Her voice broke with exhaustion; she closed her eyes and lay back in the big chair. David put her hand against his face, and held it there until she opened her eyes. She looked at him dumbly for a little while; then the slow, monotonous outpouring of all the silent months began again: "And I said I hated you. And he said if I married him, it would show you that I hated you. David, he was fond of me. I have to remember that. It wouldn't be fair not to remember that, would it? I was really the one to blame. Oh, I must be fair to him; he was fond of me.... And all that afternoon, after he married me, I was so glad to think how wicked I was. I knew how you would suffer. And that made me glad to be wicked...."

There was a long pause; he pulled a little shawl across her feet, and laid her hand over his eyes; but he was silent.

"Then," she said, in a whisper, "I died, I think. I suppose that is why I have never been angry since. Something was killed in me.... I've wondered a good deal about that. David, isn't it strange how part of you can die, and yet you can go on living? Of course I expected to die. I prayed all the time that I might. But I went on living;—you are glad I lived?" she said, incredulously, catching some broken murmur from behind his hands in which his face was hidden; "glad? Why, I should have thought— Well, that was the most awful time of all. The only peace I had, just single minutes of peace, was when I remembered that you hated me."

He laid his face against her knee, and she felt the fierce intake of his breath.

"You didn't hate me? Oh, don't say you didn't, David. Don't! It was the only comfort I had, to have you despise me. Although that was just at first. Afterward, last May, when you walked down to Nannie's with me that afternoon, and I thought you had got all over it, I...something seemed to be eating my heart away. That seems like a contradiction, doesn't it? I don't understand how I could feel two ways. But just at first I wanted you to hate me. I thought you would be less unhappy if you hated me; and besides, I wanted to feel the whips. I felt them—oh, I felt them!...And all the time I thought that soon I would die. But death would have been too easy. I had to go on living." There was another long silence; he kissed her hand once; but he did not speak. . . . "And the days went on, and went on, and went on. Sometimes I didn't feel anything; but sometimes it was like stringing sharp beads on a red-hot wire. I suppose that sounds foolish? But when his mother disinherited him, I knew I would have to go on—stringing beads. Because it would have been mean, then, to leave him. You see that, David? Besides, I was a spoiled thing, a worthless thing. If staying with him would make up for the harm I had done him,—Mrs. Maitland told me I had injured him; why of course, there was nothing else to do. I knew you would understand. So I stayed. 'Unkind to me?'" She bent forward a little to hear his smothered question. "Oh no; never. I used to wish he would be. But he—loved me"—she shuddered. "Oh, David, how I have dreamed of your arms. David . . . David . . ."

They had forgotten that each had believed love had ceased in the other; they did not even assert that it was unchanged. Nor was there any plea for forgiveness on either side. The moment was too great for that.

She sank back in her chair with a long breath. He rose, and kneeling beside her, drew her against his breast. She sighed with comfort. "Here! At last to be here. I never thought it would be. It is heaven. Yes; I shall remember that I have been in heaven. But I don't think I shall be sent to hell. No; God won't punish me any more. It will be just sleep."

He had to bend his ear almost to her white lips to catch her whisper. "What did I say? I don't remember exactly; I am so happy. . . . Let me be quiet a little while. I'm pretty tired. May I stay until morning? It is raining, and if I may stay . . . I will go away very early in the morning." The long, rambling, half-whispered story had followed the fierce statement, flung at him when she burst in out of the storm, and stood, sodden with rain, trembling with fatigue and cold, and pushing from her his alarmed and outstretched hands,—the statement that she had left Blair! There were only a few words in the outburst of terrible anger which had been dormant in her for all these years: "He stole your wife. Now he is stealing your money. I told him he couldn't keep them both. Your wife has come back to you. I have left him—"

Even while she was stammering, shrilly, the furious finality, he caught her, swaying, in his arms. It was an hour before she could speak coherently of the happenings of the last twenty-four hours; she had to be warmed and fed and calmed. And it was curious how the lover in him and the physician in him alternated in that hour; he had been instant with the soothing commonplace of help,— her wet clothes, her chilled body, her hunger, were his first concern. "I know you are hungry," he said, cheerfully; but his hands shook as he put food before her. When he drew her chair up to the fire, and kneeling down, took off her wet shoes, he held her slender, tired feet in his hands and chafed them gently; but suddenly laid them against his breast, warming them, murmuring over them with a sobbing breath, as though he felt the weariness of the little feet, plodding, plodding, plodding through the rain to find him. The next minute he was the doctor, ordering her with smiling words to lie back in her chair and rest; then looking at her with a groan.

When at last she was coherent again, she began that pitiful confession, and he listened; at first walking up and down; then coming nearer; sitting beside her; then kneeling; then lifting her and holding her against his breast. When, relaxing in his arms like a tired child, she ended, almost in a whisper, with her timid plea to be allowed to stay until morning, the tears dropped down his face.

"Until morning?" he said, with a laugh that broke into a sob— "until death!"

Long before this his first uneasiness, at the situation—for her sake,—had disappeared. The acquired uneasinesses of convention vanish before the primal realities. The long-banked fire had glowed, then broken into flames that consumed such chaff as "propriety." As he held her in his arms after that whispered and rambling story of despair, he trembled all over. For Elizabeth there had never been a single moment of conventional consciousness; she was solemnly unaware of everything but the fact that they were together for this last moment. When he said "until death," she lifted her head and looked at him.

"Yes," she said, "until death."

Something in her broken whisper touched him like ice. He was suddenly rigid. "Elizabeth, where did you mean to go to-morrow morning?" She made no answer, but he felt that she was alert. "Elizabeth! Tell me! what do you mean?" His loud and terrified command made her quiver; she was bewildered by the unexpectedness of his suspicion, but too dulled and stunned to evade it. David, with his ear close to her lips, raised his head. "Elizabeth, don't you understand? Dear, this is life, not death, for us both."

She drew away from him with a long sigh, struggling up feebly out of his arms and groping for her chair; she shook her head, smiling faintly. "I'm sorry you guessed. No, I can't go on living. There's no use talking about it, David. I can't."

He stood looking down at her, pale from the shock of his discovery. "Listen to me, Elizabeth: you belong to me. Don't you understand, dear? You always have belonged to me. He knew it when he stole you from yourself, as well as from me. You have always been mine. You have come back to me. Do you think I will let Blair Maitland or death or God Almighty, steal you now? Never. You belong to me! to me!"

"But—" she began.

"Oh, Elizabeth, what do we care for what they call right and wrong? 'Right' is being together!"

She frowned in a puzzled way. She had not been thinking of "right and wrong"; her mind had been absorbed by the large and simple necessity of death. But his inevitable reasonableness, ignoring her organic impulse, was already splitting hairs to justify an organic impulse of his own.

"God gave you to me," he said, "and by God I'll keep you! That's what is right; if we parted now it would be wrong."

It seemed as if the gale of passion which had been slowly rising in him in these hours they had been together blew away the mists in which her mind had been groping, blew away the soothing fogs of death which had been closing in about her, and left her, shrinking, in sudden, confusing light.

"Wrong?" she said, dazed; "I hadn't thought about that. David, I wouldn't have come to you except—except because it was the end. Anything else is impossible, you know."

"Why?" he demanded.

"I am married," she said, bewildered.

He laughed under his breath. "Blair Maitland will take his own medicine, now," he said;—"you are married to me!"

The triumph in his voice, while it vaguely alarmed her, struck some answering chord in her mind, for while mechanically she contradicted him, some deeper self was saying, "yes; yes."

But aloud she said, "It can't be, David; don't you see it can't be?"

"But it is already; I will never let you go. I've got you— at last. Elizabeth, listen to me; while you've been talking, I've thought it all out: as things are, I don't think you can possibly get a divorce from Blair and marry me. He's 'kind' to you, you say; and he's 'decent,' and he doesn't drink—and so forth and so forth. I know the formula to keep a woman with a man she hates and call it being respectable. No, you can't get a divorce from him; but he can get a divorce from you ... if you give him the excuse to do so."

Elizabeth looked at him with perfectly uncomprehending eyes. The innocence of them did not touch him. For the second time in her life she was at the mercy of Love. "Blair is fond of me," she said; "he never would give me a divorce. He has told me so a hundred times. Do you suppose I haven't begged him to let me go? On my knees I begged him. No, David, there is no way out except— "

"There is a way out if you love me enough to—come to me. Then," he said in a whisper, "he will divorce you and we can be married. Oh, Elizabeth, death is not the way out; it is life, dear, life! Will you live? Will you give me life?" He was breathing as if he had been running; he held her fingers against his lips until he bruised them.

