Like one stunned by an unexpected blow, he continued his walk, until he came to Birdseye Avenue and paused in front of the bishop's house. Did he really intend to keep his promise never to see Felicity again? It so, why was he even now measuring the distance between himself and those lighted windows? Perhaps some chance would yet throw her in his way; but he would not risk her contempt by following the prompting of his heart and presenting himself before her only three days after his expressed renunciation. Besides, the bishop might be there; and what had he discovered since they last met? His consciousness of wrong-doing in regard to Felicity deprived him of the desire to meet the bishop face to face and to demand an explanation. Was there not, after all, reason enough for the bishop's action, if he knew all? This thought robbed Leigh of the satisfaction of a righteous indignation, which until now he had cherished as justifiable. He was fair enough to admit that he had received what he deserved, on other than professional grounds, and having reached the lowest depth of unhappiness, he began to retrace his steps disconsolately toward the college.

A philosopher once said that every man has in him at least one poem which he could write under the stress of great emotion, and that night Leigh unconsciously exemplified the truth of the saying. It was near the dawn when he descended from the tower, having left upon the table by the telescope this fragmentary record of his vigil.

THE MORNING WATCH

Be resolute, my soul, And battle till the day, My strength is manifold, If only thou art gay; Since friendship takes its flight, Since love is far outgrown, Here, in the silent night, I watch alone.

And sing a song, my soul, A bitter song and bright, While fleeting hours unroll The enigmatic night; The saddest souls must sing— Ah, happy those that weep! So laugh, till death shall bring Unending sleep.

Now let me lie in peace On Nature's passive breast. Since human love must cease, And life is all unblest, And watch the stars outspread Within the brimming blue— But Abraham is dead Who saw them too.

And millions, ages hence, Shall watch the steady stars, And question Why and Whence Behind their prison bars; But if no love shall give A light upon the way, How can they dare to live Until the day?



CHAPTER XVIII

"TWO SISTER VESSELS"

The January thaw now took on a sinister and unwholesome phase, preparatory to its final retreat before the onslaught of returning winter. The heavy snowfall was reduced to a few discoloured streaks lingering in the deeper ruts and hollows, and the brown earth, never so unlovely, exhaled faint wreaths of vapour that caused old-fashioned folk to shake their heads and to speak of full graveyards. The sun seemed to draw up in the form of mist more and more of the water that had been soaking into the soil. People moved about in a dank haze, that rose gradually to the tops of the houses, until by noontime it had obscured the moist blue sky and turned the sun into a dull-red disk set in a golden aura. There was something ominous in the strange atmosphere thus engendered, in the dimming and distorting of architectural lines, in the muffling of familiar sounds. The unseasonable conditions resembled in some way what in other climates is called earthquake weather, when Nature seems to be throwing a veil over the world to hide the monstrous deed she is about to commit.

Those whose lives were happy, drawing their breath with a sense of oppression, imagined impending trouble, while those with real tragedies to bear now found them almost insupportable.

Early in the day, St. George's Hall looked down from its lofty ridge upon basins of mist that presented the appearance of white lakes in the meadows below. Gradually the tide rose above the long, low hall, until the towers seemed to rest on clouds. Finally the whole mass disappeared, to loom up larger than reality to the eyes of one approaching from the city. As night came on, the lights from the windows cut lurid pathways into the surrounding obscurity. A gradual chill crept along the ground, thinning the fog and disclosing at intervals ghostly glimmerings of the moon.

Through this strange medium two figures were toiling up the street that flanked the northern limit of the campus. Under normal conditions, the second could easily have seen the one in advance, but now his view was obstructed, and though he gained rapidly, he had reached the entrance of the maple walk before the mist in front of him seemed to concentrate into a flitting shadow that resembled a woman's form. The young astronomer had been wandering for hours in a vain search for diversion, and the vision before him, embodying as it did the subject upon which his mind had been concentrated, caused him to stand still in a tumult of emotion. The next moment it was gone, and he believed that he had been visited by an hallucination. Recently, that earlier picture of Felicity beside the lamp had given place in his imagination to one associated with a deeper experience. He had just pictured her in her scarlet cloak and hood; then he had looked up to see the same figure vanishing before his eyes.

A moment's reflection convinced him of the psychic nature of the phenomenon. In all the range of human probabilities, what errand could lead her at ten o'clock on such a night to that lonely hilltop, and on down the road into the country beyond? It was manifest that his own mind had shaped the vision from the pale vapours, and he realised how weary and overwrought he had become. His sensation was now almost one of fear, as if he had seen the ghost of a loved one rising out of the mists of a remote and passionate past. A strange impulse seized him to follow the phantom further, but he was shivering with the penetrating dampness to which he had been long exposed, and instead he continued his way toward his room.

Had he obeyed his impulse, he would soon have overtaken the living form which he imagined to be an apparition of the mind. Felicity did not keep straight ahead, however, to the westward, but paused at the brow of the hill, breathing deep after her long climb, conscious that the rapid beating of her heart was not wholly due to her recent exertion. It was the prospect of a meeting now imminent that caused the painful tumult in her side and the widening of her dark eyes as she looked up at the saffron blur which marked the position of the moon. Yet there was resolution in her step as she turned southward and took the road that passed between the college and the cliff. In spite of the long thaw, the gravelled track was firm beneath her feet, and she walked rapidly in the direction of the Hall, her face pale and set, her warm breath mingling with the swirling mist.

Leigh was also progressing in the same direction by the almost parallel path between the maples, but somewhat in advance of Felicity, inasmuch as she had climbed to the very summit of the hill before turning, while the course he took extended diagonally across the campus from a point further down. Thus it happened that he had gained his rooms by the time she came opposite his western windows. As she glanced up at them in passing, their location in the wall became more clearly defined by the appearance of a glimmering light within. She saw Leigh, with his hat and coat still on, come from his eastern room, holding a candle in his hand. He stood under the chandelier, raised the candle, and lighted the jets of gas. Then he advanced to the windows, and pulled the curtains down with a decisive motion, that expressed his inward determination to shut out all ghostly imaginings with the night.

Felicity stood for some time regarding the yellow squares in the murky expanse of the wall. She reflected that he might have been very near her in the mist but a few moments before, since he must have entered the grounds by the maple walk. The other path, by the bishop's statue and across the fields, was seldom used in winter, and was now impracticable because of the soggy condition of the turf. The possible results of the meeting, which had evidently been avoided by mere accident, perhaps only by the thickness of the atmosphere, were incalculable, and sent the blood to her cheeks in a sudden glow.

The memory of their last meeting flooded her whole being warmly, to be followed by a dreary realisation of their present position. The very drawing of the curtains between them seemed symbolical, not so much of his expressed determination to see her no more as of the relentlessness of Fate. She believed that he was strong enough to keep his promise, and knew how gladly she would have him break it. Her actual situation at the moment, shut out from him and standing alone in the night, gave her longing an intensity which she had not hitherto experienced. She wondered whether he would have taken her in his arms and kissed her good-bye once more, had he overtaken her upon the hill. Presently she resumed her way, thinking of the man she was leaving there in his lonely tower rather than of the man she was so soon to meet.

Some quarter of a mile further on, she came to a huge button-ball tree that marked the trysting-place. Its great trunk and long branches, spotted with white patches, like scars on the twisted limbs of a giant, confronted her as a hideous and uncanny thing. This tree, the only kind in all the country that lacked beauty of line and colour, received a touch of ghastliness from the atmosphere that enveloped it which was not without its effect upon her imagination, and when she saw the mayor emerge from its shadow, she started as if she were confronted by a highwayman.

"Is it you, Felicity?" he ventured anxiously. "I thought you were never coming."

"Was I late?" she returned. "I did n't mean to be; but let us walk further on. We can talk as we go."

As she caught sight of the eager light in his eyes and noted the intonation of his voice, she divined that his mood was radically different from that which had carried him to her house in hot haste a few mornings before. Then, he was burning with a sense of humiliation, frantic with the thought that she was slipping from his grasp, embittered by baffled ambition, and determined to assert his rights. Now, softer emotions held sway in his heart. The memory of that scene in the opera house had grown less galling. He was soothed by the blandishments of resilient self-esteem and by his friends' more flattering interpretation of the incident. Indeed, looked at from one perspective, it was a most impressive vindication of his official dignity against the slight that had been put upon it. A new point of view had somehow sprung from his brief contact with the President. For the first time, Cobbens and his kind appeared to him the provincials they were. They no longer blocked his whole horizon, like the lion in the way. Dim dreams of wider ambitions, vague exhilarations, stirred within him. He began to think it possible to transcend Warwick. Thus his temper was less bitter than before, his poise was less a pose, the result of a new adjustment of values.

