, Bessy."

Justine felt her hand quiver. "Walk again...?"

"Perhaps...not that."

"This? I can't bear it...." Her head drooped sideways, turning away toward the wall.

Justine, that night, kept her vigil with an aching heart. The news of Amherst's return had produced no sign of happiness in his wife—- the tears had been forced from her merely by the dread of being kept alive during the long days of pain before he came. The medical explanation might have been that repeated crises of intense physical anguish, and the deep lassitude succeeding them, had so overlaid all other feelings, or at least so benumbed their expression, that it was impossible to conjecture how Bessy's little half-smothered spark of soul had really been affected by the news. But Justine did not believe in this argument. Her experience among the sick had convinced her, on the contrary, that the shafts of grief or joy will find a crack in the heaviest armour of physical pain, that the tiniest gleam of hope will light up depths of mental inanition, and somehow send a ray to the surface.... It was true that Bessy had never known how to bear pain, and that her own sensations had always formed the centre of her universe—yet, for that very reason, if the thought of seeing Amherst had made her happier it would have lifted, at least momentarily, the weight of death from her body.

Justine, at first, had almost feared the contrary effect—feared that the moral depression might show itself in a lowering of physical resistance. But the body kept up its obstinate struggle against death, drawing strength from sources of vitality unsuspected in that frail envelope. The surgeon's report the next day was more favourable, and every day won from death pointed now to a faint chance of recovery.

Such at least was Wyant's view. Dr. Garford and the consulting surgeons had not yet declared themselves; but the young doctor, strung to the highest point of watchfulness, and constantly in attendance on the patient, was tending toward a hopeful prognosis. The growing conviction spurred him to fresh efforts; at Dr. Garford's request, he had temporarily handed over his Clifton practice to a young New York doctor in need of change, and having installed himself at Lynbrook he gave up his days and nights to Mrs. Amherst's case.

"If any one can save her, Wyant will," Dr. Garford had declared to Justine, when, on the tenth day after the accident, the surgeons held their third consultation. Dr. Garford reserved his own judgment. He had seen cases—they had all seen cases...but just at present the signs might point either way.... Meanwhile Wyant's confidence was an invaluable asset toward the patient's chances of recovery. Hopefulness in the physician was almost as necessary as in the patient—contact with such faith had been known to work miracles.

Justine listened in silence, wishing that she too could hope. But whichever way the prognosis pointed, she felt only a dull despair. She believed no more than Dr. Garford in the chance of recovery—that conviction seemed to her a mirage of Wyant's imagination, of his boyish ambition to achieve the impossible—and every hopeful symptom pointed, in her mind, only to a longer period of useless suffering.

Her hours at Bessy's side deepened her revolt against the energy spent in the fight with death. Since Bessy had learned that her husband was returning she had never, by sign or word, reverted to the fact. Except for a gleam of tenderness, now and then, when Cicely was brought to her, she seemed to have sunk back into herself, as though her poor little flicker of consciousness were wholly centred in the contemplation of its pain. It was not that her mind was clouded—only that it was immersed, absorbed, in that dread mystery of disproportionate anguish which a capricious fate had laid on it.... And what if she recovered, as they called it? If the flood-tide of pain should ebb, leaving her stranded, a helpless wreck on the desert shores of inactivity? What would life be to Bessy without movement? Thought would never set her blood flowing—motion, in her, could only take the form of the physical processes. Her love for Amherst was dead—even if it flickered into life again, it could but put the spark to smouldering discords and resentments; and would her one uncontaminated sentiment—her affection for Cicely—suffice to reconcile her to the desolate half-life which was the utmost that science could hold out?

Here again, Justine's experience answered no. She did not believe in Bessy's powers of moral recuperation—her body seemed less near death than her spirit. Life had been poured out to her in generous measure, and she had spilled the precious draught—the few drops remaining in the cup could no longer renew her strength.

Pity, not condemnation—profound illimitable pity—flowed from this conclusion of Justine's. To a compassionate heart there could be no sadder instance of the wastefulness of life than this struggle of the small half-formed soul with a destiny too heavy for its strength. If Bessy had had any moral hope to fight for, every pang of suffering would have been worth enduring; but it was intolerable to witness the spectacle of her useless pain.

Incessant commerce with such thoughts made Justine, as the days passed, crave any escape from solitude, any contact with other ideas. Even the reappearance of Westy Gaines, bringing a breath of common-place conventional grief into the haunted silence of the house, was a respite from her questionings. If it was hard to talk to him, to answer his enquiries, to assent to his platitudes, it was harder, a thousand times, to go on talking to herself....

Mr. Tredegar's coming was a distinct relief. His dryness was like cautery to her wound. Mr. Tredegar undoubtedly grieved for Bessy; but his grief struck inward, exuding only now and then, through the fissures of his hard manner, in a touch of extra solemnity, the more laboured rounding of a period. Yet, on the whole, it was to his feeling that Justine felt her own to be most akin. If his stoic acceptance of the inevitable proceeded from the resolve to spare himself pain, that at least was a form of strength, an indication of character. She had never cared for the fluencies of invertebrate sentiment.

Now, on the evening of the day after her talk with Bessy, it was more than ever a solace to escape from the torment of her thoughts into the rarefied air of Mr. Tredegar's presence. The day had been a bad one for the patient, and Justine's distress had been increased by the receipt of a cable from Mr. Langhope, announcing that, owing to delay in reaching Brindisi, he had missed the fast steamer from Cherbourg, and would not arrive till four or five days later than he had expected. Mr. Tredegar, in response to her report, had announced his intention of coming down by a late train, and now he and Justine and Dr. Wyant, after dining together, were seated before the fire in the smoking-room.

"I take it, then," Mr. Tredegar said, turning to Wyant, "that the chances of her living to see her father are very slight."

The young doctor raised his head eagerly. "Not in my opinion, sir. Unless unforeseen complications arise, I can almost promise to keep her alive for another month—I'm not afraid to call it six weeks!"

"H'm—Garford doesn't say so."

"No; Dr. Garford argues from precedent."

"And you?" Mr. Tredegar's thin lips were visited by the ghost of a smile.

"Oh, I don't argue—I just feel my way," said Wyant imperturbably.

"And yet you don't hesitate to predict——"

"No, I don't, sir; because the case, as I see it, presents certain definite indications." He began to enumerate them, cleverly avoiding the use of technicalities and trying to make his point clear by the use of simple illustration and analogy. It sickened Justine to listen to his passionate exposition—she had heard it so often, she believed in it so little.

Mr. Tredegar turned a probing glance on him as he ended. "Then, today even, you believe not only in the possibility of prolonging life, but of ultimate recovery?"

Wyant hesitated. "I won't call it recovery—today. Say—life indefinitely prolonged."

"And the paralysis?"

"It might disappear—after a few months—or a few years."

"Such an outcome would be unusual?"

"Exceptional. But then there are exceptions. And I'm straining every nerve to make this one!"

"And the suffering—such as today's, for instance—is unavoidable?"

"Unhappily."

"And bound to increase?"

"Well—as the anaesthetics lose their effect...."

There was a tap on the door, and one of the nurses entered to report to Wyant. He went out with her, and Justine was left with Mr. Tredegar.

He turned to her thoughtfully. "That young fellow seems sure of himself. You believe in him?"

Justine hesitated. "Not in his expectation of recovery—no one does."

"But you think they can keep the poor child alive till Langhope and her husband get back?"

There was a moment's pause; then Justine murmured: "It can be done...I think...."

"Yes—it's horrible," said Mr. Tredegar suddenly, as if in answer to her thought.

She looked up in surprise, and saw his eye resting on her with what seemed like a mist of sympathy on its vitreous surface. Her lips trembled, parting as if for speech—but she looked away without answering.

"These new devices for keeping people alive," Mr. Tredegar continued; "they increase the suffering besides prolonging it?"

"Yes—in some cases."

"In this case?"

"I am afraid so."

The lawyer drew out his fine cambric handkerchief, and furtively wiped a slight dampness from his forehead. "I wish to God she had been killed!" he said.

Justine lifted her head again, with an answering exclamation. "Oh, yes!"

"It's infernal—the time they can make it last."

"It's useless!" Justine broke out.

"Useless?" He turned his critical glance on her. "Well, that's beside the point—since it's inevitable."

She wavered a moment—but his words had loosened the bonds about her heart, and she could not check herself so suddenly. "Why inevitable?"

Mr. Tredegar looked at her in surprise, as though wondering at so unprofessional an utterance from one who, under ordinary circumstances, showed the absolute self-control and submission of the well-disciplined nurse.

"Human life is sacred," he said sententiously.

"Ah, that must have been decreed by some one who had never suffered!" Justine exclaimed.

Mr. Tredegar smiled compassionately: he evidently knew how to make allowances for the fact that she was overwrought by the sight of her friend's suffering: "Society decreed it—not one person," he corrected.

"Society—science—religion!" she murmured, as if to herself.

"Precisely. It's the universal consensus—the result of the world's accumulated experience. Cruel in individual instances—necessary for the general welfare. Of course your training has taught you all this; but I can understand that at such a time...."

"Yes," she said, rising wearily as Wyant came in.

