"Oh, yes," said Stefan with a slight frown, "that's Mary. I didn't know I had it with me. Come on, Adolph," and he tossed the picture back into the open Gladstone.

While Adolph found a taxi, Stefan paused a moment to question the concierge. Yes, monsieur's note had been left that afternoon, Madame remembered, by une petite Chinoise, bien chic, who had asked if Monsieur lived here. Madame's aged eyes snapped with Gallic appreciation of a possible intrigue.

Stefan was glad when he had dropped Adolph. He stretched at ease along the cushions of his open taxi, breathing in the warm, audacious air of spring, and watched the faces of the crowds as they emerged under the lights to be lost again mysteriously in the dusk.

Paris, her day's work done, was turning lightly, with her entrancing smile, to the pursuit of friendship, adventure, and love. All through the scented streets eyes sought eyes, voices rose in happy laughter or drooped to soft allurement. Stefan thrilled to the magic in the air. He, too, was seeking his adventure.

The taxi drew up in the courtyard of an apartment house. Giving his name, Stefan entered a lift and was carried up one floor. A white door opened, and the small Yo San, with a salutation, took his hat, and lifted a curtain. He was in a long, low room, yellow with candlelight. Facing him, open French windows giving upon a balcony showed the purpling dusk above the river and the black shapes of trees. Lights trickled their reflection in the water, the first stars shone, the scent of flowers was heavy in the air.

All this he saw; then a curtain moved, and a slim form appeared from the balcony as silently as a moth fluttering to the light.

"Ah, Stefan, welcome," a voice murmured.

The setting was perfect. As Felicity moved toward him—her gown fluttering and swaying in folds of golden pink as delicately tinted as the petals of a rose—Stefan realized he had never seen her so alluring. Her strange eyes shone, her lips curved soft and inviting, her cheeks and throat were like warm, white velvet.

He took her outstretched hand—of the texture of a camelia—and it pulsed as if a heart beat in it.

"Felicity," he half whispered, holding her hand, "how wonderful you are!"

"Am I?" she breathed, sighingly. "I have been asleep so long, Stefan. perhaps I am awake a little now."

Her eyes, wide and gleaming as he had never seen them, held him. A mysterious perfume, subtle and poignant, hung about her. Her gauzy dress fluttered as she breathed; she seemed barely poised on her slim feet. He put out his arm as if to stay her from mothlike flight, and it fell about her waist. He pressed her to him. Her lips met his—they were incredibly soft and warm—they seemed to blossom under his kisses.

* * * * *

Adolph, returning from the opera at midnight, donned his old jacket and a pair of slippers and, lighting his pipe, settled himself with a paper to await Stefan's coming. Presently first the paper, then the burnt-out pipe, fell from his hands—he dozed, started awake, and dozed again.

At last he roused himself and stretched stiffly. The lamp was burning low—he looked at his watch—it was four o'clock. Stefan's Gladstone bag still yawned on a chair beside the table. In it, the dull glow of the lamp was reflected from a small silver object lying among a litter of ties and socks. Adolph picked it up, and looked for some moments at the face of Mary, smiling above her little son. He shook his head.

"Tch, tch! Quel dommage-what a pity!" he sighed, and putting down the picture undressed slowly, blew out the lamp, and went to bed.



XII

On a Saturday morning at the end of June, Mary stood by the gate of the Byrdsnest, looking down the lane. McEwan, who was taking a whole holiday from the office, had offered to fetch her mail from the village. Any moment he might be back. It was quite likely, she told herself, that there would be a letter from France this morning—a steamer had docked on Thursday, another yesterday. Surely this time there would be something for her. Mary's eyes, as they strained down the lane, had lost some of their radiant youth. A stranger might have guessed her older than the twenty-six years she had just completed—she seemed grave and matronly— her face had a bleak look. Mary's last letter from France had come more than a month ago, and a face can change much in a month of waiting. She knew that last letter—a mere scrap—by heart.

"Thank you for your sweet letters, dear," it read. "I am well, and having a wonderful time. Not much painting yet; that is to come. Adolph admires your picture prodigiously. I have found some old friends in Paris, very agreeably. I may move about a bit, so don't expect many letters. Take care of yourself. Stefan."

No word of love, nothing about Elliston, or the child to come; just a hasty word or two dashed off in answer to the long letters which she had tried so hard to make amusing. Even this note had come after a two weeks' silence. "Don't expect many letters—" she had not, but a month was a long time.

There came Wallace! He had turned the corner—he had waved to her—but it was a quiet wave. Somehow, if there had been a letter from France, Mary thought he would have waved his hat round his head. She had never spoken of her month-long wait, but Wallace always knew things without being told. No, she was sure there was no letter. "It's too hot here in the sun," she thought, and walked slowly into the house.

"Here we are," called McEwan cheerily as he entered the sitting room. "It's a light mail to-day. Nothing but 'Kindly remit' for me, and one letter for you—looks like the fist of a Yankee schoolma'am."

He handed her the letter, holding it with a big thumb over the right-hand corner, so that she recognized Miss Mason's hand before she saw the French stamp.

"Mind if I hang round on the stoop and smoke a pipe?" queried McEwan, pulling a newspaper from his pocket.

"Do," said Mary, opening her letter. It was a long, newsy sheet written from Paris and filled with the Sparrow's opinions on continental hotels, manners, and morals. She read it listlessly, but at the fourth page suddenly sat upright.

"I thought as long as I was here I'd better see what there is to see," Miss Mason's pen chatted; "so I've been doing a play or the opera every night, and I can say that not understanding the language don't make the plays seem any less immoral. However, that's what people go abroad to get, so I guess we can't complain. The night before last who was sitting in the orchestra but your husband with that queer Miss Berber? I saw them as plain as daylight, but they couldn't see me away up in the circle. When I was looking for a bus at the end I saw them getting into an elegant electric. I must say she looked cute, all in old rose color with a pearl comb in her hair. I think your husband looked real well too—I suppose they were going to some party together. It's about time that young man was home again with you, it seems to me, and so I should have told him if I could have got anywhere near him in the crowd. All I can say is, I've had enough of Europe. I'm thinking of going through to London for a week, and then sailing."

At the end of the letter Mary turned the last page back, and slowly read this paragraph again. There was a dull drumming in her ears—a hand seemed to be remorselessly pressing the blood from her heart. She sat staring straight before her, afraid to think lest she should think too much. At last she went to the window.

"Wallace," she called. He jumped in, paper in hand, and saw her standing dead white by her chair.

"Ye've no had ill news, Mary?" he asked with a burr.

She shook her head. "No, Wallace; no, of course not. But I feel rather rotten this morning. Talk to me a little, will you?"

Obediently he sat down, and shook out the paper. "Hae ye been watching the European news much lately, Mary?" he began.

"I always try to, but it's difficult to find much in the American papers."

"It's there, if ye know where to look. What would ye think o' this assassination o' the Grand Duke now?" He cocked his head on one side, as if eagerly waiting for her opinion. She began to rally.

"Why, it's awful, of course, but somehow I can't feel much sympathy for the Austrians since they took Bosnia and Herzegovina."

"What would ye think might come of it?"

"I don't know, Wallace—what would you!"

"Weel," he said gravely, "I think something's brewing down yonder —there'll be trouble yet."

"Those poor Balkans, always fighting," she sighed.

"I'm feered it'll be more than the Balkans this time. Watch the papers, Mary—I dinna' like the looks o' it mesel'."

They talked on, he expounding his views on the menace of Austria's near- east aspirations as opposed to Russia's friendship for the Slavic races. Mary tried to listen intelligently—the effort brought a little color to her face.

"Wallace," she said presently, "do you happen to know where Miss Berber is this summer?"

"I do not," he said, his blue eyes steadily watching her. "But Mrs. Elliot would ken maybe—ye might ask her."

"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Mary. "I just wondered."

When McEwan had gone Mary read Miss Mason's letter for the third time, and again the cold touch of fear assailed her. She took a camp stool and sat by the edge of the bluff for a long time, watching the water. Then she went indoors again to her desk.

"Dear Stefan," she wrote, "I have only had one note from you in six weeks, and am naturally anxious to know how you are getting on. I am very well, and expect our baby about the tenth of October. Elliston is beautiful; imagine, he is a year old now! I think he will have your eyes. I am sorry you are not getting on well with your work, but perhaps that has changed by now. Dear, I had a letter from Miss Mason this morning, and she writes of having seen you and Miss Berber together at the opera. You didn't tell me she was in Paris, and I can't help feeling it strange that you should not have done so, and should leave me without news for so long. I trust you, dear Stefan, and believe in our love in spite of the difficulties we have had. And I think you did rightly to take a holiday abroad. But you have been gone three months, and I have heard so little. Am I wrong still to believe in our love? Only six months ago we were so happy together. Do you wish our marriage to come to an end? Please write me, dear, and tell me what you really think, for, Stefan, I don't know how I shall bear the suspense much longer. I'm trying to be brave, dear—and I do believe still.