"Felicity," he began, almost happily, "I could n't help thinking, as I stood there waiting for you, how often I have waited in the same way before. Just think of it, Felicity, for years and years! It seems almost a lifetime, so much has happened in the interval. Did you notice this coat and cap? They 're the same I used to wear when you began to take my car rather than any other. A pretty good disguise for the mayor of Warwick, don't you think?"

A pain went through her heart, not for a lost love, but for the vanished dreams of girlhood. The chord he had hoped to touch remained mute. In view of the fact that she believed love to be dead between them, this method of stimulating an outworn romance seemed sentimental and insincere. Had he loved her, she might well have thought it boyish and pathetic. What he spoke of as a disguise had seemed so natural as to escape her notice; and this indicated the height from which she had never really descended and could now never descend. He had lost his great opportunity of appearing the mayor in her eyes. It was no part of her plan, however, to emphasise this difference between them, for she had seen what vindictive passions a realisation of the fact might arouse within him. Full of the warmth of his own emotions, he failed to grasp the significance of her unresponsiveness.

"But have you spoken to the bishop yet, as you promised to?" he asked eagerly.

"No, I have n't—I could n't, yet."

"I 'm glad of it," he returned buoyantly. "I wanted another chance to see you before you spoke to him, to set myself right with you. I did n't mean to threaten you, Felicity. I knew that was no way to win forgiveness, but I was n't myself. Can't you see how the long waiting for you almost drove me mad? But now we 're together again in the old way, and I feel that I can explain everything so that you can understand. Everything that's happened lately to keep us apart seems a dream, something utterly unreal. Come, Felicity, don't you think our meeting was rather a cold one, after such a long separation? Have n't I won the prize you set for me to win, and are you going to deny me my reward?" He made as if he would put his arm about her, but she shrank away with such emphatic and spontaneous denial that he desisted in chagrin. "After all there has been between us," he protested, "are you going to let a passing flirtation outweigh the fact that we are man and wife?"

Felicity had somehow not anticipated that he would attempt to kiss her, and the movement set her quivering as at an outrage.

"Has there really been so much between us, Tom?" she asked. "Doesn't it all seem a great mistake, which it would be better to acknowledge frankly, rather than to assume the existence of something that has ceased to exist?"

"And whose mistake was it?" he demanded, with sudden fierceness. "Tell me that."

"Mine," she admitted. "You know how I came to make it—the narrowness of my life that yet seemed so broad, the insignificance of the artificial men I knew, the longing for romance, for a love affair with a flavour of risk and adventure in it. You must n't hold me now to that girl's dream, since you were the one that waked me from it. You showed me first that we really did n't care for each other. If you loved me, why did you take up with the first pretty servant-girl you met?"

She had not meant to recall their difference in class, but in Lena's station in life lay the chief sting of his offence, and the fact could not be concealed.

"Why? Why?" he echoed. "Because she loved me more than you did,—if you ever loved me at all,—because you starved my heart and made me feel that you were not my wife at all, but only a patroness who had taken me up to make something of me, with an indefinite promise of a reward at the end of it, if I would be a good little boy and do as you told me, and keep out of mischief, and win a prize. What kind of a position is that to put a man in?"

"I supposed the reward was worth working and waiting for," she retorted coolly. "You 're whipping yourself into a passion now, Tom, but you know in your heart that my cruelty to you, if it was cruelty, was not as great as your cruelty to Lena. I would have kept my promise, and you know it, if you had not yourself forfeited all claim to my respect. I supposed you were a strong man"—

"And have I no wrongs?" he broke in. "Did you think I was n't a man at all, but just a lump of putty to be moulded by your hands? How do you suppose I felt when we were married in New York, and you left me at the very door of the church?"

"I did n't realise till then what I had done," she gasped, the panic of that moment returning to her, "and I had to leave you."

"But I did realise it," he cried bitterly, "as any man would have realised it. I realised nothing else. I walked the streets, wondering whether it was a practical joke. You made a fool of me. You did n't tell me beforehand that you were going to play such a trick on me."

"Trick!"

"Yes, trick! What else, in the name of God, was it? It seemed like nothing else, at first. I could hardly remember what you said,—you spoke so confused and were so anxious to get away,—but finally I figured it out that you were just scared, and that I would have to wait a little while for you to get used to the idea that you were my wife." He paused, choked by emotion. "I waited, God knows," he went on, "waited for nearly three years. And what did I get? A few stolen meetings and a few kisses, not very genuine ones at that. Somehow you carried the thing out in your father's high-handed way. I could n't break through and get at you. Every time we met I thought I would, but instead I took advice and promises, until it became a habit of mind. I became tired of the mockery, and heart-sick. You made yourself seem less and less my wife. And when I did n't see you for weeks at a time, and when I was filled with resentment, I met Lena"—

"And did the very thing that lost me to you forever," she supplemented relentlessly.

They had come to a point where the road ascended and ran along the margin of a great stone quarry, from which the material that went into the building of St. George's Hall had been hewn. The air had grown momently colder, condensing the mist, which now floated away in milky wreaths, disclosing the full moon shining down upon the wide sweep of the valley toward the west. Stung to madness by her words, he stopped and turned upon her, but his answer died on his lips, for he looked into a face of such surpassing beauty that he seemed never to have seen it truly before. The gathered crimson hood invested it with something of the sorcery that Leigh had felt, that any man must have felt. The divinity that had hitherto hedged about the bishop's daughter vanished for the first time like a vanishing mist, and left her only an irresistible woman standing alone with him in the moonlight.

The impulse that swept over him was one of sheer desire. Lena had taught him what a woman's kisses could be, kisses such as Felicity had never given him, such as he would now have from her as his right. Before she could anticipate his intention, he had seized her roughly and strained her to his breast with a violence that hurt.

"Felicity!" he cried in savage delight, "I could make you come to me now. You are my wife—I tell you, my wife!"

She managed to free herself from his grasp, and having retreated a few steps, she faced him, white with anger. Leigh's embrace had been passionate, and had fired her blood with an answering emotion, but Emmet's was an assault, arousing within her an implacable resentment.

"I am not your wife!" she cried, quivering. "Marriage or no marriage, I am not your wife, and never will be. After what has passed between you and that girl, how dared you kiss me—how dared you? When you came down to me—the other morning—from her room—and found me in the hall—did n't I see in your face—in your tears—the state of your mind?"

In her heart she believed it probable that he had wronged Lena to the greatest extent that a man can wrong a woman. He did not divine the extent of her suspicions, however, and unfortunately his next words deepened them to practical certainty.

"God help me," he groaned. "You 've told the truth. You 're not my wife and never have been, but you 've kept her from being, poor girl. You 've made me wrong her—perhaps kill her, for all I know."

Something of the wild and tragic strain that lies so deep in the Celtic race now rose to the surface and transformed him. He took a step forward and seized her by the wrist.

"I could end it all at once by dragging you with me over the cliff, and I don't know but I will!"

Powerless in his grasp, she stood on the very edge of the rock that fell away sheer before them to the depth of two hundred feet. He looked down into the basin, showing here and there in the hollows a pool mirrored in the moonlight, and shapeless masses of machinery and stone. Whether he had really been in earnest, or had only imagined himself to be, the vision of that cruel abyss made him pause, shuddering. But Felicity had not taken her eyes from his face. Now he turned to meet them, not distended with fear, but fixed upon him in discerning scorn. She even made no effort to free her wrist, but stood poised on the brink with an apparent unconcern, that reestablished her ascendancy as if by magic.

"You 're merely acting now, Tom," she said calmly. "You don't want to die, and you have no intention of killing me. You 've got too much to live for, to throw your life away in that fashion. When you 've had time to think it over, you 'll discover that it was n't love that made you want me, but ambition. The love was gone long ago, but the ambition remains. You want to live for that."

He dropped her wrist, and cowered away from the cliff as if he were shrinking from a nightmare horror, while she began to move slowly in the direction of the college. The very act of retreat aroused within her the emotion which, curiously enough, she had not experienced in the crisis of danger. It was not fear that made her flee, but her flight that produced the fear; and the possibility of the crime, the grewsome picture it suggested, flashed upon her with such sinister power that her knees weakened and caused her to stumble. He overtook her in a few long strides, and walked beside her in dumb penitence.

"You 'll never forgive me now, Felicity," he said, when he could bear the silence no longer, "never—never!"

"We 'll not talk of forgiveness any more on either side," she returned wearily. "We 're merely going round and round in a circle, without arriving at any conclusion."