She understood. After a minute of silence she said, faintly: "As for me, nothing matters. Even if it is wicked—"

"It is not wicked!"

"Well, if it were, if you wanted me I would come. I don't seem to care. Nothing seems to me wrong in the whole world. And nothing right. Do you understand, David? I am—done. My life is worthless, anyhow. Use it—and throw it away. But it would ruin you. No, I won't do it."

"Ruin me? It would make me! I have shriveled, I have starved, I have frozen without you. Ask my mother if what I tell you isn't true." She caught her breath and drew away from him. "Your mother!" she said, faintly. But he did not notice the recoil.

"It would end your career," she said. She was confused by the mere tumult of his words.

"Career! The only career I want is you. Medicine isn't the only thing in the world, nor Philadelphia the only place to practise it. And if I can't be a doctor, I can break stones for my wife. Elizabeth, to love you is the only career I want. But you—can you? Am I asking more than you can give? Do you care what people say? We may not be able to be married for a year. Longer, perhaps; the law takes time. They will call it disgrace, you know, the people who don't know what love means. Could you bear that—for me? Do you love me enough for that, Elizabeth?"

His voice was hoarse with passion. He was on his knees beside her, his face hot against hers, his arms around her. Not only his bitterly thought-out theories of individualism, but all his years of decent living, contributed to his overthrow at that moment. He was a man; and here was his woman, who had been torn from him by a thief: she had come back to him, she had toiled back through the storm, she had fought back through cruel and imprisoning ties that had held her for nearly three years; should he not keep her, now that she had come? The cave-dweller in him cried out "Yes!" To let her go now, would be to loosen his fingers just as they gripped the neck of the thief who had robbed him! In the madness of that moment of hate and love, his face on hers, his arms around her, David did not know that his tears were wet on her lips.

"Mine," he said, panting; "mine! my own has come back to me. Say so; tell me so yourself. Say it! I want to hear you say it."

"Why David, I have always been yours. But I am not worth taking. I am not—"



"Hush! You are mine. They shall never part us again. Elizabeth— to-morrow we will go away." She sank against him in silence; for a while he was silent, too. Then, in a low voice, he told her how they must carry out a plan which had sprung, full-winged, from his mind; "when he knows you have been here to-night," David said,—and trembled from head to foot; "he will divorce you."

She listened, assenting, but bewildered. "I was going to die," she said, faintly; "I don't know how to live. Oh, I think the other way would be better."

But he did not stop to discuss it; he had put her back into the reclining chair—once in a while the physician remembered her fatigue, though for the most part the lover thought only of himself; he saw how white she was, and put her in the big chair; then, drawing up a footstool, he sat down, keeping her hand in his; sometimes he kissed it, but all the time he talked violently of right and wrong. Elizabeth was singularly indifferent to his distinctions; perhaps the deep and primitive experience of looking into the face of Death made her so. At any rate, her question was not "Is it right?" it was only "Is it best?" Was it best for him to do this thing? Would it not injure him? David, brushing away her objections with an exultant belief in himself, was far less elemental. Right? What made right and wrong? Law? Elizabeth knew better! Unless she meant God's law. As far as that went, she was breaking it if she went on living with Blair. As for dying, she had no right to die! She was his. Would she rob him again?

It was all the everlasting, perfectly sincere sophistry of the man who has been swept past honor and prudence and even pity, that poured from David's lips; and with it, love! love! love! Elizabeth, listening to it, carried along by it, had, in the extraordinary confusion of the moment, nothing to oppose to it but her own unworth. To this he refused to listen, closing her lips with his own, and then going on with his quite logical reasoning. His mind was alert to meet and arrange every difficulty and every detail; once, half laughing, he stopped to say, "We'll have to live on your money, Elizabeth. See what I've come to!" The old scruples seemed, beside this new reality, merely ridiculous—although there was a certain satisfaction in throwing overboard that hideous egotism of his, which had made all the trouble that had come to them. "You see," he explained, "we shall go away for a while, until you get your divorce. And it will take time to pick up a practice, especially, in a new place. So you will probably have to support me," he ended, smiling. But she was too much at peace in the haven of his clasping arms even to smile. Once, when he confessed his shame at having doubted her—"for I did," he said; "I actually thought you cared for him!" she roused herself: "It was my fault. I won't let you blame yourself; it was all my fault!" she said; then sank again into dreaming quiet.

It was midnight; the fire had died down; a stick of drift-wood on the iron dogs, gnawed through by shimmering blue and copper flames, broke apart, and a shower of sparks flew up, caught in the soot, and smoldered in spreading rosettes on the chimney- back. The night, pressing black against the windows, was full of the murmurous silence of the rain and the soft advancing crash of the incoming tide; the man and woman were silent, too. Sometimes he would kiss the little scar on her wrist; sometimes press his lips into the soft cup of her palm; there seemed no need of words. It was in one of these silences that David suddenly raised his head and frowned.

"Listen!" he said; then a moment later: "wheels! here? at this time of night!"

Elizabeth crouched back in her chair. "It is Blair. He has followed me—"

"No, no; it is somebody who has lost his way in the rain. Yes, I hear him; he is coming in to ask the road."

There were hurried steps on the porch, and Elizabeth grew so deadly white that David said again, reassuringly: "It's some passer-by. I'll send him about his business."

Loud, vehement knocking interrupted him, and he said, cheerfully: "Confound them, making such a noise! Don't be frightened; it is only some farmer—"

He took up a lamp and, closing the door of the living-room behind him, went out into the hall; some one, whoever it was, was fumbling with the knob of the front door as if in terrible haste. David slipped the bolt and would have opened the door, but it seemed to burst in, and against it, clinging to the knob, panting and terrified, stood his mother.

"David! Is she—Am I too late? David! Where is Elizabeth? Am I too late?"



CHAPTER XXXIII

The rainy dawn which Elizabeth had seen glimmering in the steam and smoke of the railroad station filtered wanly through Mercer's yellow fog. In Mrs. Maitland's office-dining-room the gas, burning in an orange halo, threw a livid light on the haggard faces of four people who had not slept that night.

When Blair had come frantically back from his fruitless quest at the hotel to say, "Is she here, now?" Mrs. Richie had sent him at once to Mr. Ferguson, who, roused from his bed, instantly took command.

"Tell me just what has happened, please?" he said.

Blair, almost in collapse, told the story of the afternoon. He held nothing back. In the terror that consumed him, he spared himself nothing; he had made Elizabeth angry; frightfully angry. But she didn't show it; she had even said she was not angry. But she said—and he repeated that sword-like sentence about "David's money and David's wife." Then, almost in a whisper, he added her question about—drowning. "She has—" he said; he did not finish the sentence.

Robert Ferguson made no comment, but his face quivered. "Have you a carriage?" he asked, shrugging into his overcoat. Blair nodded, and they set out.

It was after five when they came back to Mrs. Maitland's dining- room, where the gaslight struggled ineffectually with the fog. They had done everything which, at that hour, could be done.

"Oh, when will it ever get light!" Blair said, despairingly. He pushed aside the food Nannie had placed on the table for them, and dropped his face on his arms. He had a sudden passionate longing for his mother; she would have done something! She would have told these people, these dazed, terrified people! what to do. She always knew what to do. For the first time in his life he needed his mother.

Robert Ferguson, standing at the window, was staring out at the blind, yellow mist. "As soon as it's light enough, we'll get a boat and go down the river," he said, with heavy significance.

"But it is absurd to jump at such a conclusion," Mrs. Richie protested.

"You don't know her," Elizabeth's uncle said, briefly.

Blair echoed the words. "No; you don't know her."

"All the same, I don't believe it!" Mrs. Richie said, emphatically. "For one thing, Blair says that her comb and brush are not on her bureau. A girl doesn't take her toilet things with her when she goes out to—"

"Elizabeth might," Mr. Ferguson said.

Blair, looking up, broke out: "Oh, that money! It's that that has made all the trouble. Why did I say I wouldn't give it up? I'd throw it into the fire, if it would bring her back to me!"

Mrs. Richie was silent. Her face was tense with anxiety, but it was not the same anxiety that plowed the other faces. "Did you go to the depot?" she said. "Perhaps she took the night train. The ticket-agent might have seen her."

"But why should she take a night train?" Blair said; "where would she go?"

