"Nor on Arthur," acquiesced he gravely. "It is for that reason that I say you had better not tell her. I usually know what I am saying, do I not? I tell you it is for your own sake that I warn you to be quiet. Arthur isn't going to be held in the leash very long by that piece of china-ware piety, and it is to you he will naturally turn for sympathy. Don't spoil your chance of his friendship by breaking with her yet."

"Will," his wife said, with a glitter in her eyes he knew of old, "sometimes you talk like a very fiend incarnate."

"That," he replied rising, "is precisely what I am. There are a few rare, but fairly well authenticated cases on record, Helen, where a man under stress of circumstances, has been able to keep his own counsel; women without a confidant go mad. For your own sake you'd better trust me, now that Arthur isn't available; so I'll come and see you again. I am obliged to you for this jolly little supper. Your salads always were perfection. I'd like to stay and have you make me some coffee, but I have an engagement at twelve. Good-night."



XXI.

HIS PURE HEART'S TRUTH. Two Gentlemen of Verona; iv.—2.

When Grant Herman attempted to speak with Mrs. Greyson at the Fenton's reception, he had more in view than simply the desire of being near the woman he loved. He was full of trouble and bewilderment, and instinctively turned toward her for aid and sympathy.

The scene between himself and Helen, to which the latter had alluded in her conversation with Dr. Ashton, was of far deeper import than her words might have seemed to imply. In the first shock of discovering that her work was broken she had been so overcome, that although she struggled bravely to conceal her feelings, she had excited the sculptor's keenest pity; and it not unnaturally followed that in attempting to express his sympathy he found himself telling his love before he was aware. He had determined to be silent upon this subject. Uncertain what were Helen's feelings towards him and restrained by a sense of loyalty to the bond which united him to Ninitta, he had resolved to bury his love in his own breast, at least until time gave him opportunity of honorably declaring it. Now circumstances betrayed him into an avowal of his passion; and he was not without the indignant feeling that Ninitta's act had freed him from all obligations to her. It might have required an ingenious casuist to arrive logically at the conclusion that an injury which the Italian had done to another released him from his plighted word, but the person injured was the woman he loved, and he blindly felt that Ninitta had struck at himself through his most sensitive feelings. He renounced all the fealty to which he had been held by a sense of honor, and he now poured out to Helen the full tide of his passionate love.

The sculptor was not a man to be lightly moved, but it is these calm, grave natures that once aroused are most irresistible. His passionate outburst took Helen unaware; she scarcely knew what she did, and she became suddenly aware of a truth so overwhelming that every thing else faded into insignificance beside it.

"I love you!" he cried out; and at the word she first knew, with a poignant pang of mingled bliss and anguish, that she too loved him.

It seemed to her that some power above her own volition ruled her, as in moments of high excitement the body sometimes appears to declare its independence of the will, and to act wholly by its own decisions. She was aware that she raised her eyes to his, although she would have given much to avoid his glance; and she knew that it was from what he read there that he took courage to fold her in his embrace.

Yet with his arms about her and his piercing kisses upon her face, Helen felt as if sinking helplessly into a mighty ocean; as if all struggles must be unavailing, and she could only yield to the resistless love which engulfed her.

From this first feeling of powerlessness, however, her strong nature sprang with a sharp recoil. She was too noble to surrender without a struggle. She would not even think whether she loved this man; that might be considered upon some safe vantage ground; now all energy must be concentrated upon escaping from the deadly peril in which she found herself.

Helen had freed herself as far as she was able from the marriage bond which had so galled her, and she was glad to forget that such a tie had ever existed, but she yet remembered that she was still a wife, and the kiss of a man not her husband overwhelmed her with shuddering humiliation and fear. She struggled from her lover's embrace with such an expression of terror upon her face, that he started back amazed and grieved.

He began to stammer confused words of contrition, of sorrow, of love, and of supplication.

"How could you!" she gasped. "Oh, leave me!"

There came into her excited mind a way of escape, upon which, even though it brought with it a sense of baseness, she seized in despair.

"Ninitta," she said. "Ninitta!"

He gave her a look of pain which went to her very heart. He did not move or answer, but his whole soul seemed to look through his dark eyes in pitiful appeal.

"Go," she continued, but in a hurried voice which betrayed her agitation. "Leave me now. Oh, I cannot bear it!"

And crushed with pain and shame, she buried her face in her hands and burst into tears.

Herman made a step towards her, but instantly she recovered herself, looking up with swimming eyes and lips that quivered despite her utmost effort.

"No," she said, "do not touch me. You must go. I cannot bear another word. Forgive me," she went on rapidly, as he hesitated, still with those appealing eyes fixed upon her. "Oh, forgive me, but go."

He turned slowly and moved towards the door. The broken bas-relief, with its beautiful mutilated figure caught his eye, and seemed again to remind him that he had at last a right to speak to Helen, unhampered by the thought of Ninitta. He looked back as if he would even now disobey her and plead his love anew. But her eyes refused his prayer before it could be uttered. He lingered still an instant.

"I cannot go," he broke out suddenly. "I love you! I must stay! I must at least have an answer. Do you think a man could kiss you once and then leave you like this?"

She shivered as if she felt anew his passionate embrace and shrank from it. She threw her glance about as to discover some means of escape. The gesture, the look, overwhelmed him with sudden remorse. He trusted himself not for a single backward look now, but rushed out of the studio, leaving her sitting there like the princess of the fairy tale who overcame the genii only by recourse to immortal fire which consumed her also.