"Your

"Mary."

Her hand was trembling as she finished writing. She longed to cry out, "For God's sake, come back to me, Stefan"—she longed to write of the wild ache at her heart—but she could not. She could not plead with him. If he did not feel the pain in her halting sentences it would be true that he no longer loved her. She sealed and stamped the letter. "I must still believe," she kept repeating to herself. There was nothing to do but wait.

In the weeks that followed it seemed to Mary that her friends were more than ever kind to her. Not only did James Farraday continually send his car to take her driving, and Mrs. Farraday appear in the pony carriage, but not a day passed without McEwan, Jamie, the Havens, or other neighbors dropping in for a chat, or planning a walk, a luncheon, or a sail. Constance, too, immersed in work though she was, ran out several times in her car and spent the night. Mary was grateful—it made her waiting so much less hard—while her friends were with her the constant ache at her heart was drugged asleep. Knowing Wallace, she suspected his hand in this widespread activity, nor was she mistaken.

The day after the arrival of Miss Mason's letter McEwan had dropped in upon Constance in the evening, when he knew she would be resting after her strenuous day's work at headquarters. By way of a compliment on her gown he led the conversation round to Felicity Berber, and elicited the information that she was abroad.

"In Paris, perhaps?" he suggested.

"Now you mention it, I think they did say Paris when I was last in the shop."

"Byrd is in Paris, you know," said McEwan, meeting her eyes.

"Ah!" said Constance, and she stared at him, her lids narrowing. "I hadn't thought of that possibility." She fingered her jade beads.

"I wonder if you ever write her?" he asked.

"I never write any one, my dear man, and, besides, what could I say?"

"Well," said he, "I had a hunch you might need a new rig for the summer Votes campaign, or something. I thought maybe you'd want the very latest Berber styles, and would ask her to send a tip over. Then I thought you'd string her the local gossip, how Mrs. Byrd's baby will be born in October, and you don't think her looking as fit as she might. You want a cute rattle for it from Paris, or something. Get the idea?"

"You think she doesn't know?"

"I think the kid's about as harmless as a short-circuited wire, but I think she's a sport at bottom. My dope is, if there's anything to this proposition, then she doesn't know." He rose to go.

"Wallace, you are certainly a bright boy," said Constance, holding out her hand. "The missive shall be despatched."

"Moreover," said Mac, turning at the door, "Mary's worried—a little cheering up won't hurt her any."

"I'll come out," said Constance'. "What a shame it is—I'm so fond of them both."

"Yes, it's a mean world—but we have to keep right on smiling. Good night," said he.

"Good night," called Constance. "You dear, good soul," she added to herself.



XIII

Adolph was practising some new Futurist music of Ravel's. Its dissonances fatigued and irritated him, but he was lured by its horrible fascination, and grated away with an enraged persistence. Paris was hot, the attic hotter, for it was July. Adolph wondered as he played how long it would be before he could get away to the sea. He was out of love with the city, and thought longingly of a possible trip to Sweden. His reflections were interrupted by Stefan, who pushed the door open listlessly, and instantly implored him to stop making a din.

"What awful stuff—it's like the Cubist horrors," said he, petulantly.

"Yes, my friend, yet I play the one, and you go to see the other," said Adolph, laying down his fiddle and mopping his head and hands.

"Not I," contradicted Stefan, wandering over to his easel. On it was an unfinished sketch of Felicity dancing—several other impressions of her stood about the room.

"Rotten work," he said, surveying them moodily. "All I have to show for over three months here. Adolph," he flung himself into a chair, and rumpled his hair angrily, "I'm sick of my way of life. My marriage was a mistake, but it was better than this. I did better work with Mary than I do with Felicity, and I didn't hate myself."

"Well, my infant," said Adolph, with a relieved sigh, "I'm glad to hear you say it. You've told me nothing, but I am sure your marriage was a better thing than you think. As for this little lady—" he shrugged his shoulders—"I make nothing of this affair."

Stefan's frown was moodier still.

"Felicity is the most alluring woman I have ever known, and I believe she is fond of me. But she is affected, capricious, and a perfect mass of egotism."

"For egotism you are not the man to blame her," smiled his friend.

"I know that," shrugged Stefan. "I've always believed in egotism, but I confess Felicity is a little extreme."

"Where is she?"

"Oh, she's gone to Biarritz for a week with a party of Americans. I wouldn't go. I loathe mobs of dressed-up spendthrifts. We had planned to go to Brittany, but she said she needed a change of companionship—that her soul must change the color of its raiment, or some such piffle." He laughed shortly. "Here I am hanging about in the heat, most of my money gone, and not able to do a stroke of work. It's hell, Adolph."

"My boy," said his friend, "why don't you go home?"

"I haven't the face, and that's a fact. Besides, hang it, I still want Felicity. Oh, what a mess!" he growled, sinking lower into his chair. Suddenly Adolph jumped up.

"I had forgotten; there is a letter for you," and he tossed one into his lap. "It's from America."

Stefan flushed, and Adolph watched him as he opened the letter. The flush increased—he gave an exclamation, and, jumping up, began walking feverishly about the room.

"My God, Adolph, she's heard about Felicity!" Adolph exclaimed in his turn. "She asks me about it—what am I to do?"

"What does she say; can you tell me?" enquired the Swede, distressed.

"Tiens, I'll read it to you," and Stefan opened the letter and hastily translated it aloud. "She's so generous, poor dear," he groaned as he finished. Adolph's face had assumed a deeply shocked expression. He was red to the roots of his blonde hair.

"Is your wife then enceinte, Stefan!"

"Yes, of course she is—she cares for nothing but having children."

"But, Stefan!" Adolph's hands waved helplessly—he stammered. "It cannot be—it is impossible, impossible that you desert a beautiful and good wife who expects your child. I cannot believe it."

"I haven't deserted her," Stefan retorted angrily. "I only came away for a holiday, and the rest just happened. I should have been home by now if I hadn't met Felicity. Oh, you don't understand," he groaned, watching his friend's grieved, embarrassed face. "I'm fond of Mary —devoted to her—but you don't know what the monotony of marriage does to a man of my sort."

"No, I don't understand," echoed his friend. "But now, Stefan," and he brought his fist down on the table, "now you will go home, will you not, and try to make her happy?"

"I don't think she will forgive this," muttered Stefan.

"This!" Adolph almost shouted. "This you will explain away, deny, so that it troubles her no more!"

"Oh, rot, Adolph, I can't lie to Mary," and Stefan began to pace the room once more.

"For her sake, it seems to me you must," his friend urged.

"Stop talking, Adolph; I want to think!" Stefan exclaimed. He walked in silence for a minute.

"No," he said at last, "if my marriage is to go on, it must be on a basis of truth. I can't go back to Mary and act and live a lie. If she will have me back, she must know I've made some sacrifice to come, I'll go, if she says so, because I care for her, but I can't go as a faithful, loving husband—it would be too grotesque."

"Consider her health, my friend," implored Adolph, still with his bewildered, shocked air; "it might kill her!"

"Can't! She's as strong as a horse—she can face the truth like a man."

"Then think of the other woman; you must protect her."

"Pshaw! she doesn't need protection! You don't know Felicity; she'd be just as likely as not to tell Mary herself."

"I always thought you so honorable, so generous," Adolph murmured, dejectedly.

"Oh, cut it, Adolph. I'm being as honorable and generous as I know how. I'll write to Mary now, and offer to come back if she says the word, and never see Felicity again. I can't do more."

He flung himself down at the desk, and snatched a pen.