* * * * *

Her worst misery, now, was to have to discuss Bessy's condition with Wyant. To the young physician Bessy was no longer a suffering, agonizing creature: she was a case—a beautiful case. As the problem developed new intricacies, becoming more and more of a challenge to his faculties of observation and inference, Justine saw the abstract scientific passion supersede his personal feeling of pity. Though his professional skill made him exquisitely tender to the patient under his hands, he seemed hardly conscious that she was a woman who had befriended him, and whom he had so lately seen in the brightness of health and enjoyment. This view was normal enough—it was, as Justine knew, the ideal state of mind for the successful physician, in whom sympathy for the patient as an individual must often impede swift choice and unfaltering action. But what she shrank from was his resolve to save Bessy's life—a resolve fortified to the point of exasperation by the scepticism of the consulting surgeons, who saw in it only the youngster's natural desire to distinguish himself by performing a feat which his elders deemed impossible.

As the days dragged on, and Bessy's sufferings increased, Justine longed for a protesting word from Dr. Garford or one of his colleagues. In her hospital experience she had encountered cases where the useless agonies of death were mercifully shortened by the physician; why was not this a case for such treatment? The answer was simple enough—in the first place, it was the duty of the surgeons to keep their patient alive till her husband and her father could reach her; and secondly, there was that faint illusive hope of so-called recovery, in which none of them believed, yet which they could not ignore in their treatment. The evening after Mr. Tredegar's departure Wyant was setting this forth at great length to Justine. Bessy had had a bad morning: the bronchial symptoms which had developed a day or two before had greatly increased her distress, and there had been, at dawn, a moment of weakness when it seemed that some pitiful power was about to defeat the relentless efforts of science. But Wyant had fought off the peril. By the prompt and audacious use of stimulants—by a rapid marshalling of resources, a display of self-reliance and authority, which Justine could not but admire as she mechanically seconded his efforts—the spark of life had been revived, and Bessy won back for fresh suffering.

"Yes—I say it can be done: tonight I say it more than ever," Wyant exclaimed, pushing the disordered hair from his forehead, and leaning toward Justine across the table on which their brief evening meal had been served. "I say the way the heart has rallied proves that we've got more strength to draw on than any of them have been willing to admit. The breathing's better too. If we can fight off the degenerative processes—and, by George, I believe we can!" He looked up suddenly at Justine. "With you to work with, I believe I could do anything. How you do back a man up! You think with your hands—with every individual finger!"

Justine turned her eyes away: she felt a shudder of repulsion steal over her tired body. It was not that she detected any note of personal admiration in his praise—he had commended her as the surgeon might commend a fine instrument fashioned for his use. But that she should be the instrument to serve such a purpose—that her skill, her promptness, her gift of divining and interpreting the will she worked with, should be at the service of this implacable scientific passion! Ah, no—she could be silent no longer....

She looked up at Wyant, and their eyes met.

"Why do you do it?" she asked.

He stared, as if thinking that she referred to some special point in his treatment. "Do what?"

"It's so useless...you all know she must die."

"I know nothing of the kind...and even the others are not so sure today." He began to go over it all again—repeating his arguments, developing new theories, trying to force into her reluctant mind his own faith in the possibility of success.

* * * * *

Justine sat resting her chin on her clasped hands, her eyes gazing straight before her under dark tormented brows. When he paused she remained silent.

"Well—don't you believe me?" he broke out with sudden asperity.

"I don't know...I can't tell...."

"But as long as there's a doubt, even—a doubt my way—and I'll show you there is, if you'll give me time——"

"How much time?" she murmured, without shifting her gaze.

"Ah—that depends on ourselves: on you and me chiefly. That's what Garford admits. They can't do much now—they've got to leave the game to us. It's a question of incessant vigilance...of utilizing every hour, every moment.... Time's all I ask, and you can give it to me, if any one can!"

Under the challenge of his tone Justine rose to her feet with a low murmur of fear. "Ah, don't ask me!"

"Don't ask you——?"

"I can't—I can't."

Wyant stood up also, turning on her an astonished glance.

"You can't what—?"

Their eyes met, and she thought she read in his a sudden divination of her inmost thoughts. The discovery electrified her flagging strength, restoring her to immediate clearness of brain. She saw the gulf of self-betrayal over which she had hung, and the nearness of the peril nerved her to a last effort of dissimulation.

"I can't...talk of it...any longer," she faltered, letting her tears flow, and turning on him a face of pure womanly weakness.

Wyant looked at her without answering. Did he distrust even these plain physical evidences of exhaustion, or was he merely disappointed in her, as in one whom he had believed to be above the emotional failings of her sex?

"You're over-tired," he said coldly. "Take tonight to rest. Miss Mace can replace you for the next few hours—and I may need you more tomorrow."



XXIX

FOUR more days had passed. Bessy seldom spoke when Justine was with her. She was wrapped in a thickening cloud of opiates—morphia by day, bromides, sulphonal, chloral hydrate at night. When the cloud broke and consciousness emerged, it was centred in the one acute point of bodily anguish. Darting throes of neuralgia, agonized oppression of the breath, the diffused misery of the whole helpless body—these were reducing their victim to a mere instrument on which pain played its incessant deadly variations. Once or twice she turned her dull eyes on Justine, breathing out: "I want to die," as some inevitable lifting or readjusting thrilled her body with fresh pangs; but there were no signs of contact with the outer world—she had ceased even to ask for Cicely....

And yet, according to the doctors, the patient held her own. Certain alarming symptoms had diminished, and while others persisted, the strength to fight them persisted too. With such strength to call on, what fresh agonies were reserved for the poor body when the narcotics had lost their power?

That was the question always before Justine. She never again betrayed her fears to Wyant—she carried out his orders with morbid precision, trembling lest any failure in efficiency should revive his suspicions. She hardly knew what she feared his suspecting—she only had a confused sense that they were enemies, and that she was the weaker of the two.

And then the anaesthetics began to fail. It was the sixteenth day since the accident, and the resources of alleviation were almost exhausted. It was not sure, even now, that Bessy was going to die—and she was certainly going to suffer a long time. Wyant seemed hardly conscious of the increase of pain—his whole mind was fixed on the prognosis. What matter if the patient suffered, as long as he proved his case? That, of course, was not his way of putting it. In reality, he did all he could to allay the pain, surpassed himself in new devices and experiments. But death confronted him implacably, claiming his due: so many hours robbed from him, so much tribute to pay; and Wyant, setting his teeth, fought on—and Bessy paid.

* * * * *

Justine had begun to notice that it was hard for her to get a word alone with Dr. Garford. The other nurses were not in the way—it was Wyant who always contrived to be there. Perhaps she was unreasonable in seeing a special intention in his presence: it was natural enough that the two persons in charge of the case should confer together with their chief. But his persistence annoyed her, and she was glad when, one afternoon, the surgeon asked him to telephone an important message to town.

As soon as the door had closed, Justine said to Dr. Garford: "She is beginning to suffer terribly."

He answered with the large impersonal gesture of the man to whom physical suffering has become a painful general fact of life, no longer divisible into individual cases. "We are doing all we can."

"Yes." She paused, and then raised her eyes to his dry kind face. "Is there any hope?"

Another gesture—the fatalistic sweep of the lifted palms. "The next ten days will tell—the fight is on, as Wyant says. And if any one can do it, that young fellow can. There's stuff in him—and infernal ambition."

"Yes: but do you believe she can live—?"

Dr. Garford smiled indulgently on such unprofessional insistence; but she was past wondering what they must all think of her.

"My dear Miss Brent," he said, "I have reached the age when one always leaves a door open to the unexpected."

As he spoke, a slight sound at her back made her turn. Wyant was behind her—he must have entered as she put her question. And he certainly could not have had time to descend the stairs, walk the length of the house, ring up New York, and deliver Dr Garford's message.... The same thought seemed to strike the surgeon. "Hello, Wyant?" he said.

"Line busy," said Wyant curtly.

* * * * *

About this time, Justine gave up her night vigils. She could no longer face the struggle of the dawn hour, when life ebbs lowest; and since her duties extended beyond the sick-room she could fairly plead that she was more needed about the house by day. But Wyant protested: he wanted her most at the difficult hour.

"You know you're taking a chance from her," he said, almost sternly.

"Oh, no——"

He looked at her searchingly. "You don't feel up to it?"

"No."

He turned away with a slight shrug; but she knew he resented her defection.

The day watches were miserable enough. It was the nineteenth day now; and Justine lay on the sofa in Amherst's sitting-room, trying to nerve herself for the nurse's summons. A page torn out of the calendar lay before her—she had been calculating again how many days must elapse before Mr. Langhope could arrive. Ten days—ten days and ten nights! And the length of the nights was double.... As for Amherst, it was impossible to set a date for his coming, for his steamer from Buenos Ayres called at various ports on the way northward, and the length of her stay at each was dependent on the delivery of freight, and on the dilatoriness of the South American official.