Alone in his studio the sculptor strode up and down, struggling with the emotion which mastered him. He debated with himself whether Helen loved him or not; yet the more carefully he recalled his interview with her, the more impossible he found it to determine. But hope plucked courage out of this very uncertainty, and clung to the belief that had not Helen in her heart some affection for him, she could not have been so touched.

But what of Ninitta? He threw back his head and walked down the studio, his steps sounding sharply upon the hard cement floor. What of Ninitta? He had absurdly dallied with his supposed obligations to her long enough. Now, at least, after this outrage, he repeated to himself, he was free. He was at liberty now—if indeed he had not always been—to consider what he owed to himself; what to the woman he loved.

He recalled the hot words he had spoken to the model earlier in the afternoon when the anger of discovery was fresh upon him, and he felt a pang of self-reproach. He could not but know how poignant to Ninitta must be the grief of giving him up, although he assured himself that in the long years of separation she must have become accustomed to live without him, and that her grief would be rather fancied than real. Yet he was too tender-hearted to be wholly at ease after all his reasoning. He at last started out to find Ninitta, perhaps to comfort her, perhaps to cast her off forever. At least to come to some definite conclusion of their doubtful relations.

But Ninitta was not to be found. She was not in her attic; nor did she return that night, nor the next day, nor yet the following; and it was to tell of the model's disappearance, and to ask aid in tracing her, that Herman had wished to speak to Helen at the Fenton's reception.



XXII.

UPON A CHURCH BENCH. Much Ado about Nothing; iii.—3.

Herman did not see Helen for several days after the reception, but she came down to the studio Sunday afternoon to begin the repairing of her mutilated bas-relief. The sculptor heard her step pass his door, and felt a thrill at the sound for which he had longingly waited every waking hour since he had heard Helen go out upon the night of Ninitta's disappearance.

He waited what seemed to him a long time, forcing himself to perform certain trifling things needful in the studio, yet Mrs. Greyson had only been able to get fairly to work before she heard his footstep, and then his tap upon her door.

He entered the studio almost hesitatingly, and after the usual greetings stood looking gravely at the disfigured clay.

"I began to think you were never coming to restore it," he remarked, breaking at last the silence.

"I could not bear to touch it," she returned, not caring to confess that she had also wished to avoid him until time should have restored his usual self-control. "But I determined yesterday to begin this morning, only strangely enough I went to church for the first time since I came from Europe."

"Ah!" returned Herman smiling. "I often go to church when I am not too busy."

"I hardly supposed that a Pagan was guilty of going to any church where he could not worship Pasht."

"One can worship whatever deity he pleases in whatever temple, I suppose," was his rejoinder. "I'm catholic in my tastes. I do not so much mind what people worship, if they are only sincere about it."

"It must be a great comfort to believe every thing, if one only could."

"There is often danger," he observed, "that we assume it to be a weakness to believe any thing."

"It is, I'm afraid," replied she, turning her face from him and seemingly intent upon her modeling.

"At least we believe in work," Herman answered, "else we are not artists. You certainly find joy and support in your art."

"Yes," Helen said with a sigh; "but I fancy the joy of creation, great as it is, can never be so satisfying to a woman as to a man. It is humiliating to confess—or it is presumptuous to boast, I am not sure which—but a woman is never so fully an artist as a man. He is in great moments all artist; but a woman is never able to lay herself aside even in her most imaginative moods."

"I cannot think you wholly right," her master returned smiling; "but to go back a little, at least faith is woman's peculiar province and prerogative. We seem nowadays to pride ourselves upon being superior to belief in any thing; but it is really a poor enough hypocrisy. If we really believed nothing, should we ever give up a single selfish desire or combat any impulse that seizes us. For my part, I am glad to find men better than their professions. But this," he added with his genial smile, "is more of a sermon, very likely, than you heard at church."

"I at least agree with it better than the one I heard at church this morning. The preacher patronized the Deity so that he shocked me."

"That troubles me at church," Herman assented; "preachers are so irreverent."

Helen stepped back to observe the effects of the work she was doing.

"Do you think," she ventured, "that it would be possible for me to induce Ninitta to pose again for the May? If I told her that I am not angry, that I understand, and that——"

"But Ninitta is gone!" exclaimed the sculptor, suddenly recalled to present difficulties. "I have not been able to find her since the day she did this."

"Gone!" echoed Helen in dismay; "and you cannot find her?"

Herman related in detail the steps he had taken to trace Ninitta, all of which had thus far proved unavailing. He had endeavored to avoid publicity, but he already began to fear that it would be necessary to call detectives to his aid.

"Not yet," Helen said. "Let me try first. Have you seen Mr. Fenton?"

"No; why? I have been very cautious. I have told nobody but Fred Rangely."

Helen reflected a moment. Her woman's instinct told her that it was not likely Ninitta would put any great distance between herself and the sculptor. The model could have but few acquaintances in the city, and as she would need support it seemed probable she might try posing for some of the artists. As this thought crossed her mind, Helen remembered that Ninitta had promised to pose for Fenton when no longer wanted for the has-relief. It was therefore possible that Fenton might know something of the whereabouts of the missing girl; and in any case Helen had been so used to consulting the artist in any perplexity, that it was but natural for her thoughts to turn to him now.

"Let me try," she repeated. "It will be less likely to excite talk if I look for her; she was my model. Trust the search to me for a day or two."

