The butler, a white jacket taking the place of the conventional somber black, poured four cocktails from a silver mixer and placed four dishes of shaved ice, lemon rosettes and minute pinkish clams before August Turnbull, Morice and his wife, and Miss Beggs, occupying in solitude a side of the table. Then he set at Mrs. Turnbull's hand a glass of milk thinned with limewater and an elaborate platter holding three small pieces of zwieback.

She could eat practically nothing.

It was the particular character of her state that specially upset August Turnbull. He was continually affronted by the spectacle of Emmy seated before him sipping her diluted milk, breaking her dry bread, in the midst of the rich plenty he provided. Damn it, he admitted, it got on his nerves!

The sting of the cocktail whipped up his eagerness for the iced tender clams. His narrowed gaze rested on Emmy; she was actually seven years older than he, but from her appearance she might be a hundred, a million. There was nothing but her painfully slow movements to distinguish her from a mummy.

The plates were again removed and soup brought on, a clear steaming amber-green turtle, and with it crisp wheat rolls. Morice's wife gave a sigh of satisfaction at the latter.

"My," she said, "they're elegant! I'm sick and tired of war bread."

She was a pinkish young woman with regular features and abundant coppery hair. Marriage had brought her into the Turnbull family from the chorus of a famous New York roof beauty show. August had been at first displeased, then a certain complacency had possessed him—Morice, who was practically thirty years old, had no source of income other than that volunteered by his father, and it pleased the latter to keep them depending uncertainly on what he was willing to do. It insured just the attitude from Rosalie he most enjoyed, approved, in a youthful and not unhandsome woman. He liked her soft scented weight hanging on his arm and the perfumed kiss with which she greeted him in the morning.

Nevertheless, at times there was a gleam in her eyes and an expression at odds with the perfection of her submission; on several occasions Morice had approached him armed with a determination that he, August, knew had been injected from without, undoubtedly by Rosalie. Whatever it had been he quickly disposed of it, but there was a possibility that she might some day undertake a rebellion; and there was added zest in the thought of how he would totally subdue her.

"It's a wonder something isn't said to you," she continued. "They're awfully strict about wheat now."

"That," August Turnbull instructed her heavily, "is a subject we needn't pursue."

The truth was that he would permit no interference with what so closely touched his comfort. He was not a horse to eat bran. His bakery—under inspection—conformed rigidly with the Government requirements; but he had no intention of spoiling his own dinners. Any necessary conservation could be effected at the expense of the riffraff through which he had driven coming from the station. Black bread was no new experience to them.

He saw that Miss Beggs' small white teeth were crushing salted cashew nuts. Noticing her in detail for the first time he realized that she enormously appreciated good food. Why in thunder, since she ate so heartily, didn't she get fat and rosy! She was one of the thin kind— yet not thin, he corrected himself. Graceful. Why, she must weigh a hundred and twenty-five pounds; and she wasn't tall.

The butler filled his ruby goblet from a narrow bottle of Rhine wine. It was exactly right, not sweet but full; and the man held for his choice a great platter of beef, beautifully carved into thick crimson slices; the bloodlike gravy had collected in its depression and he poured it over his meat.

"A piece of this," he told Emmy discontentedly, "would set you right up; put something in your veins besides limewater."

She became painfully upset at once and fumbled in her lap, with her face averted, as the attention of the table was momentarily directed at her. There was an uncontrollable tremor of her loose colorless mouth.

What a wife for him, August Turnbull! The stimulants and rich flavors and roast filled him with a humming vitality; he could feel his heart beat—as strong, he thought, as a bell. In a way Emmy had deceived him —she probably had always been fragile, but was careful to conceal it from him at their marriage. It was unjust to him. He wished that she would take her farcical meals in her room, and not sit here—a skeleton at the feast. Positively it made him nervous to see her—spoiled his pleasure.

It had become worse lately; he had difficulty in putting her from his mind; he imagined Emmy in conjunction with the bakery, of her slowly starving and the thousands of loaves he produced in a day. There was something unnatural in such a situation; it was like a mockery at him.

A vision of her came to him at the most inopportune moments, lingering until it drove him into a hot rage and a pounding set up at the back of his neck.

The meat was brought back, and he had more of a sweet boiled huckleberry pudding. A salad followed, with a heavy Russian dressing. August Turnbull's breathing grew thicker, he was conscious of a familiar oppression. He assaulted it with fresh wine.

"I saw Bernard on the beach" he related; "Victorine is sick once more. Chocolate sundaes, Bernard said. She is always stuffing herself at soda-water counters or with candy. They oughtn't to allow it; the child should be made to eat at the table. When she is here she touches nothing but the dessert. When I was ten I ate everything or not at all. But there is no longer any discipline, not only with children but everywhere."

"There is a little freedom, though," Rosalie suggested.

His manner clearly showed displeasure, almost contempt, and he turned to Miss Beggs. "What do you think?" he demanded. "I understand you have been a school-teacher."

"Oh, you are quite right," she responded; "at least about children, and it is clear from them that most parents are idiotically lax." A blaze of discontent, loathing, surprisingly invaded her pallid face.

"A rod of iron," August recommended.

The contrast between his wife and Miss Beggs recurred, intensified—one an absolute wreck and the other as solidly slender as a birch tree. Fate had played a disgusting trick on him. In the prime of his life he was tied to a hopeless invalid. It put an unfair tension on him. Women were charming, gracious—or else they were nothing. If Emmy's money had been an assistance at first he had speedily justified its absorption in the business. She owed him, her husband, everything possible. He suddenly pictured mountains of bread, bread towering up into the clouds, fragrant and appetizing; and Emmy, a thing of bones, gazing wistfully at it. August Turnbull, with a feeling like panic, brushed the picture from his mind.

The dessert was apparently a bomb of frozen coffee, but the center revealed a delicious creamy substance flaked with pistache. The cold sweet was exactly what he craved, and he ate it rapidly in a curious mounting excitement. With the coffee he fingered the diminutive glass of golden brandy and a long dark roll of oily tobacco. He lighted this carefully and flooded his head with the coiling bluish smoke. Rosalie was smoking a cigarette—a habit in women which he noisily denounced. She extinguished it in an ash tray, but his anger lingered, an unreasoning exasperation that constricted his throat. Sharply aware of the sultriness of the evening he went hastily out to the veranda.

Morice following him with the evening paper volunteered, "I see German submarines are operating on the Atlantic coast."

His father asserted: "This country is due for a lesson. It was anxious enough to get into trouble, and now we'll find how it likes some severe instruction. All the news here is bluff—the national asset. What I hope is that business won't be entirely ruined later."

"The Germans will get the lesson," Rosalie unexpectedly declared at his shoulder.

"You don't know what you're talking about," he replied decidedly. "The German system is a marvel, one of the wonders of civilization."

She turned away, lightly singing a line from one of her late numbers: "I've a Yankee boy bound for Berlin."

Morice stirred uneasily. "They got a Danish tanker somewhere off Nantucket," he continued impotently.

August Turnbull refused to be drawn into further speech; he inhaled his cigar with a replete bodily contentment. The oppression of dinner was subsiding. His private opinion of the war was that it would end without a military decision—he regarded the German system as unsmashable—and then, with France deleted and England swamped in internal politics, he saw an alliance of common sense between Germany and the United States. The present hysteria, the sentimentality he condemned, could not continue to stand before the pressure of mercantile necessity. After all, the entire country was not made up of fools.

Morice and his wife wandered off to the boardwalk, and he, August, must have fallen asleep, for he suddenly sat up with a sensation of strangeness and dizzy vision.

He rose and shook it off. It was still light, and he could see Bernard at his automobile, parked before the latter's cottage.

The younger man caught sight of August at the same moment and called: "We are going to a cafe with the Rathes; will you come?"

He was still slightly confused, his head full, and the ride, the gayety of the crowd, he thought, would do him good.

"Be over for you," the other added; and later he was crowded into a rear seat between Louise, his daughter, and Caroline Rathe.

Louise was wearing the necklace of platinum and diamonds Bernard Foster had given her last Christmas. It was, August admitted to himself, a splendid present, and must have cost eighteen or twenty thousand dollars. The Government had made platinum almost prohibitive. In things of this kind—the adornment of his wife, of, really, himself, the extension of his pride—Bernard was extremely generous. It was in the small affairs such as gasoline that he was prudent.