She threw down the calendar and leaned back, pressing her hands to her temples. Oh, for a word with Amherst—he alone would have understood what she was undergoing! Mr. Langhope's coming would make no difference—or rather, it would only increase the difficulty of the situation. Instinctively Justine felt that, though his heart would be wrung by the sight of Bessy's pain, his cry would be the familiar one, the traditional one: Keep her alive! Under his surface originality, his verbal audacities and ironies, Mr. Langhope was the creature of accepted forms, inherited opinions: he had never really thought for himself on any of the pressing problems of life.

But Amherst was different. Close contact with many forms of wretchedness had freed him from the bondage of accepted opinion. He looked at life through no eyes but his own; and what he saw, he confessed to seeing. He never tried to evade the consequences of his discoveries.

Justine's remembrance flew back to their first meeting at Hanaford, when his confidence in his own powers was still unshaken, his trust in others unimpaired. And, gradually, she began to relive each detail of their talk at Dillon's bedside—her first impression of him, as he walked down the ward; the first sound of his voice; her surprised sense of his authority; her almost involuntary submission to his will.... Then her thoughts passed on to their walk home from the hospital—she recalled his sober yet unsparing summary of the situation at Westmore, and the note of insight with which he touched on the hardships of the workers.... Then, word by word, their talk about Dillon came back...Amherst's indignation and pity...his shudder of revolt at the man's doom.

"In your work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?" And then, after her conventional murmur of protest: "To save what, when all the good of life is gone?"

To distract her thoughts she stretched her hand toward the book-case, taking out the first volume in reach—the little copy of Bacon. She leaned back, fluttering its pages aimlessly—so wrapped in her own misery that the meaning of the words could not reach her. It was useless to try to read: every perception of the outer world was lost in the hum of inner activity that made her mind like a forge throbbing with heat and noise. But suddenly her glance fell on some pencilled sentences on the fly-leaf. They were in Amherst's hand, and the sight arrested her as though she had heard him speak.

La vraie morale se moque de la morale....

We perish because we follow other men's examples....

Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae—bugbears to frighten children....

A rush of air seemed to have been let into her stifled mind. Were they his own thoughts? No—her memory recalled some confused association with great names. But at least they must represent his beliefs—must embody deeply-felt convictions—or he would scarcely have taken the trouble to record them.

She murmured over the last sentence once or twice: The opinions of the many—bugbears to frighten children.... Yes, she had often heard him speak of current judgments in that way...she had never known a mind so free from the spell of the Lamiae.

* * * * *

Some one knocked, and she put aside the book and rose to her feet. It was a maid bringing a note from Wyant.

"There has been a motor accident beyond Clifton, and I have been sent for. I think I can safely be away for two or three hours, but ring me up at Clifton if you want me. Miss Mace has instructions, and Garford's assistant will be down at seven."

She looked at the clock: it was just three, the hour at which she was to relieve Miss Mace. She smoothed the hair from her forehead, straightened her cap, tied on the apron she had laid aside....

As she entered Bessy's sitting-room the nurse came out, memoranda in hand. The two moved to the window for a moment's conference, and as the wintry light fell on Miss Mace's face, Justine saw that it was white with fatigue.

"You're ill!" she exclaimed.

The nurse shook her head. "No—but it's awful...this afternoon...." Her glance turned to the sick-room.

"Go and rest—I'll stay till bedtime," Justine said.

"Miss Safford's down with another headache."

"I know: it doesn't matter. I'm quite fresh."

"You do look rested!" the other exclaimed, her eyes lingering enviously on Justine's face.

She stole away, and Justine entered the room. It was true that she felt fresh—a new spring of hope had welled up in her. She had her nerves in hand again, she had regained her steady vision of life....

But in the room, as the nurse had said, it was awful. The time had come when the effect of the anaesthetics must be carefully husbanded, when long intervals of pain must purchase the diminishing moments of relief. Yet from Wyant's standpoint it was a good day—things were looking well, as he would have phrased it. And each day now was a fresh victory.

Justine went through her task mechanically. The glow of strength and courage remained, steeling her to bear what had broken down Miss Mace's professional fortitude. But when she sat down by the bed Bessy's moaning began to wear on her. It was no longer the utterance of human pain, but the monotonous whimper of an animal—the kind of sound that a compassionate hand would instinctively crush into silence. But her hand had other duties; she must keep watch on pulse and heart, must reinforce their action with the tremendous stimulants which Wyant was now using, and, having revived fresh sensibility to pain, must presently try to allay it by the cautious use of narcotics.

It was all simple enough—but suppose she should not do it? Suppose she left the stimulants untouched? Wyant was absent, one nurse exhausted with fatigue, the other laid low by headache. Justine had the field to herself. For three hours at least no one was likely to cross the threshold of the sick-room.... Ah, if no more time were needed! But there was too much life in Bessy—her youth was fighting too hard for her! She would not sink out of life in three hours...and Justine could not count on more than that.

She looked at the little travelling-clock on the dressing-table, and saw that its hands marked four. An hour had passed already.... She rose and administered the prescribed restorative; then she took the pulse, and listened to the beat of the heart. Strong still—too strong!

As she lifted her head, the vague animal wailing ceased, and she heard her name: "Justine——"

She bent down eagerly. "Yes?"

No answer: the wailing had begun again. But the one word showed her that the mind still lived in its torture-house, that the poor powerless body before her was not yet a mere bundle of senseless reflexes, but her friend Bessy Amherst, dying, and feeling herself die....

Justine reseated herself, and the vigil began again. The second hour ebbed slowly—ah, no, it was flying now! Her eyes were on the hands of the clock and they seemed leagued against her to devour the precious minutes. And now she could see by certain spasmodic symptoms that another crisis of pain was approaching—one of the struggles that Wyant, at times, had almost seemed to court and exult in.

Bessy's eyes turned on her again. "Justine——"

She knew what that meant: it was an appeal for the hypodermic needle. The little instrument lay at hand, beside a newly-filled bottle of morphia. But she must wait—must let the pain grow more severe. Yet she could not turn her gaze from Bessy, and Bessy's eyes entreated her again—Justine! There was really no word now—the whimperings were uninterrupted. But Justine heard an inner voice, and its pleading shook her heart. She rose and filled the syringe—and returning with it, bent above the bed....

* * * * *

She lifted her head and looked at the clock. The second hour had passed. As she looked, she heard a step in the sitting-room. Who could it be? Not Dr. Garford's assistant—he was not due till seven. She listened again.... One of the nurses? No, not a woman's step——

The door opened, and Wyant came in. Justine stood by the bed without moving toward him. He paused also, as if surprised to see her there motionless. In the intense silence she fancied for a moment that she heard Bessy's violent agonized breathing. She tried to speak, to drown the sound of the breathing; but her lips trembled too much, and she remained silent.

Wyant seemed to hear nothing. He stood so still that she felt she must move forward. As she did so, she picked up from the table by the bed the memoranda that it was her duty to submit to him.

"Well?" he said, in the familiar sick-room whisper.

"She is dead."

He fell back a step, glaring at her, white and incredulous.

"Dead?—When——?"

"A few minutes ago...."

"Dead—? It's not possible!"

He swept past her, shouldering her aside, pushing in an electric button as he sprang to the bed. She perceived then that the room had been almost in darkness. She recovered command of herself, and followed him. He was going through the usual rapid examination—pulse, heart, breath—hanging over the bed like some angry animal balked of its prey. Then he lifted the lids and bent close above the eyes.

"Take the shade off that lamp!" he commanded.

Justine obeyed him.

He stooped down again to examine the eyes...he remained stooping a long time. Suddenly he stood up and faced her.

"Had she been in great pain?"

"Yes."

"Worse than usual?"

"Yes."

"What had you done?"

"Nothing—there was no time."

"No time?" He broke off to sweep the room again with his excited incredulous glance. "Where are the others? Why were you here alone?" he demanded.

"It came suddenly. I was going to call——"

Their eyes met for a moment. Her face was perfectly calm—she could feel that her lips no longer trembled. She was not in the least afraid of Wyant's scrutiny.

As he continued to look at her, his expression slowly passed from incredulous wrath to something softer—more human—she could not tell what....

"This has been too much for you—go and send one of the others.... It's all over," he said.



BOOK IV



XXX

ON a September day, somewhat more than a year and a half after Bessy Amherst's death, her husband and his mother sat at luncheon in the dining-room of the Westmore house at Hanaford.

The house was John Amherst's now, and shortly after the loss of his wife he had established himself there with his mother. By a will made some six months before her death, Bessy had divided her estate between her husband and daughter, placing Cicely's share in trust, and appointing Mr. Langhope and Amherst as her guardians. As the latter was also her trustee, the whole management of the estate devolved on him, while his control of the Westmore mills was ensured by his receiving a slightly larger proportion of the stock than his step-daughter.

The will had come as a surprise, not only to Amherst himself, but to his wife's family, and more especially to her legal adviser. Mr. Tredegar had in fact had nothing to do with the drawing of the instrument; but as it had been drawn in due form, and by a firm of excellent standing, he was obliged, in spite of his private views, and Mr. Langhope's open adjurations that he should "do something," to declare that there was no pretext for questioning the validity of the document.

To Amherst the will was something more than a proof of his wife's confidence: it came as a reconciling word from her grave. For the date showed that it had been made at a moment when he supposed himself to have lost all influence over her—on the morrow of the day when she had stipulated that he should give up the management of the Westmore mills, and yield the care of her property to Mr. Tredegar.