"My dearest girl:" he wrote rapidly, "your brave letter has come to me, and I can answer it only with the truth. All that you feared when you heard of F.'s being with me is true. I found her here two months ago, and we have been together most of the time since. It was not planned, Mary; it came to me wholly unexpectedly, when I thought myself cured of love. I care for you, my dear, I believe you the noblest and most beautiful of women, but from F. I have had something which a woman of your kind could never give, and in spite of the pain I feel for your grief, I cannot say with truth that I regret it. There are things—in life and love of which you, my beautiful and clear-eyed Goddess, can know nothing—there is a wild grape, the juice of which you will never drink, but which once tasted, must ever be desired. Because this draught is so different from your own milk and honey, because it leaves my tenderness for you all untouched, because drinking it has assuaged a thirst of which you can have no knowledge, I ask you not to judge it with high Olympian judgment. I ask you to forgive me, Mary, for I love you still—better now than when I left you—and I hold you above all women. The cup is still at my lips, but if you will grant me forgiveness I will drink no more. I agonize over your grief—if you will let me I will return and try to assuage it. Write me, Mary, and if the word is forgive, for your sake I will bid my friend farewell now and forever. I am still your husband if you will have me—there is no woman I would serve but you.

"Stefan."

He signed his name in a dashing scrawl, blotted and folded the letter without rereading it, addressed and stamped it, and sprang hatless down the stairs to post it.

An enormous weight seemed lifted from him. He had shifted his dilemma to the shoulders of his wife, and had no conception that in so doing he was guilty of an act of moral cowardice. Returning to the studio, he pulled out a clean canvas and began a vigorous drawing of two fauns chasing each other round a tree. Presently, as he drew, he began to hum.



XIV

It was the fourth of August.

Stefan and Felicity sat at premier dejeuner on the balcony of her apartment. About them flowers grew in boxes, a green awning hung over them, their meal of purple fruit, coffee, and hot brioches was served from fantastic green china over which blue dragons sprawled. Felicity's negligee was of the clear green of a wave's concavity—a butterfly of blue enamel pinned her hair. A breeze, cool from the river, fluttered under the awning.

It was an attractive scene, but Felicity's face drooped listlessly, and Stefan, hands deep in the pockets of his white trousers, lay back in his wicker chair with an expression of nervous irritability. It was early, for the night had been too hot for late sleeping, and Yo San had not yet brought in the newspapers and letters. Paris was tense. Germany and Russia had declared war. France was mobilizing. Perhaps already the axe had fallen.

Held by the universal anxiety, Stefan and Felicity had lingered on in Paris after her return from Biarritz, instead of traveling to Brittany as they had planned.

Stefan had another reason for remaining, which he had not imparted to Felicity. He was waiting for Mary's letter. It was already overdue, and now that any hour might bring it he was wretchedly nervous as to the result. He did not yet wish to break with Felicity, but still less did he wish to lose Mary. Without having analyzed it to himself, he would have liked to keep the Byrdsnest and all that it contained as a warm and safe haven to return to after his stormy flights. He neither wished to be anchored nor free; he desired both advantages, and the knowledge that he would be called upon to forego one frayed his nerves. Life was various —why sacrifice its fluid beauty to frozen forms?

"Stefan," murmured Felicity, from behind her drooping mask, "we have had three golden months, but I think they are now over." "What do you mean?" he asked crossly.

"Disharmony"—she waved a white hand—"is in the air. Beauty—the arts— are to give place to barbarity. In a world of war, how can we taste life delicately? We cannot. Already, my friend, the blight has fallen upon you. Your nerves are harsh and jangled. I think"—she folded her hands and sank back on her green cushions—"I shall make a pilgrimage to China."

"All of which," said Stefan with a short laugh, "is an elaborate way of saying you are tired of me."

Her eyebrows raised themselves a fraction.

"You are wonderfully attractive, Stefan; you fascinate me as a panther fascinates by its lithe grace, and your mind has the light and shade of running brooks."

Stefan looked pleased.

"But," she went on, her lids still drooping, "I must have harmony. In an atmosphere of discords I cannot live. Of your present discordant mood, my friend, I am tired, and I could not permit myself to continue to feel bored. When I am bored, I change my milieu."

"You are no more bored than I am, I assure you," he snapped rudely.

"It is such remarks as those," breathed Felicity, "which make love impossible." Her eyes closed.

He pushed back his chair. "Oh, my dear girl, do have some sense of humor," he said, fumbling for a cigarette.

Yo San entered with a folded newspaper, and a plate of letters for Felicity. She handed one to Stefan. "Monsieur Adolph leave this," she said.

Disregarding the paper, Felicity glanced through her mail, and abstracted a thick envelope addressed in Constance's sprightly hand. Stefan's letter was from Mary; he moved to the end of the balcony and tore it open. A banker's draft fell from it.

"Good-bye, Stefan," he read, "I can't forgive you. What you have done shames me to the earth. You have broken our marriage. It was a sacred thing to me—now it is profaned. I ask nothing from you, and enclose you the balance of your own money. I can make my living and care for the children, whom you never wanted."

The last three words scrawled slantingly down the page; they were in large and heavier writing—they looked like a cry. The letter was unsigned, and smudged. It might have been written by a dying person. The sight of it struck him with unbearable pain. He stood, staring at it stupidly.

Felicity called him three times before he noticed her—the last time she had to raise her voice quite loudly. He turned then, and saw her sitting with unwonted straightness at the table. Her eyes were wide open, and fixed.

"I have a letter from Connie." She spoke almost crisply. "Why did you not tell me that your wife was enceinte?"

"Why should I tell you?" he asked, staring at her with indifference.

"Had I known it I should not have lived with you. I thought she had let you come here alone through phlegmatic British coldness. If she lost you, it was her affair. This is different. You have not played fair with us."

"Mary was never cold," said Stefan dully, ignoring her accusation.

"That makes it worse." She sat like a ramrod; her face might have been ivory; her hands lay folded across the open letter.

"What do you know—or care—about Mary?" he said heavily; "you never even liked her."

"Your wife bored me, but I admired her. Women nearly always bore me, but I believe in them far more than men, and wish to uphold them."

"You chose a funny way of doing so this time," he said, dropping into his chair with a hopeless sigh.

She looked at him with distaste. "True, I mistook the situation. Conventions are nothing to me. But I have a spiritual code to which I adhere. This affair no longer harmonizes with it. I trust—" Felicity relaxed into her cushions—"you will return to your wife immediately."

"Thanks," he said ironically. "But you're too late. Mary knows, and has thrown me over."

There was silence for several minutes. Then Stefan rose, picked up the draft from the floor, looked at it idly, refolded it into Mary's letter, and put both carefully away in his inside pocket. His face was very pale.

"Adieu, Felicity," he said quietly. "You are quite right about it." And he held out his hand.

"Adieu, Stefan," she answered, waving her hand toward his, but not touching it. "I am sorry about your wife."

Turning, he went in through the French window.

Felicity waited until she heard the thud of the apartment door, then struck her hands together. Yo San appeared.

"A kirtle, Yo San. I must dance away a wound. Afterwards I will think. Be prepared for packing. We may leave Paris. It is time again for work."

Stefan, walking listlessly toward his studio, found the streets filled with crowds. Newsboys shrieked; men stood in groups gesticulating; there were cries of "Vive la France!" and "A bas l'Allemagne!" Everywhere was seething but suppressed excitement. As he passed a great hotel he found the street, early as it was, blocked with departing cabs piled high with baggage.

"War is declared," he thought, but the knowledge conveyed nothing to his senses. He crossed the Seine, and found himself in his own quarter. At the corner of the rue des Trois Ermites a hand-organ, surrounded by a cosmopolitan crowd of students, was shrilly grinding out the Marseillaise. The students sang to it, cheering wildly.

"Who fights for France?" a voice yelled hoarsely, and among cheers a score of hands went up.

"Who fights for France?" Stefan stood stock still, then hurried past the crowd, and up the stairs to his attic.

There, in the midst of gaping drawers and fast emptying shelves, stood Adolph in his shirt sleeves, methodically packing his possessions into a hair trunk. He looked up as his friend entered; his mild face was alight; tears of excitement stood in his eyes.

"Ah, my infant," he exclaimed, "it has arrived! The Germans are across the frontier. I go to fight for France."

"Adolph!" cried Stefan, seizing and wringing his friend's hand. "Thank God there's something great to be done in the world after all! I go with you."

"But your wife, Stefan?"

Stefan drew out Mary's letter. For the first time his eyes were wet.

"Listen," he said, and translated the brief words.

Hearing them, the good Adolph sat down on his trunk, and quite frankly cried. "Ah, quel dommage! quel dommage!" he exclaimed, over and over.

"So you see, mon cher, we go together," said Stefan, and lifted his Gladstone bag to a chair. As he fumbled among its forgotten contents, a tiny box met his hand. He drew out the signet ring Mary had given him, with the winged head.

"Ah, Mary," he whispered with a half sob, "after all, you gave me wings!" and he put the ring on. He was only twenty-seven.

