"Can I do anything?" What had she been all her life but burden-bearer, sorrow-sharer?

"Nothing."

"If I ever can, will you tell me?"

"This is the only secret I have kept from you, Pansy. I am sure you have kept none from me. I believe that if I could read everything in you, I should find nothing I did not wish to know."

She did not reply for a while. Then she said solemnly: "I have one secret. There is something I try to hide from every human being and I always shall. It is not a bad secret, Dent. But I do not wish to tell you what it is, and I feel sure you will never ask me."

He turned his eyes to her clear with unshakable confidence: "I never will."

Pansy was thinking of her mother's poverty.

They sat awhile in silence.

He had pulled some stems of seeding grass and drew them slowly across his palm, pondering Life. Then he began to talk to her in the way that made them so much at home with one another.

"Pansy, men used to speak of the secrets of Nature: there is not the slightest evidence that Nature has a secret. They used to speak of the mysteries of the Creator. I am not one of those who claim to be authorities on the traits of the Creator. Some of my ancestors considered themselves such. But I do say that men are coming more and more to think of Him as having no mysteries. We have no evidence, as the old hymn declares, that He loves to move in a mysterious way. The entire openness of Nature and of the Creator—these are the new ways of thinking. They will be the only ways of thinking in the future unless civilization sinks again into darkness. What we call secrets and mysteries of the universe are the limitations of our powers and our knowledge. The little that we actually do know about Nature, how open it is, how unsecretive! There is nowhere a sign that the Creator wishes to hide from us even what is Life. If we ever discover what Life is, no doubt we shall then realize that it contained no mystery."

She loved to listen, feeling that he was drawing her to his way of thinking for the coming years.

"It was the folly and the crime of all ancient religions that their priesthoods veiled them; whenever the veil was rent, like the veil of Isis, it was not God that men found behind it: it was nothing. The religions of the future will have no veils. As far as they can set before their worshippers truth at all, it will be truth as open as the day. The Great Teacher in the New Testament—what an eternal lesson on light itself: that is the beauty of his Gospel. And his Apostles—where do you find him saying to them, 'Preach my word to all men as the secrets of a priesthood and the mysteries of the Father'?

"It is the tragedy of man alone that he has his secrets. No doubt the time will come when I shall have mine and when I shall have to hide things from you, Pansy, as Rowan has his and hides things from us. Life is full of things that we cannot tell because they would injure us; and of things that we cannot tell because they would injure others. But surely we should all like to live in a time when a man's private life will be his only life."

After a silence he came back to her with a quiet laugh: "Here I am talking about the future of the human race, and we have never agreed upon our marriage ceremony! What a lover!"

"I want the most beautiful ceremony in the world."

"The ceremony of your church?" he asked with great respect, though wincing.

"My church has no ceremony: every minister in it has his own; and rather than have one of them write mine, I think I should rather write it myself: shouldn't you?"

"I think I should," he said, laughing.

He drew a little book out of his breast pocket: "Perhaps you will like this: a great many people have been married by it."

"I want the same ceremony that is used for kings and queens, for the greatest and the best people of the earth. I will marry you by no other!"

"A good many of them have used this," and he read to her the ceremony of his church.

When he finished neither spoke.

It was a clear summer afternoon. Under them was the strength of rocks; around them the noiseless growth of needful things; above them the upward-drawing light: two working children of the New World, two pieces of Nature's quietism.



II

It was the second morning after Marguerite's ball.

Marguerite, to herself a girl no longer, lay in the middle of a great, fragrant, drowsy bed of carved walnut, once her grandmother's. She had been dreaming; she had just awakened. The sun, long since risen above the trees of the yard, was slanting through the leaves and roses that formed an outside lattice to her window-blinds.

These blinds were very old. They had been her grandmother's when she was Marguerite's age; and one day, not long before this, Marguerite, pillaging the attic, had found them and brought them down, with adoring eyes, and put them up before her own windows. They were of thin muslin, and on them were painted scenes representing the River of Life, with hills and castles, valleys and streams, in a long series; at the end there was a faint vision of a crystal dome in the air—the Celestial City—nearly washed away. You looked at these scenes through the arches of a ruined castle. A young man (on one blind) has just said farewell to his parents on the steps of the castle and is rowing away down the River of Life. At the prow of his boat is the figurehead of a winged woman holding an hour-glass.

Marguerite lay on her side, sleepily contemplating the whole scene between her thick, bosky lashes. She liked everything but the winged woman holding the hour-glass. Had she been that woman, she would have dropped the hour-glass into the blue, burying water, and have reached up her hand for the young man to draw her into the boat with him. And she would have taken off her wings and cast them away upon the hurrying river. To have been alone with him, no hour-glass, no wings, rowing away on Life's long voyage, past castles and valleys, and never ending woods and streams! As to the Celestial City, she would have liked her blinds better if the rains of her grandmother's youth had washed it away altogether. It was not the desirable end of such a journey: she did not care to land there.

Marguerite slipped drowsily over to the edge of the bed in order to be nearer the blinds; and she began to study what was left of the face of the young man just starting on his adventures from the house of his fathers. Who was he? Of whom did he cause her to think? She sat up in bed and propped her face in the palms of her hands—the April face with its October eyes—and lapsed into what had been her dreams of the night. The laces of her nightgown dropped from her wrists to her elbows; the masses of her hair, like sunlit autumn maize, fell down over her neck and shoulders into the purity of the bed.

Until the evening of her party the world had been to Marguerite something that arranged all her happiness and never interfered with it. Only soundness and loveliness of nature, inborn, undestroyable, could have withstood such luxury, indulgence, surfeit as she had always known.

On that night which was designed to end for her the life of childhood, she had, for the first time, beheld the symbol of the world's diviner beauty—a cross. All her guests had individually greeted her as though each were happier in her happiness. Except one—he did not care. He had spoken to her upon entering with the manner of one who wished himself elsewhere, he alone brought no tribute to her of any kind, in his eyes, by his smile, through the pressure of his hand.

The slight wounded her at the moment; she had not expected to have a guest to whom she would be nothing and to whom it would seem no unkindness to let her know this. The slight left its trail of pain as the evening wore on and he did not come near her. Several times, while standing close to him, she had looked her surprise, had shadowed her face with coldness for him to see. For the first time in her life she felt herself rejected, suffered the fascination of that pain. Afterward she had intentionally pressed so close to him in the throng of her guests that her arm brushed his sleeve. At last she had disengaged herself from all others and had even gone to him with the inquiries of a hostess; and he had forced himself to smile at her and had forgotten her while he spoke to her—as though she were a child. All her nature was exquisitely loosened that night, and quivering; it was not a time to be so wounded and to forget.

She did not forget as she sat in her room after all had gone. She took the kindnesses and caresses, the congratulations and triumphs, of those full-fruited hours, pressed them together and derived merely one clear drop of bitterness—the languorous poison of one haunting desire. It followed her into her sleep and through the next day; and not until night came again and she had passed through the gateway of dreams was she happy: for in those dreams it was he who was setting out from the house of his fathers on a voyage down the River of Life; and he had paused and turned and called her to come to him and be with him always.

Marguerite lifted her face from her palms, as she finished her revery. She slipped to the floor out of the big walnut bed, and crossing to the blinds laid her fingers on the young man's shoulder. It was the movement with which one says: "I have come."

With a sigh she drew one of the blinds aside and looked out upon the leaves and roses of her yard and at the dazzling sunlight. Within a few feet of her a bird was singing. "How can you?" she said. "If you loved, you would be silent. Your wings would droop. You could neither sing nor fly." She turned dreamily back into her room and wandered over to a little table on which her violin lay in its box. She lifted the top and thrummed the strings. "How could I ever have loved you?"

She dressed absent-mindedly. How should she spend the forenoon? Some of her friends would be coming to talk over the party; there would be callers; there was the summer-house, her hammock, her phaeton; there were nooks and seats, cool, fragrant; there were her mother and grandmother to prattle to and caress. "No," she said, "not any of them. One person only. I must see him."

She thought of the places where she could probably see him if he should be in town that day. There was only one—the library. Often, when there, she had seen him pass in and out. He had no need to come for books or periodicals, all these he could have at home; but she had heard the librarian and him at work; over the files of old papers containing accounts of early agricultural affairs and the first cattle-shows of the state. She resolved to go to the library: what desire had she ever known that she had not gratified?

When Marguerite, about eleven o'clock, approached the library a little fearfully, she saw Barbee pacing to and fro on the sidewalk before the steps. She felt inclined to turn back; he was the last person she cared to meet this morning. Play with him had suddenly ended as a picnic in a spring grove is interrupted by a tempest.

"I ought to tell him at once," she said; and she went forward.

He came to meet her—with a countenance dissatisfied and reproachful. It struck her that his thin large ears looked yellowish instead of red and that his freckles had apparently spread and thickened. She asked herself why she had never before realized how boyish he was.

"Marguerite," he said at once, as though the matter were to be taken firmly in hand, "you treated me shabbily the night of your party. It was unworthy of you. And I will not stand it. You ought not be such a child!"

Her breath was taken away. She blanched and her eyes dilated as she looked at him: the lash of words had never been laid on her.