"Why should she do a great many things she has done?" Mrs. Richie parried; and added, softly, "I want to speak to you, Blair; come into the parlor for a minute." When they were alone, she said,— her eyes avoiding his; "I have an idea that she has gone to Philadelphia. To see me."

"You? But you are here!"

"Yes; but perhaps she thought I went home yesterday; you thought so."

Blair grasped at a straw of hope. "I will telegraph—" "No; that would be of no use. The servants couldn't answer it; and—and there is no one else there. I will take the morning express, and telegraph you as soon as I get home."

"But I can't wait all day!" he said; "I will wire—" he paused; it struck him like a blow that there was only one person to whom to wire. The blood rushed to his face. "You think that she has gone to him?"

"I think she has gone to me," she told him, coldly. "What more natural? I am an old friend, and she was angry with you."

"Yes; she was, but—"

"As for my son," said Mrs. Richie, "he is not at home; but I assure you,"—she stumbled a little over this; "I assure you that if he were he would have no desire to see your wife."

Blair was silent. Then he said, in a smothered voice: "If she is at your house, tell her I won't keep the money. I'll make Nannie build a hospital with it; or I'll ... tell her, if she will only just come back to me, I'll—" He could not go on.

"Blair," Robert Ferguson said, from the doorway, "it is light enough now to get a boat."

Blair nodded. "If she has gone to you, if she is alive," he said, "tell her I'll give him the money."

Helena Richie lifted her head with involuntary hauteur. "My son has no interest in your money!"

"Oh," he said, brokenly, "you can't seem to think of anything but his quarrel with me. Somehow, all that seems so unimportant now! Why, I'd ask David to help me, if I could reach him." He did not see her relenting, outstretched hand; for the first time in a life starved for want of the actualities of pain, Blair was suffering; he forgot embarrassment, he even forgot hatred; he touched fundamentals: the need of help and the instinctive reliance upon friendship. "David would help me!" he said, passionately; "or my mother would know what to do; but you people—" He dashed after Mr. Ferguson, and a moment later Mrs. Richie heard the carriage rattling down the street; the two men were going to the river to begin their heart-sickening search.

It was then that she started upon a search of her own. She made a somewhat lame excuse to Nannie—Nannie was the last person to be intrusted with Helena Richie's fears! Then she took the morning express across the mountains. She sat all day in fierce alternations of hope and angry concern: Surely Elizabeth was alive; but suppose she was alive—with David! David's mother, remembering what he had said to her that Sunday afternoon on the beach, knew, in the bottom of her heart, that she would rather have Elizabeth dead than alive under such conditions. Her old misgivings began to press upon her: the conditions might have held no danger for him if he had had a different mother! She found herself remembering, with anguish, a question that had been asked her very long ago, when David was a little boy: Can you make him brave; can you make him honorable; can you—"I've tried, oh, I have tried," she said; "but perhaps Dr. Lavendar ought not to have given him to me!" It was an unendurable idea; she drove it out of her mind, and sat looking at the mist-enfolded mountains, struggling to decide between a hope that implied a fear and a fear that destroyed a hope;—but every now and then, under both the hope and the fear, came a pang of memory that sent the color into her face: Robert Ferguson's library; his words; his kiss....

As the afternoon darkened into dusk, through sheer fatigue she relaxed into certainty that both the hope and the fear were baseless: Elizabeth had not gone to David; she couldn't have done such an insane thing! David's mother began to be sorry she had suggested to Blair that his wife might be in Philadelphia. She began to wish she had stayed in Mercer, and not left them all to their cruel anxiety. "If she has done what they think, I'll go back to-morrow. Robert will need me, and David would want me to go back." It occurred to her, with a lift of joy, that she might possibly find David at home. Owing to the bad weather, he might not have gone down to the beach to close the cottage as he had written her he meant to do. She wondered how he would take this news about Elizabeth. For a moment she almost hoped he would not be at home, so that she need not tell him. "Oh," she said to herself, "when will he get over her cruelty to him?" As she gathered up her wraps to leave the car, she wondered whether human creatures ever did quite "get over" the catastrophes of life. "Have I? And I am fifty,—and it was twenty years ago!"

When with a lurch the cab drew up against the curb, her glance at the unlighted windows of her parlor made her sigh with relief; there was nobody there! Yes; she had certainly been foolish to rush off across the mountains, and leave those poor, distressed people in Mercer.

"The doctor is at Little Beach, I suppose?" she said to the woman who answered her ring; "By-the-way, Mary, no one has been here to-day? No lady to see me?"

"There was a lady to see the doctor; she was just possessed to see him. I told her he was down at the beach, and she was that upset," Mary said, smiling, "you'd 'a' thought there wasn't another doctor in Philadelphia!" Patients were still enough of a rarity to interest the whole friendly household.

"Who was she? What was she like? Did she give her name?" Mrs. Richie was breathless; the servant was startled at the change in her; fear, like a tangible thing, leaped upon her and shook her.

"Who was she?" Mrs. Richie said, fiercely.

The surprised woman, giving the details of that early call, was, of course, ignorant of the lady's name; but after the first word or two David's mother knew it. "Bring me a time-table. Never mind my supper! I must see the lady. I think I know who she was. She wanted to see me, and I must find her. I know where she has gone. Hurry! Where is the new time-table?"

"She didn't ask for you, 'm," the bewildered maid assured her.

Mrs. Richie was not listening; she was turning the leaves of the Pathfinder with trembling fingers; the trains had been changed on the little branch road, but somehow she must get there,—"to-night!" she said to herself. To find a train to Normans was an immense relief, though it involved a fourteen- mile drive to Little Beach. She could not reach them ("them!" she was sure of it now), she could not reach them until nearly twelve, but she would be able to say that Elizabeth had spent the night with her.

The hour before the train started for Normans seemed endless to Helena Richie. She sent a despatch to Blair to say:

"I have found her. Do not come for her yet. This is imperative. Will telegraph you to-morrow."

After that she walked about, up and down, sometimes stopping to look out of the window into the rainswept street, sometimes pausing to pick up a book but though she turned over the pages, she did not know what she read. She debated constantly whether she had done well to telegraph Blair. Suppose, in spite of her command, he should rush right on to Philadelphia, "then what!" she said to herself, frantically. If he found that Elizabeth had followed David down to the cottage, what would he do? There would be a scandal! And it was not David's fault—she had followed him; how like her to follow him, careless of everything but her own whim of the moment! She would have recalled the despatch if she could have done so. "If Robert were only here to tell me what to do!" she thought, realizing, even in her cruel alarm, how greatly she depended on him. Suddenly she must have realized something else, for a startled look came into her eyes. "No! of course I'm not," she said; but the color rose in her face. The revelation was only for an instant; the next moment she was tense with anxiety and counting the minutes before she could start for the station.

It was a great relief when she found herself at last on the little local train, rattling out into the rainy night. When she reached Normans it was not easy to get a carriage to go to Little Beach. No depot hack-driver would consider such a drive on such a night. She found her way through the rainy streets to a livery- stable, and standing in the doorway of a little office that smelled of harnesses and horses, she bargained with a reluctant man, who, though polite enough to take his feet from his desk and stand up before a lady, told her point-blank that there wasn't no money, no, nor no woman, that he'd drive twenty-eight miles for— down to the beach and back; on no such night as this; "but maybe one of my men might, if you'd make it worth his while," he said, doubtfully.

"I will make it worth his while," Mrs. Richie said.

"There's a sort of inlet between us and the beach, kind of a river, like; you'll have to ferry over," the man warned her.

"Please get the carriage at once," she said.

So the long drive began. It was very dark. At times the rain sheeted down so that little streams of water dripped upon her from the top of the carryall, and the side curtains flapped so furiously that she could scarcely hear the driver grumbling that if he'd 'a' knowed what kind of a night it was he wouldn't have undertook the job.

"I'll pay you double your price," she said in a lull of the storm; and after that there was only the sheeting rain and the tugging splash of mud-loaded fetlocks. At the ferry there was a long delay. "The ferry-man's asleep, I guess," the driver told her; certainly there was no light in the little weather-beaten house on the riverbank. The man clambered out from under the streaming rubber apron of the carryall, and handing the wet reins back to her to hold—"that horse takes a notion to run sometimes," he said, casually; made his way to the ferry-house. "Come out!" he said, pounding on the door; "tend to your business! there's a lady wants to cross!"