* * * * *

Later in the day Stefan went to the bank and had Mary's draft endorsed back to New York. He enclosed it in a letter to James Farraday, in which he asked him to give it to his wife, with his love and blessing, and to tell her that he was enlisting with Adolph Jensen in the Foreign Legion.

That night they both went to a vaudeville theatre. It was packed to the doors—an opera star was to sing the Marseillaise. Stefan and Adolph stood at the back. No one regarded the performance at all till the singer appeared, clad in white, the French liberty cap upon her head, a great tricolor draped in her arms. Then the house rose in a storm of applause; every one in the vast audience was on his feet.

"'Allons, enfants de la patrie,'" began the singer in a magnificent contralto, her eyes flashing. The house hung breathless.

"'Aux armes, citoyens!'" Her hands swept the audience. "'Marchons! Marchons!'" She pointed at the crowd. Each man felt her fiery glance pierce to him—France called—she was holding out her arms to her sons to die for her—

"'Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!'"

The singer gathered the great flag to her heart. The tears rolled down her cheeks; she kissed it with the passion of a mistress. The house broke into wild cheers. Men fell upon each other's shoulders; women sobbed. The singer was dumb, but the drums rolled on—they were calling, calling. The folds of the flag dazzled Stefan's eyes. He burst into tears.

* * * * *

The next morning Stefan Byrd and Adolph Jensen were enrolled in the Foreign Legion of France.



PART V

THE BUILDER

I

It was spring once more. In the garden of the Byrdsnest flowering shrubs were in bloom; the beds were studded with daffodils; the scent of lilac filled the air. Birds flashed and sang, for it was May, high May, and the nests were built. Mary, warm-cheeked in the sun, and wearing a broad- brimmed hat and a pair of gardening gloves, was thinning out a clump of cornflowers. At one corner of the lawn, shaded by a flowering dog-wood, was a small sand-pit, and in this a yellow-haired two-year-old boy diligently poured sand through a wire sieve. In a white perambulator lay a pink, brown-haired, baby girl, soundly sleeping, a tiny thumb held comfortably in her mouth. Now and then Mary straightened from her task and tiptoed over to the baby, to see that she was still in the shade, or that no flies disturbed her.

Mary's face was not that of a happy woman, but it was the face of one who has found peace. It was graver than of old, but lightened whenever she looked at her children with an expression of proud tenderness. She was dressed in the simplest of white cotton gowns, beneath which the lines of her figure showed a little fuller, but strong and graceful as ever. She looked very womanly, very desirable, as she bent over the baby's carriage.

Lily emerged from the front door, and set a tea-tray upon the low porch table. She lingered for a moment, glancing with pride at the verandah with its green rocking chairs, hammock, and white creeping-rug.

"My, Mrs. Byrd, don't our new porch look nice, now it's all done?" she exclaimed, beaming.

"Yes," said Mary, dropping into a rocking-chair to drink her tea, and throwing off her hat to loosen the warm waves of hair about her forehead, "isn't it awfully pretty? I don't know how we should have managed without it on damp mornings, now that Baby wants to crawl all the time. Ah, here is Miss Mason!" she exclaimed, smiling as that spinster, in white shirtwaist and alpaca skirt, dismounted from a smart bicycle at the gate.

"Any letters, Sparrow?"

Miss Mason, extracting several parcels from her carrier, flopped gratefully into a rocker, and drew off her gloves.

"One or two," she said. "Here, Lily; here's your marmalade, and here's the soap, and a letter for you. There are a few bills, Mary, and a couple of notes—" she passed them across—"and here's an afternoon paper one of the Haven youngsters handed me as I passed him on the road. He called out something about another atrocity. I haven't looked at it. I hate to open the things these days."

"I know," nodded Mary, busy with her letters, "so do I. This is from Mr. Gunther, from California. He's been there all the winter, you know. Oh, how nice; he's coming back! Says we are to expect a visit from him soon," Mary exclaimed, with a pleased smile. "Here's a line from Constance," she went on. "Everything is doing splendidly in her garden, she says. She wants us all to go up in June, before she begins her auto speaking trip. Don't you think it would be nice!"

"Perfectly elegant," said the Sparrow. "I'm glad she's taking a little rest. I thought she looked real tired this spring."

"She works so frightfully hard."

"Land sakes, work agrees with you, Mary! You look simply great. If your new book does as well as the old one I suppose porches won't satisfy you—you'll be wanting to build an ell on the house?"

"That's just what I do want," said Mary, smiling. "I want to have a spare room, and proper place for the babies. We're awfully crowded. Did I tell you Mr. Farraday had some lovely plans that he had made years ago, for a wing?"

"You don't say!"

"Yes, but I'm afraid we'll have to wait another year for that, till I can increase my short story output."

"My, it seems to me you write them like a streak."

Mary shook her head. "No, after Baby is weaned I expect to work faster, and ever so much better."

"Well, if you do any better than you are doing, Frances Hodgson Burnett won't be in it; that's all I can say."

"Oh, Sparrow!" smiled Mary, "she writes real grown-up novels, too, and I can only do silly little children's things."

"They're not silly, Mary Byrd, I can tell you that," sniffed Miss Mason, shaking out her paper.

"My gracious!" She turned a shocked face to Mary. "What do you suppose those Germans have done now? Sunk the Lusitania!"

"The Lusitania?" exclaimed Mary, incredulously.

"Yes, my dear; torpedoed her without warning. My, ain't that terrible? It says they hope most of the passengers are saved—but they don't know yet."

"Let me see!" Mary bent over her shoulder. "The Lusitania gone!" she whispered, awed.

"No, no!" exclaimed the Sparrow suddenly, hurrying off the porch. "Ellie not pour sand over his head! No, naughty!"

Mary sank into her chair with the paper. There was the staring black headline, but she could hardly believe it. The Lusitania gone? The great ship she knew so well, on which she and Stefan had met, gone! Lying in the ooze, with fish darting above the decks where she had walked with Stefan. Those hundreds of cabins a labyrinth for fish to lose their way in—all rotting in the black sea currents. The possible loss of life had not yet come home to her. It was inconceivable that there would not have been ample time for every one to escape. But the ship, the great English ship! So swift—so proud!

Dropping the paper, she walked slowly across the garden and the lane, and found her way to a little seat she had made on the side of the bluff overlooking the water. Here, her back to a tree trunk, she sat immobile, trying to still the turmoil of memories that rose within her.

The Lusitania gone!

It seemed like the breaking of the last link that bound her to the past. All the belief, all the wonder of that time were already gone, and now the ship, her loveship, was gone, too, lost forever to the sight of men.

She saw again its crowded decks, saw the lithe, picturesque figure of the young artist with the eager face bending over her—

"Won't you be perfectly kind, and come for a walk?"

She saw the saloon on her engagement night when she sang at the ship's concert. What were the last words she had sung?

"Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty— Love's a stuff will not endure."

Alas, how unconsciously prophetic she had been. Nothing had endured, neither love, nor faith, nor the great ship of their pilgrimage herself.

Other memories crowded. Their honeymoon at Shadeham, the sweet early days of their studio life, her glorious pride in his great painting of love exalted.... The night of Constance's party, when, after her singing, her husband had left his place by Miss Berber and crossed the room so eagerly to her side. Their first weeks at the Byrdsnest—how happy they had been then, and how worshipfully he had looked at her the morning their son was born. All gone. She had another baby now, but he had never seen it—never would see it, she supposed. Her memory traveled on, flitting over the dark places and lingering at every sunny peak of their marriage journey. Their week in Vermont! How they had skated and danced together; how much he seemed to love her then! Even the day he sailed for France he seemed to care for her. "Why are we parting?" he had cried, kissing her. Yes, even then their marriage, for all the clouds upon it, had seemed real —she had never doubted in her inmost heart that they were each other's.

With a stab of the old agony, Mary remembered the day she got his letter admitting his relations with Felicity. The unbelievable breakdown of her whole life! His easy, lightly made excuses. He, in whose arms she had lain a hundred times, with whom she had first learnt the sacrament of love, had given himself to another woman, had given all that most close and sacred intimacy of love, and had written, "I cannot say with truth that I regret it." How she had lived through the reading of those words she did not know. Grief does not kill, or surely she would have died that hour. Her own strength, and the miracle of life within her, alone stayed her longing for death. It was ten months ago; she had lived down much since then, had schooled herself daily to forgetfulness; yet now again the unutterable pang swept over her—the desolation of loss, and the incapacity to believe that such loss could be.

She rebelled against the needlessness of it all now, as she had done then, in those bitter days before her little Rosamond came to half- assuage her pain.