"Are you calling me to account?" she asked. "Then I shall call you to an account. When you came up to speak to grandmother and to mamma and me, you spoke to us as though you were an indifferent suitor of mine—as though I were a suitor of yours. As soon as you were gone, mamma said to me: 'What have you been doing, Marguerite, that he should think you are in love with him—that he should treat us as though we all wished to catch him?'"

"That was a mistake of your mother's. But after what had passed between us—"

"No matter what had passed between us, I do not think that a man would virtually tell a girl's mother on her: a boy might."

He grew ashen; and he took his hand out of his pockets and straightened himself from his slouchy lounging posture, and stood before her, his head in the air on his long neck like a young stag affronted and enraged.

"It is true, I have sometimes been too much like a boy with you," he said. "Have you made it possible for me to be anything else?"

"Then I'll make it possible for you now: to begin, I am too old to be called to account for my actions—except by those who have the right."

"You mean, that I have no right—after what has passed—"

"Nothing has passed between us!"

"Marguerite," he said, "do you mean that you do not love me?"

"Can you not see?"

She was standing on the steps above him. The many-fluted parasol with its long silken fringes rested on one shoulder. Her face in the dazzling sunlight, under her hat, had lost its gayety. Her eyes rested upon his with perfect quietness.

"I do not believe that you yourself know whether you love me," he said, laughing pitifully. His big mouth twitched and his love had come back into his eyes quickly enough.

"Let me tell you how I know," she said, with more kindness. "If I loved you, I could not stand here and speak of it to you in this way. I could not tell you you are not a man. Everything in me would go down before you. You could do with my life what you pleased. No one in comparison with you would mean anything to me—not even mamma. As long as I was with you, I should never wish to sleep; if you were away from me, I should never wish to waken. If you were poor, if you were in trouble, you would be all the dearer to me—if you only loved me, only loved me!"

Who is it that can mark down the moment when we ceased to be children? Gazing backward in after years, we sometimes attempt dimly to fix the time. "It probably occurred on that day," we declare; "it may have taken place during that night. It coincided with that hardship, or with that mastery of life." But a child can suffer and can triumph as a man or a woman, yet remain a child. Like man and woman it can hate, envy, malign, cheat, lie, tyrannize; or bless, cheer, defend, drop its pitying tears, pour out its heroic spirit. Love alone among the passions parts the two eternities of a lifetime. The instant it is born, the child which was its parent is dead.

As Marguerite suddenly ceased speaking, frightened by the secret import of her own words, her skin, which had the satinlike fineness and sheen of white poppy leaves, became dyed from brow to breast with a surging flame of rose. She turned partly away from Barbee, and she waited for him to go.

He looked at her a moment with torment in his eyes; then, lifting his hat without a word, he turned and walked proudly down the street toward his office.

Marguerite did not send a glance after him. What can make us so cruel to those who vainly love us as our vain love of some one else? What do we care for their suffering? We see it in their faces, hear it in their speech, feel it as the tragedy of their lives. But we turn away from them unmoved and cry out at the heartlessness of those whom our own faces and words and sorrow do not touch.

She lowered her parasol, and pressing her palm against one cheek and then the other, to force back the betraying blood, hurried agitated and elated into the library. A new kind of excitement filled her: she had confessed her secret, had proved her fidelity to him she loved by turning off the playmate of childhood. Who does not know the relief of confessing to some one who does not understand?

The interior of the library was an immense rectangular room. Book shelves projected from each side toward the middle, forming alcoves. Seated in one of these alcoves, you could be seen only by persons who should chance to pass. The library was never crowded and it was nearly empty now. Marguerite lingered to speak with the librarian, meantime looking carefully around the room; and then moved on toward the shelves where she remembered having once seen a certain book of which she was now thinking. It had not interested her then; she had heard it spoken of since, but it had not interested her since. Only to-day something new within herself drew her toward it.

No one was in the alcove she entered. After a while she found her book and seated herself in a nook of the walls with her face turned in the one direction from which she could be discovered by any one passing. While she read, she wished to watch: might he not pass?

It was a very old volume, thumbed by generations of readers. Pages were gone, the halves of pages worn away or tattered. It was printed in an old style of uncertain spelling so that the period of its authorship could in this way be but doubtfully indicated. Ostensibly it came down from the ruder, plainer speech of old English times, which may have found leisure for such "A Booke of Folly."

Marguerite's eyes settled first on the complete title: "Lady Bluefields' First Principles of Courting for Ye Use of Ye Ladies; but Plainly Set Down for Ye Good of Ye Beginners."

"I am not a beginner," thought Marguerite, who had been in love three days; and she began to read:

"Now of all artes ye most ancient is ye lovely arte of courting. It is ye earliest form of ye chase. It is older than hawking or hunting ye wilde bore. It is older than ye flint age or ye stone aye, being as old as ye bones in ye man his body and in ye woman her body. It began in ye Garden of Eden and is as old as ye old devil himself."

Marguerite laughed: she thought Lady Bluefields delightful.

"Now ye only purpose in all God His world of ye arte of courting is to create love where love is not, or to make it grow where it has begun. But whether ye wish to create love or to blow ye little coal into ye big blaze, ye principles are ye same; for ye bellows that will fan nothing into something will easily roast ye spark into ye roaring fire; and ye grander ye fire, ye grander ye arte."

Marguerite laughed again. Then she stopped reading and tested the passage in the light of her experience. A bellows and—nothing to begin. Then something. Then a spark. Then a name. She returned to the book with the conclusion that Lady Bluefields was a woman of experience.

"This little booke will not contain any but ye first principles: if is enough for ye stingy price ye pay. But ye woman who buys ye first principles and fails, must then get ye larger work on ye Last Principles of Courting, with ye true account of ye mysteries which set ye principles to going: it is ye infallible guide to ye irresistible love. Ye pay more for ye Big Booke, and God knows it is worth ye price: it is written for ye women who are ye difficult cases—ye floating derelicts in ye ocean of love, ye hidden snags, terror of ye seafaring men."

This did not so much interest Marguerite. She skipped two or three pages which seemed to go unnecessarily into the subject of derelicts and snags. "I am not quite sure as to what a derelict is: I do not think I am one; out certainly I am not a snag."

"Now ye only reason for ye lovely arts of courtinge is ye purpose to marry. If ye do not expect to marry, positively ye must not court: flirting is ye dishonest arte. Courting is ye honest arte; if ye woman knows in ye woman her heart that she will not make ye man a good wife, let her not try to Cage ye man: let her keep ye cat or cage ye canary: that is enough for her."

"I shall dispose of my canary at once. It goes to Miss Harriet Crane."

"Now of all men there is one ye woman must not court: ye married man. Positively ye must not court such a man. If he wishes to court ye, ye must make resistance to him with all ye soul; if you wish to court him, ye must resist yourself. If he is a married man and happy, let him alone. If he is married and unhappy, let him bear his lot and beat his wife."

Marguerite's eyes flashed. "It is well the writer did not live in this age," she thought.

"Ye men to court are three kinds: first ye swain; second ye old bachelor; third ye widower. Ye old bachelor is like ye green chimney of ye new house—hard to kindle. But ye widower is like ye familiar fireplace. Ye must court according to ye kind. Ye bachelor and ye widower are treated in ye big booke."

"The swain is left," said Marguerite. "How and when is the swain to be courted?"

"Now ye beauty of ye swain is that ye can court him at all seasons of ye year. Ye female bird will signal for ye mate only when ye woods are green; but even ye old maid can go to ye icy spinnet and drum wildly in ye dead of winter with ye aching fingers and ye swain mate will sometimes come to her out of ye cold."

Marguerite was beginning to think that nearly every one treated in Lady Bluefields' book was too advanced in years: it was too charitable to the problems of spinsters. "Where do the young come in?" she asked impatiently.

"Ye must not court ye young swain with ye food or ye wine. That is for ye old bachelors and ye widowers to whom ye food and wine are dear, but ye woman who gives them not dear enough. Ye woman gives them meat and drink and they give ye woman hope: it is ye bargain: let each be content with what each gets. But if ye swain be bashful and ye know that he cannot speak ye word that he has tried to speak, a glass of ye wine will sometimes give him that missing word. Ye wine passes ye word to him and he passes ye word to you: and ye keep it! When ye man is soaked with wine he does not know what he loves nor cares: he will hug ye iron post in ye street or ye sack of feathers in ye man his bed and talk to it as though nothing else were dear to him in all ye world. It is not ye love that makes him do this; it is ye wine and ye man his own devilish nature. No; ye must marry with wine, but ye must court with water. Ye love that will not begin with water will not last with wine."

This did not go to the heart of the matter. Marguerite turned over several pages.

"In ye arte of courting, it is often ye woman her eyes that settle ye man his fate, But if ye woman her eyes are not beautiful, she must not court with them but with other members of ye woman her body. Ye greatest use of ye ugly eyes is to see but not be seen. If ye try to court with ye ugly eyes, ye scare ye man away or make him to feel sick; and ye will be sorry. Ye eyes must be beautiful and ye eyes must have some mystery. They must not be like ye windows of ye house in summer when ye curtains are taken down and ye shutters are taken off. As ye man stands outside he must want to see all that is within, but he must not be able. What ye man loves ye woman for is ye mystery in her; if ye woman contain no mystery, let her marry if she must; but not aspire to court. (This is enough for ye stingy price ye pay: if ye had paid more money, ye would have received more instruction.)"