The ferry-man had his opinion of ladies who wanted to do such things in such weather; but he came, after what seemed to the shivering passenger an interminable time, and the carryall was driven onto the flat-bottomed boat. A minute later the creak of the cable and the slow rock of the carriage told her they had started. It was too dark to see anything, but she could hear the sibilant slap of the water against the side of the scow and the brush of rain on the river. Once the dripping horse shook himself, and the harness rattled and the old hack quivered on its sagging springs. She realized that she was cold; she could hear the driver and the ferryman talking; there was the blue spurt of a match, and a whiff of very bad tobacco from a pipe. Then a dash of rain blew in her face, and the smell of the pipe was washed out of the air.

It was after twelve when, stumbling up the path to her own house, she leaned against the door awaiting David's answer to her knock; when he opened it to the gust of wet wind and her drawn, white face, he was stunned with astonishment. He never knew what answer he made to those first broken, frantic words; as for her, she did not wait to hear his answer. She ran past him and burst into the fire-lit silence that was still tingling with emotion. She saw Elizabeth rising, panic-stricken, from her chair. Clutching her shoulder, she looked hard into the younger woman's face; then, with a great sigh, she sank down into a chair.

"Thank God!" she said, faintly.

David, following her, stammered out, "How did you get here?" The full, hot torrent of passion of only a moment before had come to a crashing standstill. He could hardly breathe with the suddenness of it. His thoughts galloped. He heard his own voice as if it had been somebody else's, and he was conscious of his foolishness in asking his question; what difference did it make how she got here! Besides, he knew how: she had come over the mountains that day, taken the evening train for Normans, and driven down here, fourteen miles—in this storm! "You must be worn out," he said, involuntarily.

"I am in time; nothing else matters. David, go and pay the man. Here is my purse."

He glanced at Elizabeth, hesitated, and went. The two women, alone, looked at each other for a speechless instant.



CHAPTER XXXIX

"You ought not to be here, you know," Helena Richie said, in a low voice.

Elizabeth was silent.

"They are all very much frightened about you at home."

"I am sorry they are frightened."

"Your coming might be misunderstood," David's mother said; her voice was very harsh; the gentle loveliness of her face had changed to an incredible harshness. "I shall say I was here with you, of course; but you are insane, Elizabeth! you are insane to be here!"

"Mother," David said, quietly, "you mustn't find fault with Elizabeth." He had come back, and even as he spoke retreating wheels were heard. They were alone, these three; there was no world to any of them outside that fire-lit room, encompassed by night, the ocean, and the storm. "Elizabeth did exactly right to come down here to—to consult me," David said; "but we won't talk about it now; it's too late, and you are too tired."

Then turning to Elizabeth, he took her hand. "Won't you go up- stairs now? You are as tired as Materna! But she must have something to eat before she goes to bed." Still holding her hand, he opened the door for her. "You know the spare room? I'm afraid it's rather in disorder, but you will find some blankets and things in the closet."

Elizabeth hesitated; then obeyed him.

David was entirely self-possessed by this time; in that moment while he stood in the rain, counting out the money from his mother's purse for the driver, and telling the man of a short cut across the dunes, the emotion of a moment before cooled into grim alertness to meet the emergency: there must be no scene. To avoid the possibility of such a thing, he must get Elizabeth out of the room at once. As he slipped the bolt on the front door and hurried back to the living room, he said a single short word between his teeth. But he was not angry; he was only irritated— as one might be irritated at a good child whose ignorant innocence led it into meddling with matters beyond its comprehension. And he was not apprehensive; his mother's coming could not alter anything; it was merely an embarrassment and distress. What on earth should he do with her the next morning! "I'll have to lie to her," he thought, in consternation. David had never lied to his mother, and even in this self-absorbed moment he shrank from doing so. He was keenly disturbed, but as the door closed upon Elizabeth he spoke quietly enough: "You are very tired, Materna; don't let's get to discussing things tonight. I'll bring you something to eat, and then you must go up to your room."

"There is nothing to discuss, David," she said; "of course Elizabeth ought not to have come down here to you. But I am here. To-morrow she will go home with me."

She had taken off her bonnet, and with one unsteady hand she brushed back the tendrils of her soft hair that the rain had tightened into curls all about her temples; the glow in her cheeks from the cold air was beginning to die out, and he saw, suddenly, the suffering in her eyes. But for the first time in his life David Richie was indifferent to pain in his mother's face; that calm declaration that Elizabeth would go home with her, brushed the habit of tenderness aside and stung him into argument—which a moment later he regretted. "You say she'll 'go home.' Do you mean that you will take her back to Blair Maitland?"

"I hope she will go to her husband."

"Why?" He was standing before her, his shoulder against the mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets; his attitude was careless, but his face was alert and hard; she no longer seemed a meddlesome good child; she was his mother, interfering in what was not her business. "Why?" he repeated.

"Because he is her husband," Helena Richie said.

"You know how he became her husband; he took advantage of an insane moment. The marriage has ended."

"Marriage can't end, David. Living together may end; but Blair is not unkind to Elizabeth; he is not unfaithful; he is not unloving—"

"No, my God! he is not. My poor Elizabeth!"

His mother, looking at the suddenly convulsed face before her, knew that it was useless to pretend that this was only a matter of preserving appearances by her presence. "David," she said, "what do you mean by that?"

"I mean that she has done with that thief." As he spoke it flashed into his mind that perhaps it was best to have things out with her now; then in the morning he would arrange it, somehow, so that she and Elizabeth should not meet;—for Elizabeth must not hear talk like this. Not that he was afraid of its effect; certainly this soft, sweet mother of his could not do what he had declared neither Blair Maitland, nor death, nor God himself could accomplish! But her words would make Elizabeth uncomfortable; so he had better tell her now, and get it over. In the midst of his own discomfort, he realized that this would spare him the necessity of a lie the next morning; and he was conscious of relief at that. "Mother," he said, gently, "I was going to write to you about it, but perhaps I had better tell you now.... She is coming to me."

"Coming to you!"

He sat down beside her, and took her hand in his; the terror in her face made him wince. For a moment he wished he had not undertaken to tell her; a letter would have been better. On paper, he could have reasoned it out calmly; now, her quivering face distressed him so that he hardly knew what he said.

"Materna, I am awfully sorry to pain you! I do wish you would realize that things have to be this way."

"What way?"

"She and I have to be together," he said, simply. "She belongs to me. When I keep her from going back to Blair I merely keep my own. Mother, can't you understand? there is something higher than man's law, which ties a woman to a man she hates; there is God's law, which gives her to the man she loves! Oh, I am sorry you came to-night! To-morrow I would have written to you. You don't know how distressed I am to pain you, but—poor mother!"

She had sunk back in her chair with a blanched face. She said, faintly, "David!"

"Don't let's talk about it, Materna," he said, pitifully. He could not bear to look at her; it seemed as if she had grown suddenly old; she was broken, haggard, with appalled eyes and trembling lips. "You don't understand," David said, greatly distressed.

Helena Richie put her hands over her face. "Don't I?" she said. There was a long pause; he took her hand and stroked it gently; but in spite of tenderness for her he was thinking of that other hand, young and thrilling to his own, which he had held an hour before; his lips stung at the memory of it; he almost forgot his mother, cowering in her chair. Suddenly she spoke:

"Well, David, what do you propose to do? After you have seduced another man's wife and branded Elizabeth with a—a dreadful name—"

His pity broke like a bubble; he struck the arm of his chair with a clenched hand. "You must not use such words to me! I will not listen to words that soil your lips and my ears! Will you leave this room or shall I?"

"Answer my question first: what do you mean to do after you have taken Elizabeth?"

"I shall marry her, of course. He will divorce her, and we shall be married." He was trembling with indignation: "I will not submit to this questioning," he said. He got up and opened the door. "Will you leave me, please?" he said, frigidly.

But she did not rise. She was bending forward, her hands gripped between her knees. Then, slowly, she raised her bowed head and there was authority in her face. "Wait. You must listen. You owe it to me to listen."

He hesitated. "I owe it to myself not to listen to such words as you used a moment ago." He was standing before her, his arms folded across his breast; there was no son's hand put out now to touch hers.

"I won't repeat them," she said, "although I don't know any others that can be used when a man takes another man's wife, or when a married woman goes away with a man who is not her husband."

"You drag me into an abominable position in making me even defend myself. But I will defend myself. I will explain to you that, as things are, Elizabeth cannot get a divorce from Blair Maitland. But if she leaves him for me, he will divorce her; and we can marry."

"Perhaps he will not divorce her."