While she smote him with one hand, she sued for pardon with the other; and the contradiction was so characteristic, it explained and excused in so touching a way the inconsistencies of her impulsive heart and hesitating mind, that he was filled with that tender compunction, that searching sense of his own shortcomings, which generous natures feel when they find they have underrated the generosity of others. But Amherst's was not an introspective mind, and his sound moral sense told him, when the first pang of self-reproach had subsided, that he had done his best by his wife, and was in no way to blame if her recognition of the fact had come too late. The self-reproach subsided; and, instead of the bitterness of the past, it left a softened memory which made him take up his task with the sense that he was now working with Bessy and not against her.

Yet perhaps, after all, it was chiefly the work itself which had healed old wounds, and quelled the tendency to vain regrets. Amherst was only thirty-four; and in the prime of his energies the task he was made for had been given back to him. To a sound nature, which finds its outlet in fruitful action, nothing so simplifies the complexities of life, so tends to a large acceptance of its vicissitudes and mysteries, as the sense of doing something each day toward clearing one's own bit of the wilderness. And this was the joy at last conceded to Amherst. The mills were virtually his; and the fact that he ruled them not only in his own right but as Cicely's representative, made him doubly eager to justify his wife's trust in him.

Mrs. Amherst, looking up from a telegram which the parlour-maid had handed her, smiled across the table at her son.

"From Maria Ansell—they are all coming tomorrow."

"Ah—that's good," Amherst rejoined. "I should have been sorry if Cicely had not been here."

"Mr. Langhope is coming too," his mother continued. "I'm glad of that, John."

"Yes," Amherst again assented.

The morrow was to be a great day at Westmore. The Emergency Hospital, planned in the first months of his marriage, and abandoned in the general reduction of expenditure at the mills, had now been completed on a larger and more elaborate scale, as a memorial to Bessy. The strict retrenchment of all personal expenses, and the leasing of Lynbrook and the town house, had enabled Amherst, in eighteen months, to lay by enough income to carry out this plan, which he was impatient to see executed as a visible commemoration of his wife's generosity to Westmore. For Amherst persisted in regarding the gift of her fortune as a gift not to himself but to the mills: he looked on himself merely as the agent of her beneficent intentions. He was anxious that Westmore and Hanaford should take the same view; and the opening of the Westmore Memorial Hospital was therefore to be performed with an unwonted degree of ceremony.

"I am glad Mr. Langhope is coming," Mrs. Amherst repeated, as they rose from the table. "It shows, dear—doesn't it?—that he's really gratified—that he appreciates your motive...."

She raised a proud glance to her tall son, whose head seemed to tower higher than ever above her small proportions. Renewed self-confidence, and the habit of command, had in fact restored the erectness to Amherst's shoulders and the clearness to his eyes. The cleft between the brows was gone, and his veiled inward gaze had given place to a glance almost as outward-looking and unspeculative as his mother's.

"It shows—well, yes—what you say!" he rejoined with a slight laugh, and a tap on her shoulder as she passed.

He was under no illusions as to his father-in-law's attitude: he knew that Mr. Langhope would willingly have broken the will which deprived his grand-daughter of half her inheritance, and that his subsequent show of friendliness was merely a concession to expediency. But in his present mood Amherst almost believed that time and closer relations might turn such sentiments into honest liking. He was very fond of his little step-daughter, and deeply sensible of his obligations toward her; and he hoped that, as Mr. Langhope came to recognize this, it might bring about a better understanding between them.

His mother detained him. "You're going back to the mills at once? I wanted to consult you about the rooms. Miss Brent had better be next to Cicely?"

"I suppose so—yes. I'll see you before I go." He nodded affectionately and passed on, his hands full of papers, into the Oriental smoking-room, now dedicated to the unexpected uses of an office and study.

Mrs. Amherst, as she turned away, found the parlour-maid in the act of opening the front door to the highly-tinted and well-dressed figure of Mrs. Harry Dressel.

"I'm so delighted to hear that you're expecting Justine," began Mrs. Dressel as the two ladies passed into the drawing-room.

"Ah, you've heard too?" Mrs. Amherst rejoined, enthroning her visitor in one of the monumental plush armchairs beneath the threatening weight of the Bay of Naples.

"I hadn't till this moment; in fact I flew in to ask for news, and on the door-step there was such a striking-looking young man enquiring for her, and I heard the parlour-maid say she was arriving tomorrow."

"A young man? Some one you didn't know?" Striking apparitions of the male sex were of infrequent occurrence at Hanaford, and Mrs. Amherst's unabated interest in the movement of life caused her to dwell on this statement.

"Oh, no—I'm sure he was a stranger. Extremely slight and pale, with remarkable eyes. He was so disappointed—he seemed sure of finding her."

"Well, no doubt he'll come back tomorrow.—You know we're expecting the whole party," added Mrs. Amherst, to whom the imparting of good news was always an irresistible temptation.

Mrs. Dressel's interest deepened at once. "Really? Mr. Langhope too?"

"Yes. It's a great pleasure to my son."

"It must be! I'm so glad. I suppose in a way it will be rather sad for Mr. Langhope—seeing everything here so unchanged——"

Mrs. Amherst straightened herself a little. "I think he will prefer to find it so," she said, with a barely perceptible change of tone.

"Oh, I don't know. They were never very fond of this house."

There was an added note of authority in Mrs. Dressel's accent. In the last few months she had been to Europe and had had nervous prostration, and these incontestable evidences of growing prosperity could not always be kept out of her voice and bearing. At any rate, they justified her in thinking that her opinion on almost any subject within the range of human experience was a valuable addition to the sum-total of wisdom; and unabashed by the silence with which her comment was received, she continued her critical survey of the drawing-room.

"Dear Mrs. Amherst—you know I can't help saying what I think—and I've so often wondered why you don't do this room over. With these high ceilings you could do something lovely in Louis Seize."

A faint pink rose to Mrs. Amherst's cheeks. "I don't think my son would ever care to make any changes here," she said.

"Oh, I understand his feeling; but when he begins to entertain—and you know poor Bessy always hated this furniture."

Mrs. Amherst smiled slightly. "Perhaps if he marries again—" she said, seizing at random on a pretext for changing the subject.

Mrs. Dressel dropped the hands with which she was absent-mindedly assuring herself of the continuance of unbroken relations between her hat and her hair.

"Marries again? Why—you don't mean—? He doesn't think of it?"

"Not in the least—I spoke figuratively," her hostess rejoined with a laugh.

"Oh, of course—I see. He really couldn't marry, could he? I mean, it would be so wrong to Cicely—under the circumstances."

Mrs. Amherst's black eye-brows gathered in a slight frown. She had already noticed, on the part of the Hanaford clan, a disposition to regard Amherst as imprisoned in the conditions of his trust, and committed to the obligation of handing on unimpaired to Cicely the fortune his wife's caprice had bestowed on him; and this open expression of the family view was singularly displeasing to her.

"I had not thought of it in that light—but it's really of no consequence how one looks at a thing that is not going to happen," she said carelessly.

"No—naturally; I see you were only joking. He's so devoted to Cicely, isn't he?" Mrs. Dressel rejoined, with her bright obtuseness.

A step on the threshold announced Amherst's approach.

"I'm afraid I must be off, mother—" he began, halting in the doorway with the instinctive masculine recoil from the afternoon caller.

"Oh, Mr. Amherst, how d'you do? I suppose you're very busy about tomorrow? I just flew in to find out if Justine was really coming," Mrs. Dressel explained, a little fluttered by the effort of recalling what she had been saying when he entered.

"I believe my mother expects the whole party," Amherst replied, shaking hands with the false bonhomie of the man entrapped.

"How delightful! And it's so nice to think that Mr. Langhope's arrangement with Justine still works so well," Mrs. Dressel hastened on, nervously hoping that her volubility would smother any recollection of what he had chanced to overhear.

"Mr. Langhope is lucky in having persuaded Miss Brent to take charge of Cicely," Mrs. Amherst quietly interposed.

"Yes—and it was so lucky for Justine too! When she came back from Europe with us last autumn, I could see she simply hated the idea of taking up her nursing again."

Amherst's face darkened at the allusion, and his mother said hurriedly: "Ah, she was tired, poor child; but I'm only afraid that, after the summer's rest, she may want some more active occupation than looking after a little girl."

"Oh, I think not—she's so fond of Cicely. And of course it's everything to her to have a comfortable home."

Mrs. Amherst smiled. "At her age, it's not always everything."

Mrs. Dressel stared slightly. "Oh, Justine's twenty-seven, you know; she's not likely to marry now," she said, with the mild finality of the early-wedded.

She rose as she spoke, extending cordial hands of farewell. "You must be so busy preparing for the great day...if only it doesn't rain!... No, please, Mr. Amherst!... It's a mere step—I'm walking...."

* * * * *

That afternoon, as Amherst walked out toward Westmore for a survey of the final preparations, he found that, among the pleasant thoughts accompanying him, one of the pleasantest was the anticipation of seeing Justine Brent.