Marguerite thought it very little instruction for any money. She felt disappointed and provoked. She passed on to "Clothes." "What can she teach me on that subject?" she thought.

"When ye court with ye clothes, ye must not lift ye dress above ye ankle bone."

"Then I know what kind of ankle bone she had," said Marguerite, bitter for revenge on Lady Bluefields.

"Ye clothes play a greate part in ye arte of courtinge."

Marguerite turned the leaf; but she found that the other pages on the theme were too thumbed and faint to be legible.

She looked into the subject of "Hands": learning where the palms should be turned up and when turned down; the meaning of a crooked forefinger, and of full moons rising on the horizons of the finger nails; why women with freckled hands should court bachelors. Also how the feet, if of such and such sizes and configurations, must be kept as "ye two dead secrets." Similarly how dimples must be born and not made—with a caution against "ye dimple under ye nose" (reference to "Big Booke"—well worth the money, etc.).

When she reached the subject of the kiss, Marguerite thought guiltily of the library steps.

"Ye kiss is ye last and ye greatest act in all ye lovely arte of courtinge. Ye eyes, ye hair, ye feet, ye dimple, ye whole trunk, are of no account if they do not lead up to ye kiss. There are two kinds of ye kiss: ye kiss that ye give and ye kiss that ye take. Ye kiss that ye take is ye one ye want. Ye woman often wishes to give ye man one but cannot; and ye man often wishes to take one (or more) from ye woman but cannot; and between her not being able to give and his not being able to take, there is suffering enough in this ill-begotten and ill-sorted world. Ye greatest enemy of ye kiss that ye earth has ever known is ye sun; ye greatest friend is ye night.

"Ye most cases where ye woman can take ye kiss are put down in ye 'Big Booke.'

"When ye man lies sick in ye hospital and ye woman bends over him and he is too weak to raise his head, she can let her head fall down on his; it is only the law of gravitation. But not while she is giving him ye physick. If ye woman is riding in ye carriage and ye horses run away; and ye man she loves is standing in ye bushes and rushes out and seizes ye horses but is dragged, when he lies in ye road in ye swoon, ye woman can send ye driver around behind ye carriage and kiss him then—as she always does in ye women their novels but never does in ye life. There is one time when any woman can freely kiss ye man she loves: in ye dreame. It is ye safest way, and ye best. No one knows; and it does not disappoint as it often does disappoint when ye are awake.

"Lastly when ye beautiful swain that ye woman loved is dead, she way go into ye room where he lies white and cold and kiss him then: but she waited too long."

Marguerite let the book fall as though an arrow had pierced her. At the same time she heard the librarian approaching. She quickly restored the volume to its place and drew out another book. The librarian entered the alcove, smiled at Marguerite, peeped over her shoulder into the book she was reading, searched for another, and took it away. When she disappeared, Marguerite rose and looked; Lady Bluefields was gone.

She could not banish those heart-breaking words: "When ye beautiful swain that ye woman loved is dead." The longing of the past days, the sadness, the languor that was ecstasy and pain, swept back over her as she sat listening now, hoping for another footstep. Would he not come? She did not ask to speak with him. If she might only see him, only feel him near for a few moments.

She quitted the library slowly at last, trying to escape notice; and passed up the street with an unconscious slight drooping of that aerial figure. When she reached her yard, the tree-tops within were swaying and showing the pale gray under-surfaces of their leaves. A storm was coming. She turned at the gate, her hat in her hand, and looked toward the cloud with red lightnings darting from it: a still white figure confronting that noonday darkness of the skies.

"Grandmother never loved but once," she said. "Mamma never loved but once: it is our fate."



III

"Anna," said Professor Hardage that same morning, coming out of his library into the side porch where Miss Anna, sitting in a green chair and wearing a pink apron and holding a yellow bowl with a blue border, was seeding scarlet cherries for a brown roll, "see what somebody has sent me." He held up a many-colored bouquet tied with a brilliant ribbon; to the ribbon was pinned an old-fashioned card.

"Ah, now, that is what comes of your being at the ball," said Miss Anna, delighted and brimming with pride. "Somebody fell in love with you. I told you you looked handsome that night," and she beckoned impatiently for the bouquet.

He surrendered it with a dubious look. She did not consider the little tumulus of Flora, but devoured the name of the builder. Her face turned crimson; and leaning over to one side, she dropped the bouquet into the basket for cherry seed. Then she continued her dutiful pastime, her head bent so low that he could see nothing but the part dividing the soft brown hair of her fine head.

He sat down and laughed at her: "I knew you'd get me into trouble."

It was some moments before she asked in a guilty voice: "What did you do?"

"What did you tell me to do?"

"I asked you to be kind to Harriet," she murmured mournfully.

"You told me to take her out into the darkest place I could find and to sit there with her and hold her hand."

"I did not tell you to hold her hand. I told you to try to hold her hand."

"Well! I builded better than you knew: give me my flowers."

"What did you do?" she asked again, in a voice that admitted the worst.

"How do I know? I was thinking of something else! But here comes Harriet," he said, quickly standing up and gazing down the street.

"Go in," said Miss Anna, "I want to see Harriet alone."

"You go in. The porch isn't dark; but I'll stay here with her!"

"Please."

When he had gone, Miss Anna leaned over and lifting the bouquet from the sticking cherry seed tossed it into the yard—tossed it far.

Harriet came out into the porch looking wonderfully fresh. "How do you do, Anna?" she said with an accent of new cordiality, established cordiality.

The accent struck Miss Anna's ear as the voice of the bouquet. She had at once discovered also that Harriet was beautifully dressed—even to the point of wearing her best gloves.

"Oh, good morning, Harriet," she replied, giving the yellow bowl an unnecessary shake and speaking quite incidentally as though the visit were not of the slightest consequence. She did not invite Harriet to be seated. Harriet seated herself.

"Aren't you well, Anna?" she inquired with blank surprise.

"I am always well."

"Is any one ill, Anna?"

"Not to my knowledge."

Harriet knew Miss Anna to have the sweetest nature of all women. She realized that she herself was often a care to her friend. A certain impulse inspired her now to give assurance that she had not come this morning to weigh her down with more troubles.

"Do you know, Anna, I never felt so well! Marguerite's ball really brought me out. I have turned over a new leaf of destiny and I am going out more after this. What right has a woman to give up life so soon? I shall go out more, and I shall read more, and be a different woman, and cease worrying you. Aren't women reading history now? But then they are doing everything. Still that is no reason why I should not read a little, because my mind is really a blank on the subject of the antiquities. Of course I can get the ancient Hebrews out of the Bible; but I ought to know more about the Greeks and Romans. Now oughtn't I?"

"You don't want to know anything about the Greeks and the Romans, Harriet," said Miss Anna. "Content yourself with the earliest Hebrews. You have gotten along very well without the Greeks and the Romans—for—a—long—time."

Harriet understood at last; there was no mistaking now. She was a very delicate instrument and much used to being rudely played upon. Her friend's reception of her to-day had been so unaccountable that at one moment she had suspected that her appearance might be at fault. Harriet had known women to turn cold at the sight of a new gown; and it had really become a life principle not to dress even as well as she could, because she needed the kindness that flows out so copiously from new clothes to old clothes. But it was embarrassment that caused her now to say rather aimlessly:

"I believe I feel overdressed. What possessed me?"

"Don't overdress again," enjoined Miss Anna in stern confidence. "Never try to change yourself in anyway. I like you better as you are—a—great—deal—better."

"Then you shall have me as you like me, Anna dear," replied Harriet, faithfully and earnestly, with a faltering voice; and she looked out into the yard with a return of an expression very old and very weary. Fortunately she was short-sighted and was thus unable to see her bouquet which made such a burning blot on the green grass, with the ribbon trailing beside it and the card still holding on as though determined to see the strange adventure through to the end.

"Good-by, Anna," she said, rising tremblingly, though at the beginning of her visit.

"Oh, good-by, Harriet," replied Miss Anna, giving a cheerful shake to the yellow bowl.

As Harriet walked slowly down the street, a more courageously dressed woman than she had been for years, her chin quivered and she shook with sobs heroically choked back.

Miss Anna went into the library and sat down near the door. Her face which had been very white was scarlet again: "What was it you did—tell me quickly. I cannot stand it."

He came over and taking her cheeks between his palms turned her face up and looked down into her eyes. But she shut them quickly. "What do you suppose I did? Harriet and I sat for half an hour in another room. I don't remember what I did; but it could not have been anything very bad: others were all around us."

She opened her eyes and pushed him away harshly: "I have wounded Harriet in her most sensitive spot; and then I insulted her after I wounded her," and she went upstairs.

Later he found the bouquet on his library table with the card stuck in the top. The flowers stayed there freshly watered till the petals strewed his table: they were not even dusted away.

As for Harriet herself, the wound of the morning must have penetrated till it struck some deep flint in her composition; for she came back the next day in high spirits and severely underdressed—in what might be called toilet reduced to its lowest terms, like a common fraction. She had restored herself to the footing of an undervalued intercourse. At the sight of her Miss Anna sprang up, kissed her all over the face, was atoningly cordial with her arms, tried in every way to say: "See, Harriet, I bare my heart! Behold the dagger of remorse!"