"You mean out of revenge? I doubt if even he could be such a brute as that."

"There have been such brutes."

"Very well; then we will do without his divorce! We will do without the respectability that you think so much of."

"Nobody can do without it very long," she said, mildly. "But we won't argue about respectability; and I won't even ask you whether you will marry her, if she gets her divorce."

His indignation paused in sheer amazement. "No," he said. "I should hardly think that even you would venture to ask me such a question!"

"I will only ask you, my son, if you have thought how you would smirch her name by such a process of getting possession of her?"

"Oh," he said, despairingly, "what is the use of talking about it? I can't make you understand!"

"Have you considered that you will ruin Elizabeth?" she insisted.

"You may call happiness 'ruin,' if you want to, mother. We don't— she and I."

"I suppose you wouldn't believe me if I told you it wouldn't be happiness?"

Her question was too absurd to answer. Besides, he was determined not to argue with her; argument would only prolong this futile and distressing interview. So, holding in the leash of respect for her, contempt for her opinions, he listened with strained and silent patience to what she had to say of duty and endurance. It all belonged, he thought, to her generation and to her austere goodness; but from his point of view it was childish. When at last he spoke, in answer to an insistent question as to whether Elizabeth realized how society would regard her course, his voice as well as his words showed his entire indifference to her whole argument. "Yes," he said; "I have pointed out to Elizabeth the fact that though our course will be in accordance with a Law that is infinitely higher than the laws that you think so much of, there will be, as you say, people to throw mud at her."

"A 'higher law,'" she said, slowly. "I have heard of the 'higher law,' David."

"That Elizabeth will obey it for me, that she is willing to expose herself to the contempt of little minds, makes me adore her! And I am willing, I love her enough, to accept her sacrifice—"

"Though you did not love her enough to accept the trifling matter of her money?" his mother broke in.

Sarcasm from her was so totally unexpected that for a moment he did not realize that his armor had been pierced. "God knows I believe it is for her happiness," he said; then, suddenly, his face began to burn, and in an instant he was deeply angry.

"David," she said, "you seem very sure of God; you speak His name very often. Have you really considered Him in your plan?"

He smothered an impatient exclamation; "Mother, that sort of talk means nothing to me; and apparently my reason for my course means nothing to you. I can't make you understand—"

"I don't need you to make me understand," she interrupted him; "and your reason is older than you are; I guess it is as old as human nature: You want to be happy. That is your reason, David; nothing else."

"Well, it satisfies us," he said, coldly; "I wish you wouldn't insist upon discussing it, mother, you are tired, and—"

"Yes, I am tired," she said, with a gasp. "David, if you will promise me not to speak to Elizabeth of this until you and I can talk it over quietly—"

"Elizabeth and I are going away together, to-morrow."

"You shall not do it!" she cried.

His eyes narrowed. "I must remind you," he said, "that I am not a boy. I will do what seems to me right,—right?" he interrupted himself, "why is it you can't see that it is right? Can't you realize that Elizabeth is mine? It is amazing to me that you can't see that Nature gives her to me, by a Law that is greater than any human law that was ever made!"

"The animals know that law," she said. He would not hear her: "That unspeakable scoundrel stole her; he stole her just as much as if he had drugged her and kidnapped her. Yes; I take my own!"

His voice rang through the house; Elizabeth, in her room, shivering with excitement, wondering what they were saying, those two—heard the jar of furious sound, and crept, trembling, halfway down-stairs.

"I take my own," he repeated, "and I will make her happy; she belongs in my arms, if, my God! we die the next day!"

"Oh," said Helena Richie, suddenly sobbing, "what am I to do? what am I to do?" As she spoke Elizabeth entered. David's start of dismay, his quick protest, "Go back, dear; don't, don't get into this!" was dominated by his mother's cry of relief; she rose from her chair and ran to Elizabeth, holding out entreating hands. "You will not let him be so mad, Elizabeth? You will not let him be so bad?"

"Mother, for Heaven's sake, stop!" David implored her; "this is awful!"

"He is not bad," Elizabeth said, in a low voice, passing those outstretched hands without a look. All her old antagonism to an untempted nature seemed to leap into her face. "I heard you talking, and I came down. I could not let you reproach David."

"Haven't I the right to reproach him?—to save him from dishonoring himself as well as you?"

"You must not use that word!" Elizabeth cried out, trembling all over. "David is not dishonorable."

"Not dishonorable! Do you say there is nothing dishonorable in taking the wife of another man?"

"Elizabeth," David said, quietly, putting his arm around her, "my mother is very excited. We are not going to talk any more to- night. Do go up-stairs, dear." His one thought was to get her out of the room; it had been dreadful enough to struggle with his mother alone—power and passion and youth, against terror and weakness. But to struggle in Elizabeth's presence would be shocking. Not, he assured himself, that he had the slightest misgiving as to the effect upon her of the arguments to which he had been obliged to listen, but. . .

"Do leave us, dearest," he said, in a low voice; the misgiving which he denied had driven the color out of his face.

His mother raised her hand with abrupt command: "No, Elizabeth must hear what I have to say." She heard it unmoved; the entreaty not to wound her uncle's love, and hurt Nannie's pride, and betray old Miss White's trust, did not touch her. All she said was, "I am sorry; but I can't help it. David wants me."

Then Helena Richie turned again to her son. "How do you mean to support your mistress, David? Of course the scandal will end your career."

Instantly Elizabeth quivered; the apprehension in her eyes made his words stumble: "There—there are other things than my profession. I am not afraid that I cannot support my wife."

But that flicker of alarm in Elizabeth's eyes had caught Helena Richie's attention. "Why, Elizabeth," she said, in an astonished voice. "You love him!" Then she added, simply: "Forgive me." Her words were without meaning to the other two, but they brought a burst of hope into her entreaty: "Then you won't ruin him! I know you won't ruin my boy—if you love him."

Elizabeth flinched: "David! I told you—that is what I—"

He caught her hand and pressed it to his mouth. "Darling, she doesn't understand."

"I do understand!" his mother said. She paused for a breathless moment, and stood gripping the table, looking with dilating eyes and these two, who, loving each other, were yet preparing to murder Love. "I thank God," she said, and the elation in her face was almost joy; "I thank God, Elizabeth, that I understand the disgrace such wickedness will bring! No honest man will trust him; no decent woman will respect you! And listen, Elizabeth: even you will not really trust him; and he will never entirely respect you!"

Elizabeth slowly drew her hand from David's—and instantly he knew that she was frightened. What! Was he to lose her again? He shook with rage. When under that panic storm of words, that menace of distrust and disgrace, Elizabeth, in an agony of uncertainty, hid her face in her hands, David could have killed the robber who was trying to tear her from him. He burst into denunciation of the littleness which could regard their course in any other way than he did himself. He had no pity because his assailant was his mother. He gave no quarter because she was a woman; she was an enemy! an enemy who had stolen in out of the night to rob him of his lately won treasure. "Don't listen to her," he ended, hoarsely; "she doesn't know what she is talking about!"

"But, David, that was what I said. I said it would be bad for you; she says it will ruin you—"

"It is a lie!" he said.

It was nearly three o'clock. They were all at the breaking-point of anger and terror.

"Elizabeth," Helena Richie implored, "if you love him, are you willing to destroy him? You could not bear to have me, his mother, speak of his dishonor; how about letting the world speak of it—if you love him?"

"David," Elizabeth said again, her shaking hands on his arm; "you hear what she says? Perhaps she is right. Oh, I think she is right! What shall I do?"

The entreaty was the entreaty of a child, a frightened, bewildered child. Helena Richie caught her breath; for a single strange moment she forgot her agony of fear for her son; the woman in her was stronger than the mother in her; some obscure impulse ranged her with this girl, as if against a common enemy. "My dear, my dear!" she said, "he shall not have you. I will save you."

But Elizabeth was not listening. "David, if I should injure you"—

"You will ruin him," his mother repeated.

David gave her a deadly look. "You will kill me, Elizabeth, unless you come to me," he said, roughly. "Do you want to rob me again?—You've done it once," he reminded her; love made him brutal.

There was a moment of silence. The eyes of the mother and son crossed like swords. Elizabeth, standing between them, shivered; then slowly she turned to David, and held out her hands, her open palms falling at her sides with a gesture of complete and pitiful surrender. "Very well, David. I won't do it again. I won't hurt you again. I will do whatever you tell me."

David caught her in his arms. His mother trembled with despair; the absolute immovability of these two was awful!