He was only too glad to do so; glad to be released from the burden of anxiety, as by virtue of some subtle faith in Mrs. Greyson he was; glad of any thing in which he might obey her; glad above all of any bond of common interest which might draw them nearer to each other, even if it were search for the woman who stood between them.

On her way homeward Helen went into Studio Building, but before she had climbed half way to Fenton's room, she encountered Dr. Ashton.

"It is of no use," was his greeting. "He isn't in. His wife has probably taken him to church."

"He was at church this morning," Helen answered, putting her hand into the one Dr. Ashton extended. "I saw him."

"Did you go to church? What a lark."

"It was rather a lark," she assented; "only I got wretchedly blue before the service was done."

"What church was it? Mrs. Fenton looks as if she'd poise dizzily on high church altitudes like the angel on St. Angelo."

"So she does; she goes to the Nativity."

"How did Arthur look?"

"Amused at first; then bored; then cross; and finally, when the sermon was well under way, indignant."

"And his wife?"

"His wife, Will," Helen said with a sudden enthusiasm, "looked like a saint. She really believes all these fables. I wish I did."

"It will be some fun to watch Arthur's conversion and backsliding," Dr. Ashton observed, "if he really gets far enough along to be able to backslide. Where are you going?"

"To see Arthur. I have an errand."

"Do you object to my walking with you?" he asked with a deference rare enough to attract her notice.

The sun was setting, and the trees on the Common, as yet showing but faintest signs of coming buds, stood out against the saffron sky. The long shadows stretched softly over the dull ground, while every slight prominence was gilded and transfigured by the golden glow which flooded from the west. The atmosphere had that peculiar brilliancy characteristic of the season, while the cool and bracing air was full of that champagne-like exhilaration in which lies at once the fascination and the fatality of the New England climate.

It was some time before either broke the silence.

"How I wish," at length began Helen wistfully.

"That shows," spoke her husband, as she left the sentence unfinished, "that you are still under forty. When you have quadrupled your decades you'll thank your stars for deliverances and ask for nothing more."

"When I get to that stage, then," she returned, "I'll take poison."

"Is that a hint?"

"Life is bad enough now," she continued without heeding the interruption, "but better a bitter savor than none at all."

"You should devote yourself to cultivating the approval of conscience as I do. I only do what I think to be right, you know."

"But think right whatever you do."

"Not quite that," returned the Doctor with a laugh, "but the approval of my conscience—or of my reason, which stands in its place—is necessary to my happiness, so I change my principles whenever my acts don't accord with them."

"So do a great many persons," she responded; "perhaps most of us, for that matter, only we are seldom honest enough to own it."

"By the way," queried her companion, as they approached her destination, "how came Mrs. Fenton so quickly domesticated at the Church of the Nativity?"

"There is a young man there—a deacon or a monk; I never know these high church terms; they are usually faded out pieces of Romanism—that once wrote an article which enjoyed the honor of being interred in the Princeton Review when her uncle was one of its editors."

They reached the doorsteps and Dr. Ashton said good-by. Then he turned back.

"By the by," he said. "I walked up with you to make you invite me to supper again. I enjoyed the last time very much."

"Did you?" returned his wife, rather carelessly. "Come to-morrow—no, not until Thursday night."

"Very well. I am to dine here then, and I'll come and give you an account of my visit."



XXIII.

HEART-SICK WITH THOUGHT. Two Gentlemen of Verona; i.—I.

The Fentons were just going to dinner when Helen arrived, and she was persuaded to dine with them. She was not without some curiosity to observe her friend in his new relations, and she also found herself attracted by Edith, although the two women had apparently little in common.

The talk at dinner flowed on easily enough, Arthur conversing in the strain which of old Helen had been pleased to call "amiable," and which fretted her by being conventional and not wholly sincere. She liked the artist best when he spoke without restraint, even though she might not agree with his extravagances and often detected a trace of artificiality in his clever epigrams. It seemed to her that the whole tendency of Edith's influence upon her husband was towards restraint, yet she could not be sure whether the ultimate result upon Fenton's character might not be beneficial.

"It depends upon Arthur himself," Helen mused. "If he is strong enough to endure the struggle of adapting his honest belief to her honest belief, he will be the better for it. I hope his love of ease will not make him evade the difficulty. It never used to occur to me how little I really know Arthur, so that I cannot tell how this will be."

When the host was enjoying his after dinner cigar, which by especial indulgence upon the part of Edith he was allowed to smoke in the parlor, Helen disclosed the object of her visit.

"Do you remember," she asked, "that model who posed for my May, and was to come to you next week?"

"Ninitta? Of course. What of her?"

"That is precisely what I wish to find out," she responded. "She has changed her address, and I thought it possible you might know something of her whereabouts."

"I have not seen her since the morning when she came into your studio. Doesn't Herman know?"

"The truth is," Helen said slowly, weighing her words with regard to their effect upon Edith, "that she has run away, and we do not know what has become of her. She went off in a rage, and I am troubled about her."

"Is she the Italian you spoke of, Arthur?" interrupted Mrs. Fenton in her soft voice. "What is she like?"

"Yes; a black-haired, splendidly shaped girl with piercing black eyes."

"I think I know where she is," Edith said quietly.

"You?" the others asked in one breath.