Both Caroline Rathe and Louise were handsome women handsomely dressed; he was seated in a nest of soft tulle and ruffled embroidery, of pliant swaying bodies. Their satin-shod feet had high sharp insteps in films of black lace and their fingers glittered with prismatic stones. Bernard was in front with the chauffeur, and Frederick Rathe occupied a small seat at the knees of the three others. He had not made his money, as had August and Bernard, but inherited it with a huge brewery. Frederick was younger than the other men too; but his manner was, if anything, curter. He said things about the present war that made even August Turnbull uneasy.

He was an unusual youth, not devoted to sports and convivial pleasures —as any one might infer, viewing his heavy frame and wealth—but something of a reader. He quoted fragments from philosophical books about the will-to-power and the Uebermensch that stuck like burrs in August Turnbull's memory, furnishing him with labels, backing, for many of his personally evolved convictions and experience.

They were soon descending the steps to the anteroom of the cafe, where the men left their hats and sticks. As they entered the brilliantly lighted space beyond a captain hurried forward. "Good evening, gentlemen," he said servilely; "Mr. Turnbull——"

He ushered them to a table by the rope of an open floor for dancing and removed a reserved card. There he stood attentively with a waiter at his shoulder.

"What will you have?" Frederick Rathe asked generally. "For me nothing but beer. Not the filthy American stuff." He turned to the servants. "If you still have some of the other. You understand?"

"No beer for me!" Louise exclaimed.

"Champagne," the captain suggested.

She agreed, but Caroline had a fancy for something else. August Turnbull preferred a Scotch whisky and soda. The cafe was crowded; everywhere drinking multiplied in an illuminated haze of cigarettes. A slight girl in an airy slip and bare legs was executing a furious dance with a powdered youth on the open space. The girl whirled about her partner's head, a rigid shape in a flutter of white.

They stood limply answering the rattle of applause that followed. A woman in an extravagantly low-cut gown took their place, singing. There was no possibility of mistaking her allusions; August smiled broadly, but Louise and Caroline Rathe watched her with an unmoved sharp curiosity. In the same manner they studied other women in the cafe; more than once August Turnbull hastily averted his gaze at the discovery that his daughter and he were intent upon the same individual.

"The U-boats are at it again," Bernard commented in a lowered voice.

"And, though it is war," Frederick added, "every one here is squealing like a mouse. 'Ye are not great enough to know of hatred and envy,'" he quoted. "'It is the good war which halloweth every cause.'"

"I wish you wouldn't say those things here," his wife murmured.

"'Thou goest to women?'" he lectured her with mock solemnity. "'Do not forget thy whip!'"

The whisky ran in a burning tide through August Turnbull's senses. His surroundings became a little blurred, out of focus; his voice sounded unfamiliar, as though it came from somewhere behind him. Fresh buckets of wine were brought, fresh, polished glasses. His appetite revived, and he ordered caviar. Beyond, a girl in a snake-like dress was breaking a scarlet boiled lobster with a nut cracker; her cigarette smoked on the table edge. Waiters passed bearing trays of steaming food, pitchers of foaming beer, colorless drinks with bobbing sliced limes, purplish sloe gin and sirupy cordials. Bernard's face was dark and there was a splash of champagne on his dinner shirt. Louise was uncertainly humming a fragment of popular song. The table was littered with empty plates and glasses. Perversely it made August think of Emmy, his wife, and acute dread touched him at the mockery of her wasting despair.

III

The following morning, Thursday, August Turnbull was forced to go into the city. He drove to the Turnbull Bakery in a taxi and dispatched his responsibilities in time for luncheon uptown and an early afternoon train to the shore. The bakery was a consequential rectangle of brick, with the office across the front and a court resounding with the shattering din of ponderous delivery trucks. All the vehicles, August saw, bore a new temporary label advertising still another war bread; there was, too, a subsidiary patriotic declaration: "Win the War With Wheat."

He was, as always, fascinated by the mammoth trays of bread, the enormous flood of sustenance produced as the result of his energy and ability. Each loaf was shut in a sanitary paper envelope; the popular superstition, sanitation, had contributed as much as anything to his marked success. He liked to picture himself as a great force, a granary on which the city depended for life; it pleased him to think of thousands of people, men, women and children, waiting for his loaves or perhaps suffering through the inability to buy them.

August left a direction for a barrel of superlative flower to be sent to his cottage, and then with a curious feeling of expectancy he departed. He was unable to grasp the cause of his sudden impatience to be again at the sea. On the train, in the Pullman smoking compartment, his coat swinging on a hook beside him, the vague haste centered surprisingly about the person of Miss Beggs. At first he was annoyed by the reality and persistence of her image; then he slipped into an unquestioning consideration of her.

Never had he seen a more healthy being, and that alone, he told himself, was sufficient to account for his interest. He liked marked physical well-being; particularly, he added, in women. A sick wife, for example, was the most futile thing imaginable; a wife should exist for the comfort and pleasure of her husband. What little Miss Beggs—her name, he now remembered from the checks made out for her, was Meta Beggs—had said was as vigorous as herself. He realized that she had a strong, even rebellious personality. That, in her, however, should not be encouraged—an engaging submission was the becoming attitude for her sex.

He proceeded immediately into the ocean, puffing strenuously and gazing about. No women could be seen. They never had any regularity of habit, he complained silently. After dinner—a surfeit of tenderloin Bordelaise—he walked up the short incline to the boardwalk, where on one of the benches overlooking the sparkling water he saw a slight familiar figure. It was Miss Beggs. Her eyes dwelt on him momentarily and then returned to the horizon.

"You are a great deal alone," he commented on the far end of the bench.

"It's because I choose to be," she answered sharply.

An expression of displeasure was audible in his reply, "You should have no trouble."

"I ought to explain," she continued, her slim hands clasped on shapely knees; "I mean that I can't get what I want"

"So you prefer nothing?"

She nodded.

"That's different," August Turnbull declared. "Anybody could see you're particular. Still, it's strange you haven't met—well, one that suited you."

"What good would it do me—a school-teacher, and now a companion!"

"You might be admired for those very things."

"Yes, by old ladies, male and female. Not men. There's just one attraction for them."

"Well——"

She turned now and faced him with a suppressed bitter energy. "Clothes," she said.

"That's nonsense!" he replied emphatically. "Dress is only incidental."

"When did you first notice me?" she demanded. "In bathing. That bathing suit cost more than any two of my dresses. It is absolutely right." August was confused by the keenness of her perception. It wasn't proper for a woman to understand such facts. He was at a loss for a reply. "Seven men spoke to me in it on one afternoon. It is no good for you to try to reassure me with platitudes; I know better. I ought to, at least."

August Turnbull was startled by the fire of resentment smoldering under her still pale exterior. Why, she was like a charged battery. If he touched her, he thought, sparks would fly. She was utterly different from Emmy, as different as a live flame from ashes.

It was evident that having at last spoken she intended to unburden herself of long-accumulated passionate words.

"All my life I've had to listen to and smile sweetly at ridiculous hypocrisies. I have had to teach them and live them too. But now I'm so sick of them I can't keep it up a month longer. I could kill some one, easily. In a world where salvation for a woman is in a pair of slippers I have to be damned. If I could have kept my hair smartly done up and worn sheer batiste do you suppose for a minute I'd be a companion to Mrs. Turnbull? I could be going out to the cafes in a landaulet."

"And looking a lot better than most that do," he commented without premeditation.

She glanced at him again, and he saw that her eyes were gray, habitually half closed and inviting.

"I've had frightfully bad luck," she went on; "once or twice when it seemed that I was to have a chance, when it appeared brighter— everything went to pieces."

"Perhaps you want too much," he suggested.

"Perhaps," she agreed wearily; "ease and pretty clothes and—a man." She added the latter with a more musical inflection than he had yet heard.

"Of course," he proceeded importantly, "there are not a great many men. At least I haven't found them. As you say, most people are incapable of any power or decision. I always maintain it's something in the country. Now in——" He stopped, re-began: "In Europe they are different. There a man is better understood, and women as well."

"I have never been out of America," Miss Beggs admitted.

"But you might well have been," he assured her; "you are more Continental than any one else I can think of."

He moved toward the middle of the bench and she said quickly: "You must not misunderstand. I am not cheap nor silly. It might have been better for me." She addressed the fading light on the sea. "Silly women, too, do remarkably well. But I am not young enough to change now." She rose, gracefully drawn against space; her firm chin was elevated and her hands clenched. "I won't grow old this way and shrivel like an apple," she half cried.

It would be a pity, he told himself, watching her erect figure diminish over the boardwalk. He had a feeling of having come in contact with an extraordinarily potent force. By heaven, she positively crackled! He smiled, thinking of the misguided people who had employed her, ignorant of all that underlay that severe prudent manner. At the same time he was flattered that she had confided in him. It was clear she recognized that he, at least, was a man. He was really sorry for her—what an invigorating influence she was!