Among the little group who were to surround him on the morrow, she was the only one discerning enough to understand what the day meant to him, or with sufficient knowledge to judge of the use he had made of his great opportunity. Even now that the opportunity had come, and all obstacles were levelled, sympathy with his work was as much lacking as ever; and only Duplain, at length reinstated as manager, really understood and shared in his aims. But Justine Brent's sympathy was of a different kind from the manager's. If less logical, it was warmer, more penetrating—like some fine imponderable fluid, so subtle that it could always find a way through the clumsy processes of human intercourse. Amherst had thought very often of this quality in her during the weeks which followed his abrupt departure for Georgia; and in trying to define it he had said to himself that she felt with her brain.

And now, aside from the instinctive understanding between them, she was set apart in his thoughts by her association with his wife's last days. On his arrival from the south he had gathered on all sides evidences of her tender devotion to Bessy: even Mr. Tredegar's chary praise swelled the general commendation. From the surgeons he heard how her unwearied skill had helped them in their fruitless efforts; poor Cicely, awed by her loss, clung to her mother's friend with childish tenacity; and the young rector of Saint Anne's, shyly acquitting himself of his visit of condolence, dwelt chiefly on the consolatory thought of Miss Brent's presence at the death-bed.

The knowledge that Justine had been with his wife till the end had, in fact, done more than anything else to soften Amherst's regrets; and he had tried to express something of this in the course of his first talk with her. Justine had given him a clear and self-possessed report of the dreadful weeks at Lynbrook; but at his first allusion to her own part in them, she shrank into a state of distress which seemed to plead with him to refrain from even the tenderest touch on her feelings. It was a peculiarity of their friendship that silence and absence had always mysteriously fostered its growth; and he now felt that her reticence deepened the understanding between them as the freest confidences might not have done.

Soon afterward, an opportune attack of nervous prostration had sent Mrs. Harry Dressel abroad; and Justine was selected as her companion. They remained in Europe for six months; and on their return Amherst learned with pleasure that Mr. Langhope had asked Miss Brent to take charge of Cicely.

Mr. Langhope's sorrow for his daughter had been aggravated by futile wrath at her unaccountable will; and the mixed sentiment thus engendered had found expression in a jealous outpouring of affection toward Cicely. He took immediate possession of the child, and in the first stages of his affliction her companionship had been really consoling. But as time passed, and the pleasant habits of years reasserted themselves, her presence became, in small unacknowledged ways, a source of domestic irritation. Nursery hours disturbed the easy routine of his household; the elderly parlour-maid who had long ruled it resented the intervention of Cicely's nurse; the little governess, involved in the dispute, broke down and had to be shipped home to Germany; a successor was hard to find, and in the interval Mr. Langhope's privacy was invaded by a stream of visiting teachers, who were always wanting to consult him about Cicely's lessons, and lay before him their tiresome complaints and perplexities. Poor Mr. Langhope found himself in the position of the mourner who, in the first fervour of bereavement, has undertaken the construction of an imposing monument without having counted the cost. He had meant that his devotion to Cicely should be a monument to his paternal grief; but the foundations were scarcely laid when he found that the funds of time and patience were almost exhausted.

Pride forbade his consigning Cicely to her step-father, though Mrs. Amherst would gladly have undertaken her care; Mrs. Ansell's migratory habits made it impossible for her to do more than intermittently hover and advise; and a new hope rose before Mr. Langhope when it occurred to him to appeal to Miss Brent.

The experiment had proved a success, and when Amherst met Justine again she had been for some months in charge of the little girl, and change and congenial occupation had restored her to a normal view of life. There was no trace in her now of the dumb misery which had haunted him at their parting; she was again the vivid creature who seemed more charged with life than any one he had ever known. The crisis through which she had passed showed itself only in a smoothing of the brow and deepening of the eyes, as though a bloom of experience had veiled without deadening the first brilliancy of youth.

As he lingered on the image thus evoked, he recalled Mrs. Dressel's words: "Justine is twenty-seven—she's not likely to marry now."

Oddly enough, he had never thought of her marrying—but now that he heard the possibility questioned, he felt a disagreeable conviction of its inevitableness. Mrs. Dressel's view was of course absurd. In spite of Justine's feminine graces, he had formerly felt in her a kind of elfin immaturity, as of a flitting Ariel with untouched heart and senses: it was only of late that she had developed the subtle quality which calls up thoughts of love. Not marry? Why, the vagrant fire had just lighted on her—and the fact that she was poor and unattached, with her own way to make, and no setting of pleasure and elegance to embellish her—these disadvantages seemed as nothing to Amherst against the warmth of personality in which she moved. And besides, she would never be drawn to the kind of man who needed fine clothes and luxury to point him to the charm of sex. She was always finished and graceful in appearance, with the pretty woman's art of wearing her few plain dresses as if they were many and varied; yet no one could think of her as attaching much importance to the upholstery of life.... No, the man who won her would be of a different type, have other inducements to offer...and Amherst found himself wondering just what those inducements would be.

Suddenly he remembered something his mother had said as he left the house—something about a distinguished-looking young man who had called to ask for Miss Brent. Mrs. Amherst, innocently inquisitive in small matters, had followed her son into the hall to ask the parlour-maid if the gentleman had left his name; and the parlour-maid had answered in the negative. The young man was evidently not indigenous: all the social units of Hanaford were intimately known to each other. He was a stranger, therefore, presumably drawn there by the hope of seeing Miss Brent. But if he knew that she was coming he must be intimately acquainted with her movements.... The thought came to Amherst as an unpleasant surprise. It showed him for the first time how little he knew of Justine's personal life, of the ties she might have formed outside the Lynbrook circle. After all, he had seen her chiefly not among her own friends but among his wife's. Was it reasonable to suppose that a creature of her keen individuality would be content to subsist on the fringe of other existences? Somewhere, of course, she must have a centre of her own, must be subject to influences of which he was wholly ignorant. And since her departure from Lynbrook he had known even less of her life. She had spent the previous winter with Mr. Langhope in New York, where Amherst had seen her only on his rare visits to Cicely; and Mr. Langhope, on going abroad for the summer, had established his grand-daughter in a Bar Harbour cottage, where, save for two flying visits from Mrs. Ansell, Miss Brent had reigned alone till his return in September.

Very likely, Amherst reflected, the mysterious visitor was a Bar Harbour acquaintance—no, more than an acquaintance: a friend. And as Mr. Langhope's party had left Mount Desert but three days previously, the arrival of the unknown at Hanaford showed a singular impatience to rejoin Miss Brent.

As he reached this point in his meditations, Amherst found himself at the street-corner where it was his habit to pick up the Westmore trolley. Just as it bore down on him, and he sprang to the platform, another car, coming in from the mills, stopped to discharge its passengers. Among them Amherst noticed a slender undersized man in shabby clothes, about whose retreating back, as he crossed the street to signal a Station Avenue car, there was something dimly familiar, and suggestive of troubled memories. Amherst leaned out and looked again: yes, the back was certainly like Dr. Wyant's—but what could Wyant be doing at Hanaford, and in a Westmore car?

Amherst's first impulse was to spring out and overtake him. He knew how admirably the young physician had borne himself at Lynbrook; he even recalled Dr. Garford's saying, with his kindly sceptical smile: "Poor Wyant believed to the end that we could save her"—and felt again his own inward movement of thankfulness that the cruel miracle had not been worked.

He owed a great deal to Wyant, and had tried to express his sense of the fact by warm words and a liberal fee; but since Bessy's death he had never returned to Lynbrook, and had consequently lost sight of the young doctor.

Now he felt that he ought to try to rejoin him, to find out why he was at Hanaford, and make some proffer of hospitality; but if the stranger were really Wyant, his choice of the Station Avenue car made it appear that he was on his way to catch the New York express; and in any case Amherst's engagements at Westmore made immediate pursuit impossible.

He consoled himself with the thought that if the physician was not leaving Hanaford he would be certain to call at the house; and then his mind flew back to Justine Brent. But the pleasure of looking forward to her arrival was disturbed by new feelings. A sense of reserve and embarrassment had sprung up in his mind, checking that free mental communion which, as he now perceived, had been one of the unconscious promoters of their friendship. It was as though his thoughts faced a stranger instead of the familiar presence which had so long dwelt in them; and he began to see that the feeling of intelligence existing between Justine and himself was not the result of actual intimacy, but merely of the charm she knew how to throw over casual intercourse.

When he had left his house, his mind was like a summer sky, all open blue and sunlit rolling clouds; but gradually the clouds had darkened and massed themselves, till they drew an impenetrable veil over the upper light and stretched threateningly across his whole horizon.



XXXI

THE celebrations at Westmore were over. Hanaford society, mustering for the event, had streamed through the hospital, inspected the clinic, complimented Amherst, recalled itself to Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell, and streamed out again to regain its carriages and motors.

The chief actors in the ceremony were also taking leave. Mr. Langhope, somewhat pale and nervous after the ordeal, had been helped into the Gaines landau with Mrs. Ansell and Cicely; Mrs. Amherst had accepted a seat in the Dressel victoria; and Westy Gaines, with an empressement slightly tinged by condescension, was in the act of placing his electric phaeton at Miss Brent's disposal.