"You see," Mrs. Fenton explained, turning towards Helen, "I have made rather a plunge into charity work. Of course I meant to do something, but I hardly expected to begin quite so soon. But Mr. Candish is my rector, and he came for me yesterday to go to an Italian family that cannot speak English well. The children have just been put into our schools, but they have not advanced very far as yet. Their teacher asked Mr. Candish to do something for them; they are wretchedly poor. I wish you could see the place, Mrs. Greyson. Eight people in a room not so large as this, and such poverty as you could hardly imagine. Yet these people had taken in another. The mother goes about selling fruit, and she happened to speak to this girl that I think is Ninitta in her own language one night. The girl had been wandering about in the cold, not knowing where to go, and I suppose the sound of her own tongue touched her heart. Poor thing; she would not speak a word to me. How strange that I should chance to find her."

"Thank heaven she is safe," was Helen's inward exclamation. Aloud she said: "But what is she doing?"

"Nothing," Edith answered. "She seems to have had a little money, so that she can pay the family something, and she has helped to take care of the children. They are Catholics, naturally, and not in Mr. Candish's parish; but they do not seem to have much religion of any kind, and keep clear of the priest for some reason."

"My wife will know more of the North End in a month," Arthur observed with an effort at good humor which did not wholly conceal from Helen a trace of annoyance, "than I should in six years. I wonder she can bear to go into such dirty places. Of course philanthropy is all very well, but I'd rather take it after it has been disinfected."

The bitterness in his tone jarred upon Helen. She felt a pang at his evident dissatisfaction with his wife's views, his want of harmony with his new surroundings.

"Arthur must be disciplined," Mrs. Fenton said, smiling fondly. "If he once learns that the secret of being happy lies in helping others, he'll be unselfish from mere selfishness, if from nothing else."

"Happy!" Helen exclaimed involuntarily. "Does one ever expect to be happy nowadays? Happiness went out of fashion with our grandmothers' bonnets."

"In this world," Edith answered, without any trace in her voice of the reproof which Helen half expected, "perhaps you are right. The age is too restless and skeptical for happiness here; but that makes me long the more for it hereafter."

"But even in a future life," returned Helen, "I can hardly expect to be happy, since I shall still be myself."

"Happiness," was Mrs. Fenton's reply, "is a question of harmony with surroundings, is it not? And your surroundings in the other life may be such that you cannot but be happy."

"No more theology, please," interposed Arthur. "You forget, Edith, that I have been to church to-day, and too much piety at once might impair my spiritual digestion forever."

A perception that the flippancy of his tone shocked his wife, made Helen turn the conversation again to Ninitta, arranging to go with Mrs. Fenton in the morning to find the missing girl.

They fell into silence after this, the twilight deepening until only the glow of the fire lighted the room. Edith went to the piano and played a bit of Mozart, wandering off then into the hymn-tunes which she loved and which were familiar in all orthodox homes of the last generation: plaintive Olmutz and stately Geneva, aspiring Amsterdam and resonant St. Martin's, placid Boylston and grand Hamburg, Nuremburg, Benevento, Turner and Old Hundred; the tunes of our fathers, the melodies which embody the spirit of the old time New England Sabbath, a day heavy, constrained and narrow, it may be; but, too, a day calm, unworldly and pure.

Arthur's cigar was finished, and he had fallen into a deep reverie, looking into the coals. He recalled his conversations with Helen before his marriage. He wondered whether his acquiescence in the limitations of his present condition, his yielding to his wife's social and religious views, was an advance or a deterioration. These pious tunes jarred upon his mood, and he was glad when his wife left the instrument. His Bohemian instinct stirred within him, and taunted the ease-loving quality of his nature which put him in subjection to that which he believed no more now than in the days when he was the most sharp-spoken of the Pagans. A wave of disgust and self-loathing swept over him. He turned abruptly in the dusk toward Helen.

"Sing to us," he said. "Edith has never heard you."

But Helen had been moved by the melodies, which came to her as an echo from her childhood. She understood the half-peremptory accent in Arthur's voice to which she had so often yielded, but to which she would not now submit.

"No," she answered. "How can you ask me. My barbaric chant would be wholly out of keeping here. Some other time I shall be glad to sing for Mrs. Fenton; now I must go home."



XXIV.

IN PLACE AND IN ACCOUNT NOTHING. I. Henry IV.; v.—I.

Notwithstanding her previous visit, Mrs. Fenton found it no easy matter to guide Helen to the place where Ninitta had taken refuge.

The poorer classes of foreigners in any city are led by similarity of language and occupations to gather into neighborhoods according to their nationality, and the Italians are especially clannish. The fruit-venders and organ-grinders form separate colonies, each distinguished by the peculiarities incident to the calling of its inhabitants, the crooked courts in the fruit-sellers' neighborhood being chiefly marked to outward observance by the number of two-wheeled hand-carts which, out of business hours, are crowded together there.

Ninitta was found in a room tolerably clean for that portion of the city, the old fruit woman who was its mistress having retained more of the tidiness of thrifty peasant ancestors than most of her class. One room was made to accommodate the mother and seven children, and during the absence of the former from home the premises were left in charge of a girl just entering her teens, who, when Helen and Edith reached the place, was engaged in preparing the family dinner of maccaroni. The younger members of the family had just returned from school, and were noisily clamoring for their share, and all together relating the incidents of the day.

Upon a bed in one corner lay the object of their search, her face flushed, her hair disordered, her eyes wild and vacant. To all appearances she was in a high fever, and she took no heed of Edith, who approached the bed and spoke to her. At the sound of Mrs. Greyson's voice, however, the sick girl gave a cry and raised herself into a sitting posture.

"No, no!" she exclaimed in Italian, excitedly, "I will not! I will not!"