She had spoken of being no longer young—something over thirty-five he judged—and that brought the realization that he was getting on. A few years now, ten or twelve, and life would be behind him. It was a rare and uncomfortable thought. Usually he saw himself as at the most desirable age—a young spirit tempered by wisdom and experience. But in a flash he read that his prime must depart; every hour left was priceless.

The best part of this must be dedicated to a helpless invalid; a strong current of self-pity set through him. But it was speedily lost in a more customary arrogance. August Turnbull repeated the favorite aphorisms from Frederick Rathe about the higher man. If he believed them at all, if they applied to life in general they were equally true in connection with his home; in short—his wife. Emmy Turnbull couldn't really be called a wife. There should be a provision to release men from such bonds.

It might be that the will-to-power would release itself. In theory that was well enough, but practically there were countless small difficulties. The strands of life were so tied in, one with another. Opinion was made up of an infinite number of stupid prejudices. In short, no way presented itself of getting rid of Emmy.

His mind returned to Meta Beggs. What a woman she was! What a triumph to master her contemptuous stubborn being!

IV

At least, August reflected with a degree of comfort at breakfast, Emmy didn't come down in the morning; she hadn't enough strength. He addressed himself to the demolishment of a ripe Cassaba melon. It melted in his mouth to the consistency of sugary water. His coffee cup had a large flattened bowl, and pouring in the ropy cream with his free hand he lifted the silver cover of a dish set before him. It held spitted chicken livers and bacon and gave out an irresistible odor. There were, too, potatoes chopped fine with peppers and browned; and hot delicately sweetened buns. He emptied two full spits, renewed his coffee and finished the potatoes.

With a butter ball at the center of a bun he casually glanced at the day's paper. The submarines, he saw, were operating farther south. A small passenger steamer, the Veronica had been torpedoed outside the Delaware Capes.

A step sounded in the hall, and Louise entered the dining room, clad all in white with the exception of a closely fitting yellow hat. After a moment Victorine, a girl small for her age, with a petulant satiated expression, followed.

"It's a shame," Louise observed, "that with Morice and his wife in the cottage you have to breakfast alone. I suppose all those theatrical people get up at noon."

"Not quite," Rosalie told her from the doorway.

Louise made no reply other than elevating her brows. Victorine looked at the other with an exact mirroring of her mother's disdain.

"Good morning," Morice said indistinctly, hooking the collar of his uniform. "It's a bloody nuisance," he asserted. "Why can't they copy the English jacket?"

"It is much better looking," Louise added.

"Well," Rosalie proclaimed, "I'm glad to see Morice in any; even if it means nothing more than a desk in the Quartermaster's Department."

"That is very necessary," August Turnbull spoke decidedly.

"Perhaps," she agreed.

"I think it is bad taste to raise such insinuations." Louise was severe.

"An army," August put in, "travels on its stomach. As Louise suggests— we must ask you not to discuss the question in your present tone." Morice's wife half-audibly spoke into her melon, and his face reddened. "What did I understand you to say?" he demanded.

"Oh, 'Swat the fly!'" Rosalie answered hardily.

"Not at all!" he almost shouted. "What you said was 'Swat the Kaiser!'"

"Well, swat him!"

"It was evident, also, that you did not refer to the Emperor of Germany—but to me."

"You said it," she admitted vulgarly. "If any house ever had a Hohenzollern this has."

"Shut up, Rosalie!" her husband commanded, perturbed; "you'll spoil everything."

"It might be better if she continued," Louise Foster corrected him. "Perhaps then we'd learn something of this—this beauty."

"I got good money for my face anyhow," Rosalie asserted. "And no cash premium went with it either. As for going on, I'll go." She turned to August Turnbull: "I've been stalling round here for nearly a year with Morice scared to death trying to get a piece of change out of you. Now I'm through; I've worked hard for a season's pay, but this is slavery. What you want is an amalgamated lady bootblack and nautch dancer. You're a joke to a free white woman. I'm sorry for your wife. She ought to slip you a bichloride tablet. If it was worth while I'd turn you over to the authorities for breaking the food regulations."

She rose, unceremoniously shoving back her chair. "For a fact, I'm tired of watching you eat. You down as much as a company of good boys on the march. Don't get black in the face; I'd be afraid to if I were you."

August Turnbull's rage beat like a hammer at the base of his head. He, too, rose, leaning forward with his napkin crumpled in a pounding fist.

"Get out of my house!" he shouted.

"That's all right enough," she replied; "the question is—is Morice coming with me? Is that khaki he has on or a Kate Greenaway suit?"

Morice looked from one to the other in obvious dismay. He had a pleasant dull face and a minute spiked mustache on an irresolute mouth.

"If you stay with me," she warned him further, "I'll have you out of that grocery store and into a trench."

"Pleasant for you, Morice," Louise explained.

"Things were so comfortable, Rosalie," he protested despairingly. "What in the name of sense made you stir this all up? The governor won't do a tap for us now."

His wife stood by herself, facing the inimical Turnbull front, while Morice wavered between.

"If you'll get along," the former told him, "I can make a living till you come back. We can do without any Truebner money. I'm not a lot at German, but I guess you can understand me," she again addressed August. "Not that I blame you for the change, such as it is."

"I'll have to go with her," Morice unhappily declared.

August Turnbull's face was stiff with congestion. The figures before him wavered in a sort of fog. He put out a hand, supporting himself on the back of his chair.

"Get out of my house," he repeated in a hoarse whisper.

Fortunately Morice's leave had come to an end, and Rosalie and he withdrew in at least the semblance of a normal departure. August's rage changed to an indignant surprise, and he established himself with a rigid dignity on the veranda. There, happening on a cigar that burned badly, he was reduced to a state of further self-commiseration. That is, he dwelt on the general deterioration of the world about him. There was no discipline; there was no respect; authority was laughed at. All this was the result of laxness, of the sentimentality he condemned; a firmer hand was needed everywhere.

He turned with relief to the contemplation of Meta Beggs; she was enormously satisfactory to consider. August watched her now with the greatest interest; he even sat in his wife's room while her companion moved silently and gracefully about. Miss Beggs couldn't have noticed this, for scarcely ever did her gaze meet his; she had a habit of standing lost in thought, her slimness a little drooping, as if she were weary or depressed. She was in his mind continually—Miss Beggs and Emmy, his wife.

The latter had a surprising power to disturb him; lately he had even dreamed of her starving to death in the presence of abundant food. He began to be superstitious about it, to think of her in a ridiculous nervous manner as an evil design on his peace and security. She seemed unnatural with her shrunken face bowed opposite him at the table. His feeling for her shifted subconsciously to hatred. It broke out publicly in sardonic or angry periods under which she would shrink away, incredibly timid, from his scorn. This quality of utter helplessness gave the menace he divined in her its illusive air of unreality. She seemed—she was—entirely helpless; a prematurely aged woman, of the mildest instincts, dying of malnutrition.

Miss Beggs now merged into all his daily life, his very fiber. He regarded her in an attitude of admirable frankness. "Still it is extraordinary you haven't married."

The tide was out, it was late afternoon, and they were walking over the hard exposed sand. Whenever she came on a shell she crushed it with a sharp heel.

"There were some," she replied indifferently.

He nodded gravely. "It would have to be a special kind of man," he agreed. "An ordinary individual would be crushed by your personality. You'd need a firm hand."

Her face was inscrutable. "I have always had the misfortune to be too late," she told him.

"I wish I had known you sooner!" he exclaimed.

Her arms, in transparent sleeves, were like marble. His words crystallized an overwhelming realization of how exactly she was suited to him. The desire to shut her will in his hand increased a thousandfold.

"Yes," she said, "I would have married you. But there's no good discussing it." She breathed deeply with a sinking forward of her rounded shoulders. All her vigor seemed to have left her. "I have been worried about Mrs. Turnbull lately," she went on. "Perhaps it's my imagination—does she look weaker to you?"

"I haven't noticed," he answered brusquely.

Curiously he had never thought of Emmy as dying; she appeared eternal, without the possibility of offering him the relief of such freedom as yet remained. Freedom for—for Meta Beggs.

"The doctor was at the cottage again Thursday," she informed him. "I didn't hear what he said."

"Humbugs," August Turnbull pronounced.

A sudden caution invaded him. It would be well not to implicate himself too far with his wife's companion. She was a far shrewder woman than was common; there was such a thing as blackmail. He studied her privately. Damn it, what a pen he had been caught in! Her manner, too, changed immediately, as though she had read his feeling.

"I shall have to go back."