His own nature shared her reaction from intense emotion to indifference, and again silence fell between them. Apparently, they were scarcely better able to understand each other than if they spoke in different languages, and each took refuge in incommunicable thoughts. It would always be thus, she reflected, if they lived together; no community of interests, herself living in a region apart, which he was generations short of being able to enter. Nothing would remain but practical politics, and already she sickened of the sordid subject. Unionism, public ownership of public utilities versus private privilege, charges and counter-charges of political corruption, problems of taxation—such things would constitute his sole interest in life and the gist of his conversation. It was not enough that he talked intelligently, even eloquently, on these subjects. Her active mind had already exhausted their possibilities, and what to her was a mere by-play of the intellect was to him the be-all and end-all of existence. Of the books she had given him, he understood and appropriated only those parts that related to his subject. All the rest was lost: the literary quality, the atmosphere, the historic perspective. To him it could never mean anything that Plato saw the Parthenon.

This fact indicated a limitation, a reason why he could never develop from the politician into the statesman, why, for example, she knew that he was not the kind of man to become a cabinet officer or ambassador. She would be merely the wife of a mayor, or at the most, of a governor or representative. And she knew she would never respect his opinions, that he was one who might champion crude and undigested theories, theories which men trained as her father and Leigh and Cardington had been trained would weigh in the balance and find wanting. How rashly she had condemned this training, how effectually her experiment had cured her of radicalism, she herself now saw clearly. The problem of liberty within conventionality was still unsolved, and she had beaten her wings against the bars in vain.

On the other hand, just as she had once endowed Emmet with possibilities he never possessed, so now, in her disillusion, she lost sight of those primitive virtues that would always make him a force for good in whatever level he was destined to reach. Unjust to him in the beginning, she was unjust to him still.

Felicity Wycliffe was a mystery to herself no less than to others. The normal functions of her sex had dropped so far below her ken, in the course of her complicated development, as to seem negligible. Beginning with this negation, she had passed rapidly on to an attitude of universal scepticism, to which religion was merely a matter of taste, and prayer was a psychological phenomenon. She was not one to lend herself to the constructive dreams of men, or to attach herself to their theories. Her weariness of her father's academic plans presaged her disillusion in regard to Emmet's career, even if he had been what she first imagined him. Her colossal egotism demanded everything from a man, and was prepared to give nothing in return, except the precarious possession of herself. Yet what man, fascinated by the mysterious unrest and nocturnal splendour of her eyes, would not gladly pay for that possession whatever price she might demand?

Presently, when their silence had again become awkward, she began to speak of impersonal things; of the strange transformation of the night, lately so oppressive and obscure, now so dazzlingly serene; of the carrying power of sound in the stillness about—a dog's barking, the distant notes of the bell in the tower of the First Church striking the hour of eleven. As they passed the Hall, she saw that the windows of Leigh's room were again dark, and imagined that he had taken advantage of the clearing atmosphere to ascend to the top of the tower and resume his observations. Emmet, following the direction of her eyes upward, divined her thought.

"The professor is probably looking at the moon through his telescope," he remarked.

"Yes," she answered, in a tone as casual as his own, "he would doubtless not lose this opportunity of examining the cracks that have appeared recently on its surface, if he can see them with that lens, which is n't likely. They are said to be hundreds, or even thousands, of miles long, and only a few yards in width."

Her knowledge of such a recent astronomical discovery confirmed his suspicion that she and Leigh saw much of each other. Knowing the man's infatuation with her by his own confession, he now became convinced that she returned it; that she had used his fault in regard to Lena Harpster to justify its counterpart in herself. Correct in his main surmise, he was nevertheless mistaken concerning the source of her information, a short press despatch from the Lick Observatory which he had overlooked in the morning paper.

He was in no mood to renew the struggle with her on the basis of these suspicions, but laid them away in his heart for future consideration. About to reply indifferently, his words were checked by a sudden fit of coughing. The long exposure in the penetrating fog and the subsequent increase in the cold were producing their effect, and as they descended the hill, his cough became more frequent and severe.

She was concerned for him, much as she would have been concerned for any one under similar circumstances. Some hereditary instinct, a tradition of professional humanity, moved her to expressions of sympathy and advice; and when they arrived before her house, she insisted that he come in and get something warm to drink before exposing himself further to the cold night air. He followed her obediently through the dimly lighted hall into the dining-room, wondering at her apparent indifference to the possibility of meeting either Lena or the bishop.

The indifference was real. Wearied of her own efforts to disentangle herself from the meshes of her plight, she was ready to challenge chance. Had her father been sitting up for her, she would have led her husband into his presence, prepared to take the consequences. But as chance decided otherwise, she accepted the respite, not without relief.

She heated water over a small alcohol lamp, which she placed on the table, and called his attention to the reflection of the green flame in the polished mahogany surface. There was that in her manner and conversation which deprived her act of the tone of personal service. She watched him sip his whiskey with a judicial expression, overruling the protest his principles suggested. She poured for herself a glass of wine and sat opposite him, the tall wax candles between them, and asked him for the first time how he found his duties as mayor. The question seemed to occur to her as one which ordinary courtesy should have prompted her to ask before.

Emmet felt her aloofness, and met it with unexpected dignity. In his answer he spoke of Bat Quayle, and of a plan forming against him among his enemies in the board of aldermen to lay all his appointments on the table indefinitely, and thus to make his administration a failure. But he did not assume, as he would once have done, that she was vitally interested, and his remarks were fragmentary.

Felicity noticed his sombre mood and attributed it partly to his physical condition, little dreaming how bitterly he resented, not her kindness, but the manner of it. It was the old grievance over again. Like the bishop, like her whole class, she was unconsciously patronising, he reflected, even when she meant to be charitable. For the time, at least, he asked nothing from her, and this indifference gave him more of a tone of the world, more the air of a gentleman, than she had ever seen in him before. For once the tables were turned, and it was he who appeared enigmatical. If he were any longer conscious of his conductor's uniform, it was a proud consciousness, and he seemed to wear it like the insignia of a soldier. When he left, it was without further appeals or personalities, but with brief thanks for her kindness and good wishes.

She stood and watched him going down the walk in the moonlight, the black shadows of the bare branches falling one after another across his shoulders, and suddenly the thought that this was her husband who was leaving her thus came over her with a wave of irresistible emotion. Her throat ached with a piercing realisation of the tragedy of it, and without stopping to think, she ran down the steps and pursued him, panting and almost weeping. He turned at the sound of her hurrying steps, puzzled by the pursuit and on his guard against her influence. He was suspicious of her intentions now, and waited for her to explain the meaning of this mercurial change.

"Tom," she said in a choking voice, laying a detaining hand upon his sleeve. But she was possessed by an emotion, rather than by a thought that could be expressed in words, and so she stood thus awhile in silence. His grim immobility and manly self-containment brought back some flavour of that early romance, when he, unaware as yet of her fancy, paid her slight heed, and for that very reason appealed to her imagination.

The change in her mood seemed to flow into him like a solvent that broke up his resentment and suspicion. That realisation of their relationship which had sent her after him was conveyed in the thrilling note of her voice when she uttered his name, and though at first he had refused to understand it thus, her lingering touch became its full interpreter. They searched each other's eyes mutely, and he knew before he began to speak that she was his.

"Felicity," he said, his eyes gathering an intense, exultant light, "you 've come after me of your own accord, and you 've got to abide by it. You 've played fast and loose with me long enough. Don't go back into the house—come with me now—you're my wife—why should n't you come with me? Whose business is it but our own? I say you must!"

With an effort she withdrew her eyes from his face and looked back at the open door of her father's house, imprinting every detail upon her memory: the dull red carpet, the antique chairs, the stairway hung with old engravings, climbing upward to the room which she was never again to enter as before. The temptation assailed her to cut once and for all the Gordian knot, and obeying its impulse, she began to walk down the flagging beside him.

At the street she paused once more and pressed her hands piteously against her heart, trying to think. This was the spot where Leigh had kissed her, and his ghost seemed to confront her there in the cold moonlight, looking at her with sad, reproachful eyes, eyes full of a deep, ethereal passion that burned this other passion to ashes. This, then, was the explanation of her vacillation. If his mere memory could stay her thus, while she vibrated to the influence of the man that was present, she must love him indeed. She looked up and saw Emmet's face distinctly, already hardening with new suspicion, without a trace of tenderness, marked only by the ravages of disappointment. By contrast she remembered that other face. She felt again Leigh's kisses and heard his murmured words of love.

"No, Tom," she said, shrinking back. "I will not go with you—I am not your wife."

Her tone was final, but his passion, newly awakened, was terrible in its imperious demands. He could scarcely carry her off by force, and yet for one moment such seemed to be his intention. He took a step toward her, his hand raised as if to strike her down, then stopped.