Helen drew off her gloves and sat down upon the dingy bed beside Ninitta, regarding her with pitying eyes.

"You shall not," she answered, in the girl's own language. "You need do nothing but what you choose."

The soft tone seemed to calm Ninitta. She allowed Helen to arrange the soiled and crumpled pillows, and yielded when her self-constituted nurse wished her to lie down again. The latter procured a bowl of water, and with her handkerchief bathed the sick girl's face, soothing her with womanly touches which waked in Edith a new feeling of sympathy and tenderness. Mrs. Greyson's white fingers, contrasting strongly with the Italian's clear dark skin, smoothed the tangled hair from the hot forehead, and all the while her rich, pure voice murmured comforting words, of little meaning in themselves, perhaps, but sweet with the sympathy and womanhood which spoke through them.

Edith meanwhile was not idle. She applied herself to hushing the boisterous children, and to bringing something like quiet out of the tumult of the crowded room. She assisted the girl with her maccaroni, gravely listening to the principles which governed its equitable distribution, with her own hands giving the grimy little children the share belonging to each. An air of comfort seemed to come over the frowsy room after Edith had quietly set a chair straight here, picked up something from the floor there, and arranged the ragged shade at the window. Even the little Italians, half barbarians as they were, felt the change, and were more subdued.

Ninitta, too, was calmed and soothed, and, with Helen's cool hand upon her hot brow, she sank presently into a drowse.

"Mrs. Fenton," Helen whispered, fanning her sleeping patient, "Ninitta cannot remain here. I must take her home with me. I think she had better run the risk of being moved than to be ill in this crowded room."

"But," remonstrated Edith, somewhat aghast at this summary procedure, "you do not even know what is the matter with her."

"No," Helen returned lightly, "but I shall probably discover."

"Not by finding it something contagious, I hope," her friend said, laying her hand upon Mrs. Greyson's forehead with a slight, caressing touch.

"Can you get me a hack?" Helen asked of the girl who kept the house.

But the girl had no idea how to obtain one of those vehicles, which she had been accustomed to see driving about with a certain awe, but without the hope of ever being able to do more than admire them from a distance, unless, indeed, she should have the great good fortune of going to a funeral, when perhaps she might even ride in one, as did little Sally McMann of the next court, when her mother died. Mrs. Fenton therefore went herself for the carriage, finding remonstrance in vain to change her companion's decision.

During her absence Ninitta awakened, and, while seeming more rational, was less quiet than before. She repulsed her visitor with angry looks and muttered defiance. Knowing perfectly well the cause of the girl's agitation, Helen knew, also, that it was best to go directly to the root of the matter, and she did so unshrinkingly.

"You are wrong," she said in Ninitta's ear. "It is you he loves. You are to go home with me because he wishes it."

At first the sick girl seemed to gather no meaning from these words, but as Helen repeated the assurance again and again, in different phrases and with Herman's name, she became passive, as if she at least caught the spirit if not the actual significance.

Mrs. Fenton had some difficulty in finding a carriage, and by the time she returned Ninitta had yielded herself submissively to Helen's guidance.

Mrs. Greyson saw that her charge was carefully protected against the cold, a matter which the mildness of the day rendered easy, and, supported by the two ladies, the model was able to walk down stairs to the carriage.

During the drive homeward Helen lay back thinking hotly, and flushed with excitement. Ninitta sank into a doze, and Mrs. Fenton sat looking at her friend with the air of one who has discovered in an acquaintance characteristics before wholly unsuspected. She hesitated a little, and then, mastering her shyness, she bent forward and kissed Helen's hand.

The other submitted in silence. Indeed, the exaltation of her mood seemed to lift her above her surroundings so that she felt a strange remoteness from her companion. Yet she was conscious of a vague twinge of annoyance at Edith's act, although she could neither have excused nor defined the feeling. Mrs. Fenton not infrequently aroused in her a curious mingling of attraction and repulsion; and it was under the influence of the latter that she answered brusquely her friend's next remark.

"How did you quiet Ninitta?" Edith asked.

"By telling her lies," returned Helen wearily and laconically.

"What!"

"She is in no condition to be dealt with rationally," continued Mrs. Greyson, in a tone explanatory, but in no way defensive, "so I said whatever would soothe her."

Edith sat in silent dismay. Apparently the woman before her, by whose generous self-forgetfulness she had been touched, was perfectly untroubled by the idea of speaking a falsehood, a state of mind so utterly beyond Edith's experience as to be incomprehensible to her. She could not bring herself to remonstrate, but it pained her that such philanthropy should be stained by what she considered so wrong.

Mrs. Fenton was perhaps equally mistaken in her opinion of Helen's regard for truth and of her philanthropy. Mrs. Greyson had a deep repugnance to falsehood, and Arthur Fenton had often good-humoredly jeered at what he called her Puritanic scrupulousness in this respect. On an occasion such as at present, however, the use of an untruth would cause her not even a second thought, her reason so strongly supporting her course as even to overcome her instincts; a fact which a moralist might deplore but which still remains a fact.

Her philanthropy, upon the other hand, although seeming to Edith so disinterested, was largely instigated by a desire to aid Grant Herman. Just what she wished or expected him to do, she could not have told, her actions being no more regulated by strict logic than those of most women; but she felt that it was the office of friendship to see, if possible, that no harm came to the Italian through the jealousy which both herself and Herman knew to be but too well founded. She determined to take Ninitta home and do for her all that was necessary, in order that the sculptor be spared the remorse which would pursue him if harm came to his old betrothed. She was not without a secret feeling, moreover, scarcely acknowledged to herself, that she owed some reparation to the girl whose lover's heart she had won, no matter how undesignedly.