Harriet saw; and she walked up and took the dagger by the handle and twisted it to the right and to the left and drove it in deeper and was glad.

"How do you like this dress, Anna?" she inquired with the sweetest solicitude. "Ah, there is no one like a friend to bring you to your senses! You were right. I am too old to change, too old to dress, too old even to read: thank you, Anna, as always."

Many a wound of friendship heals, but the wounder and the wounded are never the same to each other afterward. So that the two comrades were ill at ease and welcomed a diversion in the form of a visitor. It happened to be the day of the week when Miss Anna received her supply of dairy products from the farm of Ambrose Webb. He came round to the side entrance now with two shining tin buckets and two lustreless eyes.

The old maids stood on the edge of the porch with their arms wrapped around each other, and talked to him with nervous gayety. He looked up with a face of dumb yearning at one and then at the other, almost impartially.

"Aren't you well, Mr. Webb?" inquired Miss Anna, bending over toward him with a healing smile.

"Certainly I am well," he replied resentfully. "There is nothing the matter with me. I am a sound man."

"But you were certainly groaning," insisted Miss Anna, "for I heard you; and you must have been groaning about something."

He dropped his eyes, palpably crestfallen, and scraped the bricks with one foot.

Harriet nudged Miss Anna not to press the point and threw herself gallantly into the breach of silence.

"I am coming out to see you sometime, Mr. Webb," she said threateningly; "I want to find out whether you are taking good care of my calf. Is she growing?"

"Calves always grow till they stop," said Ambrose, axiomatically.

"How high is she?"

He held his hand up over an imaginary back.

"Why, that is high! When she stops growing, Anna, I am going to sell her, sell her by the pound. She is my beef trust. Now don't forget, Mr. Webb, that I am coming out some day."

"I'll be there," he said, and he gave her a peculiar look.

"You know, Anna," said Harriet, when they were alone again, "that his wife treats him shamefully. I have heard mother talking about it. She says his wife is the kind of woman that fills a house as straw fills a barn: you can see it through every crack. That accounts for his heavy expression, and for his dull eyes, and for the groaning. They say that most of the time he sits on the fences when it is clear, and goes into the stable when it rains."

"Why, I'll have to be kinder to him than ever," said Miss Anna. "But how do you happen to have a calf, Harriet?" she added, struck by the practical fact.

"It was the gift of my darling mother, my dear, the only present she has made me that I can remember. It was an orphan, and you wouldn't have it in your asylum, and my mother was in a peculiar mood, I suppose. She amused herself with the idea of making me such a present. But Anna, watch that calf, and see if thereby does not hang a tale. I am sure, in some mysterious way, my destiny is bound up with it. Calves do have destinies, don't they, Anna?"

"Oh, don't ask me, Harriet! Inquire of their Creator; or try the market-house."

It was at the end of this visit that Harriet as usual imparted to Miss Anna the freshest information regarding affairs at home: that Isabel had gone to spend the summer with friends at the seashore, and was to linger with other friends in the mountains during autumn; that her mother had changed her own plans, and was to keep the house open, and had written for the Fieldings—Victor's mother and brothers and sisters—to come and help fill the house; that everything was to be very gay.

"I cannot fathom what is under it all," said Harriet, with her hand on the side gate at leaving. "But I know that mother and Isabel have quarrelled. I believe mother has transferred her affections—and perhaps her property. She has rewritten her will since Isabel went away. What have I to do, Anna, but interest myself in other people's affairs? I have none of my own. And she never calls Isabel's name, but pets Victor from morning till night. And her expression sometimes! I tell you, Anna, that when I see it, if I were a bird and could fly, gunshot could not catch me. I see a summer before me! If there is ever a chance of my doing anything, don't be shocked if I do it;" and in Harriet's eyes there were two mysterious sparks of hope—two little rising suns.

"What did she mean?" pondered Miss Anna.



IV

"Barbee," said Judge Morris one morning a fortnight later, "what has become of Marguerite? One night not long ago you complained of her as an obstacle in the path of your career: does she still annoy you with her attentions? You could sue out a writ of habeas corpus in your own behalf if she persists. I'd take the case. I believe you asked me to mark your demeanor on the evening of that party. I tried to mark it; but I did not discover a great deal of demeanor to mark."

The two were sitting in the front office. The Judge, with nothing to do, was facing the street, his snow-white cambric handkerchief thrown across one knee, his hands grasping the arms of his chair, the newspaper behind his heels, his straw hat and cane on the floor at his side, and beside them the bulldog—his nose thrust against the hat.

Barbee was leaning over his desk with his fingers plunged in his hair and his eyes fixed on the law book before him—unopened. He turned and remarked with dry candor:

"Marguerite has dropped me."

"If she has, it's a blessed thing."

"There was more depth to her than I thought."

"There always is. Wait until you get older."

"I shall have to work and climb to win her."

"You might look up meantime the twentieth verse of the twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis."

Barbee rose and took down a Bible from among the law books: it had been one of the Judge's authorities, a great stand-by for reference and eloquence in his old days of pleading. He sat down and read the verse and laid the volume aside with the mere comment: "All this time I have been thinking her too much of a child; I find that she has been thinking the same of me."

"Then she has been a sound thinker."

"The result is she has wandered away after some one else. I know the man; and I know that he is after some one else. Why do people desire the impossible person? If I had been a Greek sculptor and had been commissioned to design as my masterwork the world's Frieze of Love, it should have been one long array of marble shapes, each in pursuit of some one fleeing. But some day Marguerite will be found sitting pensive on a stone—pursuing no longer; and when I appear upon the scene, having overtaken her at last, she will sigh, but she will give me her hand and go with me: and I'll have to stand it. That is the worst of it. I shall have to stand it—that she preferred the other man."

The Judge did not care to hear Barbee on American themes with Greek imagery. He yawned and struggled to his feet with difficulty. "I'll take a stroll," he said; "it is all I can take."

Barbee sprang forward and picked up for him his hat and cane. The dog, by what seemed the slow action of a mental jackscrew, elevated his cylinder to the tops of his legs; and presently the two stiff old bodies turned the corner of the street, one slanting, one prone: one dotting the bricks with his three legs, the other with his four.

Formerly the man and the brute had gone each his own way, meeting only at meal time and at irregular hours of the night in the Judge's chambers. The Judge had his stories regarding the origin of their intimacy. He varied these somewhat according to the sensibilities of the persons to whom they were related—and there were not many habitues of the sidewalks who did not hear them sooner or later. "No one could disentangle fact and fiction and affection in them.

"Some years ago," he said one day to Professor Hardage, "I was a good deal gayer than I am now and so was he. We cemented a friendship in a certain way, no matter what: that is a story I'm not going to tell. And he came to live with me on that footing of friendship. Of course he was greatly interested in the life of his own species at that time; he loved part of it, he hated part; but he was no friend to either. By and by he grew older. Age removed a good deal of his vanity, and I suppose it forced him to part with some portion of his self-esteem. But I was growing older myself and no doubt getting physically a little helpless. I suppose I made senile noises when I dressed and undressed, expressive of my decorative labors. This may have been the reason; possibly not; but at any rate about this time he conceived it his duty to give up his friendship as an equal and to enter my employ as a servant. He became my valet—without wages—and I changed his name to 'Brown.'

"Of course you don't think this true; well, then, don't think it true. But you have never seen him of winter mornings get up before I do and try to keep me out of the bath-tub. He'll station himself at the bath-room door; and as I approach he will look at me with an air of saying; 'Now don't climb into that cold water! Stand on the edge of it and lap it if you wish! But don't get into it. Drink it, man, don't wallow in it.' He waits until I finish, and then he speaks his mind plainly again: 'Now see how wet you are! And to-morrow you will do the same thing.' And he will stalk away, suspicious of the grade of my intelligence.

"He helps me to dress and undress. You'd know this if you studied his face when I struggle to brush the dust off of my back and shoulders: the mortification, the sense of injustice done him, in his having been made a quadruped. When I stoop over to take off my shoes, if I do it without any noise and he lies anywhere near, very well; but if I am noisy about it, he always comes and takes a seat before me and assists. Then he makes his same speech: 'What a shame that you should have to do this for yourself, when I am here to do it for you, but have no hands.'

"You know his portrait in my sitting room. When it was brought home and he discovered it on the wall, he looked at it from different angles, and then came across to me with a wound and a grievance: 'Why have you put that thing there? How can you, who have me, tolerate such a looking object as that? See the meanness in his face! See how used up he is and how sick of life! See what a history is written all over him—his crimes and disgraces! And you can care for him when you have me, your Brown.' After I am dead, I expect him to publish a memorial volume entitled 'Reminiscences of the late Judge Ravenel Morris, By his former Friend, afterward his Valet, Taurus-Canis.'"

The long drowsing days of summer had come. Business was almost suspended; heat made energy impossible. Court was not in session, farmers were busy with crops. From early morning to late afternoon the streets were well-nigh deserted.