"We 'll see about that," he retorted, with a strange, short laugh. He would have said more and disclosed his further intention by a final threat, but another fit of coughing caught at his throat, and before he could find his voice again she was well on her way toward the house, fleeing between the trees like a frightened bird. He stood still until the door closed behind her.

"She must be a devil," he said aloud. "She stirs up the devil in me. She makes me bad."

Could any one have seen the malign record which his experience with her had traced upon his face, he would have been forced to admit the justice of this accusation. He walked slowly away, striving to reckon with his tempestuous emotions, but he could not pass beyond the limit of the grounds.

"I was going away quietly enough," he muttered, "when she came chasing after me. Why did n't she let me go, or else come with me?"

He stopped short, as a sudden thought flashed upon him. Then he looked up at the windows of Lena's room. They were dark; but the windows of Felicity's room, immediately below, now shone with a saffron glow behind their curtains. He regarded them only to reflect how he hated the woman they concealed from his view, and then wondered whether Lena were asleep. He took out his watch and held it up to the moon. As he did so, he saw that the hands pointed at midnight, and simultaneously the bell from the First Church began to ring the hour.

If Lena were still awake, she might possibly be lingering in the kitchen, perhaps with some new lover. She had a right to do so, but the very thought filled him with a fury of jealousy. It would be an easy matter, he reflected, to tiptoe down the driveway behind the trees, to gain the shadow of the house, and to peep into one of the kitchen windows. Of course they were dark, but he wished to be assured of it. Let him once discover that the house was closed for the night, and he would be content.

As he began to put his plan into execution, gliding stealthily from tree to tree and pausing to look and listen from the shelter of each shadow, he was acutely aware of the fact that it was the mayor of Warwick who was doing this thing. The realisation could not stay his progress or change his purpose. After all, she would probably not be there; and if the bishop's coachman or some servant should come out and find him, his explanation was ready. The driveway passed by the bishop's stable and on through the square to the street beyond. He would say that he was making a short cut, and the explanation would be plausible. From time to time he stifled a cough with difficulty, and it was this difficulty alone that almost persuaded him to turn back.

It was by no strange coincidence or accident that Lena remained reading by the lamp in the large, deserted kitchen. She might have been seen there, as Emmet saw her now, almost every evening after the others had gone to bed, poring over some paper-covered novel that depicted a life of romance quite different from the dull monotony of her own days. But though she herself was wide awake with the interest of the story, her good angel had gone to sleep, and left her there, unwarned, to face her peril alone.

Emmet ventured to thrust his head for a moment into the bar of light that cut the deep shadow of the house, and saw that his most extravagant hopes were fulfilled. He saw also that she was prettily dressed, with a red velvet ribbon about her throat, her hair showing a careful and coquettish arrangement. He was convinced that she had dressed herself thus for a lover, and he meant to call her to account.

Little by little he crept closer, until he stood beside the window, his back against the wall. He had only to turn and lean forward and look her in the face. His eyes searched the wide stretches of the lawn in vain for a sign of life. The stable was dark, the house was silent. Only he and Lena were awake. No thought of pity for her softened his heart at that moment. He only chafed inwardly at a memory of his stupid and mistaken loyalty to Felicity.

Lena Harpster was one of those timid natures that are paralysed by sudden surprise or fear. Had it not been so, the apparition of his face against the pane, his intense and hungry gaze, would have caused her to wake the house with a scream. But she sat staring at him with her wide grey eyes, like one turned to stone, until she saw that her first impression of a burglar was false, and then that her lover was beckoning her to come.

She had never resisted his will, and she did not do so now. When she had comprehended who it was, and his meaning, she glanced behind her with instinctive caution; she rose from her chair and tiptoed to the farther door, where she looked and listened until satisfied. Then she returned, placed her hands on the table, and leaned over the lamp.

Emmet saw the light of the flame illumine the pink curve of her lips as she formed them for a breath. He saw the upward shadow of her features against the golden mist of her hair, and then the vision was swallowed up in darkness. A moment later the outside door was softly opened, and as softly closed.



CHAPTER XIX

FATHER AND DAUGHTER

When the bishop and his daughter met at the breakfast-table the next morning, the air was full of unpleasant possibilities. She came in by way of the kitchen with the news that Lena had gone home on a plea of illness, and though he was concerned for the girl, the necessity of breaking in a new maid to his ways added to his evident irritation of mind.

There was none of the bright-eyed vitality and serene spiritual tone that follows nights free from care. Felicity observed that her father omitted his customary inquiries in regard to her rest, that the morning paper, the usual basis of comment at breakfast, lay unopened beside his plate, and guessed correctly that the explanation she must make could no longer be postponed. His bewilderment and suspicions had reached a point that would drive him to take the initiative, and he was only waiting for a favourable opening.

The crafty expression of his eyes filled her with irritation and resentment. How well she knew the trend of his thoughts! Others might find him inscrutable, but she knew him through and through. In their long and subtle struggle concerning the disposition of her property, in the question whether she would or would not help him to build up the college, she had always been sustained by a peculiar loyalty to her mother, who had passed her fortune on to her daughter unimpaired. This was a practical declaration of her own will in the matter, and Felicity accepted it as she might have accepted a sacred trust. She barely remembered her mother as a shadowy and benign being floating through the great rooms of the house. During her childhood, a certain angel in one of the windows of St. George's Church had somehow been confused in her mind with that figure, and had inspired her with vague awe. These dim memories and childish fancies had crystallised in later years into an appreciation of the common interests that would doubtless have been theirs, had her mother lived.

No hint of this hidden psychological drama had ever reached the bishop's ken. His daughter's attitude seemed her mother's obstinacy and worldliness reincarnated, and he was distressed also by more dangerous elements, by inexplicable sympathies, antipathies, and rebellions, until the whole fabric of his careful plans seemed destined to fall in ruins.

As the sunlight came stealing in across the table, striking prismatic colours from the glassware, he shaded his eyes with his hand and sharply ordered the maid to draw the curtain.

"What is the matter with you this morning, father?" Felicity asked severely. "Are you ill?"

The corners of her mobile lips were curled slightly upward, with just a suggestion of scorn. Unhappiness is no great promoter of the courtesies of life, and if she was conscious of wrong-doing, she was far from being on the defensive.

"Yes," he answered, "I am ill. I am sick at heart."

"If you will drink coffee, and keep on smoking those strong cigars"—

He eyed her so intently over the rim of his shaking cup that she left the sentence uncompleted. In spite of her tragic mood, his glare of resentment aroused within her an inclination to laugh.

"You see how your nerves are affected," she finished.

It was not the first time this subject had come up between them, but hitherto he had denied with urbane mendacity the ill results of his favourite indulgences. Now his control was gone.

"They are not affected," he retorted, while the rattling of the cup against the saucer disproved his declaration. It was with difficulty that he could extricate his fingers from the handle without breaking the delicate ware. "Or if they are," he went on, "you misstate the cause, deliberately, as I believe."

She opened her eyes incredulously, and pushing back his chair, he rose petulantly to his feet.

"Felicity, I am disappointed in you—more than disappointed—wounded—cut to the heart—scandalised!"

He turned away, then, coming back, he seized the morning paper, and with a parting glance of reproach went into his study and closed the door. His words, his manner of retreat, were a challenge to follow which she meant to accept. A few moments later, she flung back the door of her father's study and confronted him, intensely angry, and strikingly beautiful in her anger.

"Scandalised!" she echoed, as if no time had elapsed since he uttered the word. "What do you mean by that?"

The apparition was not unexpected, but the bishop, glancing over the top of his paper, managed to convey his surprise with the subtlety of which he was master. Chagrined by his conduct at the table, he had fortified himself in the interim against a renewal of the struggle.

"I used the word advisedly," he replied with dignity. "You might come in and close the door. It is just as well, perhaps, not to take the servants into our confidence."

She accepted the suggestion and sat confronting him expectantly, her anger ebbing away imperceptibly in the pause until only the underlying dread remained.

"Who was the man that came in with you last night?" he asked with authority. "You went out about half-past nine o'clock to Mrs. Parr's, as I supposed, and returned at midnight, not alone. I might have thought that Mr. Parr had seen you home, but I looked from my window, and though I could n't hear what you said—but never mind that. You will do me the justice to admit that I have never pried into your affairs or actions. Until recently such a question as I have now thought it my duty to ask would never have occurred to me."

"It was Mayor Emmet," she answered in a thin voice. She was panic-stricken, and her heart beat to suffocation.

"Emmet!" he echoed.

"Who did you think it was?" she asked, with a wan smile.