Reaching home, she got Ninitta to bed and sent for Dr. Ashton. Then she dispatched a note to Grant Herman, saying:

"Ninitta is with me; give yourself no uneasiness."



XXV.

THIS DEED UNSHAPES ME.

Measure for Measure; iv.—4.

Ninitta's illness proved after all very slight. So slight, indeed, that Dr. Ashton, calling in on his way to dine with the Fentons Thursday evening, found her gone. She had insisted upon returning to her attic, although Helen had not allowed her to depart without promising not to abscond a second time.

Ninitta was grateful to Mrs. Greyson with all the ardor of her passionate southern heart. She did not, it is true, understand the relations between Herman and Helen, but even her jealousy was lost in the gratitude she felt for the beautiful woman who had cared for her, and it is not unlikely saved her from a dangerous illness. It did not seem possible to the undisciplined Italian, versed only in crude, simple emotions, that a woman who was her rival could treat her with tenderness. She accepted Helen's kindness as indisputable proof that the latter did not love the sculptor, a conclusion which the premises scarcely warranted. She volunteered to pose again, and Mrs. Greyson, thinking it well to keep the girl under her influence, and desiring a return to at least the semblance of the peaceful existence preceding the stormy episode just ended, eagerly accepted this offer, only stipulating that the model should undertake nothing until she was really well able.

"I shall come back to supper," Dr. Ashton said, as he left his wife. "I have half a mind not to go to Fenton's; only it amuses me to watch the fellow's degeneration."

"It never amuses me to watch any degradation," she returned gravely. "How do you know he is degenerating? If you mean by following his wife, why, they may be right after all, and what we call superstition the veriest truth."

"Of course," answered he. "I never pretended to administer the exclusive mysteries of truth; but it is always a degradation to yield to personal influence at the expense of conviction. Arthur is as much of a heathen to-day as he ever was, only he is too fond of comfort to have the courage of his opinions."

Helen sighed.

"Truth to me," she said thoughtfully, "is whatever one sincerely believes; I cannot conceive of any other standard. One man's truth is often another's falsehood."

"You are as dull as a preface to-night, Helen; what carking care is gnawing at your vitals?"

"Nothing in particular. A certain melancholy is befitting a widow, you know, and that's what I am supposed to be."

"On the contrary there is a certain vivacity about the word widow to my mind."

"Your experience has been wider than mine. I am aware that I am too much given to vast moral reflections, but you provoke them."

"I am sorry to provoke you," he said gayly. "Forgive me before supper time; who knows what rich experiences I may have between now and then. Good-by."

As he walked toward his appointment, could Dr. Ashton's vision have reached to the house whither he was going, he would have seen Arthur Fenton and his wife sitting together before an open fire awaiting their guest. The artist was showing Edith a portfolio of sketches by foreign painters, which he had brought from his studio.

"What a strange uncanny thing this is," he remarked, holding one up. "It is just like Frontier; I never saw any thing more characteristic. I wonder you got so few of his tricks, Edith, while you studied with him."

"He always repelled me. I was afraid of him. Where did you get this sketch?"

"Dr. Ashton gave it to me."

"Dr. Ashton!"

"Yes; when he was in Paris, both he and his wife were intimate with Frontier. Or at least Will was."

"Oh, Arthur!"

She leaned forward in her chair, her always pale face assuming a new pallor. Laying her hand upon her husband's, she asked in a quick, excited manner:

"Do you know how Frontier died?"

"I know he died suddenly; now you speak of it, I have an idea it was a case of felo de se. You know I was in Munich at the time."

"Arthur," Edith said earnestly, "I have never told even you; but I saw Frontier die. I had a pass-key to his studio, and his private rooms were just behind it. That night I went in on my way from dinner—Uncle Peter and I had been dining together, and I left him at the door with the carriage—after a study I'd forgotten. We were going to Rome the next morning, and I didn't want to leave it. The picture was at the further end of the studio, and as I went down the room I heard voices and saw that Frontier's door was open. He sat at a table with a tiny wine-glass in his hand. A man who stood back to me said, just as I came within hearing: 'It is none of my affair, and I shall not interfere; but you'll allow me to advise you not to be rash.' I could not hear Frontier's answer, partly because I paid no attention, of course never suspecting the truth. But as I went towards my easel, Frontier, hearing the noise, I suppose, and afraid of being interrupted, caught up the glass and drank what was in it. The other man sprang forward just in time to catch him as he fell back, and it suddenly came over me that he was taking poison. I cried out and ran into the room, but it seemed only an instant before it vas all over. Oh, it was terrible, Arthur, terrible!"

She covered her agitated face with her hands, as if to shut out the vision which rose before her. Her husband sat in silent astonishment, a conviction growing in his mind of whom the other witness of Frontier's death must have been.

"Arthur," Edith broke out suddenly, "that man was no better than a murderer. He let Frontier kill himself. When I cried out, 'Oh, why didn't you stop him!' he said as coolly as if I had asked the most trivial question, 'Why should I? What right had I to interfere?' It was terrible! He seemed to me a perfect fiend!"

"It was—who was it?" demanded her husband, a name almost escaping him in his excitement.

"It was Dr. Ashton; the man who is coming to sit down at your table to-night. Arthur, I cannot meet him! I knew when he came to our reception that I had seen him before, but I could not tell where. There is his ring now. Let me get by you!"