Well, he had redeemed himself in a way. The day James Farraday came to tell her that Stefan had enlisted, some part of her load was eased. The father of her children was not all ignoble.

Mary mused on. How would it end? Would Stefan live? Should she—could she—ever see him again? She thanked God he was there, serving the country he loved. "The only thing he ever really loved, perhaps," she thought. She supposed he would be killed—all that genius lost like so much more of value that the world was scrapping to-day—and then it would all be quite gone—

Through the trees dropped the insistent sound of a baby's cry to its mother. She rose; the heavy clouds of memory fell away. The past was gone; she lived for the future, and the future was in her children.

* * * * *

The next morning Mary had just bathed the baby, and was settling her in her carriage, when the Sparrow, who, seated on the porch with Elliston, was engaged in cutting war maps from the papers and pasting them in an enormous scrapbook, gave a warning cough.

"Here comes Mr. McEwan," she whispered, in the hushed voice reserved by her simple type for allusions to the afflicted.

"Oh, poor dear," said Mary, hurrying across the lawn to meet him. She felt more than ever sympathetic toward him, for Mac's wife had died in a New Hampshire sanitarium only a few weeks before, and all his hopes of mending her poor broken spirit were at an end. Reaching the gate, she gave an involuntary cry.

McEwan was stumbling toward her almost like a drunken man. His face was red, his eyes bloodshot; a morning paper trailed loosely from his hand.

"Mary," he cried, "I came back from the station to see ye—hae ye heard, my girl?"

"Wallace!" she exclaimed, frightened, "what is it? What has happened?" She led him to a seat on the porch; he sank into it unresisting. Miss Mason pushed away her scrapbook, white-faced.

"The Lusitania! They were na' saved, Mary. There's o'er a thousand gone. O'er a hundred Americans—hundreds of women and little bairns, Mary—like yours—Canadian mithers and bairns going to be near their brave lads —babies, Mary." And the big fellow dropped his rough head on his arms and sobbed like a child.

"Oh, Wallace; oh, Wallace!" whispered Mary, fairly wringing her hands; "it can't be! Over a thousand lost?"

"Aye," he cried suddenly, bringing his heavy fist down with a crash on the wicker table, "they drooned them like rats—God damn their bloody souls."

His face, crimson with rage and pity, worked uncontrollably. Mary covered her eyes with her hands. The Sparrow sat petrified. The little Elliston, terrified by their strange aspects, burst into loud wails.

"There, darling; there, mother's boy," crooned Mary soothingly, pressing her wet cheek to his.

"Little bairns like that, Mary," McEwan repeated brokenly. Mary gathered the child close into her arms. They sat in stunned horror.

"Weel," said McEwan at last, more quietly. "I'll be going o'er to enlist. I would ha' gone long sine, but that me poor girl would ha' thocht I'd desairted her. She doesna' need me now, and there's eno' left for the lad. Aye, this is me call. I was ay a slow man to wrath, Mary, but now if I can but kill one German before I die—" His great fist clenched again on the table.

"Oh, don't, dear man, don't," whispered Mary, with trembling lips, laying her cool hand over his. "You're right; you must go. But don't feel so terribly."

His grip relaxed; his big hand lay under hers quietly.

"I could envy you, Wallace, being able to go. It's hard for us who have to stay here, just waiting. My poor sister has lost her husband already, and I don't know whether mine is alive or dead. And now you're going! Elliston's pet uncle!" She smiled at him affectionately through her tears.

"I'll write you if I hear aught about the Foreign Legion, Mary," he said, under his breath.

She pressed his hand in gratitude. "When shall you go?" she asked.

"By the next boat."

"Go by the American Line."

His jaw set grimly. "Aye, I will. They shall no torpedo me till I've had ae shot at them!"

Mary rose. "Now, Wallace, you are to stay and lunch with us. You must let us make much of the latest family hero while we have him. Eh, Sparrow?"

"Yes," nodded Miss Mason emphatically, "I've hated the British ever since the Revolution—I and my parents and my grandparents—but I guess I'm with them, and those that fight for them, from now on."



II

On the Monday following the sinking of the Lusitania, James Farraday received a letter from the American Hospital in Paris, written in French in a shaky hand, and signed Adolph Jensen.

New York was still strained and breathless from Saturday's horror. Men sat idle in their offices reading edition after edition of the papers, rage mounting in their hearts. Flags were at half mast. Little work was being done anywhere save at the newspaper offices, which were keyed to the highest pitch. Farraday's office was hushed. Those members of his staff who were responsible for The Child at Home—largely women, all picked for their knowledge of child life—were the worst demoralized. How think of children's play-time stories when those little bodies were being brought into Queenstown harbor? Farraday himself, the efficient, the concentrated, sat absent-mindedly reading the papers, or drumming a slow, ceaseless tap with his fingers upon the desk. The general gloom was enhanced by their knowledge that Mac, their dear absurd Mac, was going. But they were all proud of him.

By two o'clock Farraday had read all the news twice over, and Adolph's letter three times.

Telephoning for his car to meet him, he left the office and caught an early afternoon train home. He drove straight to the Byrdsnest and found Mary alone in the sitting room.

She rose swiftly and pressed his hand:

"Oh, my dear friend," she murmured, "isn't it terrible?"

He nodded. "Sit down, Mary, my dear girl." He spoke very quietly, unconsciously calling her by name for the first time. "I have something to tell you."

She turned white.

"No," he said quickly, "he isn't dead."

She sat down, trembling.

"I have a letter from Adolph Jensen. They are both wounded, and in the American Hospital in Paris. The Foreign Legion has suffered heavily. Jensen is convalescent, and returns to the front. He was beside your husband in the trench. It was a shell. Byrd was hit in the back. My dear child—" he stopped for a moment. "Mary—"

"Go on," she whispered through stiff lips.

"He is paralyzed, my dear, from the hips down."

She stared at him.

"Oh, no, James—oh, no, James—oh, no!" she whispered, over and over.

"Yes, my poor child. He is quite convalescent, and going about the wards in a wheeled chair. But he will never be able to walk again."

"Why," said Mary, wonderingly, "he never used to be still—he always ran, and skipped, like a child." Her breast heaved. "He always ran, James—" she began to cry—the tears rolled down her cheeks—she ran quickly out of the room, sobbing.

James waited in silence, smoking a pipe, his face set in lines of inexpressible sadness. In half an hour she returned. Her eyes were swollen, but she was calm again.

"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting so long," she said, with a pitiful attempt at a smile. "Please read me the letter, will you?"

James read the French text. Stefan had been so brave in the trenches, always kept up a good heart. He used to sing to the others. A shell had struck the trench; they were nearly all killed or wounded. Stefan knew he would walk no more, but he was still so brave, with a smile for every one. He was drawing, too, wonderful pencil drawings of the front. Adolph thought they were much more wonderful than anything he had ever done. All the nurses and wounded asked for them. Adolph would be going back in a month. He ventured to ask Mr. Farraday to lay the affair before Mrs. Byrd. Stefan had no money, and no one to take care of him when he left the hospital. He, Adolph, would do all that was possible, but he was sure that his friend should go home. Stefan often, very often, spoke of his wife to Adolph. He wore a ring of hers. Would Mr. Farraday use his good offices?

James folded the letter and looked at Mary.

"I must go and fetch him," she said simply.

"Mrs. Byrd—Mary—I want you to let me go. Mac has offered to do it before enlisting, but I don't think your husband cared for Mac, and he always liked me. It wouldn't be fair to the baby for you to go, and it would be very painful for you. But it will give me real happiness—the first thing I've been able to do in this awful business."

"Oh, no, James, I couldn't let you. Your work—it is too much altogether."

"The office can manage without me for three weeks. I want you to let me do this for you both—it's such a small thing."

"I feel I ought to go, James," she reiterated, "I ought to be there."

"You can't take the baby—and she mustn't suffer," he urged. "There will be any amount of red tape. You really must let me go."

They discussed it for some time, and at last she agreed, for the sake of the small Rosamond. She began to see, too, that there would be much for her to do at this end. With her racial habit of being coolest in an emergency, Mary found herself mentally reorganizing the regime of the Byrdsnest, and rapidly reviewing one possible means after another of ensuring Stefan's comfort. She talked over her plans with James, and before he left that afternoon their arrangements were made. On one point he was obliged to give way. Stefan's money, which he had returned to Mary before enlisting, was still intact, and she insisted it should be used for the expenses of the double journey. Enough would be left to carry out her plans at this end, and Stefan would know that he was in no sense an object of charity.