"Elizabeth, he is selfish and wicked! David, have you no manhood? Shame on you!" Contempt seemed her last resource; it did not touch him. "Wait two days," she implored him; "one day, even—"

"I told you we are going to-morrow," he said. He was urging Elizabeth gently from the room, but at his mother's voice she paused.

"Suppose," Helena Richie was saying—"suppose that Blair does not give you a divorce?"

Elizabeth looked into David's eyes silently.

"And," his mother said, "when David gets tired of you—what then?"

"Mother!"

"Men do tire of such women, Elizabeth. What then?"

"I am not afraid of that," the girl said.

The room was very still. The two looking into each other's eyes needed no words; the battling mother had apparently reached the end of effort. Yet it was not the end. As she stood there a slow illumination grew in her face—the knowledge, tragic and triumphant, that if Love would save others, itself it cannot save! . . . "I'm not afraid that he will tire of me," Elizabeth had said; and David's mother, looking at him with ineffable compassion, said, very gently:

"I was not afraid of that, once, myself."

That was all. She was standing up, clinging to the table; her face gray, her chin shaking. They neither of them grasped the sense of her words; then suddenly David caught his breath:

"What did you say?"

"I said—" She stopped. "Oh, my poor David, I wouldn't tell you if I could help it; if only there was any other way! But there isn't. I have tried, oh, I have tried every other way." She put her hands over her face for an instant, then looked at him. "David, I said that I was not afraid, once, myself, that my lover would tire of me." There was absolute silence in the room. "But he did, Elizabeth. He did. He did."

Then David said, "I don't understand."

"Yes, you do; you understand that a man once talked to me just as you are talking to Elizabeth; he said he would marry me when I got my divorce. I think he meant it—just as you mean it, now. At any rate, I believed him. Just as Elizabeth believes you."

David Richie stepped back violently; his whole face shuddered. "You?" he said, "my mother? No!—no!—no!"

And his mother, gathering up her strength, cringing like some faithful dog struck across the face, pointed at him with one shaking hand.

"Elizabeth, did you see how he looked at me? Some day your son will look that way at you."



CHAPTER XL

No one spoke. The murmuring crash along the sands was suddenly loud in their ears, but the room was still. It was the stillness of finality; David had lost Elizabeth.

He knew it; but he could not have said why he knew it. Perhaps none of the great decisions of passion can at the moment say "why." Under the lash of some invisible whip, the mind leaps this way or that without waiting for the approval of Reason. Certainly David did not wait for it to know that all was over between him and Elizabeth. He did not reason—he only cringed back, his eyes hidden in his bent arm, and gasped out those words which, scourging his mother, arraigned himself. Nor was there any reason in Elizabeth's cry of "Oh, Mrs. Richie, I love you"; or in her run across the room to drop upon the floor beside David's mother, clasping her and pressing her face against the older woman's shaking knees. "I do love you—" Only in Helena Richie's mind could there have been any sort of logic. "This," her ravaged and exalted face seemed to say, "this was why he was given to me." Once he had told her that her goodness had saved him; that night her goodness had not availed. And God had used her sin! Aloud, all that she said was:

"David, don't feel so badly. It isn't as if I were your own mother, you know; you needn't be so un-happy, David." Her eyes yearned over him. "You won't do it?" she said, in a breathless whisper.

To himself he was saying: "It makes no difference! What difference can it possibly make? Not a particle; not a particle." Yet some deeper self must have known that the difference was made, for at that whispered question he seemed to shake his head. But Elizabeth, weeping, said:

"No; we won't—we won't! Dear Mrs. Richie, I love you. David! Speak to her."

He got up with a stupid look, then his eye fell on his mother's face. "You are worn out," he said in a dazed way, "You'll come up-stairs now? Elizabeth, make her go up-stairs."

She was worn out; she nodded, with a sort of meek obedience, and put out her hand to Elizabeth. David opened the door for them and followed them up-stairs. Would his mother have this or that? Could he do anything? Nothing, nothing. No, Elizabeth must not stay with her, please; she would rather be alone. As he turned away she called to him, "Elizabeth and I will take the noon train, David."

And he said, "Yes, I will have a carriage here."

The door closed; on one side of it was the mother, exhausted almost to unconsciousness, yet elate, remembering no more the anguish for joy of what had been born out of it. On the other side these two, still ignorant—as the new-born always are—of the future to which that travail had pledged them. They stood together in the narrow upper hall and their pitiful eyes met in silence. Then David took her in his arms and held her for a long moment. Then he kissed her. She whispered, "Good-by, David." But he was speechless. He went with her to her own door, left her without a word, and went down-stairs.

In the clamorous emptiness of the living-room he looked about him; noticed that the table-cover was still crumpled from his mother's hands and smoothed it automatically; then he sat down. He had the sensation, spiritually, that a man might have physically whose face had been violently and repeatedly slapped. The swiftness of the confounding experiences of the last nine hours made him actually dizzy. His thoughts rushed to one thing, then to another. Elizabeth? No, no; he could not think of her yet. His mother? No, he could not think of her, either. It occurred to him that he was cold, and getting up abruptly, he went to the fireplace, and kicked the charred sticks of driftwood together over a graying bed of ashes. Then he heard a chair pushed back overhead and a soft, tired step, and he wondered vaguely if his mother's room was comfortable. Reaching for the bellows, he knelt down and blew the reluctant embers into a faint glow; when a hesitant flicker of flame caught the half-burned logs he got on his feet and stood, his fingers on the mantelpiece, his forehead on the back of his hand, watching the fire catch and crackle into cheerful warmth. He stood there for a long time. Suddenly his cheek grew rigid: some man, some beast, had—my God! wronged Materna! It was the first really clear thought; instantly some other thought must have sprung up to meet it, for he said, under his breath, "No, because I didn't mean . . . it is different with us; quite different!" The thought, whatever it was, must have persisted, for it stung him into restless movement. He began to walk about; once or twice he stumbled over a footstool, that his eyes, looking blindly at the floor, apparently did not see. Once he stood stock-still, the blood surging in his ears, his face darkly red. But his mind was ruthlessly clear. He was remembering; he was putting two and two together. She was a widow; he knew that. Her marriage had been unhappy; he knew that. There had been a man—he dimly remembered a man. He had not thought of him for twenty years! . . . "Damn him," David said, and the tears stood in his eyes. Then again that thought must have come to him, for he said to himself, violently, "But I love Elizabeth, it is different with me!" Perhaps that persistent inner voice said, "In what way?" for he said again, "Entirely different! It is the only way to make him divorce her so we can be married." Again he stood still and stared blindly at the floor. That a man could live who would be base enough to take advantage of—Materna! Between rage and pity, and confusion he almost forgot Elizabeth, until suddenly the whirl of his thoughts was pierced by the poignant realization that his outcry of dismay at his mother's confession had practically told Elizabeth that he was willing to let her do what he found unthinkable in his mother. His whole body winced with mortification. It was the first prick of the sword of shame— that sword of the Lord! Even while he reddened to his forehead the sword-thrust came again in a flash of memory. It was only a single sentence; neither argument nor entreaty nor remonstrance; merely the statement of a fact: "you did not love her enough to accept her money." At the time those ironical words were spoken they had scarcely any meaning to him, and what meaning they had was instantly extinguished by anger. Now abruptly they reverberated in his ears. He forgot his mother; he forgot the "beast," who was, after all, only the same kind of a beast that he was himself. "You, who could not accept a girl's money could take her good name; could urge her to a course which in your mother overwhelms you with horror; could ask her to give you that which ranks a man who accepted it from your mother as a 'beast.'" David had never felt shame before; he had known mortification, and regret, too, to a greater or less degree; and certainly he had known remorse; he had experienced the futile rage of a man who realizes that he has made a fool of himself; these things he had known, as every man nearly thirty years old must know them. Especially and cruelly he had known them when he understood the effect of the reasoning egotism of his letter upon Elizabeth. But the beneficent agony of shame he had never known until this moment.