She spoke coldly. A moment before she had been close beside him, but now she might as well have been miles away.

V

The fuse of the electric light in the dining room burned out, and dinner proceeded with only the illumination of the silk-hooded candles. In the subdued glow Meta Beggs was infinitely attractive. His wife's place was empty. Miss Beggs had brought apologetic word from Emmy that she felt too weak to leave her room. A greater degree of comfort possessed August Turnbull than he had experienced for months. With no one at the table but the slim woman on the left and himself a positive geniality radiated from him. He pressed her to have more champagne—he had ordered that since she preferred it to Rhine wine—urged more duckling, and ordered the butler to leave the brandy decanter before them.

She laughed—a rare occurrence—and imitated, for his intense amusement, Mrs. Frederick Rathe's extreme cutting social manner. He drank more than he intended, and when he rose his legs were insecure. He made his way toward Meta Beggs. She stood motionless, her thin lips like a thread of blood on her tense face.

"What a wife you'd make!" he muttered.

There was a discreet cough at his back, and swinging about he saw a maid in a white starched cap and high cuffs.

"Excuse me, sir," she said; "Mrs. Turnbull wants to know would you please come up to her room."

He swayed slightly, glowering at her with a hot face in which a vein throbbed persistently at his temple. Miss Beggs had disappeared.

"Very well," he agreed heavily.

Mounting the stairs he fumbled for his cigar case, and entered the chamber beyond his, clipping the end from a superlative perfecto.

Emmy was in bed, propped up on a bank of embroidered pillows. A light from one side threw the shadow of her head on a wall in an animated caricature of life.

"I didn't want to disturb you, August."

Her voice was weak and apologetic. He stood irritably beside her.

"It's hot in here." His wife at once detected whatever assaulted his complete comfort. She fell into a silence that strained his patience to the utmost.

When at last she spoke it was in a tone of voice he had never heard from her—impersonal, with at the same time a note of fear like the flutter of a bird's wing.

"The doctor has been here two or three times lately. I didn't want to bother you, and he said——"

She broke off, and her hand raised from her side in a gesture of seeking. He held it uncomfortably, wishing that the occasion would speedily end.

"August, I've—I've got to leave you."

He did not comprehend her meaning, and stood stupidly looking down at her spent face. "I'm going to die, August, almost any time now. I wanted to tell you first when we were quietly together; and then Louise and Bernard must know."

His sensations were so confused, the mere shock of such an announcement had so confounded him that he was unable to penetrate the meaning of the sudden expansion of his blood. His attention strayed from the actuality of his wife to the immaterial shadow wavering on the wall. There Emmy's profile, grotesquely enlarged and sharpened, grimaced at him. August Turnbull's feelings disentangled and grew clearer, there was a conventional memory of his wife as a young woman, the infinitely sharper realization that soon he must be free, a vision of Meta Beggs as she had been at dinner that night, and intense relief from nameless strain.

He moved through the atmosphere of suspense that followed the knowledge of Emmy's condition with a feeling of being entirely apart from his family. Out of the chaos of his emotions the sense of release was most insistent. Naturally he couldn't share it with any one else, not at present. He avoided thinking directly of Meta Beggs, partly from the shreds of the superstitious dread that had once colored his attitude toward his wife and partly from the necessity to control what otherwise would sweep him into a resistless torrent. However, most of his impatience had vanished—a little while now, and in a discreet manner he could grasp all that he had believed so hopelessly removed.

Except for the occasions of Louise's informal presence he dined alone with Miss Beggs. They were largely silent, attacking their plates with complete satisfaction. On the day of her monthly payment he drew the check for a thousand dollars in place of the stipulated hundred, and gave it to her without comment. She nodded, managing to convey entire understanding and acceptance of what it forecast. Once, at the table, he called her Meta.

She deliberated a reply—he had asked her opinion about British bottled sauces—but when she answered she called him Mr. Turnbull. This, too, pleased him. She had an unerring judgment in the small affairs of deference. Dinner had been better than usual, and he realized he had eaten too much. His throat felt constricted, he had difficulty in swallowing a final gulp of coffee; the heavy odors of the dining room almost sickened him.

"We'll get out on the beach," he said abruptly; "a little air."

They proceeded past the unremitting sprinklers on the strip of lawn to the wide gray sweep of sand. At that hour no one else was visible, and a new recklessness invaded his discomfort. "You see," he told her, "that bad luck of yours isn't going to hold."

"It seems incredible," she murmured. She added without an appearance of the least ulterior thought: "Mrs. August Turnbull."

"Exactly," he asserted.

A triumphant conviction of pleasure to come surged through him like a subtle exhilarating cordial.

"I'll take no nonsensical airs from Louise or the Rathes," he proclaimed.

"Don't let that worry you," she answered serenely.

He saw that it need not, and looked forward appreciatively to a scene in which Meta would not come off second.

Above them the long curve of the boardwalk was empty, with, behind it, the suave ornamental roofs of the cottages. A wind quartering from the shore had smoothed the ocean into the semblance of a limitless and placid lake. Minute waves ruffled along the beach with a continuous whispering, and the vault of the west, from which the sun had just withdrawn, was filled with light the color of sauterne wine.

It was inconceivable to August Turnbull that soon Emmy would be gone out of his life. He shook his thick shoulders as if by a gesture to unburden himself of her unpleasant responsibility. He smiled slightly at the memory of how he had come to fear her. It had been the result of the strain he was under; once more the vision of mountainous bread and Emmy returned. The devil was in the woman!

"What are you smiling at?" Meta asked.

"Perhaps it was because my luck, as well, has changed," he admitted.

She came close up to him, quivering with emotion.

"I want everything!" she cried in a vibrant hunger; "everything! Do you understand? Are you willing? I'm starved as much as that woman up in her bed. Can you give me all the gayety, all the silks and emeralds there are in the world?"

He patted her shoulder. "You'll look like a Christmas tree. When this damned war is over we will go to Europe, to Berlin and Munich. They have the finest streets and theaters and cafes in the world. There things are run by men for men. The food is the best of all—no French fripperies, but solid rare cuts. Drinking is an art——"

"What is that out in the water?" she idly demanded.

He gazed impatiently over the unscored tide and saw a dark infinitesimal blot.

"I have been watching it for a long while," she continued. "It's coming closer, I think."

He again took up his planning.

"We'll stay two or three years; till things get on their feet here. Turn the bakery into a company. No work, nothing but parties."

"Do look!" she repeated. "It's coming in—a little boat. I suppose it is empty."

The blot was now near enough for him to distinguish its outline. As Meta said, no one was visible. It was drifting. Against his wish his gaze fastened on the approaching boat. It hesitated, appeared to swing away, and then resumed the progress inshore.

"I believe it will float into that cut in the beach below," he told her.

His attention was divided between the craft and the image of all the pleasures he would introduce to Meta—Turnbull. It was a lucky circumstance that he had plenty of money, for he realized that she would not marry a poor man. This was not only natural but commendable. Poor men were fools, too weak for success; only the strong ate white bread and had fine women, only the masterful conquered circumstance.

"Come," she said, catching his hand; "it's almost here."

She half pulled him over the glistening wet sand to where the deeper water thrust into the beach. Her interest was now fully communicated to him.

"We must drag it safely up," he articulated, out of breath from her eagerness. The bow swept into the onward current, it moved more swiftly, and then sluggishly settled against the bottom. Painted on its blistering white side was a name, "Veronica," and "Ten persons." There was a slight movement at the rail, and a sharp unreasoning horror gripped August Turnbull.

"Something in it," he muttered. He wanted to turn away, to run from the beach; but a stronger curiosity dragged him forward. Not conscious of stepping through shallow water he advanced.

A hunger-ravished dead face was turned to him from the bottom, a huddle of bony joints, dried hands. There were others—all dead, starved. In a red glimmer he saw the incredible travesty of a child, a lead-colored woman, shriveled and ageless from agony.

He fell back with a choking cry, "Emmy!"

There was a dull uproar in his head, and then a violent shock at the back of his brain. August Turnbull's body slid down into the tranquil ripples that ran along the boat's side.



ROSEMARY ROSELLE

It would be better for my purpose if you could hear the little clear arpeggios of an obsolete music box, the notes as sweet as barley sugar; for then the mood of Rosemary Roselle might steal imperceptibly into your heart. It is made of daguerreotypes blurring on their misted silver; tenebrous lithographs—solemn facades of brick with classic white lanterns lifted against the inky smoke of a burning city; the pages of a lady's book, elegant engravings of hooped and gallooned females; and the scent of crumbled flowers.