She stood in the pretty white porch of the hospital, looking out across its squares of flower-edged turf at the long street of Westmore. In the warm gold-powdered light of September the factory town still seemed a blot on the face of nature; yet here and there, on all sides, Justine's eye saw signs of humanizing change. The rough banks along the street had been levelled and sodded; young maples, set in rows, already made a long festoon of gold against the dingy house-fronts; and the houses themselves—once so irreclaimably outlawed and degraded—showed, in their white-curtained windows, their flowery white-railed yards, a growing approach to civilized human dwellings.

Glancing the other way, one still met the grim pile of factories cutting the sky with their harsh roof-lines and blackened chimneys; but here also were signs of improvement. One of the mills had already been enlarged, another was scaffolded for the same purpose, and young trees and neatly-fenced turf replaced the surrounding desert of trampled earth.

As Amherst came out of the hospital, he heard Miss Brent declining a seat in Westy's phaeton.

"Thank you so much; but there's some one here I want to see first—one of the operatives—and I can easily take a Hanaford car." She held out her hand with the smile that ran like colour over her whole face; and Westy, nettled by this unaccountable disregard of her privileges, mounted his chariot alone.

As he glided mournfully away, Amherst turned to Justine. "You wanted to see the Dillons?" he asked.

Their eyes met, and she smiled again. He had never seen her so sunned-over, so luminous, since the distant November day when they had picnicked with Cicely beside the swamp. He wondered vaguely if she were more elaborately dressed than usual, or if the festal impression she produced were simply a reflection of her mood.

"I do want to see the Dillons—how did you guess?" she rejoined; and Amherst felt a sudden impulse to reply: "For the same reason that made you think of them."

The fact of her remembering the Dillons made him absurdly happy; it re-established between them the mental communion that had been checked by his thoughts of the previous day.

"I suppose I'm rather self-conscious about the Dillons, because they're one of my object lessons—they illustrate the text," he said laughing, as they went down the steps.

Westmore had been given a half-holiday for the opening of the hospital, and as Amherst and Justine turned into the street, parties of workers were dispersing toward their houses. They were still a dull-eyed stunted throng, to whom air and movement seemed to have been too long denied; but there was more animation in the groups, more light in individual faces; many of the younger men returned Amherst's good-day with a look of friendliness, and the women to whom he spoke met him with a volubility that showed the habit of frequent intercourse.

"How much you have done!" Justine exclaimed, as he rejoined her after one of these asides; but the next moment he saw a shade of embarrassment cross her face, as though she feared to have suggested comparisons she had meant to avoid.

He answered quite naturally: "Yes—I'm beginning to see my way now; and it's wonderful how they respond—" and they walked on without a shadow of constraint between them, while he described to her what was already done, and what direction his projected experiments were taking.

The Dillons had been placed in charge of one of the old factory tenements, now transformed into a lodging-house for unmarried operatives. Even its harsh brick exterior, hung with creepers and brightened by flower-borders, had taken on a friendly air; and indoors it had a clean sunny kitchen, a big dining-room with cheerful-coloured walls, and a room where the men could lounge and smoke about a table covered with papers.

The creation of these model lodging-houses had always been a favourite scheme of Amherst's, and the Dillons, incapacitated for factory work, had shown themselves admirably adapted to their new duties. In Mrs. Dillon's small hot sitting-room, among the starched sofa-tidies and pink shells that testified to the family prosperity, Justine shone with enjoyment and sympathy. She had always taken an interest in the lives and thoughts of working-people: not so much the constructive interest of the sociological mind as the vivid imaginative concern of a heart open to every human appeal. She liked to hear about their hard struggles and small pathetic successes: the children's sicknesses, the father's lucky job, the little sum they had been able to put by, the plans they had formed for Tommy's advancement, and how Sue's good marks at school were still ahead of Mrs. Hagan's Mary's.

"What I really like is to gossip with them, and give them advice about the baby's cough, and the cheapest way to do their marketing," she said laughing, as she and Amherst emerged once more into the street. "It's the same kind of interest I used to feel in my dolls and guinea pigs—a managing, interfering old maid's interest. I don't believe I should care a straw for them if I couldn't dose them and order them about."

Amherst laughed too: he recalled the time when he had dreamed that just such warm personal sympathy was her sex's destined contribution to the broad work of human beneficence. Well, it had not been a dream: here was a woman whose deeds spoke for her. And suddenly the thought came to him: what might they not do at Westmore together! The brightness of it was blinding—like the dazzle of sunlight which faced them as they walked toward the mills. But it left him speechless, confused—glad to have a pretext for routing Duplain out of the office, introducing him to Miss Brent, and asking him for the keys of the buildings....

It was wonderful, again, how she grasped what he was doing in the mills, and saw how his whole scheme hung together, harmonizing the work and leisure of the operatives, instead of treating them as half machine, half man, and neglecting the man for the machine. Nor was she content with Utopian generalities: she wanted to know the how and why of each case, to hear what conclusions he drew from his results, to what solutions his experiments pointed.

In explaining the mill work he forgot his constraint and returned to the free comradery of mind that had always marked their relation. He turned the key reluctantly in the last door, and paused a moment on the threshold.

"Anything more?" he said, with a laugh meant to hide his desire to prolong their tour.

She glanced up at the sun, which still swung free of the tall factory roofs.

"As much as you've time for. Cicely doesn't need me this afternoon, and I can't tell when I shall see Westmore again."

Her words fell on him with a chill. His smile faded, and he looked away for a moment.

"But I hope Cicely will be here often," he said.

"Oh, I hope so too," she rejoined, with seeming unconsciousness of any connection between the wish and her previous words.

Amherst hesitated. He had meant to propose a visit to the old Eldorado building, which now at last housed the long-desired night-schools and nursery; but since she had spoken he felt a sudden indifference to showing her anything more. What was the use, if she meant to leave Cicely, and drift out of his reach? He could get on well enough without sympathy and comprehension, but his momentary indulgence in them made the ordinary taste of life a little flat.

"There must be more to see?" she continued, as they turned back toward the village; and he answered absently: "Oh, yes—if you like."

He heard the change in his own voice, and knew by her quick side-glance that she had heard it too.

"Please let me see everything that is compatible with my getting a car to Hanaford by six."

"Well, then—the night-school next," he said with an effort at lightness; and to shake off the importunity of his own thoughts he added carelessly, as they walked on: "By the way—it seems improbable—but I think I saw Dr. Wyant yesterday in a Westmore car."

She echoed the name in surprise. "Dr. Wyant? Really! Are you sure?"

"Not quite; but if it wasn't he it was his ghost. You haven't heard of his being at Hanaford?"

"No. I've heard nothing of him for ages."

Something in her tone made him return her side-glance; but her voice, on closer analysis, denoted only indifference, and her profile seemed to express the same negative sentiment. He remembered a vague Lynbrook rumour to the effect that the young doctor had been attracted to Miss Brent. Such floating seeds of gossip seldom rooted themselves in his mind, but now the fact acquired a new significance, and he wondered how he could have thought so little of it at the time. Probably her somewhat exaggerated air of indifference simply meant that she had been bored by Wyant's attentions, and that the reminder of them still roused a slight self-consciousness.

Amherst was relieved by this conclusion, and murmuring: "Oh, I suppose it can't have been he," led her rapidly on to the Eldorado. But the old sense of free communion was again obstructed, and her interest in the details of the schools and nursery now seemed to him only a part of her wonderful art of absorbing herself in other people's affairs. He was a fool to have been duped by it—to have fancied it was anything more personal than a grace of manner.

As she turned away from inspecting the blackboards in one of the empty school-rooms he paused before her and said suddenly: "You spoke of not seeing Westmore again. Are you thinking of leaving Cicely?"

The words were almost the opposite of those he had intended to speak; it was as if some irrepressible inner conviction flung defiance at his surface distrust of her.

She stood still also, and he saw a thought move across her face. "Not immediately—but perhaps when Mr. Langhope can make some other arrangement——"

Owing to the half-holiday they had the school-building to themselves, and the fact of being alone with her, without fear of interruption, woke in Amherst an uncontrollable longing to taste for once the joy of unguarded utterance.

"Why do you go?" he asked, moving close to the platform on which she stood.

She hesitated, resting her hand on the teacher's desk. Her eyes were kind, but he thought her tone was cold.

"This easy life is rather out of my line," she said at length, with a smile that draped her words in vagueness.

Amherst looked at her again—she seemed to be growing remote and inaccessible. "You mean that you don't want to stay?"

His tone was so abrupt that it called forth one of her rare blushes. "No—not that. I have been very happy with Cicely—but soon I shall have to be doing something else."

Why was she blushing? And what did her last phrase mean? "Something else—?" The blood hummed in his ears—he began to hope she would not answer too quickly.

She had sunk into the seat behind the desk, propping her elbows on its lid, and letting her interlaced hands support her chin. A little bunch of violets which had been thrust into the folds of her dress detached itself and fell to the floor.

"What I mean is," she said in a low voice, raising her eyes to Amherst's, "that I've had a great desire lately to get back to real work—my special work.... I've been too idle for the last year—I want to do some hard nursing; I want to help people who are miserable."