In the next hour or two, while the flame of the lamp still burning on the table, whitened in the desolating morning light that crept into the room, David Richie did not reason things out consecutively. His thoughts came without apparent sequence; sometimes he wondered, dully, if it were still raining; wondered how he would get a carriage in the morning; wondered if Elizabeth was asleep; wondered if she would go back to Blair Maitland? "No, no, no!" he said aloud; "not that; that can't be." Yet through all this disjointed thought his eyes, cleared by shame, saw Reason coming slowly up to explain and confirm his conviction that, whatever Elizabeth did or did not do, for the present he had lost her. And Reason, showing him his likeness to that other "beast," showing him his arrogance to his mother, his cruelty to his poor girl, his poor, pitiful Elizabeth! showed him something else: his assertions of his intrinsic right to Elizabeth—how much of their force was due to love for her, how much to hatred of Blair? David's habit of corroborating his emotions by a mental process had more than once shackled him and kept him from those divine impetuosities that add to the danger and the richness of life; but this time the logical habit led him inexorably into deeper depths of humiliation. It was dawn when he saw that he had hated Blair more than he had loved Elizabeth. This was the most intolerable revelation of all; he had actually been about to use Love to express Hate!

Up-stairs Elizabeth had had her own vision; it was not like David's. There was no sense of shame. There was only Love! Love, pitiful, heart-breaking, remorseful. When David left her she sank down on the edge of her bed and cried—not for disappointment or dread or perplexity, not for herself, not for David, but for Helena Richie. Once she crept across the hall and listened at the closed door. Silence. Then she pushed it open and listened again. Oh, to go to her, to put her arms about her, to say, "I will be good, I will do whatever you say, I love you." But all was still except for soft, scarcely heard, tranquil breathing. For David's mother slept.

When Elizabeth came down the next morning it was to the crackle of flames and the smell of coffee and the sight of David scorching his face over toasting bread. It was so unheroic that it was almost heroic, for it meant that they could keep on the surface of life. David said, simply, "Did you get any sleep, Elizabeth?" and she said: "Well, not much. Here, let me make the toast; you get something for your mother." But when she carried a little tray of food up to Mrs. Richie, and kneeling by the bedside took the soft mother-hand in hers, she went below the surface.

"I am going back to him," she said; and put Mrs. Richie's hand against her lips.

David's mother gave her a long look, but she had nothing to say.

Later, as they came down-stairs together, Elizabeth, still holding that gentle hand in hers, felt it tremble when Helena Richie met her son. Perhaps his trembled, too. Yet his tenderness and consideration for her, as he told her how he had arranged for her journey to town was almost ceremonious; it seemed as if he dared not come too near her. It was not until he was helping her into the carriage that he made any reference to the night before:

"I have given her up," he said, almost in a whisper, "but she can't go back to him, you know—that can't be! Mother, that can't be?"

But she was silent. Then Elizabeth came up behind him and got into the carriage; there were no good-bys between them.

"I shall come to town to-morrow on the noon train," he told his mother; and she looked at him as one looks at another human creature who turns his face toward the wilderness. There was nothing more that she could do for him; he must hunger and know how he might be fed; he must hear the lying whisper that if he broke the Law, angelic hands would prevent the law from breaking him; he must see the Kingdom he desired, the glory of it, and its easy price. He must save himself.

Elizabeth, groping for Mrs. Richie's hand, held it tightly in hers, and the old carriage began its slow tug along the road that wound in and out among the dunes....

The story of David and Elizabeth and Blair pauses here.

Or perhaps one might say it begins here. A decision such as was reached in the little house by the sea is not only an end, it is also a beginning. In their bleak certainty that they were parted, David and Elizabeth had none of that relief of the dismissal of effort, which marks the end of an experience. Effort was all before them; for the decision not to change conditions did not at the moment change character; and it never changed temperaments. Elizabeth was as far from self-control on the morning after that decision as she had been in the evening that preceded it. There had to be many evenings of rebellion, many mornings of taking up her burden; the story of them begins when she knew, without reasoning about it, that the hope of escape from them had ceased.

Because of those gray hours of dawn and shame and self-knowledge, love did not end in David, nor did he cease to be rational and inarticulate; there had to be weeks of silent, vehement refusal to accept the situation: something must be done! Elizabeth must get a divorce "somehow"! It would take time, a long time, perhaps; but she must get it, and then they would marry. There had to be weeks of argument: "why should I sacrifice my happiness to 'preserve the ideal of the permanence of marriage'?" There had to be weeks of imprisonment in himself before a night came when his mother woke to find him at her bedside: "Mother—mother— mother," he said. What else he said, how in his agonizing dumbness he was able to tell her that she was the mother, not, indeed, of his body, but of his soul—was only for her ears; what his face, hidden in her pillow, confessed, the quiet darkness held inviolate. This silent man's experiences of shame and courage, began that night when, in the fire-lit room, besieged by darkness and the storm, that other experience ended.

Blair's opportunity—the divine opportunity of sacrifice, had its beginning in that same desolate End. But there had to be angry days of refusing to recognize any opportunity—life had not trained him to such courageous recognition! There had to be days when the magnanimity of his prisoner in returning to her prison was unendurable to him. There had to be months, before, goaded by his god, he urged his hesitating manhood to abide by the decision of chance whether or not he should offer her her freedom. There even had to be days of deciding just what the chance should be!

There had to be for these three people, caught in the mesh of circumstance, time for growth and for hope, and that is why their story pauses just when the angel has troubled the water. All the impulses and the resolutions that had their beginnings in that End, are like circles on that troubled water, spreading, spreading, spreading, until they touch Eternity. At first the circles were not seen; only the turmoil in the pool when the angel touched it. And how dark the water was with the sediment of doubt and fear and loss in the days that followed that decision which was the beginning of all the circles!

Robert Ferguson and David's mother used to wonder how they could any of them get through the next few months. "But good is going to come out of it somehow," Helena Richie said once. "Oh, you mean 'character' and all that sort of thing," he said, sighing. "I tell you what it is, I'm a lot more concerned about my child's happiness than her 'character.' Elizabeth is good enough for me as she is."

David's mother had no rebuke for him; she looked at him with pitying eyes; he was so very unhappy in his child's unhappiness! She herself was doing all she could for the "child"; she was in Mercer most of that winter. "No, I won't hire the house," she told the persistent landlord; "I can't afford it; I'm only here for a few days at a time. No, you sha'n't lower the rent! Robert, Robert, what shall I do to keep you from being so foolish? I wouldn't live there if you gave me the house! I want to stay at the hotel and be near Elizabeth."

In her frequent visits in those next few months she grew very near to Elizabeth; it was a wonderfully tender relation, full of humility on both sides.

"I never knew how good you were, Mrs. Richie," Elizabeth said.

"I never really understood you, dear child," Helena Richie confessed. She drew near Blair, too; she knew how he had borne the story Elizabeth told him when she came back to Mercer; she knew the recoil of anger and jealousy, then the reaction of cringing acceptance of the fact; she knew his passionate efforts, as the winter passed, to buy his way into his wife's friendship by doing everything he fancied might please her. She knew why he asked Mr. Ferguson to find a place for him in the Works, and why he induced Nannie to take the money he believed to be his, and build a hospital. "He is going to use the old house for it," Mrs. Richie told Mr. Ferguson; "well! it's one way of getting Nannie out of it, though I'm afraid he'll have to turn the workmen in and rebuild over her head before he can move her."

"It's the bait in the trap," Robert Ferguson said, contemptuously. "Well, suppose it is? Can you blame him for trying to win her?"

"He'll never succeed. If he was half-way honest he would have offered to let her go in the first place. If he expects any story-book business of 'duty creating love' he'll come out the small end of the horn."

"I suppose he hopes," she admitted. But she sighed. She knew those hopes would never be realized, and she felt the pain of that poor, selfish, passionate heart until her own ached. Yes, of course he ought to 'offer to let her go.' She knew that as well as Elizabeth's uncle himself. "And he will," she said to herself. Then her face was softly illuminated by the lambent flame of some inner serenity: "But she won't go!"

Those were the days when Blair would not recognize his opportunity. It was not because it was not pointed out to him.

"I'm certain that a divorce could be fixed up some way," Robert Ferguson said once, "and I hinted as much to him. I told him she couldn't endure the sight of him."

"Do you call that a hint?"

"Well, he didn't take it, anyway. Of course, if nothing moves him, I suppose I can shoot him?"

She smiled. "You won't have to shoot him. He is very unhappy. Wait."

"For a change of heart? It will never come! No, the marriage was a travesty from the beginning, and I ought to have pulled her out of it. I did suggest it to her, but she said she was going to stick it out like a man."