James, anxious as he was to help his friends in all ways, had to admit that she was right. He was infinitely relieved that the necessity for practical action had so completely steadied her. He knew now that she would be almost too busy in the intervening weeks for distress.

The next day James engaged his passage, sent a long cable to Adolph, and performed prodigies of work at the office. By means of some wire-pulling he and Mac succeeded in securing a cabin together on the next American liner out.

Meanwhile, Mary began her campaign. At breakfast she expounded her plans to Miss Mason, who had received the news overnight.

"You see, Sparrow," she said, "we don't know how much quiet he will need, but we couldn't give him any in this little cottage, with the babies. So I shall fit up the studio—a big room for him, a small one for the nurse, and a bath. The nurse will be the hardest part, for I'm sure he would rather have a man. The terrible helplessness"—her voice faltered for a second—"would humiliate him before a woman. But it must be the right man, Sparrow, some one he can like—who won't jar him—and some one we can afford to keep permanently. I've been thinking about it all night and, do you know, I have an idea. Do you remember my telling you about Adolph Jensen's brother?"

"The old one, who failed over here?"

"Yes. Stefan helped him, you know, and I'm sure he was awfully grateful. When the Berber shop changed hands in January, I wondered what would become of him; I believe Miss Berber was only using him out of kindness. It seems to me he might be just the person, if we could find him."

"You're a smart girl, Mary, and as plucky as they make 'em," nodded the spinster.

"Oh, Sparrow, when I think of his helplessness! He, who always wanted wings!" Mary half choked.

"Now," said Miss Mason, rising briskly, "we've got to act, not think. Come along, child, and let's go over to the barn." Gratefully Mary followed her.

Enquiries at the now cheapened and popularized Berber studio elicited Jensen's old address, and Mary drove there in a taxi, only to find that he had moved to an even poorer quarter of the city. She discovered his lodgings at last, in a slum on the lower east side. He was out, looking for a job, the landlady thought, but Mary left a note for him, with a bill inside it, asking him to come out to Crab's Bay the next morning. She hurried back to Rosamond, and found that the excellent Sparrow had already held lively conferences with the village builders and plumbers.

"I told 'em they'd get a bonus for finishing the job in three weeks, and I guess I got the whole outfit on the jump," said she with satisfaction. "Though the dear Lord knows," she added, "if the plumbers get through on schedule it'll be the first time in history."

When Henrik Jensen arrived next day Mary took an instant liking to him. He was shabbier and more hopeless than ever, but his eyes were kind, his mouth gentle, and when she spoke of Stefan his face lighted up.

She told him the story of the two friends, of his brother's wound and Stefan's crippling, and saw that his eyes filled with tears.

"He was wonderful to me, Mrs. Byrd, he gave me a chance. I was making good, too, till Miss Berber left and the whole scheme fell to pieces. I'm glad Adolph is with him; it was very gracious of you to let me hear about it."

"Are you very busy now, Mr. Jensen?"

He smiled hopelessly.

"Yes, very busy—looking for work. I'm down and out, Mrs. Byrd."

She unfolded her scheme to him. Stefan would need some one near him night and day. He would be miserable with a servant; he would—she knew—feel his helplessness more keenly in the presence of a woman. She herself could help, but she had her work, and the children. Mr. Jensen would be one of the family. She could offer him a home, and a salary which she hoped would be sufficient for his needs—

"I have no needs, Mrs. Byrd," he interrupted at this point, his eyes shining with eagerness. "Enough clothes for decency, that's all. If I could be of some use to your husband, to my friend and Adolph's, I should ask no more of life. I'm a hopeless failure, ma'am, and getting old—you don't know what it is like to feel utterly useless."

Mary listened to his gentle voice and watched his fine hands—hands used to appraising delicate, beautiful things. The longer they talked, the more certain she felt that here was the ideal person, one bound to her husband by ties of gratitude, and whose ministrations could not possibly offend him.

She rang up Mrs. Farraday, put the case to her, and obtained her offer of a room to house Mr. Jensen while the repairs were making. She arranged with him to return next day with his belongings, and advanced a part of his salary for immediate expenses. Mary wanted him to come to her at once, both out of sympathy for his wretched circumstances, and because she wished thoroughly to know him before Stefan's return.

Luckily, the Sparrow took to Jensen at once, so there was nothing to fear on that score. For the Sparrow was now a permanent part of Mary's life. She had a small independent income, but no home—her widowed sister having gone west to live with a daughter—and she looked upon herself as the appointed guardian of the Byrdsnest. Not only did she relieve Mary of the housekeeping, and help Lily with the household tasks, which she adored, but she had practically taken the place of nurse to the children, leaving Mary hours of freedom for her work which would otherwise have been unattainable.

The competency of the two friends achieved the impossible in the next few weeks, as it had done on the memorable first day of Mary's housekeeping. Mr. Jensen, with his trained taste, was invaluable for shopping expeditions, going back and forth to the city with catalogues, samples, and orders.

In a little over three weeks Stefan's old studio had been transformed into a bed-sitting-room, with every comfort that an invalid could desire, and the further end of it had been partitioned into a bathroom and a small bedroom for Mr. Jensen, with a separate outside entrance.

"Oh, if only I had the new wing," sighed Mary.

"This will be even quieter for him, Mrs. Byrd, and the chair can be wheeled so quickly to the house," replied Mr. Jensen.

The back window of Mary's sitting room had been enlarged to glass doors, and from these a concrete path ran to the studio entrance. Mary planned to make it a covered way after the summer.

The day the wheeled chair arrived it was hard for her to keep back the tears. It was a beautifully made thing of springs, cushions, and rubber tires. It could be pushed, or hand-propelled by the occupant. It could be lowered, heightened, or tilted. It was all that a chair could be—but how to picture Stefan in it, he of the lithe steps and quick, agile movements, the sudden turns, and the swift, almost running walk? Her heart trembled with pity at the thought.

They had already received an "all well" cable from Paris, and three weeks after be had sailed, James telegraphed that they were starting. He had waited for the American line—he would have been gone a month.

As the day of landing approached, Mary became intensely nervous. She decided not to meet the boat, and sent James a wireless to that effect. She could not see Stefan first among all those crowds; her instinct told her that he, too, would not wish it.

The ship docked on Saturday. The day before, the last touches had been put to Stefan's quarters. They were as perfect as care and taste could make them. Early on Saturday morning Mr. Jensen started for the city, carrying a big bunch of roses—Mary's welcome to her husband. While the Sparrow flew about the house gilding the lily of cleanliness, Mary, with Elliston at her skirts, picked the flowers destined for Stefan's room. These she arranged in every available vase—the studio sang with them. Every now and then she would think of some trifle to beautify it further —a drawing from her sitting room—her oldest pewter plate for another ashtray—a pine pillow from her bedroom. Elliston's fat legs became so tired with ceaselessly trotting back and forth behind her that he began to cry with fatigue, and was put to bed for his nap. Rosamond waked, demanding dinner and amusement.

The endless morning began to pass, and all this while Mary had not thought!

At lunch time James telephoned. They would be out by three o'clock. Stefan had stood the journey well, was delighted with the roses, and to see Jensen. He was wonderfully brave and cheerful.

Mary was trembling as she hung up the receiver. He was here, he was on the way; and still, she had not thought!

Both children asleep, the last conceivable preparation made, Mary settled herself on the porch at last, to face what was coming.

The Sparrow peeped out at her.

"I guess you'd as soon be left alone, my dear," she said, tactfully.

"Yes, please, Sparrow," Mary replied, with a nervous smile. The little spinster slipped away.

What did she feel for Stefan? Mary wondered. Pity, deep pity? Yes. But that she would feel for any wounded soldier. Admiration for his courage? That, too, any one of the war's million heroes could call forth. Determination to do her full duty by this stricken member of her family? Of course, she would have done that for any relative. Love? No. Mary felt no love for Stefan. That had died, nearly a year ago, died in agony and humiliation. She could not feel that her lover, her husband, was returning to her. She waited only for a wounded man to whom she owed the duty of all kindness.

Suddenly, her heart shook with fear. What if she were unable to show him more than pity, more than kindness? What if he, stricken, helpless, should feel her lack of warmth, and tenderness, should feel himself a stranger here in this his only refuge? Oh, no, no! She must do better than that. She must act a part. He must feel himself cared for, wanted. Surely he, who had lost everything, could ask so much for old love's sake? ... But if she could not give it? Terror assailed her, the terror of giving pain; for she knew that of all women she was least capable of insincerity. "I don't know how to act," she cried to herself, pitifully.