Ravenel Morris found life more active for him during this idlest season of his native town. Having no business to prefer, people were left more at leisure to talk with him; more acquaintances sat fanning on their doorsteps and bade him good night as he passed homeward. There were festivals in the park; and he could rest on one of the benches and listen to the band playing tunes. He had the common human heart in its love of tunes. When tunes stopped, music stopped for him. If anything were played in which there was no traceable melody, when the instruments encountered a tumult of chords and dissonances, he would exclaim though with regretful toleration:

"What are they trying to do now? What is it all about? Why can't music be simple and sweet? Do noise and confusion make it better or greater?"

One night Barbee had him serenaded. He gave the musicians instruction as to the tunes, how they were to be played, in what succession, at what hour of the night. The melodists grouped themselves in the middle of the street, and the Judge came out on a little veranda under one of his doors and stood there, a great silver-haired figure, looking down. The moonlight shone upon him. He remained for a while motionless, wrapped loosely in what looked like a white toga. Then with a slight gesture of the hand full of mournful dignity he withdrew.

It was during these days that Barbee, who always watched over him with a most reverent worship and affection, made a discovery. The Judge was breaking; that brave life was beginning to sink and totter toward its fall and dissolution. There were moments when the cheerfulness, which had never failed him in the midst of trial, failed him now when there was none; when the ancient springs of strength ceased to run and he was discovered to be feeble. Sometimes he no longer read his morning newspaper; he would sit for long periods in the front door of his office, looking out into the street and caring not who passed, not even returning salutations: what was the use of saluting the human race impartially? Or going into the rear office, he would reread pages and chapters of what at different times in his life had been his favorite books: "Rabelais" and "The Decameron" when he was young; "Don Quixote" later, and "Faust"; "Clarissa" and "Tom Jones" now and then; and Shakespeare always; and those poems of Burns that tell sad truths; and the account of the man in Thackeray who went through so much that was large and at the end of life was brought down to so much that was low. He seemed more and more to feel the need of grasping through books the hand of erring humanity. And from day to day his conversations with Barbee began to take more the form of counsels about life and duty, about the ideals and mistakes and virtues and weaknesses in men. He had a good deal to say about the ethics of character in the court room and in the street.

One afternoon Barbee very thoughtfully asked him a question: "Uncle, I have wanted to know why you always defended and never prosecuted. The State is supposed to stand for justice, and the State is the accuser; in always defending the accused and so in working against the State, have you not always worked against justice?"

The Judge sat with his face turned away and spoke as he sat—very gravely and quietly: "I always defended because the State can punish only the accused, and the accused is never the only criminal. In every crime there are three criminals. The first criminal is the Origin of Evil. I don't know what the Origin of Evil is, or who he is; but if I could have dragged the Origin of Evil into the court room, I should have been glad to try to have it hanged, or have him hanged. I should have liked to argue the greatest of all possible criminal cases: the case of the Common People vs. the Devil—so nominated. The second criminal is all that coworked with the accused as involved in his nature, in his temptation, and in his act. If I could have arraigned all the other men and women who have been forerunners or copartners of the accused as furthering influences in the line of his offence, I should gladly have prosecuted them for their share of the guilt. But most of the living who are accessory can no more be discovered and summoned than can the dead who also were accessory. You have left the third criminal; and the State is forced to single him out and let the full punishment fall upon him alone. Thus it does not punish the guilty—it punishes the last of the guilty. It does not even punish him for his share of the guilt: it can never know what that share is. This is merely a feeling of mine, I do not uphold it. Of course I often declined to defend also."

They returned to this subject another afternoon as the two sat together a few days later:

"There was sometimes another reason why I felt unwilling to prosecute: I refer to cases in which I might be taking advantage of the inability of a fellow-creature to establish his own innocence. I want you to remember this—nothing that I have ever said to you is of more importance: a good many years ago I was in Paris. One afternoon I was walking through the most famous streets in the company of a French scholar and journalist, a deep student of the genius of French civilization. As we passed along, he pointed out various buildings with reference to the history that had been made and unmade within them. At one point he stopped and pointed to a certain structure with a high wall in front of it and to a hole in that wall. 'Do you know what that is?' he asked. He told me. Any person can drop a letter into that box, containing any kind of accusation against any other person; it is received by the authorities and it becomes their duty to act upon its contents. Do you know what that means? Can you for a moment realize what is involved? A man's enemy, even his so-called religious enemy, any assassin, any slanderer, any liar, even the mercenary who agrees to hire out his honor itself for the wages of a slave, can deposit an anonymous accusation against any one whom he hates or wishes to ruin; and it becomes the duty of the authorities to respect his communication as much as though it came before a court of highest equity. An innocent man may thus become an object of suspicion, may be watched, followed, arrested and thrown into prison, disgraced, ruined in his business, ruined in his family; and if in the end he is released, he is never even told what he has been charged with, has no power of facing his accuser, of bringing him to justice, of recovering damages from the State. While he himself is kept in close confinement, his enemy may manufacture evidence which he alone would be able to disprove; and the chance is never given him to disprove it."

The Judge turned and looked at Barbee in simple silence.

Barbee sprang to his feet: "It is a damned shame!" he cried. "Damn the French! damn such a civilization."

"Why damn the French code? In our own country the same thing goes on, not as part of our system of jurisprudence, but as part of our system of—well, we'll say—morals. In this country any man's secret personal enemy, his so-called religious enemy for instance, may fabricate any accusation against him. He does not drop it into the dark crevice of a dead wall, but into the blacker hole of a living ear. A perfectly innocent man by such anonymous or untraceable slander can be as grossly injured in reputation, in business, in his family, out of a prison in this country as in a prison in France. Slander may circulate about him and he will never even know what it is, never be confronted by his accuser, never have power of redress.

"Now what I wish you to remember is this: that in the very nature of the case a man is often unable to prove his innocence. All over the world useful careers come to nothing and lives are wrecked, because men may be ignorantly or malignantly accused of things of which they cannot stand up and prove that they are innocent. Never forget that it is impossible for a man finally to demonstrate his possession of a single great virtue. A man cannot so prove his bravery. He cannot so prove his honesty or his benevolence or his sobriety or his chastity, or anything else. As to courage, all that he can prove is that in a given case or in all tested cases he was not a coward. As to honesty, all that he can prove is that in any alleged instance he was not a thief. A man cannot even directly prove his health, mental or physical: all that he can prove is that he shows no unmistakable evidences of disease. But an enemy may secretly circulate the charge that these evidences exist; and all the evidences to the contrary that the man himself may furnish will never disperse that impression. It is so for every great virtue. His final possession of a single virtue can be proved by no man.

"This was another reason why I was sometimes unwilling to prosecute a fellow-creature; it might be a case in which he alone would actually know whether he were innocent, but his simple word would not be taken, and his simple word would be the only proof that he could give. I ask you, as you care for my memory, never to take advantage of the truth that the man before you, as the accused, may in the nature of things be unable to prove his innocence. Some day you are going to be a judge. Remember you are always a judge; and remember that a greater Judge than you will ever be gave you the rule: 'Judge as you would be judged.' The great root of the matter is this: that all human conduct is judged; but a very small part of human conduct is ever brought to trial."

He had many visitors at his office during these idle summer days. He belonged to a generation of men who loved conversation—when they conversed. All the lawyers dropped in. The report of his failing strength brought these and many others.

He saw a great deal of Professor Hardage. One morning as the two met, he said with more feeling than he usually allowed himself to show: "Hardage, I am a lonesome old man; don't you want me to come and see you every Sunday evening? I always try to get home by ten o'clock, so that you couldn't get tired of me; and as I never fall asleep before that time, you wouldn't have to put me to bed. I want to hear you talk, Hardage. My time is limited; and you have no right to shut out from me so much that you know—your learning, your wisdom, yourself. And I know a few things that I have picked up in a lifetime. Surely we ought to have something to say to each other."

But when he came, Professor Hardage was glad to let him find relief in his monologues—fragments of self-revelation. This last phase of their friendship had this added significance: that the Judge no longer spent his Sunday evenings with Mrs. Conyers. The last social link binding him to womankind had been broken. It was a final loosening and he felt it, felt the desolation in which it left him. His cup of life had indeed been drained, and he turned away from the dregs.

One afternoon Professor Hardage found him sitting with his familiar Shakespeare on his knees. As he looked up, he stretched out his hand in eager welcome and said: "Listen once more;" and he read the great kindling speech of King Henry to his English yeomen on the eve of battle.

He laid the book aside.

"Of course you have noticed how Shakespeare likes this word 'mettle,' how he likes the thing. The word can be seen from afar over the vast territory of his plays like the same battle-flag set up in different parts of a field. It is conspicuous in the heroic English plays, and in the Roman and in the Greek; it waves alike over comedy and tragedy as a rallying signal to human nature. I imagine I can see his face as he writes of the mettle of children—the mettle of a boy—the quick mettle of a schoolboy—a lad of mettle—the mettle of a gentleman—the mettle of the sex—the mettle of a woman, Lady Macbeth—the mettle of a king—the mettle of a speech—even the mettle of a rascal—mettle in death. I love to think of him, a man who had known trouble, writing the words: 'The insuppressive mettle of our spirits.'