Such intangible sources must of necessity be fragile—a perfume linked to a thin chime, elusive faces on the shadowy mirror of the past, memories of things not seen but felt in poignant unfathomable emotions. This is a magic different from that of to-day; here perhaps are only some wistful ghosts brought back among contemptuous realities—a man in a faded blue uniform with a face drawn by suffering long ended, a girl whose charm, like the flowers, is dust.

It is all as remote as a smile remembered from youth. Such apparent trifles often hold a steadfast loveliness more enduring than the greatest tragedies and successes. They are irradiated by an imperishable romance: this is my desire—to hold out an immaterial glamour, a vapor, delicately colored by old days in which you may discover the romantic and amiable shapes of secret dreams.

I

It will serve us best to see Elim Meikeljohn first as he walked across Winthrop Common. It was very early in April and should have been cool, but it was warm—already there were some vermilion buds on the maples— and Elim's worn shad-belly coat was uncomfortably heavy. The coat was too big for him—his father had worn it for twenty years before he had given it to Elim for college—and it hung in somber greenish folds about his tall spare body. He carried an equally oppressive black stiff hat in a bony hand and exposed a gaunt serious countenance.

Other young men passing, vaulting lightly over the wooden rail that enclosed the common, wore flowing whiskers, crisply black or brown like a tobacco leaf; their luxuriant waistcoats were draped with a profusion of chains and seals; but Elim's face was austerely shaved, he wore neither brocade nor gold, and he kept seriously to the path.

He was, even more than usual, absorbed in a semi-gloom of thought. It was his birthday, he was twenty-six, and he had been married more than nine years. Already, with his inherited dark temperament, he was middle-aged in situation and feeling. He had been assistant to the professor of philosophy and letters for three of those married years; yes—he had been graduated when he was twenty-three. He arrived at an entrance to the common that faced the row of houses where he had his room, and saw that something unusual was in progress.

The front of his boarding house was literally covered with young men: they hung over the small portico from steps to ridge, they bulged from every window and sat astride of the dormer windows in the roof. Before them on the street a camera had been set up and was covered, all save the snout, by a black rubber cloth, backward from which projected the body and limbs of the photographer.

The latter, Elim realized, was one of a traveling band that took pictures of whatever, on their way, promised sufficient pecuniary return. Here the operator had been in luck—he would sell at least thirty photographs at perhaps fifty cents each. Harry Kaperton, a great swell, was in his window with his setter, Spot; his legs, clad in bags with tremendous checks and glossy boots, hung outward. On the veranda were Hinkle and Ben Willing, the latter in a stovepipe hat; others wore stovepipes set at a rakish angle on one ear. They were all irrepressibly gay, calling from roof to ground, each begging the photographer to focus on his own particular charm.

Perhaps fifty cents—Elim Meikeljohn would have liked a place in the picture; he would like to possess one, to keep it as a memento of the youthful life that flowed constantly about him, but the probable cost was prohibitive. He even wished, as he paused before making his way up the crowded veranda steps, that some one would ask him to stay and have his picture taken with the rest. He delayed, hoping for the mere formality of this friendliness. But it was not forthcoming. He had felt that it wouldn't be; he had divined the careless silence with which the men moved aside for him to mount. There was even a muttered allusion to his famous Scotch thrift, contained in a sharper word. Elim didn't mind—actively. He had been accustomed to the utmost monetary caution since the first dawn of his consciousness. He had come to regard the careful weighing of pennies as an integral part of his being. It had always been necessary for the Meikeljohns, father and son, on their rocky pastures. He didn't mind, but at the same time he bore a faint resentment at the injustice of the marked and perceptible disdain of the majority of his fellows.

They didn't understand, he told himself, still ascending to his room in the third floor back. Every cent that he could squeeze from his small salary must go back to the support of the invalid, his wife. He had never, of course, explained this to any one in Cambridge. They wouldn't be particularly interested and, in addition, his daily companions seemed far too young for such serious confidences. In reality Harry Kaperton was three years older than Elim; and Kaperton had been pleasantly at college, racing horses, for seven years; many others were Elim's age, but the maturity of the latter's responsibility separated them.

In his room he took off his formal coat and nankeen waistcoat and hung them on a pegged board. The room was bare, with two uncurtained windows that afforded a glimpse of the shining river; it contained a small air- tight stove, now cold and black, and a wood box, a narrow bed, a deal table with a row of worn text-books and neatly folded papers, a stand for water pitcher and basin, and two split-hickory Windsor chairs. Now it was filled with an afternoon glow, like powdered gold, and the querulously sweet piping of an early robin.

He dipped his face and hands in cooling water and, at the table, with squared elbows, addressed himself to a set task.

II

Elim Meikeljohn laid before him a small docket of foolscap folded lengthwise, each section separately indorsed in pale flowery ink, with a feminine name, a class number and date. They were the weekly themes of a polite Young Ladies' Academy in Richmond, sent regularly north for the impressive opinion of a member of Elim's college faculty. The professor of philosophy and letters had undertaken the task primarily; but, with the multiplication of his duties, he had turned the essays over to Elim, whose careful judgments had been sufficiently imposing to secure for him a slight additional income.

He sat for a moment regarding the papers with a frown; then, with a sudden movement, he went over the names that headed each paper. Two he laid aside. They bore above their dates in March, eighteen sixty-one, the name Rosemary Roselle.

He picked one up tentatively. It was called A Letter. Elim opened it and regarded its tenuous violet script. Then, with an expression of augmented determination, he folded it again and placed it with its fellow at the bottom of the heap. He firmly attacked the topmost theme. He read it slowly, made a penciled note in a small precise hand on its margin, folded it once more and marked it with a C minus. He went carefully through the pile, jotting occasional comments, judging the results with A, B or C, plus or minus. Finally only the two he had placed at the bottom remained.

Elim took one up again, gazing at it severely. He wondered what Rosemary Roselle had written about—in her absurd English—this time. As he looked at the theme's exterior, his attention shifted from the paper to himself, his conscience towered darkly above him, demanding a condemnatory examination of his feelings and impulses.

Had he not begun to look for, to desire, those essays from a doubtless erroneous and light young woman? Had he not even, on a former like occasion, awarded her effort with a B minus, when it was questionable if she should have had a C plus? Had his conduct not been dishonest, frivolous and wholly reprehensible? To all these inexorable accusations he was forced to confess himself guilty. He had undoubtedly, only a few minutes before, looked almost impatiently for something from Rosemary Roselle. Beyond cavil she should have had an unadorned C last month. And these easily proved him a broken reed.

He must at once take himself in hand, flames were reaching hungrily for him from the pit of eternal torment. In a little more he would be damned beyond any redemption. He was married ... shame! His thoughts turned to Hester, his wife for nine and more years.

Her father's farm lay next to the Meikeljohns'; the two places formed practically one convenient whole; and when Elim had been no more than a child, Meikeljohn Senior and Hester's parents had solemnly agreed upon a mutually satisfactory marriage. Hester had always been a thin pale slip of a girl, locally famous for her memory and grasp of the Scriptures; but it was only at her fourteenth year that her health began perceptibly to fail, at the same time that a succession of material mischances overwhelmed her family. Finally, borne down to actual privation, her father decided to remove to another section and opportunity. He sold his place for a fraction more than the elder Meikeljohn could pay ... but there was Hester, now an invalid; and there was the agreement that Meikeljohn had made when it had seemed to his advantage. The latter was a rigidly upright man—he accepted for his son the responsibility he himself had assumed, and Hester was left behind. Space in the Meikeljohn household was valuable, the invalid presented many practical difficulties, and, with the solemn concurrence of the elders of their church, Elim—something short of seventeen but a grave mature-seeming boy—and Hester were married.

The winter of his marriage Elim departed for college—his father was a just man, who had felt obscurely that some reparation was due Elim; education was the greatest privilege of which Meikeljohn could conceive, so, at sacrifices that all grimly accepted, Elim was sent to Cambridge. There, when he had been graduated, he remained—there were already more at the Meikeljohn home than their labor warranted— assistant to the professor of philosophy and letters.