"Never mind—never mind," he returned impatiently. "Ah, I begin to see more clearly. What was it you said he wanted with you here the other morning? Some trivial thing—I can't remember. Now I want to know at once—I have a right to know—whether there is anything between you and that man. It is n't possible—I am ashamed to ask—but your face betrays you. You are n't—Felicity—you can't imagine yourself in love with such a fellow?"

"Perhaps it would be better if I could," she answered desperately, "but I can't. Father, you must control yourself. I used to think myself in love with him, and—and—and I was very foolish"—

"How foolish?" His face had grown white, and he steadied his hands on the arms of his chair. "Don't torture me, Felicity. Tell me the worst at once."

"I married him."

At the words his paleness became ashen, and the rigidity of his features was so ghastly that, forgetting everything else in her alarm, she ran to his assistance. He waved her away angrily.

"No—I am not going to faint—and I don't want anything to drink."

She resumed her chair obediently, and waited for him to ask more questions. Apparently he was unwilling or unable to do so, and the silence seemed interminable, though in reality it lasted but a few minutes. During that short time the bishop's thoughts ranged with characteristic rapidity over every aspect of the situation. Emmet as a son-in-law! First of all, the fact that he was the mayor of Warwick, a fact which the bishop had hitherto belittled, now presented itself as a mitigating circumstance. Then the thought that he was a Catholic followed immediately, to suggest complications and humiliations which the bishop's large experience enabled him to see with fatal distinctness. What was the man's paltry office compared with this stupendous fact? Nothing—a mere accident—a passing honour that would probably be plucked from him two years hence, leaving him—what? Tom Emmet, ex-professional baseball player and streetcar conductor, out of a job, no longer mayor, but always a Catholic, married to the richest woman in Warwick, and that woman his daughter, the daughter of Bishop Wycliffe!

It was inevitable that he should look at the situation from the point of view of the bishop rather than from that of the father simply. Had she been a son who had "gone over to Rome" after taking Anglican orders, the bishop's professional humiliation would not have been as great as that which now stared him in the face. It would have been a keen disappointment indeed, but lightened by the prospect of his son's preferment in an ancient communion. There would still have been the possibility of a career for the boy, a career which his father could watch, or at least anticipate, with emotions of pride; for the bishop was too purely an ecclesiastic to under-estimate professional success in the Church of Rome. The career of a Cardinal Newman, for example, was one that challenged his respect, however much he regretted the loss of such talents to the Anglican faith, however forcibly he might characterise the convert's action as apostasy.

But how different the actual case, how infinitely worse! Felicity's fortune was lost indeed to the great cause for which he had laboured a lifetime. Could he not imagine the delicately malicious triumph of the Catholic bishop, by whose side he had so recently sat on equal terms? Did he not know how the man would begin to scheme for the fortune of Emmet's wife from the very day the marriage was published, how he would strive to reach Felicity through her husband, flattering, threatening, moving heaven and earth to get the money for his parochial schools, his nunneries, his cathedral? Only one as intensely partisan as the bishop, and with his reasons for partisanship, could divine his sensations as he viewed the picture thus presented to his mind—the troops of Irish or Italian children screaming in their dusty playground, watched by the monkish forms of their teachers. And the other possibility had been St. George's Hall, the miniature Oxford of America!

But even if the money should not go in such a direction through the hands of Felicity,—and the bishop realised that a husband would not be likely to succeed where a father had failed,—it would ultimately reach the hands of her children. Baffled by the parents, the authorities of the Catholic Church would transfer their efforts to the children from their very cradles, and would bring the game to earth at last.

The thought of children reminded the bishop now far he had gone on the facts he knew thus far. What were they? That Felicity had married Emmet, that she did not love him, that she already repented the deed! It was characteristic of his mental processes that the consideration of love had been overlooked in his first agonised speculations, but now he clutched at it as a drowning man clutches at a straw.

It was a wonderfully interesting face that he turned upon her, transformed by his complicated emotions—his mechanical smile of suffering, humiliation, scorn, disgust; the sudden leaping into his eyes of a desperate hope. The master spirit within him was already awaking from the stunning blow she had dealt. Every faculty of his acute mind was once more alert, hungering for more facts, all the facts, as a basis of future action.

He spoke not one word of the terrible anger that racked him like a physical nausea. Even in this crisis, his temperament and training held fast. Reproaches on his part would only drive her more surely to the place from which she seemed desirous to return. His flurry at the table had shown him how she could match anger with anger, and over-power him by sheer vitality. An instinct of self-preservation, and an astuteness that now reached its final triumph, pointed the wiser way.

"Then you feel that you have made a mistake, Felicity?" he questioned. "I have long divined a great trouble in you, though of course this is far beyond my worst fears. If I am to be of any help to you, I must know all."

For the first time in her life she felt that her father might be her friend, her refuge in trouble. Hungry for sympathy and understanding,—she knew not how hungry till now,—she told her story, beginning impetuously and with starting tears. The bishop listened attentively to the facts, dismissing from his mind her point of view, her reasons for dissatisfaction with her life. Such crude immaturity he had encountered a thousand times, though he had never suspected it in her.

The only facts that concerned him were: that the marriage had never really been consummated; that there was no question of a child to consider; that Felicity was anxious to escape from the man in whose clutches she had placed herself; and that there were grounds for divorce. Emmet himself might be induced—purchased—to bring action on the ground of desertion. To be sure, such a cause was not acknowledged by the Church as valid, but the bishop was prepared to lay aside his prejudice in this particular case. Not for a moment did he think of holding his daughter to her mistake, as soon as he knew the facts in the case. But she made no mention of Leigh.

As the dangers with which he had at first seen himself threatened became less formidable, and the way of escape suggested itself, his wonder at her stupendous selfishness increased. What manner of woman had he reared and educated with such care? In spite of the restraints of his questions and comments, incredulous scorn was written in his expression and in the gleam of his eyes. It was much that she had not been physically coarse, but her psychic equation was beyond his solving.

Felicity could not fail to be conscious of this growing antagonism, and the warmth of emotion with which she had begun her explanation cooled with every word. Her gratitude vanished, to give way to implacable resentment at his attitude of virtuous superiority. Her judgment of him was no less bitter than that she received. Angry reproaches would have stung her less than this courteous contempt.

"And how many persons are in this secret?" he asked finally.

"Mr. Emmet has taken Mr. Leigh into his confidence, I believe," she answered, a faint colour creeping into her face.

"Ah, Leigh," he returned, thrown off his guard by surprise. He thought he saw now what her intimacy with the young professor really meant. She was pledging him to secrecy, and the young man had now the motive of revenge to turn and reveal what he knew.

"It would perhaps be better to keep him in the college, after all," he mused.

"What do you mean, father?" she demanded. "To keep him in the college? You had n't asked him to go?"

To this question he made no reply, but she saw confusion plainly written in his face.

"I naturally supposed that he was a fortune hunter"—

She rose to her feet, flaming with an anger that appalled him. "You asked him to go," she cried, "because you thought I might marry him, and not give my mother's money and mine to the college! A fortune hunter! It does n't seem to me, father, that you have much cause to talk about fortune hunting!"

The taunt stung him to the quick, and his face grew scarlet and livid by turns. Never had this question come to an open issue and caused an explosion like the present.

"I am not a fortune hunter," he said raspingly. "If you are so dead to the most inspiring of God's works, yours be the blame, Felicity, and yours the condemnation."

"I have no idea of marrying Mr. Leigh," she went on passionately, "but one thing I can tell you once for all. If you think I am going to give one cent to the college, you are utterly mistaken! Don't I know your plans? Haven't I seen the drift of your casual remarks about the glory of serving God? I know you would have me give every cent I possess to the college and become a deaconess—repent of my sins—retire from the world. You already see an opportunity in my mistake to profit by my repentance. Oh, I know all the choice phrases by heart! You never loved my mother, nor me, but you wanted the money for your St. George's Hall. It was you that drove me into this marriage. God knows, I admit I was wrong, but I made the mistake in a frantic desire for fresh air, for some other atmosphere than the stuffy gloom of churches and seminaries and colleges. What do I care for that miserable little college on the hill, full of your good little boys with their churchly conceits and bowings and deadness? I want life, and I mean to have it. I will spend my money as I see fit—for travel—for clothes—for luxury—for anything that strikes my fancy—but never—never—never—for that college!"

A wild impulse swept over her to seize something and break it in fragments on the floor, but seeing nothing fragile at hand in that book-lined room, she stood still, trembling like an aspen leaf. The bishop, little realising that she was driven to this extraordinary transport by his treatment of Leigh, looked at her in stupefaction. It seemed to him that her mother stood before him once more, though she had never acted thus; but the mental attitude was the same. The mother had thwarted his plans by leaving her money to the daughter, and now the daughter would spend it as she willed. It was like a second defeat at the hands of the same woman. And this was the flower he had cherished with such pride, now scentless of spirituality and dead at the roots! He rose to his feet, suddenly an old man, utterly bereft, and shook a trembling finger in her face.