"But this particular phrase—the mettle of the pasture—belongs rather to our century than to his, more to Darwin than to the theatre of that time. What most men are thinking of now, if they think at all, is of our earth, a small grass-grown planet hung in space. And, unaccountably making his appearance on it, is man, a pasturing animal, deriving his mettle from his pasture. The old question comes newly up to us: Is anything ever added to him? Is anything ever lost to him? Evolution—is it anything more than change? Civilizations—are they anything but different arrangements of the elements of man's nature with reference to the preeminence of some elements and the subsidence of others?

"Suppose you take the great passions: what new one has been added, what old one has been lost? Take all the passions you find in Greek literature, in the Roman. Have you not seen them reappear in American life in your own generation? I believe I have met them in my office. You may think I have not seen Paris and Helen, but I have. And I have seen Orestes and Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Oedipus. Do you suppose I have not met Tarquin and Virginia and Lucretia and Shylock—to come down to nearer times—and seen Lear and studied Macbeth in the flesh? I knew Juliet once, and behind locked doors I have talked with Romeo. They are all here in any American commonwealth at the close of our century: the great tragedies are numbered—the oldest are the newest. So that sometimes I fix my eyes only on the old. I see merely the planet with its middle green belt of pasture and its poles of snow and ice; and wandering over that green belt for a little while man the pasturing animal—with the mystery of his ever being there and the mystery of his dust—with nothing ever added to him, nothing ever lost out of him—his only power being but the power to vary the uses of his powers.

"Then there is the other side, the side of the new. I like to think of the marvels that the pasturing animal has accomplished in our own country. He has had new thoughts, he has done things never seen elsewhere or before. But after all the question remains, what is our characteristic mettle? What is the mettle of the American? He has had new ideas; but has he developed a new virtue or carried any old virtue forward to characteristic development? Has he added to the civilizations of Europe the spectacle of a single virtue transcendently exercised? We are not braver than other brave people, we are not more polite, we are not more honest or more truthful or more sincere or kind. I wish to God that some virtue, say the virtue of truthfulness, could be known throughout the world as the unfailing mark of the American—the mettle of his pasture. Not to lie in business, not to lie in love, not to lie in religion—to be honest with one's fellow-men, with women, with God—suppose the rest of mankind would agree that this virtue constituted the characteristic of the American! That would be fame for ages.

"I believe that we shall sometime become celebrated for preeminence in some virtue. Why, I have known young fellows in my office that I have believed unmatched for some fine trait or noble quality. You have met them in your classes."

He broke off abruptly and remained silent for a while.

"Have you seen Rowan lately?" he asked, with frank uneasiness: and receiving the reply which he dreaded, he soon afterward arose and passed brokenly down the street.

For some weeks now he had been missing Rowan; and this was the second cause of his restlessness and increasing loneliness. The failure of Rowan's love affair was a blow to him: it had so linked him to the life of the young—was the last link. And since then he had looked for Rowan in vain; he had waited for him of mornings at his office, had searched for him on the streets, scanning all young men on horseback or in buggies; had tried to find him in the library, at the livery stable, at the bank where he was a depositor and director. There was no ground for actual uneasiness concerning Rowan's health, for Rowan's neighbors assured him in response to his inquiries that he was well and at work on the farm.

"If he is in trouble, why does he not come and tell me? Am I not worth coming to see? Has he not yet understood what he is to me? But how can he know, how can the young ever know how the old love them? And the old are too proud to tell." He wrote letters and tore them up.

As we stand on the rear platform of a train and see the mountains away from which we are rushing rise and impend as if to overwhelm us, so in moving farther from his past very rapidly now, it seemed to follow him as a landscape growing always nearer and clearer. His mind dwelt more on the years when hatred had so ruined him, costing him the only woman he had ever asked to be his wife, costing him a fuller life, greater honors, children to leave behind.

He was sitting alone in his rear office the middle of one afternoon, alone among his books. He had outspread before him several that are full of youth. Barbee was away, the street was very quiet. No one dropped in—perhaps all were tired of hearing him talk. It was not yet the hour for Professor Hardage to walk in. A watering-cart creaked slowly past the door and the gush of the drops of water sounded like a shower and the smell of the dust was strong. Far away in some direction were heard the cries of school children at play in the street. A bell was tolling; a green fly, entering through the rear door, sang loud on the dusty window-panes and then flew out and alighted on a plant of nightshade springing up rank at the doorstep.

He was not reading and his thoughts were the same old thoughts. At length on the quiet air, coming nearer, were heard the easy roll of wheels and the slow measured step of carriage horses. The sound caught his ear and he listened with quick eagerness. Then he rose trembling and waited. The carriage had stopped at the door; a moment later there was a soft low knock on the lintel and Mrs. Meredith entered. He met her but she said: "May I go in there?" and entered the private office.

She brought with her such grace and sweetness of full womanly years that as she seated herself opposite him and lifted her veil away from the purity of her face, it was like the revelation of a shrine and the office became as a place of worship. She lifted the veil from the dignity and seclusion of her life. She did not speak at once but looked about her. Many years had passed since she had entered that office, for it had long ago seemed best to each of them that they should never meet. He had gone back to his seat at the desk with the opened books lying about him as though he had been searching one after another for the lost fountain of youth. He sat there looking at her, his white hair falling over his leonine head and neck, over his clear mournful eyes. The sweetness of his face, the kindness of it, the shy, embarrassed, almost guilty look on it from the old pain of being misunderstood—the terrible pathos of it all, she saw these; but whatever her emotions, she was not a woman to betray them at such a moment, in such a place.

"I do not come on business," she said. "All the business seems to have been attended to; life seems very easy, too easy: I have so little to do. But I am here, Ravenel, and I suppose I must try to say what brought me."

She waited for some time, unable to speak.

"Ravenel," she said at length, "I cannot go on any longer without telling you that my great sorrow in life has been the wrong I did you."

He closed his eyes quickly and stretched out his hand against her, as though to shut out the vision of things that rose before him—as though to stop words that would unman him.

"But I was a young girl! And what does a young girl understand about her duty in things like that? I know it changed your whole life; you will never know what it has meant in mine."

"Caroline," he said, and he looked at her with brimming eyes, "if you had married me, I'd have been a great man. I was not great enough to be great without you. The single road led the wrong way—to the wrong things!"

"I know," she said, "I know it all. And I know that tears do not efface mistakes, and that our prayers do not atone for our wrongs."

She suddenly dropped her veil and rose,

"Do not come out to help me," she said as he struggled up also.

He did not wish to go, and he held out his hand and she folded her soft pure hands about it; then her large noble figure moved to the side of his and through her veil—her love and sorrow hidden from him—she lifted her face and kissed him.



V

And during these days when Judge Morris was speaking his mind about old tragedies that never change, and new virtues—about scandal and guilt and innocence—it was during these days that the scandal started and spread and did its work on the boy he loved—and no one had told him.

The summer was drawing to an end. During the last days of it Kate wrote to Isabel:

"I could not have believed, dearest friend, that so long a time would pass without my writing. Since you went away it has been eternity. And many things have occurred which no one foresaw or imagined. I cannot tell you how often I have resisted the impulse to write. Perhaps I should resist now; but there are some matters which you ought to understand; and I do not believe that any one else has told you or will tell you. If I, your closest friend, have shrunk, how could any one else be expected to perform the duty?

"A week or two after you left I understood why you went away mysteriously, and why during that last visit to me you were unlike yourself. I did not know then that your gayety was assumed, and that you were broken-hearted beneath your brave disguises. But I remember your saying that some day I should know. The whole truth has come out as to why you broke your engagement with Rowan, and why you left home. You can form no idea what a sensation the news produced. For a while nothing else was talked of, and I am glad for your sake that you were not here.

"I say the truth came out; but even now the town is full of different stories, and different people believe different things. But every friend of yours feels perfectly sure that Rowan was unworthy of you, and that you did right in discarding him. It is safe to say that he has few friends left among yours. He seldom comes to town, and I hear that he works on the farm like a common hand as he should. One day not long after you left I met him on the street. He was coming straight up to speak to me as usual. But I had the pleasure of staring him in the eyes and of walking deliberately past him as though he were a stranger—except that I gave him one explaining look. I shall never speak to him.

"His mother has the greatest sympathy of every one. They say that no one has told her the truth: how could any one tell her such things about her own son? Of course she must know that you dropped him and that we have all dropped him. They say that she is greatly saddened and that her health seems to be giving way.

"I do not know whether you have heard the other sensation regarding the Meredith family. You refused Rowan; and now Dent is going to marry a common girl in the neighborhood. Of course Dent Meredith was always noted for being a quiet little bookworm, near-sighted, and without any knowledge of girls. So it doesn't seem very unnatural for him to have collected the first specimen that he came across as he walked about over the country. This marriage which is to take place in the autumn is the second shock to his mother.

"You will want to hear of other people. And this reminds me that a few of your friends have turned against you and insist that these stories about Rowan are false, and even accuse you of starting them. This brings me to Marguerite.

"Soon after her ball she had typhoid fever. In her delirium of whom do you suppose she incessantly and pitifully talked? Every one had supposed that she and Barbee were sweethearts—and had been for years. But Barbee's name was never on her lips. It was all Rowan, Rowan, Rowan. Poor child, she chided him for being so cold to her; and she talked to him about the river of life and about his starting on the long voyage from the house of his fathers; and begged to be taken with him, and said that in their family the women never loved but once. When she grew convalescent, there was a consultation of the grandmother and the mother and the doctors: one passion now seemed to constitute all that was left of Marguerite's life; and that was like a flame burning her strength away.