Elim again opened the paper before him and spread it severely on the table. The supposititious letter, "Two, Linden Row," opened in proper form and spelling, addressed to "Dearest Elizabeth." Its progress, however, soon wabbled, its periods degenerated into a confusion. It endeavored to be casual, easy, but he judged it merely trivial. At one paragraph, despite his resolution of critical impersonality, his interest deepened:

"On Thursday we have to have ready a Theme to send off to Harvard. Of course, every Thursday morning We, with one accord, begin to make excuses. Well, the Dread Day rolls around to-morrow, and consequently I am deep in the Slough of Despond. My only consolation is that our Geniuses can't write regularly, but then the mood to write never possesses me.... This week, in writing a comparison between Hamlet and Antonio, I did succeed in jotting down something, but unfortunately I found that I had said the same many times before, only about different heroes. My tale of Woe——"

Elim once more took himself firmly in hand; he folded the paper and sharply indorsed it with a C minus. Afterward he felt decidedly uncomfortable. He wondered if Rosemary Roselle would be made unhappy by the low marking? Probably she wouldn't care; probably all that occupied her mind were dress and company. Possibly she danced—light, godless.

The haze within deepened; he could see through the window the tops of the maples—they held a green sheen as if in promise of the leaves to follow. The robin whistled faint and clear.

Possibly she danced. Carried away on the gracious flood of the afternoon, he wondered what Rosemary Roselle looked like. He was certain that she was pretty—her writing had the unconscious assurance of a personable being. Well, he would never know.... Rosemary Roselle— the name had a trick of hanging in the memory; it was astonishingly easy to repeat. He tried it aloud, speaking with a sudden emphasis that startled him. The name came back to him from the bare walls of his room like an appeal. Something within him stirred sharp as a knife. He rose with a deep breath, confused, as if some one else, unseen, had unexpectedly spoken.

III

His conscience, stirring again, projected the image of Hester, with her pinched glistening countenance, on his conjecturing. He resolutely addressed himself to the judgment of Rosemary Roselle's second paper, his lighter thoughts drowned in the ascending dark tide of his temperament It was called Our Waitress, and an instant antagonism for the entire South and its people swept over him.

He saw that the essay's subject was a negro, a slave; and all his impassioned detestation of the latter term possessed him. The essence of the Meikeljohns was a necessity for freedom, an almost bitter pride in the independence of their bodies. Their souls they held to be under the domination of a relentless Omnipotence, evolved, it might have been, from the obdurate and resplendent granite masses of the highland where they had first survived. These qualities gave to Elim Meikeljohn's political enmity for the South a fervor closely resembling fanaticism. Even now when, following South Carolina, six other states had seceded, he did not believe that war would ensue; he believed that slavery would be abolished at a lesser price; but he was a supporter of drastic means for its suppression. His Christianity, if it held a book in one hand, grasped a sword in the other, a sword with a bright and unsparing blade for the wrong-doer.

He consciously centered this antagonism on Rosemary Roselle; he visualized her as a thoughtless and capricious female, idling in vain luxury, cutting with a hard voice at helpless and enslaved human beings. He condemned his former looseness of being, his playing with insidious and destructive forces. A phrase, "Babylonish women," crept into his mind from some old yellow page. He read:

"Indy is a large light mulatto, very neat and very slow. She has not much Sense, but a great deal of Sensibility. Helping her proves Fatal. The more that is done for her the less well does she work.... Indy is very unfortunate: going out with a present of money she lost every penny. Of course she was incapable of work until the sum was replaced."

Elim paused with an impatient snort at this exhibition of shiftlessness. If the negroes were not soon freed they would be ruined beyond redemption. He read the remainder of the paper rigid and unapproving. It gave, he considered, such an excellent picture of Southern iniquities that he marked it B plus, the highest rating his responsibility had allowed Rosemary Roselle. Now he was certain that her very name held a dangerous potentiality—it came too easily to the tongue; it had a wanton sound like a silk skirt.

The warm glow faded from the room; without, the tenuous and bare upper branches of the maples wavered in the oncoming dusk. The river had disappeared. Elim was acutely conscious of the approaching hour of supper; and in preparation to go out to it he donned again the nankeen waistcoat and solemn garment that had served his father so long and so well.

IV

The following day was almost hot; at its decline coming across Winthrop Common Elim was oppressed and weary. Nothing unusual was happening at the boarding house; a small customary group was seated on the veranda steps, and he joined it. The conversation hung exclusively to the growing tension between North and South, to the forming of a Confederate States of America in February, the scattered condition of the Union forces, the probable fate of the forts in Charleston harbor.

The men spoke, according to their dispositions, with the fiery emphasis or gravity common to great crises. The air was charged with a sense of imminence, the vague discomfort of pending catastrophe. Elim listened without comment, his eyes narrowed, his long countenance severe. Most of the men had gone into Boston, to the Parker House, where hourly bulletins were being posted. Those on the steps rose to follow, all except Elim Meikeljohn—in Boston he knew money would be spent.

He went within, stopping to glance through a number of lately arrived letters on a table and found one for himself, addressed in his father's painstaking script. Alone, once more without his coat, he opened the letter. Its beginning was commonplace—"My dear son, Elim"—but what followed confused him by the totally unexpected shock it contained: Hester, his wife, was dead.

At first he was unable to comprehend the details of what had happened to him; the fact itself was of such disturbing significance. He had never considered the possibility of Hester's dying; he had come to think of her as a lifelong responsibility. She had seemed, in her invalid's chair, withdrawn from the pressure of life as it bore upon others, more enduring than his father's haggard concern over the increasing difficulties of material existence and spiritual salvation, than his mother's flushed toiling.

Elim had lived with no horizon wider than the impoverished daily necessity; he had accepted this with mingled fatality and fortitude; any rebellion had been immediately suppressed as a wicked reflection upon Deity. His life had been ordered in this course; he had accepted it the more readily from his inherited distrust of worldly values and aspirations; it had, in short, been he, and now the foundations of his entire existence had been overthrown.

He read the letter more carefully, realizing the probable necessity of his immediate return home for the funeral. But that was dispelled—his father wrote that it had been necessary to bury Hester at once. The elder Meikeljohn proceeded relentlessly to an exact exposition of why this had been done. "A black swelling" was included in the details. He finished:

"And if it would be inconvenient for you to leave your work at this time it is not necessary for you to come here. In some ways it would be better for you to stay. There is little enough for you to do and it would stop your money at college.... The Lord is a swift and terrible Being Who worketh His will in the night."

Hester was dead. Elim involuntarily walked to a window, gazing with unseeing eyes at the familiar pleasant prospect. A realization flashed unbidden through his mind, a realization like a stab of lightning—he was free. He overbore it immediately, but it left within him a strange tingling sensation. He directed his mind upon Hester and the profitable contemplation of death; but rebellion sprang up within him, thoughts beyond control whirled in his brain.

Free! A hundred impulses, desires, of which—suppressed by his rigid adherence to a code of duty—he had not been conscious, leaped into vitality. His vision of life swung from its focus upon outward and invisible things to a new surprising regard of his own tangible self. He grew aware of himself as an entity, of the world as a broad and various field of exploit and discovery.

There was, his father had bluntly indicated, no place for him at home; and suddenly he realized that his duties at college had been a tedious grind for inconsiderable return. This admission brought to him the realization that he detested the whole thing—the hours in class; the droning negligent recitations of the men; the professor of philosophy and letters' pedantic display; the cramped academic spirit of the institution. The vague resentment he had felt at the half-concealed disdain of his fellows gave place to a fiery contempt for their majority; the covert humility he had been forced to assume—by the thought of Hester and the few miserable dollars of an inferior position—turned to a bitter freedom of opinion.

The hour for supper approached and passed, but Elim did not leave his room. He walked from wall to wall, by turns arrogant and lost in his new situation. Of one thing he was certain—he would give up his occupation here. It might do for some sniveling sycophant of learning and money, but he was going forth to—what?

He heard footfalls in the bare hall below, and a sudden easy desire for companionship seized him; he drew on the sturdy Meikeljohn coat and descended the stairs to the lower floor. Harry Kaperton's door was open and Elim saw the other moving within. He advanced, leaning in the doorway.

"Back early," Elim remarked. "What's new at Parker's?"

Kaperton was unsuccessful in hiding his surprise at the other's unexpected appearance and direct question. "Why—why, nothing when I left;" then more cordially: "Come in, find a chair. Bottle on the table—oh, I didn't think." He offered an implied apology to Elim's scruples.

But Elim advanced to the table, where, selecting a decanter at random, he poured out a considerable drink of pale spirits. Harry Kaperton looked at him in foolish surprise.

"Had no idea you indulged!" he ejaculated. "Always took you to be a severe Puritan duck."

"Scotch," Elim corrected him, "Presbyterian."

He tilted the glass and the spirits sank smoothly from sight. His throat burned as if he had swallowed a mouthful of flame, but there was a quality in the strong rum that accorded with his present mood: it was fiery like his released sense of life. Kaperton poured himself a drink, elevated it with a friendly word and joined Elim.