A car honked in the lane. They were here. She jumped up and ran to the gate, wheeling the waiting chair outside it. Farraday's big car rounded the bend—three men sat in the tonneau. Seeing them, Mary ran suddenly back inside the gate; her eyes fell, she dared not look.

The car had stopped. Through half-raised lids she saw James alight. The chauffeur ran to the chair. Jensen stood up in the car, and some one was lifted from it. The chair wheeled about and came toward her. It was through the gate—it was only a yard away.

"Mary," said a voice. She looked up.

There was the well-known face, strangely young, the eyes large and shadowed. There was his smile, eager, and very anxious now. There were his hands, those finely nervous hands. They lay on a rug, beneath which were the once swift limbs that could never move again. He was all hers now. His wings were broken, and, broken, he was returning to the nest.

"Mary!"

She made one step forward. Stooping, she gathered his head to her breast, that breast where, loverlike, it had lain a hundred times. Her arms held him close, her tears ran down upon his hair.

"My boy!" she cried.

Here was no lover, no husband to be forgiven. Cradled upon her heart there lay only her first, her most wayward, and her best loved child.



III

Mary never told Stefan of those nightmare moments before his arrival. From the instant that her deepest passion, the maternal, had answered to his need, she knew neither doubt nor unhappiness.

She settled down to the task of creating by her labor and love a home where her three dependents and her three faithful helpmates could find the maximum of happiness and peace.

The life of the Byrdsnest centered about Stefan; every one thought first of him and his needs. Next in order of consideration came Ellie and little Rosamond. Then Lily had to be remembered. She must not be overworked; she must take enough time off. Henrik, too, must not be over- conscientious. He must allow Mary to relieve him often enough. As for the Sparrow, she must not wear herself out flying in three directions at once. She must not tire her eyes learning typewriting. But at this point Mary's commands were apt to be met with contempt.

"Now, Mary Byrd," the Sparrow would chirp truculently, "you 'tend to your business, and let me 'tend to mine. Anybody would think that we were all to save ourselves in this house but you. As for my typing, it's funny if I can't save you something on those miserable stenographers' bills."

Mary was wonderfully happy in these days—happier in a sense than she had ever been, for she had found, beyond all question, the full work for hands to do. And to her love for her children there was added not merely her maternal tenderness for Stefan, but a deep and growing admiration.

For Stefan was changed not only in the body, but in the spirit. Everybody remarked it. The fierce fires of war seemed to have burnt away his old confident egotism. In giving himself to France he had found more than he had lost; for, by a strange paradox, in the midst of death he had found belief in life.

"Mary, my beautiful," he said to her one day in September, as he worked at an adjustable drawing board which swung across his knees, "did you ever wonder why all my old pictures used to be of rapid movement, nearly all of running or flying?"

"Yes, dearest, I used to try often to think out the significance of it."

They were in the studio. Mary had just dropped her pencil after a couple of hours' work on a new serial she was writing. She often worked now in Stefan's room. He was busy with a series of drawings of the war. He had tried different media—pastel, ink, pencils, and chalks—to see which were the easiest for sedentary work.

"It's good-bye to oils," he had said, "I couldn't paint a foot from the canvas."

Now he was using a mixture of chalk and charcoal, and was in the act of finishing the sixth drawing of his series. The big doors of the barn were opened wide to the sunny lawn, gay with a riot of multicolored dahlias.

"It's odd," said Stefan, pushing away his board and turning the wheels of his chair so that he faced the brilliant stillness of the garden, "but I seem never to have understood my work till now. I used always to paint flight partly because it was beautiful in itself but also, I think, with some hazy notion that swift creatures could always escape from the ugliness of life."

Mary came and sat by him, taking his hand.

"It seems to me," he went on, "that I spent my life flying from what I thought was ugly. I always refused to face realities, Mary, unless they were pleasant. I fled even from the great reality of our marriage because it meant responsibilities and monotony, and they seemed ugly things to me. And now, Mary," he smiled, "now that I can never shoulder responsibilities again, and am condemned to lifelong monotony"—she pressed his hand—"neither seems ugly any more. The truth is, I thought I fled to get away from things, and it was really to get away from myself. Now that I've seen such horrors, such awful suffering, and such unbelievable sacrifice, I have something to think about so much more real than my vain, egotistical self. I know what my work is now, something much better than just creating beauty. I gave my body to France—that was nothing. But now I have to give her my soul—I have to try and make it a voice to tell the world a little of what she has done. Am I too vain, dearest, in thinking that these really say something big?"

He nodded toward his first five drawings, which hung in a row on the wall.

"Oh, Stefan, you know what I think of them," she said, her eyes shining.

"Would you mind pinning up the new one, Mary, so that we can see them all together?"

She rose and, unfastening the drawing from its board, pinned it beside the others. Then she turned his chair to face them, and they both looked silently at the pictures.

They were drawings of the French lines, and the peasant life behind them. Dead soldiers, old women by a grave, young mothers following the plow —men tense, just before action. The subjects were already familiar enough through the work of war correspondents and photographers, but the treatment was that of a great artist. The soul of a nation was there —which is always so much greater than the soul of an individual. The drawings were not of men and women, but of one of the world's greatest races at the moment of its transfiguration.

For the twentieth time Mary's eyes moistened as she looked at them.

The shadows began to lengthen. Shouts came from the slope, and presently Ellie's sturdy form appeared through the trees, followed by the somewhat disheveled Sparrow carrying Rosamond, who was smiting her shoulder and crowing loudly.

"I'll come and help you in a few minutes, Sparrow," Mary called, as the procession crossed the lawn, her face beaming love upon it.

"Can you spare the few minutes, dear?" Stefan asked, watching her.

"Yes, indeed, they won't need me yet."

The light was quite golden now; the dahlias seemed on fire under it.

"Mary," said Stefan, "I've been thinking a lot about you lately."

"Have you, dear?"

"Yes, I never tried to understand you in the old days. I had never met your sort of woman before, and didn't trouble to think about you except as a beautiful being to love. I was too busy thinking about myself," he smiled. "I wondered, without understanding it, where you got your strength, why everything you touched seemed to turn to order and helpfulness under your hands. I think now it is because you are always so true to life—to the things life really means. Every one always approves and upholds you, because in you the race itself is expressed, not merely one of its sports, as with me."

She looked a little puzzled. "Do you mean, dearest, because I have children?"

"No, Beautiful, any one can do that. I mean because you have in perfect balance and control all the qualities that should be passed on to children, if the race is to be happy. You are so divinely normal, Mary, that's what it is, and yet you are not dull."

"Oh, I'm afraid I am," smiled Mary, "rather a bromide, in fact."

He shook his head, with his old brilliant smile.

"No, dearest, nobody as beautiful and as vital as you can be dull to any one who is not out of tune with life. I used to be that, so I'm afraid I thought you so, now and then."

"I know you did," she laughed, "and I thought you fearfully erratic."

He laughed back. They had both passed the stage in which the truth has power to hurt.

"I remember Mr. Gunther talking to me a little as you have been doing," she recalled, "when he came to model me. I don't quite understand either of you. I think you're just foolishly prejudiced in my favor because you admire me."

"What about the Farradays, and Constance, and the Sparrow and Lily and Henrik and McEwan and the Havens and Madame Corriani and—"

"Oh, stop!" she laughed, covering his mouth with her hand.

"And even in Paris," he concluded, holding the hand, "Adolph, and—yes, and Felicity Berber. Are they all 'prejudiced in your favor'?"

"Why do you include the last named?" she asked, rather low. It was the first time Felicity had been spoken of between them.

"She threw me over, Mary, the hour she discovered how it was with you," he said quietly.

"That was rather decent of her. I'm glad you told me that," she answered after a pause.

"All this brings me to what I really want to say," he continued, still holding her hand in his. "You are so alive, you are life; and yet you're chained to a half-dead man."

"Oh, don't, dearest," she whispered, deeply distressed.

"Yes, let me finish. I shan't last very long, my dear—two or three years, perhaps—long enough to say what I must about France. I want you to go on living to the full. I want you to marry again, Mary, and have more beautiful, strong children."

"Oh, darling, don't! Don't speak of such things," she begged, her lips trembling.

"I've finished, Beautiful. That's all I wanted to say. Just for you to remember," he smiled.

Her arms went round him. "You're bad," she whispered, "I shan't remember."

"Here comes Henrik," he replied. "Run in to your babies."

He watched her swinging steps as, after a farewell kiss, she sped down the little path.