She spoke earnestly, almost passionately, and as he listened his undefined fear was lifted. He had never before seen her in this mood, with brooding brows, and the darkness of the world's pain in her eyes. All her glow had faded—she was a dun thrush-like creature, clothed in semi-tints; yet she seemed much nearer than when her smile shot light on him.

He stood motionless, his eyes absently fixed on the bunch of violets at her feet. Suddenly he raised his head, and broke out with a boyish blush: "Could it have been Wyant who was trying to see you?"

"Dr. Wyant—trying to see me?" She lowered her hands to the desk, and sat looking at him with open wonder.

He saw the irrelevance of his question, and burst, in spite of himself, into youthful laughter.

"I mean—It's only that an unknown visitor called at the house yesterday, and insisted that you must have arrived. He seemed so annoyed at not finding you, that I thought...I imagined...it must be some one who knew you very well...and who had followed you here...for some special reason...."

Her colour rose again, as if caught from his; but her eyes still declared her ignorance. "Some special reason——?"

"And just now," he blurted out, "when you said you might not stay much longer with Cicely—I thought of the visit—and wondered if there was some one you meant to marry...."

A silence fell between them. Justine rose slowly, her eyes screened under the veil she had lowered. "No—I don't mean to marry," she said, half-smiling, as she came down from the platform.

Restored to his level, her small shadowy head just in a line with his eyes, she seemed closer, more approachable and feminine—yet Amherst did not dare to speak.

She took a few steps toward the window, looking out into the deserted street. "It's growing dark—I must go home," she said.

"Yes," he assented absently as he followed her. He had no idea what she was saying. The inner voices in which they habitually spoke were growing louder than outward words. Or was it only the voice of his own desires that he heard—the cry of new hopes and unguessed capacities of living? All within him was flood-tide: this was the top of life, surely—to feel her alike in his brain and his pulses, to steep sight and hearing in the joy of her nearness, while all the while thought spoke clear: "This is the mate of my mind."

He began again abruptly. "Wouldn't you marry, if it gave you the chance to do what you say—if it offered you hard work, and the opportunity to make things better...for a great many people...as no one but yourself could do it?"

It was a strange way of putting his case: he was aware of it before he ended. But it had not occurred to him to tell her that she was lovely and desirable—in his humility he thought that what he had to give would plead for him better than what he was.

The effect produced on her by his question, though undecipherable, was extraordinary. She stiffened a little, remaining quite motionless, her eyes on the street.

"You!" she just breathed; and he saw that she was beginning to tremble.

His wooing had been harsh and clumsy—he was afraid it had offended her, and his hand trembled too as it sought hers.

"I only thought—it would be a dull business to most women—and I'm tied to it for life...but I thought...I've seen so often how you pity suffering...how you long to relieve it...."

She turned away from him with a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I hate suffering!" she broke out, raising her hands to her face.

Amherst was frightened. How senseless of him to go on reiterating the old plea! He ought to have pleaded for himself—to have let the man in him seek her and take his defeat, instead of beating about the flimsy bush of philanthropy.

"I only meant—I was trying to make my work recommend me..." he said with a half-laugh, as she remained silent, her eyes still turned away.

The silence continued for a long time—it stretched between them like a narrowing interminable road, down which, with a leaden heart, he seemed to watch her gradually disappearing. And then, unexpectedly, as she shrank to a tiny speck at the dip of the road, the perspective was mysteriously reversed, and he felt her growing nearer again, felt her close to him—felt her hand in his.

"I'm really just like other women, you know—I shall like it because it's your work," she said.



XXXII

EVERY one agreed that, on the whole, Mr. Langhope had behaved extremely well.

He was just beginning to regain his equanimity in the matter of the will—to perceive that, in the eyes of the public, something important and distinguished was being done at Westmore, and that the venture, while reducing Cicely's income during her minority, might, in some incredible way, actually make for its ultimate increase. So much Mr. Langhope, always eager to take the easiest view of the inevitable, had begun to let fall in his confidential comments on Amherst; when his newly-regained balance was rudely shaken by the news of his son-in-law's marriage.

The free expression of his anger was baffled by the fact that, even by the farthest stretch of self-extenuating logic, he could find no one to blame for the event but himself.

"Why on earth don't you say so—don't you call me a triple-dyed fool for bringing them together?" he challenged Mrs. Ansell, as they had the matter out together in the small intimate drawing-room of her New York apartment.

Mrs. Ansell, stirring her tea with a pensive hand, met the challenge composedly.

"At present you're doing it for me," she reminded him; "and after all, I'm not so disposed to agree with you."

"Not agree with me? But you told me not to engage Miss Brent! Didn't you tell me not to engage her?"

She made a hesitating motion of assent.

"But, good Lord, how was I to help myself? No man was ever in such a quandary!" he broke off, leaping back to the other side of the argument.

"No," she said, looking up at him suddenly. "I believe that, for the only time in your life, you were sorry then that you hadn't married me."

She held his eyes for a moment with a look of gentle malice; then he laughed, and drew forth his cigarette-case.

"Oh, come—you've inverted the formula," he said, reaching out for the enamelled match-box at his elbow. She let the pleasantry pass with a slight smile, and he went on reverting to his grievance: "Why didn't you want me to engage Miss Brent?"

"Oh, I don't know...some instinct."

"You won't tell me?"

"I couldn't if I tried; and now, after all——"

"After all—what?"

She reflected. "You'll have Cicely off your mind, I mean."

"Cicely off my mind?" Mr. Langhope was beginning to find his charming friend less consolatory than usual. After all, the most magnanimous woman has her circuitous way of saying I told you so. "As if any good governess couldn't have done that for me!" he grumbled.

"Ah—the present care for her. But I was looking ahead," she rejoined.

"To what—if I may ask?"

"The next few years—when Mrs. Amherst may have children of her own."

"Children of her own?" He bounded up, furious at the suggestion.

"Had it never occurred to you?"

"Hardly as a source of consolation!"

"I think a philosophic mind might find it so."

"I should really be interested to know how!"

Mrs. Ansell put down her cup, and again turned her gentle tolerant eyes upon him.

"Mr. Amherst, as a father, will take a more conservative view of his duties. Every one agrees that, in spite of his theories, he has a good head for business; and whatever he does at Westmore for the advantage of his children will naturally be for Cicely's advantage too."

Mr. Langhope returned her gaze thoughtfully. "There's something in what you say," he admitted after a pause. "But it doesn't alter the fact that, with Amherst unmarried, the whole of the Westmore fortune would have gone back to Cicely—where it belongs."

"Possibly. But it was so unlikely that he would remain unmarried."

"I don't see why! A man of honour would have felt bound to keep the money for Cicely."

"But you must remember that, from Mr. Amherst's standpoint, the money belongs rather to Westmore than to Cicely."

"He's no better than a socialist, then!"

"Well—supposing he isn't: the birth of a son and heir will cure that."

Mr. Langhope winced, but she persisted gently: "It's really safer for Cicely as it is—" and before the end of the conference he found himself confessing, half against his will: "Well, since he hadn't the decency to remain single, I'm thankful he hasn't inflicted a stranger on us; and I shall never forget what Miss Brent did for my poor Bessy...."

It was the view she had wished to bring him to, and the view which, in due course, with all his accustomed grace and adaptability, he presented to the searching gaze of a society profoundly moved by the incident of Amherst's marriage. "Of course, if Mr. Langhope approves—" society reluctantly murmured; and that Mr. Langhope did approve was presently made manifest by every outward show of consideration toward the newly-wedded couple.

* * * * *

Amherst and Justine had been married in September; and after a holiday in Canada and the Adirondacks they returned to Hanaford for the winter. Amherst had proposed a short flight to Europe; but his wife preferred to settle down at once to her new duties.

The announcement of her marriage had been met by Mrs. Dressel with a comment which often afterward returned to her memory. "It's splendid for you, of course, dear, in one way," her friend had murmured, between disparagement and envy—"that is, if you can stand talking about the Westmore mill-hands all the rest of your life."

"Oh, but I couldn't—I should hate it!" Justine had energetically rejoined; meeting Mrs. Dressel's admonitory "Well, then?" with the laughing assurance that she meant to lead the conversation.

She knew well enough what the admonition meant. To Amherst, so long thwarted in his chosen work, the subject of Westmore was becoming an idee fixe; and it was natural that Hanaford should class him as a man of one topic. But Justine had guessed at his other side; a side as long thwarted, and far less articulate, which she intended to wake into life. She had felt it in him from the first, though their talks had so uniformly turned on the subject which palled on Hanaford; and it had been revealed to her during the silent hours among his books, when she had grown into such close intimacy with his mind.

She did not, assuredly, mean to spend the rest of her days talking about the Westmore mill-hands; but in the arrogance of her joy she wished to begin her married life in the setting of its habitual duties, and to achieve the victory of evoking the secret unsuspected Amherst out of the preoccupied business man chained to his task. Dull lovers might have to call on romantic scenes to wake romantic feelings; but Justine's glancing imagination leapt to the challenge of extracting poetry from the prose of routine.