"You lack nothing of filling up your cup of wickedness," he quavered, "but that you have refrained from making a physical attack upon me. Felicity, God will punish you!"

The corners of her beautiful lips curled upward in cruel scorn, and she swept from the room, slamming the door behind her. Presently he heard the door of her own room closed with equal force, not once, but twice, as if she had opened it again, and again slammed it shut, to give adequate expression to her feelings. Completely bewildered, he wandered into the hall, reached mechanically for his hat and coat, and went out into the street.

Instinctively he turned his steps toward St. George's Hall, as if from its contemplation he could derive comfort. Something, at least, had been done toward realising his ideal, though far less than he had hoped to accomplish. Many a graduate had gone forth from beneath the shadow of that stately tower to win fame and applause in the great world. The bishop knew most of them, and was known and loved by all. There were bishops among them, and clergymen, and judges, and physicians, and some who had freely given their promising young lives in the service of their country. He counted over the names, as a miser counts his gold. His boys! It was such as these, their successors, whom his daughter characterised with scorn, impatient of the passing fads and fancies common to their age, of an immaturity which she herself had exemplified so much less venially.

Musing thus, he traversed the length of Birdseye Avenue, saluting those who passed him with absent-minded courtesy. At length he raised his eyes and looked up the hill to the long, low roof against the cloudless sky. For the thousandth time his eyes kindled at the sight, for the thousandth time he experienced the artistic satisfaction of the connoisseur in collegiate architecture, and mentally limned the remainder of the plan. His sensations were like those of a skilled musician who has heard the first movement of a masterly sonata and is left to imagine the perfect whole. The sun, now mounting toward the zenith, was shortening the shadows of the tower on the slate roof that shone in the bright atmosphere like dull silver. Not a student was in sight, and the place seemed to share the drowsy influence of the noontime.

Motionless, and leaning heavily on his cane, the bishop's mood grew warm, as if it travelled upward with the sun. His dream, now destined to remain unfulfilled, had not been one merely of stone and brick and mortar. His spirit was akin to that of the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages. They might drive the people in harness to accomplish their purpose, but that purpose was to erect a splendid temple to their God, a symbol of human aspiration toward the divine.

The bishop reflected with pride that if he had measurably failed, he had yet planned greatly. He had taken his stand firmly on the ideal, defying the utilitarian spirit of his time and country. It was nothing to him that the money which disappeared in the rearing of that splendid fragment could have been spent for humbler structures which practical men would have called more useful. Useful! He hated the word. As if a beautiful thing employed in the service of God were not useful in exact proportion to its beauty! If the churchmen of America had not been inspired by this fair and brave beginning to complete the work, the fault was theirs. He had pointed them the way.

And how had he merited his wife's indifference, his daughter's reproaches? He had not desired the money for himself, he had used no undue influence, he had forged no will; he had merely striven to make them realise their stewardship, to inspire them with his own ideal. In this effort he could find no grounds for self-accusation; on the contrary, the effort was a merit he might lay with humble pride before his God, when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed.

Presently he resumed his way, until he stood directly opposite the towers, at the foot of the path which crossed the intervening meadows. Here the gateway was to have been built, similar to that of Trinity College, Cambridge, with flanking towers and a statue, perhaps of himself, standing above the portal. At the thought the bishop smiled ironically, and began a tentative progress up the hill.

The later hours of the night had been cold and the ground was still fairly firm, even under the softening influence of the noonday sun. As he went further, the students began to come from their recitations and to disperse toward their various rooms. One figure, however, detached itself from the rest and struck out across the upper campus in the direction of the bronze statue of the founder, who stood with hand outstretched in perennial blessing toward the hall which one of his successors had reared. That successor now caught sight of a head and shoulders emerging above the rim of the plateau, until a man's full length came into view and rapidly descended the slope. Then the bishop recognised Leigh. His greeting to the young man was affable, and his pause an invitation.

"You are adventurous to come this way," he remarked, prodding the earth with his cane. "This crust will scarcely sustain the weight of an old Tithonus like myself, let alone a vigorous young Ajax like you."

Leigh glanced down at his soiled shoes, and smiled with an appreciation of the ironies of life not unlike that which the other had felt so recently. "I came this way for sentimental reasons, I imagine," he replied. "This is a good point from which to look back at the towers."

"Then you 've caught the disease too?" the bishop asked. "But one can't long remain an immune in St. George's Hall."

"I shall have plenty of time to recover," Leigh returned, "when I shall have left."

"Yes—yes," the bishop murmured. "I heard something about that. There was an unfortunate misunderstanding, concerning which I believe I can set Dr. Renshaw right. It will give me great pleasure, Mr. Leigh, if you will not think of leaving us."

The overture was practically an admission of his own responsibility in the matter, but the astronomer was only impressed by the fact that for some reason the bishop had ceased to regard him with disfavour. Could it be that he had discovered Felicity's secret at last? A study of the haggard record in the old man's face made the conjecture almost a certainty. Leigh felt that the bishop would now make amends to him for suspecting him falsely in connection with his daughter, and reflected guiltily that the suspicion was not as false as the bishop supposed.

"I have been thinking of leaving—naturally," he answered, hesitating, "but my plans are not yet matured."

The bishop nodded understandingly. He appreciated the fact that the other's sensitiveness and resentment could not be put aside at once, and that his own change of front could not draw forth immediate confidences. The subject was a delicate one to both, and they were mutually anxious to separate.

"I hope you will let me know, then," he said courteously, "whether you decide that your best interests call you elsewhere, but I hope not—I hope not."

He turned his face once more toward the Hall, his sagacious mind already grappling with another possibility. If Felicity must marry after getting her divorce,—and it now seemed wiser that she should,—let her marry this young professor, who was, after all, of her own class. Her fortune would not be wholly alienated from the college interests, should Leigh continue in his professorship. The young man might be made president after Dr. Renshaw's impending retirement. He could take orders to conform with the traditions of the place; and men had taken orders for smaller rewards. His pride in the institution, which his wife must then share, would influence them much in the direction of giving.

Leigh's first words upon coming down the hill had betrayed his growing appreciation of the Hall, his gradual conversion to the ideal of the church college. Though a scientist, he had taken the degree of bachelor of arts, and he was an inheritor of church traditions. As for Felicity—the bishop recalled the times he had seen her with Leigh, and especially at the lecture at Littleford's. He had divined their mutual attraction from the first, though he credited them both with more conscience in the matter than they had shown.

Leigh reached the street and turned southward, following the course that Emmet had taken with his sleigh when he picked Lena up on that very spot some two months before. It wanted yet an hour of his lunch time, and he had come forth with no other thought than to get the fresh air and to turn over again in his mind the plans of which he had hinted to the bishop.

After his interview with Dr. Renshaw, he had written to the authorities of the Lick Observatory and asked permission to join one of the three expeditions that were soon to be sent out to observe the approaching eclipse of the sun. It was too early as yet for a reply, but he had reason to believe that his previous connection with the observatory and his record there would assure the granting of his request, if the number were not entirely completed. Already he imagined himself transported to Norway, or South America, or Egypt. He could not tell which expedition, if any, he would be permitted to join, but of the three, the last named was most to his mind.

Felicity had become interwoven with his consciousness of himself, and in thinking of Egypt he pictured her there with him, a vivid creation of memory and imagination. Some association of ideas between her and the country that had given birth to Cleopatra must have influenced him in his choice, he reflected with a disconsolate smile. The association did Felicity little justice in one way, but the impossibility of imagining her at home on the cold heights of Norway or the Andes showed her kinship with the land of colour and nocturnal mystery.

Sometimes he felt that he must brush aside all opposition of persons and circumstance and beg her to go with him, leaving the world to gape and wonder as it might. It was only a fevered dream, but it suggested another possibility that presently became a definite resolve. At least he would see her again, and beg her not to go blundering back into the arms of the man she did not love. He would plead with her not to try to rectify one mistake by making another more fatal still. Did he not owe it to her and to himself to make one last effort for their happiness? Had he a right to desert her in her trouble, to yield supinely to a conventional prejudice?