"I'm going home," the former proceeded. "You see, I live in Maryland, and the situation there is getting pretty warm. We want to get our women out of Baltimore, and our affairs conveniently shaped, before any possible trouble. I had a message this evening to come at once."

The two men presented the greatest possible contrast—Harry Kaperton had elegantly flowing whiskers, a round young face that expressed facile excitement at a possible disturbance, and sporting garb of tremendous emphasis. Elim's face, expressing little of the tumult within, harsh and dark and dogged, was entirely appropriate to his somber greenish-black dress. Kaperton gestured toward the bottle, and they took a second drink, then a third.

Kaperton's face flushed, he grew increasingly voluble, but Elim Meikeljohn was silent; the liquor made no apparent impression upon him. He sat across the table from the other with his legs extended straight before him. They emptied the decanter of spirits and turned to sherry, anything that was left. Kaperton apologized profoundly for the depleted state of his cellar—knowing that he was leaving, he had invited a party of men to his room the night before. He was tremendously sorry that Elim had been overlooked—the truth being that no one had known what a good companion Elim was.

It seemed to Elim Meikeljohn, drinking sherry, that the night before he had not existed at all. He did not analyze his new being, his surprising potations; he was proceeding without a cautious ordering of his steps. It was neither a celebration nor a protest, but instinctive, like the indiscriminate gulping of a man who has been swimming under the water.

"Why," Kaperton gasped, "you've got a head like a cannon ball."

He rose and wandered unsteadily about, but Elim sat motionless, silent, drinking. He was conscious now of a drumming in his ears like distant martial music, a confused echo like the beat of countless feet. He tilted his glass and was surprised to find it empty.

"It's all gone," Kaperton said dully.

He was as limp as an empty doll, Elim thought contemptuously. He, Elim, felt like hickory, like iron; his mind was clear, vindicative. He rose, sweeping back the hair from his high austere brow. Kaperton had slid forward in his chair with hanging open hands and mouth.

The drumming in Elim's ears grew louder, a hum of voices was added to it, and it grew nearer, actual. A crowd of men was entering the boarding house, carrying about them a pressure of excited exclamations and a more subtle disturbance. Elim Meikeljohn left Kaperton and went out into the hall. An ascending man met him.

"War!" he cried. "The damned rebels have assaulted and taken Sumter! Lincoln has called for fifty thousand volunteers!" He hurried past and left Elim grasping the handrail of the stair.

War! The word carried an overwhelming significance to his mind dominated by the intangible drumming, to his newly released freedom. War upon oppression, upon the criminal slaveholders of the South! He descended the stairs, pausing above the small agitated throng in the hall.

A passionate elation swept over him. He held his long arms upward and out.

"How many of the fifty thousand are here?" he asked. His ringing voice was answered in an assent that rolled in a solid volume of sound up the stairs. Elim Meikeljohn's soul leaped in the supreme kinship that linked him, man to man, with all.

V

It was again April, extremely early in the morning and month, and thickly cold, when Brevet-Major Elim Meikeljohn, burning with the fever of a re-opened old saber wound, strayed away from his command in the direction of Richmond. His thoughts revolved with the rapidity of a pinwheel, throwing off crackling ideas, illuminated with blinding spurts and exploding colors, in every direction. A vague persistent pressure sent him toward the city. It was being evacuated; the Union forces, he knew, were to enter at dawn; but he had stumbled ahead, careless of consequences, oblivious of possible reprisal.

He was, he recognized by the greater blackness ahead, near the outskirts of the city—for Richmond was burning. The towering black mass of smoke was growing more perceptible in the slowly lightening dawn. Elim Meikeljohn could now hear the low sullen uprush of flames, the faint crackling of timbers, and a hot aromatic odor met him in faint waves.

His scabbard beat awkwardly about his heels, and he impatiently unhooked it and threw it into the gloom of the roadside. The service revolver was still in its holster; but he had forgotten its presence and use. In the multicolored confusion of his mind but one conscious impression remained; and, in its reiteration, he said aloud, over and over, in dull tones, "Two, Linden Row."

The words held no concrete meaning, they constructed no vision, embodied no tangible desire; they were merely the mechanical expression of an obscure and dominating impulse. He was hardly more sensate in his progress than a nail drawn irresistibly by a magnet.

The gray mist dissolved, and his long haggard face grew visible; it had not aged in the past four years of struggle—almost from boyhood it had been marked with somber longitudinal lines—but it had grown keener, more intense, with the expression of a man whose body had starved through a great spiritual conflict. His uniform, creased and stained, and now silvery with dew, flapped about a gaunt ironlike frame; and from under the leather peak of his kepi, even in his fever, his eyes burned steady and compelling.

Scattered houses, seemingly as unsubstantial as shadows, gathered about him; they grew more frequent, joined shoulder to shoulder, and he was in a city street. On the left he caught a glimpse of the river, solid and smooth and unshining; a knot of men passed shouting hoarsely, and a wave of heat swept over him like a choking cloth. Like the morning, his mind partially cleared, people and scenes grew coherent. The former were a disheveled and rioting rabble; the conflagration spread in lurid waves.

The great stores of the tobacco warehouses had been set on fire, and the spanning flames threatened the entire city. The rich odor of the burning tobacco leaves rolled over the streets in drifting showers of ruby sparks. The groups on the streets resolved into individuals. Elim saw a hulking woman, with her waist torn from grimy shoulders, cursing the retreating Confederate troops with uplifted quivering fists; he saw soldiers in gray joined to shifty town characters furtively bearing away swollen sacks; carriages with plunging frenzied horses, a man with white-faced and despairingly calm women. He stopped hurrying in the opposite direction and demanded:

"Two, Linden Row?"

The other waved a vague arm toward the right and broke away.

The street mounted sharply and Elim passed an open space teeming with hurrying forms, shrill with cries lost in the drumming roar of the flames. Every third man was drunk. He passed fights, bestial grimaces, heard the fretful crack of revolvers. The great storehouses were now below him, and he could see the shuddering inky masses of smoke blotting out quarter after quarter. He was on a more important thoroughfare now, and inquired again:

"Two, Linden Row?"

This man ejaculated:

"The Yankees are here!" The fact seemed to stupefy him, and he stood with hanging hands and mouth.

Elim Meikeljohn repeated his query and was answered by a negro who had joined them.

"On ahead, capt'n," he volunteered; "fourth turn past the capitol and first crossing."

The other regained his speech and began to curse the negro and Elim, but the latter moved swiftly on.

Above him, through the shifting tenebrous banks, he saw a classic white building on a patch of incredible greenery, infinitely remote; and then from the center of the city came a deafening explosion, a great sullen sheet of flame, followed by flashes like lightning in the settling blackness.

"The powder magazines," Elim heard repeated from person to person. An irregular file of Confederate soldiers galloped past him, and the echo of their hoofs had hardly died before a troop of mounted Union cavalry, with slanting carbines, rode at their heels. They belonged, Elim recognized, to Kautz' command.

He had now reached the fourth turn beyond the withdrawn vision of the capitol, and he advanced through a black snowing of soot. Flames, fanlike and pallid, now flickered about his feet, streamed in the gutters and lapped the curbs. He saw heaps of broken bottles against the bricks, and the smell of fine spilled wines and liquors hung in his nostrils. His reason again wavered—the tremendous spectacle of burning assumed an apocalyptic appearance, as if the city had burst spontaneously into flame from the passionate and evil spirits engendered and liberated by war.

He stopped at the first crossing and saw before him a row of tall brick houses, built solidly and set behind small yards and a low iron fencing. They had shallow porticoes with iron grilling, and at this end a towering magnolia tree swept its new glossy greenery against the third-story windows.

"Linden Row," he muttered. "Well—Number Two?"

He swung back a creaking gate and went up a flight of bricked steps to the door. He had guessed right; above a brass knocker filmed with the floating muck of the air he saw the numeral, Two, painted beneath the fanlight. The windows on the left were blank, curtained. The house rose silent and without a mark of life above the obscene clamor of the city. He knocked sharply and waited; then he knocked again. Nothing broke the stillness of the facade, the interior. He tried the door, but it was solidly barred. Then a second fact, a memory, joined the bare location in his brain. It was a name—Rose—Rosemary Roselle. He beat with an emaciated fist on the paneling and called, "Roselle! Roselle!"

There was a faint answering stir within; he heard the rattle of a chain; the door swung back upon an apparently empty and cavernous cool hall.