And this was precisely the triumph that the first months brought her. To mortal eye, Amherst and Justine seemed to be living at Hanaford: in reality they were voyaging on unmapped seas of adventure. The seas were limitless, and studded with happy islands: every fresh discovery they made about each other, every new agreement of ideas and feelings, offered itself to these intrepid explorers as a friendly coast where they might beach their keel and take their bearings. Thus, in the thronging hum of metaphor, Justine sometimes pictured their relation; seeing it, again, as a journey through crowded populous cities, where every face she met was Amherst's; or, contrarily, as a multiplication of points of perception, so that one became, for the world's contact, a surface so multitudinously alive that the old myth of hearing the grass grow and walking the rainbow explained itself as the heightening of personality to the utmost pitch of sympathy.

In reality, the work at Westmore became an almost necessary sedative after these flights into the blue. She felt sometimes that they would have been bankrupted of sensations if daily hours of drudgery had not provided a reservoir in which fresh powers of enjoyment could slowly gather. And their duties had the rarer quality of constituting, precisely, the deepest, finest bond between them, the clarifying element which saved their happiness from stagnation, and kept it in the strong mid-current of human feeling.

It was this element in their affection which, in the last days of November, was unexpectedly put on trial. Mr. Langhope, since his return from his annual visit to Europe, showed signs of diminishing strength and elasticity. He had had to give up his nightly dinner parties, to desert his stall at the Opera: to take, in short, as he plaintively put it, his social pleasures homoeopathically. Certain of his friends explained the change by saying that he had never been "quite the same" since his daughter's death; while others found its determining cause in the shock of Amherst's second marriage. But this insinuation Mr. Langhope in due time discredited by writing to ask the Amhersts if they would not pity his loneliness and spend the winter in town with him. The proposal came in a letter to Justine, which she handed to her husband one afternoon on his return from the mills.

She sat behind the tea-table in the Westmore drawing-room, now at last transformed, not into Mrs. Dressel's vision of "something lovely in Louis Seize," but into a warm yet sober setting for books, for scattered flowers, for deep chairs and shaded lamps in pleasant nearness to each other.

Amherst raised his eyes from the letter, thinking as he did so how well her bright head, with its flame-like play of meanings, fitted into the background she had made for it. Still unobservant of external details, he was beginning to feel a vague well-being of the eye wherever her touch had passed.

"Well, we must do it," he said simply.

"Oh, must we?" she murmured, holding out his cup.

He smiled at her note of dejection. "Unnatural woman! New York versus Hanaford—do you really dislike it so much?"

She tried to bring a tone of consent into her voice. "I shall be very glad to be with Cicely again—and that, of course," she reflected, "is the reason why Mr. Langhope wants us."

"Well—if it is, it's a good reason."

"Yes. But how much shall you be with us?"

"If you say so, I'll arrange to get away for a month or two."

"Oh, no: I don't want that!" she said, with a smile that triumphed a little. "But why should not Cicely come here?"

"If Mr. Langhope is cut off from his usual amusements, I'm afraid that would only make him more lonely."

"Yes, I suppose so." She put aside her untasted cup, resting her elbows on her knees, and her chin on her clasped hands, in the attitude habitual to her in moments of inward debate.

Amherst rose and seated himself on the sofa beside her. "Dear! What is it?" he said, drawing her hands down, so that she had to turn her face to his.

"Nothing...I don't know...a superstition. I've been so happy here!"

"Is our happiness too perishable to be transplanted?"

She smiled and answered by another question. "You don't mind doing it, then?"

Amherst hesitated. "Shall I tell you? I feel that it's a sort of ring of Polycrates. It may buy off the jealous gods."

A faint shrinking from some importunate suggestion seemed to press her closer to him. "Then you feel they are jealous?" she breathed, in a half-laugh.

"I pity them if they're not!"

"Yes," she agreed, rallying to his tone. "I only had a fancy that they might overlook such a dull place as Hanaford."

Amherst drew her to him. "Isn't it, on the contrary, in the ash-heaps that the rag-pickers prowl?"

* * * * *

There was no disguising it: she was growing afraid of her happiness. Her husband's analogy of the ring expressed her fear. She seemed to herself to carry a blazing jewel on her breast—something that singled her out for human envy and divine pursuit. She had a preposterous longing to dress plainly and shabbily, to subdue her voice and gestures, to try to slip through life unnoticed; yet all the while she knew that her jewel would shoot its rays through every disguise. And from the depths of ancient atavistic instincts came the hope that Amherst was right—that by sacrificing their precious solitude to Mr. Langhope's convenience they might still deceive the gods.

* * * * *

Once pledged to her new task, Justine, as usual, espoused it with ardour. It was pleasant, even among greater joys, to see her husband again frankly welcomed by Mr. Langhope; to see Cicely bloom into happiness at their coming; and to overhear Mr. Langhope exclaim, in a confidential aside to his son-in-law: "It's wonderful, the bien-etre that wife of yours diffuses about her!"

The element of bien-etre was the only one in which Mr. Langhope could draw breath; and to those who kept him immersed in it he was prodigal of delicate attentions. The experiment, in short, was a complete success; and even Amherst's necessary weeks at Hanaford had the merit of giving a finer flavour to his brief appearances.

Of all this Justine was thinking as she drove down Fifth Avenue one January afternoon to meet her husband at the Grand Central station. She had tamed her happiness at last: the quality of fear had left it, and it nestled in her heart like some wild creature subdued to human ways. And, as her inward bliss became more and more a quiet habit of the mind, the longing to help and minister returned, absorbing her more deeply in her husband's work.

She dismissed the carriage at the station, and when his train had arrived they emerged together into the cold winter twilight and turned up Madison Avenue. These walks home from the station gave them a little more time to themselves than if they had driven; and there was always so much to tell on both sides. This time the news was all good: the work at Westmore was prospering, and on Justine's side there was a more cheerful report of Mr. Langhope's health, and—best of all—his promise to give them Cicely for the summer. Amherst and Justine were both anxious that the child should spend more time at Hanaford, that her young associations should begin to gather about Westmore; and Justine exulted in the fact that the suggestion had come from Mr. Langhope himself, while she and Amherst were still planning how to lead him up to it.

They reached the house while this triumph was still engaging them; and in the doorway Amherst turned to her with a smile.

"And of course—dear man!—he believes the idea is all his. There's nothing you can't make people believe, you little Jesuit!"

"I don't think there is!" she boasted, falling gaily into his tone; and then, as the door opened, and she entered the hall, her eyes fell on a blotted envelope which lay among the letters on the table.

The parlour-maid proffered it with a word of explanation. "A gentleman left it for you, madam; he asked to see you, and said he'd call for the answer in a day or two."

"Another begging letter, I suppose," said Amherst, turning into the drawing-room, where Mr. Langhope and Cicely awaited them; and Justine, carelessly pushing the envelope into her muff, murmured "I suppose so" as she followed him.



XXXIII

OVER the tea-table Justine forgot the note in her muff; but when she went upstairs to dress it fell to the floor, and she picked it up and laid it on her dressing-table.

She had already recognized the hand as Wyant's, for it was not the first letter she had received from him.

Three times since her marriage he had appealed to her for help, excusing himself on the plea of difficulties and ill-health. The first time he wrote, he alluded vaguely to having married, and to being compelled, through illness, to give up his practice at Clifton. On receiving this letter she made enquiries, and learned that, a month or two after her departure from Lynbrook, Wyant had married a Clifton girl—a pretty piece of flaunting innocence, whom she remembered about the lanes, generally with a young man in a buggy. There had evidently been something obscure and precipitate about the marriage, which was a strange one for the ambitious young doctor. Justine conjectured that it might have been the cause of his leaving Clifton—or or perhaps he had already succumbed to the fatal habit she had suspected in him. At any rate he seemed, in some mysterious way, to have dropped in two years from promise to failure; yet she could not believe that, with his talents, and the name he had begun to make, such a lapse could be more than temporary. She had often heard Dr. Garford prophesy great things for him; but Dr. Garford had died suddenly during the previous summer, and the loss of this powerful friend was mentioned by Wyant among his misfortunes.

Justine was anxious to help him, but her marriage to a rich man had not given her the command of much money. She and Amherst, choosing to regard themselves as pensioners on the Westmore fortune, were scrupulous in restricting their personal expenditure; and her work among the mill-hands brought many demands on the modest allowance which her husband had insisted on her accepting. In reply to Wyant's first appeal, which reached her soon after her marriage, she had sent him a hundred dollars; but when the second came, some two months later—with a fresh tale of ill-luck and ill-health—she had not been able to muster more than half the amount. Finally a third letter had arrived, a short time before their leaving for New York. It told the same story of persistent misfortune, but on this occasion Wyant, instead of making a direct appeal for money, suggested that, through her hospital connections, she should help him to establish a New York practice. His tone was half-whining, half-peremptory, his once precise writing smeared and illegible; and these indications, combined with her former suspicions, convinced her that, for the moment, he was unfit for medical work. At any rate, she could not assume the responsibility of recommending him; and in answering she advised him to apply to some of the physicians he had worked with at Lynbrook, softening her refusal by the enclosure of a small sum of money. To this letter she received no answer. Wyant doubtless found the money insufficient, and resented her unwillingness to help him by the use of her influence; and she felt sure that the note before her contained a renewal of his former request.