He was in the glow of this new resolve when he climbed the hill to the south of the college and turned to follow the road along the ridge which Felicity and Emmet had taken that misty night. At the quarry he paused for a few moments to look down absently at the men working below, and then began to retrace his steps toward the Hall. His turning brought the tower of the college and the distant city before his eyes. The absence of foliage from the trees exposed to view innumerable glinting roofs that were hidden in summer as by a forest. He picked out the tower of St. George's Church and the various steeples with which he had become familiar. Then he caught sight of the pale wings of the figure of Victory above the triumphal column in the park, poised like those of a butterfly about to soar into the still, bright air.

Once more the beauty of the country made its great appeal: the magnificent valleys to east and west swelling upward to ridges of hills clothed in ever changing lights and shadows; the Hall standing sentinel over all; the city nestled below, a city of dreams.



CHAPTER XX

"PUNISHMENT, THOUGH LAME OF FOOT"——

The bishop sat in his study, awaiting the arrival of Mayor Emmet in a frame of mind that boded ill for the success of the interview. In reply to his letter suggesting a conference on a subject of mutual interest, the mayor had named the third morning as the one that would find him most free from his numerous engagements. The coolness of this reply was exasperating to the bishop, and he thought he divined in the delay a deliberate intention to keep him on the rack of uncertainty. Being a man of ample leisure, he had found plenty of time to formulate the position he meant to take. He and his daughter had threshed out the subject, and now avoided it by mutual consent. Their relationship became unnatural and constrained. They met only at meal-times, and not always then, for each one sought more than one pretext to dine elsewhere. More words on the subject would only precipitate a repetition of the scene that still rankled in the memory of both, and the discussion was therefore closed until Emmet should have stated his own position.

While the situation remained thus stationary, the appearance of the world without had been so completely transformed that a whole season, rather than three days, seemed to have elapsed. Winter had returned in a storm of snow that threatened to assume the proportions of the historic blizzard, which piled such deep drifts about St. George's Hall that the students had leaped with impunity from the upper windows. During the previous night, however, the sky had cleared, and now the air was filled with those familiar brumal sounds, the scraping of shovels and the ringing of sleighbells, that usually make such a pleasant appeal to those within-doors; but the bishop was merely moved to impatient longing for the spring.

The bright sun filled the study with a garish light reflected from the snow without, and the bishop pulled down the heavy shades, introducing thereby an effect of twilight in the room. At the same time the wood fire in the grate, which had previously seemed pale and thin, took on a ruddy and cheerful activity, relieved from the overpowering competition of the sun.

The mayor finally arrived, half an hour behind the time he had appointed, drawn in his sleigh by the pacer that had stood by him so gallantly in his race with Anthony Cobbens. He fastened the mare to the post with careful deliberation, conscious the while that he might be under inspection from behind the drawn curtains of Felicity's room. When he entered the bishop's study, it was evident at once that he came in no very conciliatory mood. The bold glance of his eyes was a trifle more bold than usual and swept the room rapidly, as if he anticipated seeing Felicity there. Something of disappointment and resentment seemed to show itself in his manner, as he took the chair the bishop indicated; and now he waited, with the instinct of the politician, for his opponent to show his hand.

The bishop had always hated this man, and never more so than now. In addition to his special reason for hostility, Emmet's type was one peculiarly distasteful to him. Just as he had catalogued Leigh as a Westerner, and had assumed certain characteristics in him, so he had put Emmet, from the first, into the class of loud-voiced, big-limbed, heavy-heeled centurions. It made no difference that the mayor showed marked deviations from the type; there was just enough of the feminine in his judge to keep him true to his prejudices, and never were they so nearly justified as now. He saw that he must make a beginning, and did so with his usual circumspection. His words were carefully selected to avoid giving offence, but the gist of their meaning was that he waited for his visitor to give an account of himself.

"I should like to speak in the presence of my wife," Emmet announced uncompromisingly.

"My daughter will not be present at this interview," the bishop declared, with marked austerity, "nor at any other interview that may subsequently become necessary, though I hope we shall come to such a satisfactory understanding to-day as to make further conferences superfluous. This arrangement is with her entire consent, or rather, is the fulfilment of her expressed wish. I must protest also against your designation of my daughter as your wife. She is not such in the full sense of the term. She has never appeared with you publicly as your wife, but by her desertion of you at the very altar she emphatically showed that she realised her mistake at once and repudiated it."

"Desertion is no cause for divorce, bishop," Emmet returned, with an ugly gleam in his eyes, "either in your Church or in mine. Your daughter's treatment of me has been such that the only amends she can make is to acknowledge our relationship and act accordingly."

"Come, come, Mr. Emmet," the other retorted, "I need scarcely remind you how far my daughter has already atoned for her mistake by helping you to realise your ambition, by suggesting it, in fact, and by lending you books for your instruction. It seems to me that a manly man would acknowledge this frankly, that he would not strive to hold the woman to the letter of the agreement after discovering that the spirit was no longer there to give it life."

"I could have won without her," the mayor declared hoarsely.

The bishop smiled with exasperating, ironical amusement. "We will waive that point, then, Mr. Emmet. It suggests a fruitless discussion, that would merely serve to distract us from the main question. I was about to say, when you interrupted me, that if you always considered your marriage as binding as you now feign to consider it, you should have come to me and announced the fact. By your acquiescence in my daughter's desertion, you tacitly admitted that you released her, that you had nothing to announce. If you did not consider then that the marriage was binding, you cannot begin to do so at this late hour."

"Allow me to say that your daughter considered it binding," Emmet put in shrewdly. "She did not repudiate her mistake, as you call it, by leaving me at the altar. On the contrary, she intended all along to acknowledge our marriage as soon as I should be elected mayor."

"She did not, perhaps, realise the full significance of her instinctive action," the bishop answered. "A woman is a mystery to herself no less than to others. I am putting the case to you as man to man, hoping to kindle a spark of generous understanding in your heart. Could any woman who really loved a man do as she did? I tell you, and you know, that it was the folly of a romantic girl, a folly that does not deserve the penalty you would inflict. If my daughter did not actually, in so many words, repudiate her mistake in the beginning, she did so in a recent interview with you, and she does so finally now by me."

"And she did me a great wrong!" Emmet cried hotly. "If you are a man, bishop, you must know what it meant to be tricked and disappointed as I was."

The bishop's face grew livid, and he shrank within himself.

"You offer a pitiful excuse, sir!" he retorted. "It depends upon what kind of man you mean—the brute man, who regards women merely as the instruments of his passion, or the chivalrous man, who knows that the woman is the weaker vessel and bears himself accordingly. I confess to you that I am not the former kind."

His eyes assumed a keen, inquisitorial look that required all of Emmet's false fortitude to meet.

"Mr. Emmet, I venture to say that I give you the benefit of a very considerable doubt in assuming that you have not given my daughter statutory grounds for divorce by your conduct with some other woman. It seems passing strange that you should have been so acquiescent under an arrangement which you describe as such a hardship, if you were not kept so by a consciousness of duplicity. But I have no desire to pursue that line of inquiry. This so-called marriage must be dissolved. Let us admit that you have not given statutory grounds; there are other grounds concerning which there exists no manner of doubt whatever. I do not speak now of the eternal fitness of things, of those humane and ethical considerations to which I find you impervious, but of legal grounds. My daughter cannot bring an action for non-support against you, because she left you voluntarily. It remains for you to institute proceedings of divorce against her on the ground of desertion. We will not defend the suit."

There was something almost clairvoyant in the bishop's guess of the mayor's infidelity, for pride had caused Felicity to keep Lena out of her confession. She had told only as much as she chose to tell, leaving her father to imagine himself in possession of all the facts. Had she told all, she would have strengthened her case at the expense of her pride; but this was a sacrifice she could not bring herself to make.

Before the bishop finished speaking, his listener had discerned that the veiled accusation was a guess, and nothing more. This knowledge helped him to remain apparently unmoved. It did more. It showed him Felicity's pride in remaining silent concerning a rival so much beneath her. This had been her attitude all along,—to consider Lena beneath contempt,—and he burned to make her suffer for it. He was filled with fury against himself also for yielding at the last to his passion for Lena, after a long and successful struggle. It was this that made it impossible for him to say plainly that he would not give Felicity up, though he had tormented her father by implying it. This method of revenge was the only one now left him.

"But your religion," he suggested, with a sneer.

"Excuse me," the bishop returned, with patient dignity, "if I feel that I am not accountable to you for the manner in which I defend or fail to defend the canons of my Church. My daughter acts as an individual who is of age, and her reckoning is with the civil law. To clear up your evident confusion of mind, I will explain that I violate no canons of the Church in eliminating myself officially from the situation. I am merely suggesting to you, as one individual to another, a way out of a most unhappy complication. Besides, you evade the hard fact that this was no marriage in the full sense of the word."

Emmet realised that his shaft had fallen short, and the knowledge stung him to fury.