Blair was indeed unhappy. His god was tormenting him by contrasting Elizabeth's generosity with his selfishness. It was then that he saw, terror-stricken, his opportunity. He tried not to see it. He denied it, he struggled against it; yet all the while he was drawn by an agonized curiosity to consider it. Finally, with averted eyes, he held out shrinking hands to chance, to see if opportunity would fall into them. This was some six months after she had come back to him; six months on her part of clinging to Mrs. Richie's strength; of wondering if David, working hard in Philadelphia, was beginning to be happier; of wondering if Blair was really any happier for her weariness of soul. Six months on Blair's part, of futile moments of hope because Elizabeth seemed a little kinder;—"perhaps she's beginning to care!" he would say to himself; six months of agonizing jealousy when he knew she did not care; of persistent, useless endeavors to touch her heart; of endless small, pathetic sacrifices; of endless small, pathetic angers and repentances. "Blair," she used to say, with wonderful patience, after one of these glimmerings of hope had arisen in him because of some careless amiability on her part, "I am sorry to be unkind; I wish you would get over caring about me, but all I can do ever is just to be friends. No, I don't hate you. Why should I hate you? You didn't wrong me any more than I wronged you. We are just the same; two bad people. But I'm trying to be good, truly I am; and—and I'm sorry for you, Blair, dear. That's all I can say."

It was after one of those miserable discussions between the husband and wife that Blair had gone out of the hotel with violent words of despair. He never knew just where he spent that day—certainly not in the office at the Works; but wherever it was, it brought him face to face with his opportunity. Should he accept it? Should he refuse it? He said to himself that he could not decide. Perhaps he was right; he had shirked decisions all his life; perhaps so great a decision was impossible for him. At any rate, he thought it was. Something must decide for him. What should it be? All that afternoon he tried to make a small decision which should settle the great decision. Of course, he might pitch up a penny? no, the swiftness of such judgment seemed beyond endurance; he might say: "if it rains before noon, I'll let her go;" then he could watch the skies, and meet the decision gradually; no; it rained so often in March! If when he got back to the hotel he found her wearing this piece of jewelry or that; if the grimy pigeon, teetering up and down on the granite coping across the street, flew away before he reached the next crossing. . . . On and on his mind went, jibing away, terrified, from each suggestion; then returning to it again. It was dusk when he came back to the hotel. David's mother was sitting with Elizabeth, and they were talking, idly, of Nannie's new house, or Cherry-pie's bad cold, or anything but the one thing that was always on their minds, when, abruptly, Blair entered. He flung open the door with a bang,—then stood stock-still on the threshold. He was very pale, but the room was so shadowy that his pallor was not noticed.

"Why are you sitting here in the dark!" he cried out, violently. "Why don't you light the gas? Good God!" he said, almost with a sob. Elizabeth looked at him in astonishment; before she could reply that she and Mrs. Richie liked the dusk and the firelight, he saw that she was not alone, and burst into a loud laugh: "Mrs. Richie here? How appropriate!" He came forward into the circle of flickering light, but he seemed to walk unsteadily and his face was ghastly. Helena Richie gave him a startled look. Blair's gentleness had never failed David's mother before; she thought, with consternation, that he had been drinking. Perhaps her gravity checked his reckless mood, for he said more gently: "I beg your pardon; I didn't see you, Mrs. Richie. I was startled because everything was dark. Outer darkness! Please don't go,— it's so appropriate for you to be here!" he ended. Again his voice was sardonic. Mrs. Richie said, coldly, that she had been just about to return to her own room. As she left them, she said to herself, anxiously, that she was afraid there was something the matter. She would have been sure of it had she stayed in the twilight with the husband and wife.

"I'll light the gas," Elizabeth said, rising. But he caught her wrist. "No! No! there's no use lighting up now." As he spoke he pulled her down on his knee. "Elizabeth, is there no hope?" he said; "none? none?" She was silent. He leaned his forehead on her shoulder for a moment, and she heard that dreadful sound— a man's weeping. Then suddenly, roughly, he flung his arms about her, and kissed her violently—her lips, her eyes, her neck; the next moment he pushed her from his knee. "Why, why did you sit here in the dark to-night? I never knew you to sit in the dark!" He got on his feet, leaving her, standing amazed and offended, her hair ruffled, the lace about her throat in disorder; at the window, his back turned to her, he flung over his shoulder: "Look here—you can go. I won't hold you any longer. I suppose your uncle can fix it up; some damned legal quibble will get you out of it. I—I'll do my part."

Before she could ask him what he meant he went out. He had accepted his opportunity!

But it was not until the next day that she really understood.

"He says," Mrs. Richie told Robert Ferguson, "that he will take Nannie and go abroad definitely; she can call it desertion. Yes; on Nannie's money of course; how else could he go? Oh, my poor Blair!"

"'Poor Blair'? He deserves all he gets," Elizabeth's uncle said, after his first astonishment. Then, in spite of himself, he was sorry for Blair. "I suppose he's hard hit," he said, grudgingly, "but as for 'poor Blair,' I don't believe it goes very deep with him. You say he was out of temper because she had not lighted up, and told her she could go? Rather a casual way of getting rid of a wife."

"Robert, how can you be so unjust?" she reproached him. "Oh, perhaps he will be a man yet! How proud his mother would be."

"My dear Helena, one swallow doesn't make a summer." Then, a little ashamed of his harshness, he added, "No, he'll never be very much of a person; but he's his mother's son, so he can't be all bad; he'll just wander round Europe, with Nannie tagging on behind, enjoying himself more or less harmlessly."

"Robert," she said, softly, "I'm not sure that Elizabeth will accept his sacrifice."

"What! Not accept it? Nonsense! Of course she'll accept it. I should have doubts of her sanity if she didn't. If Blair had been half as much of a man as his mother, he'd have made the 'sacrifice,' as you call it, long ago. Helena, you're too extreme. Duty is well enough, but don't run it into the ground."

Mrs. Richie was silent.

"Helena, you know she ought to leave him!"

"If every woman left unpleasant conditions—mind, he isn't unkind or wicked; what would become of us, Robert?"

Elizabeth's uncle would not pursue her logic; his face suddenly softened: "Well, David will come to his own at last! I wonder how soon after the thing is fixed up (if it can be fixed up) they can marry?"

The color rose sharply in her face.

"You think they won't?" he exclaimed.

"I hope not. Oh, I hope not!"

"Why not?" he said, affronted.

"Because I don't want them, just for their own happiness, to do what seems to me wrong."

"Wrong! If the law permits it, you can't say 'wrong.'"

"I think it is," she said timidly; then tried to explain that it seemed to her that no one, for his own happiness, had a right to do a thing which would injure an ideal by which the rest of us live; "I don't express it very well," she said, flushing.

Robert Ferguson snorted. "That's high talk; well enough for angels; but no men and mighty few women are angels. I," he interrupted himself hurriedly, "I don't like angel women myself."

She smiled a little sadly. "And besides that," she said, "it seems to me we ought to take the consequences of our sins. I think they ought, all three of them, to just try and make the best of things. Robert, did it ever strike you that making the best of things was one way of entering the Kingdom of Heaven?"

He gave her a tender look, but he shook his head. "Helena," he said, gently, "do you mind telling me how you finally brought them to their senses that night? Don't if you'd rather not."

Her face quivered. "I would rather. There was only one way; I ... told them, Robert."

There was a moment of silence, then Robert Ferguson twitched his glasses off and began to polish them. "You are an angel, after all," he said. Then he lifted a ribbon falling from her waist, and kissed it.

"I sha'n't try to influence either David or Elizabeth," she said; "they will do what they think right; it may not be my right—"

"It won't be," he told her, dryly; "once a man is free to marry his girl, mothers take a back seat."

She smiled wisely.

"Oh, you can smile; but, my dear Helena, the apron-string won't do for a man who is thirty years old. Yes, they'll do as they choose, in spite of either you or me—and I know what it will be!"

"Poor Blair," she said, sighing. "Robert, if she leaves him you will be kind to him, won't you? He's never had a chance—"

But he was not thinking of Blair; he was looking into her face, and his own face moved with emotion: "Helena, don't be obstinate any longer. We have so little time left! I don't ask you to love me, but just marry me, Helena."

"Oh, my dear Robert—"

"Will you?"

"If I lived here," she said breathlessly, "my boy could not come to see me."

"Is that the reason you won't say yes?"

She was silent.

"Will you?" he said again.

Her voice was so low he could hardly hear her answer: "No."

And at that his face glowed with sudden, amazed assurance. "Why," he cried, "you love me!"

She looked at him beseechingly. "Robert, please—"

"Life has been good to me, after all," he said, joyously: "I've got what I don't deserve!"

Helena was silent.

THE END