IV

Stefan's moods were not always calm. He had his hours of fierce rebellion, when he felt he could not endure another moment with his deadened carcass; when, without life, it seemed so much better to die. He had days of passionate longing for the world, for love, for everything he had lost. Mary fell into the habit of borrowing the Farradays' car when she saw such a mood approaching, and sending Stefan for long drives alone. The rushing flight seldom failed to carry him beyond the reach of his black mood. Returning, he would plunge into work, and the next day would find him calm and smiling once again. He suffered much pain from his back, but this he bore with admirable patience.

"It's nothing," he would say, "compared to the black devils."

Stefan's courage was enormously fortified by the success of his drawings, which created little less than a sensation. Reproductions of them appeared for some weeks in The Household Review, and were recopied everywhere. The originals were exhibited by Constantine in November.

"Here," wrote one of the most distinguished critics in New York, himself a painter of repute, "we have work which outranks even Mr. Byrd's celebrated Danae, and in my judgment far surpasses any of the artist's other achievements. I have watched the development of this young American genius with the keenest interest. I placed him in the first rank as a technichian, but his work—with the exception of the Danae—appeared to me to lack substance and insight. It was brilliant, but too spectacular. Even his Danae, though on a surprising inspirational plane, had a quality high rather than profound, I doubted if Mr. Byrd had the stuff of which great art is made, but after seeing his war drawings, I confess myself mistaken. If I were to sum up my impression of them I should say that on the battlefield Mr. Byrd has discovered the one thing his work lacked—soul."

Stefan read this eulogy with a humorous grin.

"I expect the fellow's right," he said. "I don't think my soul was as strong on wings in the old days as my brush was. Without joking, though," he went on, suddenly grave, "I don't know if there is such a thing as a soul, but if there is, such splendid ones were being spilled out there that I think, perhaps, Mary, I may have picked a bit of one up."

"Dearest," said Mary, with a kiss of comprehension, "I'm so proud of you. You are great, a great artist, and a great spirit." And she kissed him again, her eyes shining.

If the Byrdsnest was proud in November of its distinguished head, it positively bristled with importance in December, when Constantine telephoned that the trustees of the Metropolitan were negotiating for Stefan's whole series. This possibility had already been spoken of in the press, though the family had not dared hope too much from the suggestion.

The Museum bought the drawings, and Stefan took his place as one of America's great artists.

"Mary, I'm so glad I can be useful again, as well as ornamental," he grinned, presenting to her with a flourish a delightfully substantial cheque.

His courage, and his happiness in his success, were an increasing joy to Mary. She blossomed in her pride of him, and the old glowing look came back to her face.

Only one thing—besides her anxiety for his health—troubled her. With all his tenderness to her, and his renewed love, he still remained a stranger to his children. He seemed proud of their healthy beauty, and glad of Mary's happiness in them; but their nearness bored and tired him, and they, quick to perceive this, became hopelessly unresponsive in his presence. Ellie would back solemnly away from the approaching chair, and Rosamond would hang mute upon her mother's shoulder. "It's strange," Mary said to the Sparrow, who was quick to notice any failure to appreciate her adored charges; "they're his own, and yet he hasn't the key to them. I suppose it's because he's a genius, and too far apart from ordinary people to understand just little human babies."

The thought stirred faintly the memory of her old wound.



V

That Christmas, for the first time in its history, the Byrdsnest held high festival. House and studio were decorated, and in the afternoon there was a Christmas-tree party for all the old friends and their children.

The dining-room had been closed since the night before in order to facilitate Santa Clans' midnight spiritings.

When all the guests had arrived, and Stefan had been wheeled in from the studio, the mysterious door was at last thrown open, revealing the tree in all its glory, rooted in a floor of glittering snow, with its topmost star scraping the ceiling.

With shouts the older children surrounded it; Ellie followed more slowly, awed by such splendor; and Rosamond crept after, drawn irresistibly by a hundred glittering lures.

Crawling from guest to guest, her tiny hands clutching toys as big as herself, her dark eyes brilliant, her small red mouth emitting coos of rapture, she enchanted the men, and drew positive tears of delight from Constance.

"Oh, Walter!" she cried, shaking her son with viciousness, "how could you have been so monotonous as to be born a boy?"

After a time Mary noticed that Stefan was being tired by the hubbub, and signaled an adjournment to the studio for tea and calm. The elders trooped out; the children fell upon the viands; and Miss Mason caught Rosamond by the petticoat as she endeavored to creep out after Gunther, whose great size seemed to fascinate her.

The sculptor had given Mary a bronze miniature of his now famous "Pioneers" group. It was a beautiful thing, and Constance and James were anxious to know if other copies were to be obtained.

"No," Gunther answered them laconically, "I have only had three cast. One the President wished to have, the second is for myself, and Mrs. Byrd, as the original of the woman, naturally has the third."

"Couldn't you cast one or two more?" Constance pleaded.

"No," he replied, "I should not care to do so."

Stefan examined the bronze with interest, his keen eyes traveling from the man's figure to the woman's.

"It's very good of you both," he said, looking from Gunther to Mary, with a trace of his old teasing smile. Mary blushed slightly. For some reason which she did not analyze she was a trifle embarrassed at seeing herself perpetuated in bronze as the companion of the sculptor.

When the guests began to leave, Mary urged the Farradays to remain a little longer. "It's only five o'clock," she reminded them.

Mrs. Farraday settled herself comfortably, and drew out her khaki-colored knitting. James lit his pipe, and Stefan wheeled forward to the glow of the fire, fitting a cigarette into his new amber holder.

"I have a letter from Wallace," said James, "that I've been waiting to read you. Shall I do so now?"

"Oh, do!" exclaimed Mary, "we shall love to hear it. Wait a moment, though, while I fetch Rosamond—the Sparrow can't attend to them both at once and help Lily."

She returned in a moment with the sleepy baby.

"I'll have to put her to bed soon," she said, settling into a low rocking chair, "but it isn't quite time yet. I suppose Jamie has heard his father's letter?"

"Oh, yes," said James, "and has dozens of his own, too."

"He's such a dear boy," Mary continued, "he's playing like an angel with Ellie in there, while the Sparrow flits."

James unfolded Mac's closely written sheets, and read his latest accounts of the officers' training corps with which he had been for the last six months, the gossip that filtered to them from the front, and his expectation of being soon gazetted to a Highland Regiment.

"The waiting is hard, but when once I get with our own lads in the trenches I'll be the happiest man alive," wrote Mac. "Meanwhile, I think a lot of all you dear people. I'm more than happy in what you tell me of Byrd's success and of the bairns' and Mary's well being. Give them all my love and congratulations."

James turned the last page, and paused. "I think that's about all," he said.

But it was not all. While the others sat silent for a minute, their thoughts on the great struggle, Farraday's eyes ran again down that last page.

"Poor Byrd," Mac wrote, "so you say he'll not last many years. Well, life would have broken him anyway, and it's grand he's found himself before the end. He's not the lasting kind, there's too much in him, and too little. She wins, after all, James; life won't cheat her as it has him. She is here just to be true to her instincts—to choose the finest mate for her nest-building. She'll marry again, though the dear woman doesn't know it, and would be horrified at the thought. But she will, and it won't be either of us—we are too much her kind. It will be some other brilliant egoist who will thrill her, grind her heart, and give her wonderful children. She is an instrument. As I think I once heard poor Byrd say, she is not merely an expression of life, she is life."

James folded the letter and slipped it into his pocket.

"Come, son, we must be going," murmured Mrs. Farraday, putting up her knitting.

"Rosamond is almost asleep," smiled Mary.

"Don't rise, my dear," said the little lady, "we'll find our own way."

"Good-bye, Farraday," said Stefan, "and thank you for everything."

Mary held out her hand to them both, and they slipped quietly out.

"What a good day it has been, dearest. I hope you aren't too tired," she said, as she rocked the drowsy baby.

"No, Beautiful, only a little."

He dropped his burnt-out cigarette into the ash-tray at his side. The rocker creaked rhythmically.

"Mary, I want to draw Rosamond," said Stefan thoughtfully.

"Oh, do you, dearest? That will be nice!" she exclaimed, her face breaking into a smile of pleasure.

"Yes. Do you know, I was watching the little thing this afternoon, when Gunther and all the others were playing with her. It's very strange—I never noticed it before—but it came to me quite suddenly. She's exactly like my mother."

"Is she really?" Mary murmured, touched.

"Yes, it's very wonderful. I felt suddenly, watching her eyes and smile, that my mother is not dead after all. Will you—" he seemed a little embarrassed—"could you, do you think, without disturbing her, let me hold the baby for a little while?"

THE END