"I will not bring any such action!" he cried recklessly, rising in white heat. "I will not release her!"

"We shall accomplish nothing by violence," the bishop interposed. "Pray, resume your chair and hear me out. A marriage without love is a mere mockery and sham. You do not love my daughter, and she does not love you. We will not argue about that, if you please, for it is not possible to contradict an evident fact. You are an ambitious man, and marriage is only one of the ways by which ambition can be furthered. In this case, the marriage is out of the question; but if you will name a compensation which you deem adequate recompense for your disappointment, we shall be ready to listen to the proposition."

Emmet had taken his seat at the bishop's request, but this cynical proposal to buy him off caused him to spring to his feet again in an indignation that was not altogether unjustified. He was a money-maker himself, and had not coveted Felicity's wealth. From her he had sought only social advantage and revenge upon his enemies; but it was his pride to be the builder of his own fortune.

"If you were not an old man," he said tempestuously, "you would not make such an offer with impunity. You will find I have no price. I wish you good day."

"Wait!" the bishop cried, raising his trembling hand and clearing his throat from suffocating emotion. "Only one word more. You shall not have her—that is all. And this house is mine—you shall not enter it again."

The other's face became diabolical in its passion. He leaned against the jamb of the open door and folded his arms mockingly, as if inviting an effort to eject him.

"You were speaking pretty freely of statutory grounds," he said, raising his voice. "It has n't occurred to you, perhaps, that I may name a co-respondent myself. You ought to have a care, bishop, what kind of professors you employ in your college." With these words he turned and strode from the house.

The bishop's speechless indignation presently gave way to the first touch of pity he had yet felt for Felicity in her trouble. The mayor was more of a brute than even he had thought possible, and should receive no quarter in the future. The front door had scarcely closed when his daughter's figure took the place her husband had just occupied before him.

"Well?" she asked simply.

He searched her face with haggard eyes, and guessed from its pallor that his fears were justified.

"Did you hear what the fellow said," he demanded—"his last words?"

The colour came back to her cheeks with a rush. "I could n't very well help it. I was in the dining-room, and the door was open."

"I 'm sorry," he murmured, "very sorry. I hoped you did not. But there, we 'll not discuss the subject any more at present, Felicity. The interview was fruitless, worse than fruitless, I fear." He shifted uneasily in his chair, and she understood his dumb appeal to be left alone.

When she had gone, he arose from his seat and unlocked a long drawer beneath one of his bookcases, from which he took a mass of material relating to the plans for St. George's Hall. These he spread out on the desk before him and studied with deep attention, turning again to this dream with an instinct of self-preservation. To-morrow he would take up again the fight for his daughter's freedom and happiness, but now he was in sore need of some narcotic influence, of something beautiful and permanent, as a refuge from the passions that had threatened to overpower him. Felicity would live this down; it would ultimately seem but a stormy day in the retrospect. Meanwhile, what could he do about this chapel? Here, in this envelope, was a promise of half the money needed, if he could raise the balance within a specified time. He recalled having read in the morning paper of the arrival from Europe of an old friend and former parishioner. She was a rich woman, and was now alone in the world. Perhaps he could get away in a few days and run down to New York to see her. He began to drum absently on the desk with his fingers, turning over in his mind some details in the arrangement of the chapel which he had never settled to his satisfaction. Presently he realised that something was lacking, and reaching forward, he took a cigar from the open box that stood on the revolving bookcase near by.

It was noon when the mayor returned to the City Hall. On the steps, as he entered, stood a figure long familiar in the streets of Warwick, a blind news-vender, with his cane and smoked glasses and bundle of papers. In the morning, he might be seen at the railroad station, a grotesque and patient form, holding out his papers silently in the direction of the shuffling feet that passed by. He never cried his wares, but his appeal was more compelling than the noisy shouts of his more fortunate competitors. He had become an institution in Warwick. Every one knew where to find him at certain hours: in the morning, at the station; toward noon, taking his way, unassisted except by his cane, toward the City Hall, carrying the first edition of a great metropolitan daily of the flaming variety; in the evening, at the station once more. He had made these two posts of vantage his own, as unfortunates in the Old World take possession of sunny corners beside cathedral doors, and no one ventured to trespass within his sphere.

Each noon Emmet had been accustomed to buy a paper, paying a nickel or a dime as it came to his hand, but seldom the penny that was the price of the sheet. To-day he followed his custom mechanically and hurried on, eager to plunge into the distraction of work as a refuge from the tormenting devil within him. The outer office, lined with chairs for visitors and adorned with pictures of former occupants of the mayoralty, was deserted. He passed into the inner office, where his desk stood, piled with the last mail, and sent his stenographer out to lunch, for his own appetite had deserted him.

He had thrown the paper down, with no thought of reading it, and paused to hang up his coat and hat. Upon his return, he was confronted by a black headline in letters two inches deep, and flinging the paper open with a sharp crackle, he stood rigid while the meaning of it burst upon him.

PRETTY MAID MARRIES RICH SWELL!

ROMANTIC RUNAWAY MATCH. YOUNG HOLLISTER PYLE OF WARWICK MARRIES THE GIRL THAT FORMERLY LIVED IN HIS HOUSE. CUPID NOT TO BE BAFFLED BY THE DIFFERENCE IN SOCIAL POSITION. PARENTS OF BRIDEGROOM TELEGRAPH THEIR FORGIVENESS.

Emmet slowly sank into his chair, his staring eyes fixed on the page while he rapidly ran through the startling story—not a seven days' wonder, indeed, in these times of universal publicity, but the gossip of a few hours, until the whirling sheets of the next issue should fling some other story of folly or crime into the hands of its gaping readers.

But Emmet was not comforted by a realisation of the transitory nature of the sensation. He heard the newsboys in the street without, crying it hoarsely, and almost wondered why his own name was not coupled with the others, to be bruited about the sidewalks, proclaiming his guilt. In the first moments, his sensations were those of fear and horror. The bottom had dropped out of his world, leaving him suspended over an abyss. He experienced no relief that this act of Lena's freed his own hands. He was free in one sense, but she had fastened a crime upon him forever by taking herself from his path.

What he had intended to do, he did not know. Some vague idea of providing for her had lain dormant in his mind. He had even gone to the bishop's with a subconscious disposition to give Felicity up; but her father's scorn had aroused his perversity, and had resulted in a declaration of obstinacy that was unpremeditated.

Now he knew that he had loved Lena, had intended to stand by her, even to marry her; and he was struck by her pitiful humility. Evidently it had not occurred to her mind that he might get a divorce. Too late he wished he had been frank with her and had asked her to wait. In reality, he was no sensualist, and Lena's frailty had not made him a cynic; on the contrary, he regarded it as a proof of her love alone. In his agony, he did not judge her; he judged only himself. He had taught her duplicity, but he was aghast at her skill in practising the lesson she had learned. During all this time, he had received no hint that young Pyle had followed her from his house. He could only imagine the facts. When Lena left that place to go to Bishop Wycliffe's, she doubtless had an honest desire to escape from the unwelcome attentions she had told him of. She must have begun to weaken only after discovering that the man for whom she made the effort had played her false.

Emmet threw down the paper with a groan and turned to his desk, moved by a desperate hope that he could force himself to appreciate the reality of the interests those piled envelopes represented. He seized them feverishly, and began to shuffle them over like a pack of cards. His random glance was arrested by a thin, wavering hand he knew well, scrawled on an envelope that bore the picture and name of a New York hotel. Had he been a student of chirography, he might have read the secret of the enigma that tormented him in those pale, uncertain pen-strokes, so unlike the firm, compact characters by which Miss Wycliffe visualised her will. But his only thought was that this letter came to him as a final explanation and farewell, after he had lost her forever.

The epistle was confused, and blotted with tears. She told how Pyle had pursued her, how she had resisted him, how she had finally yielded to his importunities, to shield the man that had wronged her and to save herself. If she had not done this, she would have killed herself, but she was afraid to die, and there was no third way. She wrote no word of reproach, but closed with a final message of love and a prayer for his happiness.

Emmet shrank from the lines, as if each were the waving lash of a whip that descended upon him. When he had finished reading, he tore the letter into minute fragments and threw them in the basket. His heart was swelling with the sense of a tragedy that was not completed, but only begun, a tragedy that he and Lena must share together. She had bound him to her forever by putting this barrier between them. He thought of Felicity only to resolve to free himself from her at once, that he might be in readiness to come to Lena's aid in the future, should she need him. Perhaps God would yet give him a chance to make amends. If her husband would only break his worthless neck in one of his mad rushes with his machine, Emmet reflected savagely, or drink himself to death—