"They did as the doctor said had to be done. Mrs. Meredith had been very kind during her illness, had often been to the house. They kept from her of course all knowledge of what Marguerite had disclosed in her delirium. So when Marguerite by imperceptible degrees grew stronger, Mrs. Meredith begged that she might be moved out to the country for the change and the coolness and the quiet; and the doctors availed themselves of this plan as a solution of their difficulty—to lessen Marguerite's consuming desire by gratifying it. So she and her mother went out to the Merediths'. The change proved beneficial. I have not been driving myself, although the summer has been so long and hot; and during the afternoons I have so longed to see the cool green lanes with the sun setting over the fields. But of course people drive a great deal and they often meet Mrs. Meredith with Marguerite in the carriage beside her. At first it was Marguerite's mother and Marguerite. Then it was Mrs. Meredith and Marguerite; and now it is Rowan and Marguerite. They drive alone and she sits with her face turned toward him—in open idolatry. She is to stay out there until she is quite well. How curiously things work around! If he ever proposes, scandal will make no difference to Marguerite.

"How my letter wanders! But so do my thoughts wander. If you only knew, while I write these things, how I am really thinking of other things. But I must go on in my round-about way. What I started out to say was that when the scandals, I mean the truth, spread over the town about Rowan, the three Marguerites stood by him. You could never have believed that the child had such fire and strength and devotion in her nature. I called on them one day and was coldly treated simply because I am your closest friend. Marguerite pointedly expressed her opinion of a woman who deserts a man because he has his faults. Think of this child's sitting in moral condemnation upon you!

"The Hardages also—of course you have no stancher friends than they are—have stood up stubbornly for Rowan. Professor Hardage became very active in trying to bring the truth out of what he believes to be gossip and misunderstanding. And Miss Anna has also remained loyal to him, and in her sunny, common-sense way flouts the idea of there being any truth in these reports.

"I must not forget to tell you that Judge Morris now spends his Sunday evenings with Professor Hardage. No one has told him: they have spared him. Of course every one knows that he was once engaged to Rowan's mother and that scandal broke the engagement and separated them for life. Only in his case it was long afterward found out that the tales were not true.

"I have forgotten Barbee. He and Marguerite had quarrelled before her illness—no one knows why, unless she was already under the influence of her fatal infatuation for Rowan. Barbee has gone to work. A few weeks ago he won his first serious case in court and attracted attention. They say his speech was so full of dignity and unnecessary rage that some one declared he was simply trying to recover his self-esteem for Marguerite's having called him trivial and not yet altogether grown up.

"Of course you must have had letters of your own, telling you of the arrival of the Fieldings—Victor's mother and sisters; and the house is continually gay with suppers and parties.

"How my letter wanders! It is a sick letter, Isabel, a dead letter. I must not close without going back to the Merediths once more. People have been driving out to see the little farm and the curious little house of Dent Meredith's bride elect—a girl called Pansy Something. It lies near enough to the turnpike to be in full view—too full view. They say it is like a poultry farm and that the bride is a kind of American goose girl: it will be a marriage between geology and the geese. The geese will have the best of it.

"Dearest friend, what shall I tell you of my own life—of my nights, of the mornings when I wake, of these long, lonesome, summer afternoons? Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing! I should rather write to you how, my thoughts go back to the years of our girlhood together when we were so happy, Isabel, so happy, so happy! What ideals we formed as to our marriages and our futures!

"KATE.

"P.S.—I meant to tell you that of course I shall do everything in my power to break up the old friendship between George and Rowan. Indeed, I have already done it."



VI

This letter brought Isabel home at once through three days of continuous travel. From the station she had herself driven straight to Mrs. Osborn's house, and she held the letter in her hand as she went.

Her visit lasted for some time and it was not pleasant. When Mrs. Osborn hastened down, surprised at Isabel's return and prepared to greet her with the old warmth, her greeting was repelled and she herself recoiled, hurt and disposed to demand an explanation.

"Isabel," she said reproachfully, "is this the way you come back to me?"

Isabel did not heed but spoke: "As soon as I received this letter, I determined to come home. I wished to know at once what these things are that are being said about Rowan. What are they?"

Mrs. Osborn hesitated: "I should rather not tell you."

"But you must tell me: my name has been brought into this, and I must know."

While she listened her eyes flashed and when she spoke her voice trembled with excitement and anger. "These things are not true," she said. "Only Rowan and I know what passed between us. I told no one, he told no one, and it is no one's right to know. A great wrong has been done him and a great wrong has been done me; and I shall stay here until these wrongs are righted."

"And is it your feeling that you must begin with me?" said Mrs. Osborn, bitterly.

"Yes, Kate; you should not have believed these things. You remember our once saying to each other that we would try never to believe slander or speak slander or think slander? It is unworthy of you to have done so now."

"Do you realize to whom you are speaking, and that what I have done has been through friendship for you?"

Isabel shook her head resolvedly. "Your friendship for me cannot exact of you that you should be untrue to yourself and false to others. You say that you refuse to speak to Rowan on the street. You say that you have broken up the friendship between Mr. Osborn and him. Rowan is the truest friend Mr. Osborn has ever had; you know this. But in breaking off that friendship, you have done more than you have realized: you have ended my friendship with you."

"And this is gratitude for my devotion to you and my willingness to fight your battles!" said Mrs. Osborn, rising.

"You cannot fight my battles without fighting Rowan's. My wish to marry him or not to marry him is one thing; my willingness to see him ruined is another."

Isabel drove home. She rang the bell as though she were a stranger. When her maid met her at the door, overjoyed at her return, she asked for her grandmother and passed at once into her parlors. As she did so, Mrs. Conyers came through the hall, dressed to go out. At the sound of Isabel's voice, she, who having once taken hold of a thing never let it go, dropped her parasol; and as she stooped to pick it up, the blood rushed to her face.

"I wish to speak to you," said Isabel, coming quickly out into the hall as though to prevent her grandmother's exit. Her voice was low and full of shame and indignation.

"I am at your service for a little while," said Mrs. Conyers, carelessly; "later I am compelled to go out." She entered the parlors, followed by Isabel, and, seating herself in the nearest chair, finished buttoning her glove.

Isabel sat silent a moment, shocked by her reception. She had not realized that she was no longer the idol of that household and of its central mind; and we are all loath to give up faith in our being loved still, where we have been loved ever. She was not aware that since she had left home she had been disinherited. She would not have cared had she known; but she was now facing what was involved in the disinheritance—dislike; and in the beginning of dislike there was the ending of the old awe with which the grandmother had once regarded the grandchild.

But she came quickly back to the grave matter uppermost in her mind. "Grandmother," she said, "I received a few days ago a letter from Kate Osborn. In it she told me that there were stories in circulation about Rowan. I have come home to find out what these stories are. On the way from the station I stopped at Mrs. Osborn's, and she told me. Grandmother, this is your work."

Mrs. Conyers pushed down the thumb of her glove.

"Have I denied it? But why do you attempt to deny that it is also your work?"

Isabel sat regarding her with speechless, deepening horror. She was not prepared for this revelation. Mrs. Conyers did not wait, but pressed on with a certain debonair enjoyment of her advantage.

"You refused to recognize my right to understand a matter that affected me and affected other members of the family as well as yourself. You showed no regard for the love I had cherished for you many a year. You put me aside as though I had no claim upon your confidence—I believe you said I was not worthy of it; but my memory is failing—perhaps I wrong you."

"It is true!" said Isabel, with triumphant joy in reaffirming it on present grounds. "It is true!"

"Very well," said Mrs. Conyers, "we shall let that pass. It was of consequence then; it is of no consequence now: these little personal matters are very trivial. But there was a serious matter that you left on my hands; the world always demands an explanation of what it is compelled to see and cannot understand. If no explanation is given, it creates an explanation. It was my duty to see that it did not create an explanation in this case. Whatever it may have been that took place between you and Rowan, I did not intend that the responsibility should rest upon you, even though you may have been willing that it should rest there. You discarded Rowan; I was compelled to prevent people from thinking that Rowan discarded you. Your reason for discarding him you refused to confide to me; I was compelled therefore to decide for myself what it probably was. Ordinarily when a man is dropped by a girl under such circumstances, it is for this," she tapped the tips of her fingers one by one as she went on, "or for this, or for this, or for this; you can supply the omitted words—nearly any one can—the world always does. You see, it becomes interesting. As I had not your authority for stating which one of these was the real reason, I was compelled to leave people at liberty to choose for themselves. I could only say that I myself did not know; but that certainly it was for some one of these reasons, or two of them, or for all of them."

"You have tried to ruin him!" Isabel cried, white with suffering.

"On the contrary, I received my whole idea of this from you. Nothing that I said to others about him was quite so bad as what you said to me; for you knew the real reason of your discarding him, and the reason was so bad—or so good—that you could not even confide it to me, your natural confidant. You remember saying that we must drop him from the list of our acquaintances, must not receive him at the house, or recognize him in society, or speak, to him in public. I protested that this would be very unjust to him, and that he might ask me at least the grounds for so insulting him; you assured me that he would never dare ask. And now you affect to be displeased with me for believing what you said, and trying to defend you from criticism, and trying to protect the good name of the family."