"But where are you going?" Fenton asked in amazement.

"To my room. Any where to get out of his way."

"But what shall I tell him?"

"The truth; that I will not sit down to eat with a murderer."

She vanished from the room, leaving her husband alone. Dr. Ashton's step was already upon the stair, and however keenly Mrs. Fenton might feel the wickedness of the Doctor in not preventing Frontier's self-destruction, the action was too strictly in accord with Arthur's own views to allow of his condemning it. His friend found him in a state of confusion which instantly connected itself in the guest's mind with the non-appearance of Edith, an impression which was strengthened by the lameness of the excuses tendered for her absence. Dr. Ashton not unnaturally concluded that he had just escaped stumbling upon a family quarrel. He accepted whatever his host chose to say, and the two proceeded rather gloomily to dinner.

In Arthur's mind there sprang an irritation against both his wife and his friend. His instincts were all protective, that term including comfort as well as self-preservation. He was intensely annoyed at his wife's attitude, and began to vent his spleen in cynical speeches, which since his marriage had been rare with him.

"Christian grace," he declared, "is exactly like milk; excellent and nourishing while it is fresh, but hard to get pure, and even then sure to sour."

"Say something more original if you are cross, Arthur," observed his friend good humoredly. "What is the matter? Is it a new rug or a Japanese bronze you are dying for?"

"Hang rugs and bronzes," retorted Arthur, with a vicious determination to be ill-natured. "If I can get the necessities of life, I am lucky."

"Nonsense," was the reply. "It isn't that. The lack of the necessities of life makes a man sad; it is the lack of luxuries that makes him cynical."

Dr. Ashton was perfectly right in his inward comment that Fenton was secretly regretting his marriage. This was the thought that filled Arthur's mind. It was true he had had no absolute disagreement with his wife, although it is not impossible that it might have come to this, had a delay in the guest's arrival allowed time. But it filled the husband with an unreasoning rage that Edith presumed to establish so strict a code of morals. He felt that her position as his wife demanded more conformity to his standards. Why need she trouble herself about that which did not concern her, and sit in such lofty judgment upon the morals of her neighbors? Did she propose keeping Dr. Ashton's conscience as well as her own—and his? Certainly those whom the husband found worthy his friendship it ill became the wife to stigmatize and avoid. He sat moodily tearing his fish in pieces instead of eating; for the moment wholly forgetting his duty as host.

"If you'll pardon my mentioning it," Dr. Ashton said at length, "you are about as cheerful company as a death's head. You are so melancholy that I am tempted to fling in your face one of my old epigrams; that love is a gay young bachelor who can never be persuaded to marry and settle down."

The other laughed and made an effort to shake off his gloom; but with so little success that his guest resolved to escape at the earliest moment possible. Something in Fenton's forced talk, however, attracted Dr. Ashton's attention.

"My wife was a pupil of Frontier."

The simple phrase, which had escaped Arthur's lips because it had been in his mind not to allude to this fact, might have gone unnoticed had not the speaker himself so strongly felt the shock of disclosure as to show sudden confusion. The whole matter was at once clear to Dr. Ashton, who having recognized Edith at the reception, had been prepared for identification in his own turn.

"So that," he observed calmly, "is the reason Mrs. Fenton does not dine with us to-night. I knew she was sure to recognize me sooner or later; but as I had no motive for concealing this matter, on the other hand I had no reason for recalling so unpleasant a circumstance to her mind."

There was a pause of a moment, and then the Doctor continued:

"I think Frontier was rather foolish. I told him so. A charming little Hungarian girl of whom he was fond, had left him to follow the fortunes of a Polish Count, or something of the sort. I do not see why a man should kill himself for so trifling a thing as a woman; but if he chose to, I am not one of those officious persons who feel justified in interfering with any private act they don't happen to approve. I certainly should resent such impertinent intrusion into my own affairs."

"And I," assented Arthur doggedly; "but my wife——"

"Certainly; I understand. Mrs. Fenton says hard things of me because I would not rob poor Frontier of what little comfort he could get from dying. Very well; I will not offend her by my presence. Only she is setting herself a hard task in attempting to treat people according to their conservatism. In these days the sheep and goats have come to be so much alike in appearance, that I scarcely see how a mere mortal is to distinguish between them. My own case I settle for her by avoiding her house."

"But this is my house," protested Arthur, intensely chagrined.

"No," his guest replied, still smiling and moving toward the door. "It is the nest you have built for your love and your—regeneration! Good night."



XXVI.

THERE BEGINS CONFUSION. I Henry VI.; iv.—i.

Alone in her own room, Edith relieved her overwrought feelings by a burst of tears, brief, indeed, but bitter. Like her husband, she felt that this incident, although not assuming the guise of a quarrel, was an opening wedge in the unity of their affection. Unlike Arthur, however, she thought of it with self-reproach and misgiving. She did not for an instant consider the possibility of having taken a different position in regard to Dr. Ashton, yet in a womanly, illogical way, she felt that she should have learned her husband's wishes before so vehemently declaring her own views.