VI

A colored woman, in a crisp white turban, with a strained face more gray than brown, suddenly advanced holding before her in both hands a heavy revolver of an outworn pattern. Elim Meikeljohn could see by her drawn features that she was about to pull the trigger, and he said fretfully:

"Don't! The thing will explode. One of us will get hurt." She closed her eyes, Elim threw up his arm, and an amazingly loud report crashed through the entry. He stood swaying weakly, with hanging palms, while the woman dropped the revolver with a gasp. Elim Meikeljohn began to cry with short dry sobs.... It was incredible that any one should discharge a big revolver directly at his head. He sank limply against a chest at the wall.

"Oh, Indy!" a shaken voice exclaimed. "Do you think he's dying?" The colored woman went reluctantly forward and peered at Elim. She touched him on a shoulder.

"'Deed, Miss Rosemary," she replied, relieved and angry, "that shot didn't touch a hair. He's just crying like a big old nothing." She grasped him more firmly, gave him a shake. "Dressed like a soldier," she proceeded scornfully, "and scaring us out of our wits. What did you want to come here for anyhow calling out names?"

Elim's head rolled forward and back. The hall seemed full of flaming arrows, and he collapsed slowly on the polished floor. He was moved; he was half-conscious of his heels dragging upstairs, of frequent pauses, voices expostulating and directing thinly. Finally he sank into a sublimated peace in, apparently, a floating white cloud.

He awoke refreshed, mentally clear, but absurdly weak—he was lying in the middle of a four-posted bed, a bed with posts so massive and tall that they resembled smooth towering trees. Beyond them he could see a marble mantel; a grate filled with softly smoldering coals, and a gleaming brass hod; a highboy with a dark lustrous surface; oval gold frames; and muslin curtains in an open window, stirring in an air that moved the fluted valance at the top of the bed. It was late afternoon, the light was fading, the interior wavering in a clear shadow filled with the faint fat odor of the soft coal.

The immaculate bed linen bore an elusive cool scent, into which he relapsed with profound delight. The personality of the room, somber and still, flowed about him with a magical release from the inferno of the past years, the last hours. He heard a movement at a door, and the colored woman in the white turban moved to the side of the bed.

"I told her," she said in an aggrieved voice, "there wasn't nothing at all wrong with you. I reckon now you're all ready to fight again or eat. Why did you stir things all up in Richmond and kill good folks?"

"To set you free!" Elim Meikeljohn replied.

She gazed at him thoughtfully.

"Capt'n," she asked finally, "are you free?"

"Why, certainly——" he began, and then stopped abruptly, lost in the memory of the dour past. He recalled his father, with a passion for learning, imprisoned in the narrow poverty of his circumstances and surroundings; he remembered Hester, with her wishful gaze in the confines of her invalid chair; his own laborious lonely days. Freedom, a high and difficult term, he saw concerned regions of the spirit not liberated—solved—by a simple declaration on the body. The war had been but the initial, most facile step. The woman had silenced his sounding assertion, humiliated him, by a word. He gazed at her with a new, less confident interest. The mental effort brought a momentary recurrence of fever; he flushed and muttered: "Freedom ... spirit."

"You're not as wholesome as you appeared," the woman judged. "You can't have nothing beside a glass of milk." She crossed the room and, stirring the fire, put on fresh coal that ignited with an oily crackle. Again at the door she paused. "Don't you try to move about," she directed; "you stay right in this room. Mr. Roselle, he's downstairs, and Mr. McCall, and—" her voice took on a faint insistent note of warning. He paid little heed to her; he was lost in a wave of weariness.

The following morning, stronger, he rose and tentatively trying the door found it locked. The colored woman appeared soon after with a tray which, when he had performed a meager toilet, he attacked with a pleasant zest.

"The city's just burning right up," she informed him, standing in the middle of the floor; "the boats on the river caught fire and their camions banged into Canal Street." She had a pale even color, a straight delicate nose and sensitive lips.

"Are the Union troops in charge?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. They got some of the fire out, I heard tell. But that's not the worst now—a body can't set her foot in the street, it's so full of drunken roaring trash, black and white. It's good Mr. Roselle and Mr. McCall and Mr. John are here," she declared again; "they could just finish off anybody that offered to turn a bad hand."

This, Elim felt, was incongruous with his reception yesterday.

Still he made no inquiry. The breakfast finished, he relapsed once more on his pillows and heard the key stealthily turn in the door from the outside.

He told himself, without conviction, that he must rise and join his command. The war, he knew, was over; the courage that had sustained him during the struggle died. The simple question of the colored woman had largely slain it. His own personality, the vision of his forthcoming life and necessity, rose to the surface of his consciousness. Elim realized what had drawn, him to his present situation—it had, of course, been the memory of Rosemary Roselle. The days when he—an assistant to a professor of philosophy and letters—had read and marked her essays seemed to lie in another existence, infinitely remote. How would he excuse his presence, the calling of her name before the house? This was an inopportune—a fatal—moment for a man in the blue of the North to make his bow to a Richmond girl, in the midst of her wasted and burning place of home. He decided reluctantly that it would be best to say nothing of his connection with her academic labors, but to depart as soon as possible and without explanation of his first summons.... Rosemary Roselle—the name had clung persistently to his memory. It was probable that he would see her—once. That alone was extraordinary. He marveled at the grim humor of circumstance that had granted him such a wildly improbable wish, and at the same time made it humanly impossible for him to benefit from it.

VII

The leisurely progress of his thoughts was interrupted by hasty feet without; the bolt was shot back and his door flung open. It was the colored woman—the Indy of the essay—quivering with anger and fear.

"Capt'n," she exclaimed, gasping with her rapid accent, "you come right down to the dining room, and bring that big pistol of yours. There's two, two——" Words failed her. "Anyhow you shoot them! It's some of that liberty you brought along, I reckon. You come down to Miss Rosemary!"

She stood tense and ashen, and Elim rose on one elbow.

"Some of our liberty?" he queried. "Did Miss Roselle send for me?"

"No, sir, she didn't. Miss Rosemary she wouldn't send for you, not if you were the last man alive. I'm telling you to come down to the dining room.... We've tended you and—"

"Well," he demanded impatiently, "what do you want; whom shall I shoot?"

"You'll see, quick enough. And I can't stand here talking either; I've got to go back. You get yourself right along down!"

With painful slowness Elim made his preparations to descend; his fingers could hardly buckle the stiff strap of his revolver sling, but finally he made his way downstairs through a deep narrow hall. He turned from a blank wall to a darkened reception room, with polished mahogany, somber books and engravings on the walls, and a rosy blur of fire in the hearth. A more formal chamber lay at his right, empty, but through an opposite door he caught the faint clatter of a spoon.

Rosemary Roselle was seated, rigid and white, at the end of a table that bore a scattered array of dishes. There were shadows beneath her eyes, and her hands, on the table, were clenched. On her left a man in an unmarked blue uniform sat, sagging heavily forward in his chair, breathing stertorously, with a dark flush over a pouched and flaccid countenance. Opposite him, sitting formally upright, was a negro in a carefully brushed gray suit, with a crimson satin necktie surcharged by vivid green lightning. His bony face, the deep pits of his temples, were the dry spongy black of charcoal, and behind steel-rimmed glasses his eyes rolled like yellow agates. He glanced about, furtive and startled, when Elim Meikeljohn entered, but he was immediately reassured by Elim's disordered uniform. He made a solemn obeisance.

"Colonel," he said, "will you make one of a little informal repast? We are, you see, at the lady's table."

Overcome by a sharp weakness, Elim slipped into the chair at his side and faced Rosemary Roselle. The latter gave no sign of his presence. She sat frozen into a species of statuesque rage. "Like you," the negro continued pompously, "we invited ourselves. All things are free and easy for all. The glorious principle of equality instituted lately has swept away—swept away the inviderous distinctions of class and color. The millenium has come!" He made a grandiloquent gesture with a sooty hand.

"'Ray!" the sodden individual opposite unexpectedly cried.

"We came in," the other continued, "to uphold our rights as the exponents of—of——"

"You sneaked in the kitchen," the woman in the doorway interrupted; "and I found you rummaging in the press."

"Silence!" the orator commanded. "Are you unaware of the dignity now resting on your kinks—hair, hair." He rose, facing Elim Meikeljohn. "Colonel, gentleman, in a conglomeration where we are all glorious cohevals of—of—"

"Shut up!" said the apostrophized colonel, sudden and fretful. "Get out!"

The orator paused, disconcerted, in the midflow of his figures; and unaccustomed arrogance struggled with habitual servility. "Gentleman," he repeated, "in a corposity of souls high above all narrow malignations—"

Elim Meikeljohn took his revolver from its holster and laid it before him on the table. The weapon produced an electrical effect on the figure nodding in a drunken stupor. He rose abruptly and uncertain.