"Ah," cried Isabel, "you can give fair reasons for foul deeds. You always could. We often do, we women. The blacker our conduct, the better the names with which we cover it. If you would only glory openly in what you have done and stand by it! Not a word of what you have said is true, as you have said it. When I left home not a human being but yourself knew that there had been trouble between Rowan and me. It need never have become public, had you let the matter be as I asked you to do, and as you solemnly promised that you would. It is you who have deliberately made the trouble and scattered the gossip and spread the scandal. Why do you not avow that your motive was revenge, and that your passion was not justice, but malice. Ah, you are too deep a woman to try to seem so shallow!"

"Can I be of any further service to you?" said Mrs. Conyers with perfect politeness, rising. "I am sorry that the hour of my engagement has come. Are you to be in town long?"

"I shall be here until I have undone what you have done," cried Isabel, rising also and shaking with rage. "The decencies of life compel me to shield you still, and for that reason I shall stay in this house. I am not obliged to ask this as a privilege; it is my right."

"Then I shall have the pleasure of seeing you often."

Isabel went up to her room as usual and summoned her maid, and ordered her carriage to be ready in half an hour.

Half an hour later she came down and drove to the Hardages'. She showed no pleasure in seeing him again, and he no surprise in seeing her.

"I have been expecting you," he said; "I thought you would be brought back by all this."

"Then you have heard what they are saying about Rowan?"

"I suppose we have all heard," he replied, looking at her sorrowfully.

"You have not believed these things?"

"I have denied them as far as I could. I should have denied that anything had occurred; but you remember I could not do that after what you told me. You said something had occurred."

"Yes, I know," she said. "But you now have my authority at least to say that these things are not true. What I planned for the best has been misused and turned against him and against me. Have you seen him?"

"He has been in town, but I have not seen him."

"Then you must see him at once. Tell me one thing: have you heard it said that I am responsible for the circulation of these stories?"

"Yes."

"Do you suppose he has heard that? And could he believe it? Yet might he not believe it? But how could he, how could he!"

"You must come here and stay with us. Anna will want you." He could not tell her his reason for understanding that she would not wish to stay at home.

"No, I should like to come; but it is better for me to stay at home. But I wish Rowan to come to see me here. Judge Morris—has he done nothing?"

"He does not know. No one has told him."

Her expression showed that she did not understand.

"Years ago, when he was about Rowan's age, scandals like these were circulated about him. We know how much his life is wrapped up In Rowan. He has not been well this summer: we spared him."

"But you must tell him at once. Say that I beg him to write to Rowan to come to see him. I want Rowan to tell him everything—and to tell you everything."

All the next day Judge Morris stayed in his rooms. The end of life seemed suddenly to have been bent around until it touched the beginning. At last he understood.

"It was she then," he said. "I always suspected her; but I had no proof of her guilt; and if she had not been guilty, she could never have proved her innocence. And now for years she has smiled at me, clasped my hands, whispered into my ear, laughed in my eyes, seemed to be everything to me that was true. Well, she has been everything that is false. And now she has fallen upon the son of the woman whom she tore from me. And the vultures of scandal are tearing at his heart. And he will never be able to prove his innocence!"

He stayed in his rooms all that day. Rowan, in answer to his summons, had said that he should come about the middle of the afternoon; and it was near the middle of the afternoon now. As he counted the minutes, Judge Morris was unable to shut out from his mind the gloomier possibilities of the case.

"There is some truth behind all this," he said. "She broke her engagement with him,—at least, she severed all relations with him; and she would not do that without grave reason." He was compelled to believe that she must have learned from Rowan himself the things that had compelled her painful course. Why had Rowan never confided these things to him? His mind, while remaining the mind of a friend, almost the mind of a father toward a son, became also the mind of a lawyer, a criminal lawyer, with the old, fixed, human bloodhound passion for the scent of crime and the footsteps of guilt.

It was with both attitudes that he himself answered Rowan's ring; he opened the door half warmly and half coldly. In former years when working up his great cases involving life and death, it had been an occasional custom of his to receive his clients, if they were socially his friends, not in his private office, but in his rooms; it was part of his nature to show them at such crises his unshaken trust in their characters. He received Rowan in his rooms now. It was a clear day; the rooms had large windows; and the light streaming in took from them all the comfort which they acquired under gaslight: the carpets were faded, the rugs were worn out and lay in the wrong places. It was seen to be a desolate place for a desolated life.

"How are you, Rowan?" he said, speaking as though he had seen him the day before, and taking no note of changes in his appearance. Without further words he led the way into his sitting room and seated himself in his leather chair.

"Will you smoke?"

They had often smoked as they sat thus when business was before them, or if no business, questions to be intimately discussed about life and character and good and bad. Rowan did not heed the invitation, and the Judge lighted a cigar for himself. He was a long time in lighting it, and burned two or three matches at the end of it after it was lighted, keeping a cloud of smoke before his eyes and keeping his eyes closed. When the smoke rose and he lay back in his chair, he looked across at the young man with the eyes of an old lawyer who had drawn the truth out of the breast of many a criminal by no other command than their manly light. Rowan sat before him without an effort at composure. There was something about him that suggested a young officer out of uniform, come home with a browned face to try to get himself court-martialled. He spoke first:

"I have had Isabel's letter, and I have come to tell you."

"I need not say to you, tell me the whole truth."

"No, you need not say that to me. I should have told you long ago, if it had been a duty. But it was not a duty. You had not the right to know; there was no reason why you should know. This was a matter which concerned only the woman whom I was to marry." His manner had the firm and quiet courtesy that was his birthright.

A little after dark, Rowan emerged into the street. His carriage was waiting for him and he entered it and went home. Some minutes later, Judge Morris came down and walked to the Hardages'. He rang and asked for Professor Hardage and waited for him on the door-step. When Professor Hardage appeared, he said to him very solemnly: "Get your hat."

The two men walked away, the Judge directing their course toward the edge of the town. "Let us get to a quiet place," he said, "where we can talk without being overheard." It was a pleasant summer night and the moon was shining, and they stepped off the sidewalk and took the middle of the pike. The Judge spoke at last, looking straight ahead.

"He had a child, and when he asked Isabel to marry him he told her."

They walked on for a while without anything further being said. When Professor Hardage spoke, his tone was reflective:

"It was this that made it impossible for her to marry him. Her love for him was everything to her; he destroyed himself for her when he destroyed himself as an ideal. Did he tell you the story?"

"Told everything."

By and by the Judge resumed: "It was a student's love affair, and he would have married her. She said that if she married him, there would never be any happiness for her in life; she was not in his social class, and, moreover, their marriage would never be understood as anything but a refuge from their shame, and neither of them would be able to deny this. She disappeared sometime after the birth of the child. More than a year later, maybe it was two years, he received a letter from her stating that she was married to a man in her own class and that her husband suspected nothing, and that she expected to live a faithful wife to him and be the mother of his children. The child had been adopted, the traces of its parentage had been wiped out, those who had adopted it could do more for its life and honor than he could. She begged him not to try to find her or ruin her by communicating the past to her husband. That's about all."

"The old tragedy—old except to them."

"Old enough. Were we not speaking the other day of how the old tragedies are the new ones? I get something new out of this; you get the old. What strikes me about it is that the man has declined to shirk—that he has felt called upon not to injure any other life by his silence. I wish I had a right to call it the mettle of a young American, his truthfulness. As he put the case to me, what he got out of it was this: Here was a girl deceiving her husband about her past—otherwise he would never have married her. As the world values such things, what it expected of Rowan was that he should go off and marry a girl and conceal his past. He said that he would not lie to a classmate in college, he would not cheat a professor; was it any better silently to lie to and cheat the woman that he loved and expected to make the mother of his children? Whatever he might have done with any one else, there was something in the nature of the girl whom he did come to love that made it impossible: she drove untruthfulness out of him as health drives away disease. He saved his honor with her, but he lost her."

"She saved her honor through giving up him. But it is high ground, it is a sad hilltop, that each has climbed to."

"Hardage, we can climb so high that we freeze."

They turned back. The Judge spoke again with a certain sad pride:

"I like their mettle, it is Shakespearean mettle, it is American mettle. We lie in business, and we lie in religion, and we lie to women. Perhaps if a man stopped lying to a woman, by and by he might begin to stop lying for money, and at last stop lying with his Maker. But this boy, what can you and I do for him? We can never tell the truth about this; and as we can try to clear him, unless we ourselves lie, we shall leave him the victim of a flock of lies."

Isabel remained at home a week.

During her first meeting with Rowan, she effaced all evidences that there had ever been a love affair between them. They resumed their social relations temporarily and for a definite purpose—this was what she made him understand at the outset and to the end. All that she said to him, all that she did, had no further significance than her general interest in his welfare and her determination to silence the scandal for which she herself was in a way innocently responsible. Their old life without reference to it was assumed to be ended; and she put all her interest into what she assumed to be his new life; this she spoke of as a certainty, keeping herself out of it as related to it in any way. She forced him to talk about his work, his plans, his ambitions; made him feel always not only that she did not wish to see him suffer, but that she expected to see him succeed.