She heard the artist and his guest go in to dinner, and the thought flashed upon her that this was the first time her husband had dined without her since their marriage. She wondered if he remembered it, and, remembering, regretted. She longed for companionship, for some friend into whose sympathetic ear she could pour her story, from whom she might ask advice. She reflected sadly how far she was removed from her intimate friends. Of her new acquaintances many had been most kind to her, but towards none of them, not even to her relatives, had she been so strongly drawn as to wish now to go to them for confidence and sympathy; unless, came a second thought, it were Mrs. Greyson. She was a widow, Edith reflected, and had evidently suffered much, while the strength of her character was evident from her dealing with the Italian girl. It would be no disloyalty to go to her; there had been no words spoken between husband and wife which could not be told a friend, and Edith felt that she needed the advice of a woman more versed in the intricacies of life than herself.

She dressed herself for walking, and slipped noiselessly out of the house.

Mrs. Greyson was at dinner, and was naturally surprised at seeing her caller, but she had both too much tact and too much breeding to ask explanations.

"I do hope you have not dined," she said. "I am so much alone that it is a perfect delight to me to have company. My dinner is a little like a picnic, but if you will only consider how great a favor you are doing me by sharing it, the consciousness of philanthropy ought to make it palatable."

Neither lady mentioned Arthur, although his name was uppermost in the thoughts of both. They sat down together in Helen's tiny dining-room, and served by her only maid, had a charming meal. The hostess exerted herself to entertain her guest, wisely judging that what Edith said in calmness she would be far less likely to regret than words uttered in the unguarded moments of her excitement. She told Mrs. Fenton stories of her studio life both in Boston and abroad, she led Edith on to speak of her own travels and experiences, until the latter almost forgot that she was dining in one house and her husband in another. It was not until the coffee was reached, coffee made as only Helen could make it, that the subject of the visit was really broached.

"How is Mr. Fenton?" Helen asked deliberately, believing the time had come for such a question.

The face of the other fell. She experienced a pang at the consciousness of having been gay and happy, forgetful of her husband and her trouble.

"He is well," she answered falteringly.

"Why did you not bring him with you?" continued Mrs. Greyson lightly, yet with a secret determination to know the cause of her guest's evident disturbance.

"He did not know I was coming," Edith responded in a low voice. "That is what I came to talk about. I thought you might understand; but it involves a third person, and perhaps I ought not to tell you. I am sure, though," she went on, gaining confidence now that the ice was broken, "that I can trust you. A friend of Arthur's came to dine to-night, and just as the door-bell rang, I found him to be the man I once saw commit murder in Paris."

"Murder!" exclaimed Helen, turning white. "Commit murder?"

"Consent to it," corrected Edith, unconsciously a little pleased to have produced so great an effect upon her usually self-possessed friend. "He looked on while Frontier took poison, without trying to prevent him."

"But that," Mrs. Greyson said slowly, "is hardly the same thing as murder."

"It is quite as bad," Edith protested earnestly. "It makes me shudder to think of his dining alone with Arthur at this moment. Who knows what might happen!"

"Nothing tragic, I think," Helen replied smiling. "He does not go about with pistols in his belt, I suppose.'

"It is awful to me," Edith continued, with increasing excitement, too much stirred to notice the sarcasm. "I told Arthur I could not sit down with a murderer, and just at that moment we heard his step, and I ran away upstairs; and then I felt dreadfully, and I came to you."

"I thank you for your confidence. But what do you mean to do? What will Arthur tell him?"

"The truth, I hope."

"He is scarcely likely to say to the guest he has himself invited that you think him a murderer," answered her friend, smiling again, "and I am not sure that he would even look at this quite so severely as you do."

"How else can he look at it?" demanded Edith. "How else can any one look at it? Isn't it murder to take human life, and if one does not prevent suicide when he might, isn't it the same as if he did it himself?"

"We will not get into a discussion," Helen replied gently. "I feel about it as you do; though I believe very differently. But I see perfectly well how a man might be strictly honest in thinking that it was the privilege of any human being to lay aside his life when he is weary of it; and I do not presume to condemn others for feeling what I only think I believe."

"Think you believe!" cried the other in horror. "You do not think you believe that murder is right?"

"Assuredly not; but as there are so many related points upon which we do not agree, would it not be better to talk of this particular case than of general belief?"

"But it is impossible for any one to believe as you say," persisted Edith; "simply impossible. No one can believe that wrong is right."

"But each has his own standard."

Against this Edith protested, but Helen returned no answer. She regretted being involved in such a debate, and resolved to let the discussion go no further. They sat in silence a moment, and then Edith again spoke.

"I do not know what to do," she said. "Of course Arthur cannot know that man any longer. You were in Paris at the time Frontier died, were you not? Did you ever know——"

She broke off suddenly, remembering that she had not intended disclosing the name of her guest.

"Dr. Ashton?" Helen returned, fixing her eyes upon her companion, and unconsciously speaking with a deliberation which gave especial weight to her words. "Yes; I know him. We went to Paris together."

"Together! Was he a friend of your husband? How did you know whom I meant?"

There was no perceptible pause before Helen answered; but meanwhile she determined to throw aside all concealment. She could no longer stand before Arthur Fenton's wife with the humiliation of even a tacit deception between them. She felt a spirit of defiance rising within her. Who was this woman that she assumed the right to judge them all by standards for whose narrowness only contempt was possible! At least she would rise above all conventional prejudices, and no longer tacitly ask, as by silence she had done, exemption from the harsh judgments of Mrs. Fenton's creed.

Helen was too womanly not to shrink from this disclosure, and she had been too thoroughly educated in the faith by which Edith lived not to understand just how her life would appear seen through the latter's belief. Disconnected with a question relating to the marriage relation and by implication casting reflection upon her delicacy and even purity of life as a woman separated from her lawful husband, Helen could have met with dispassionate reasoning whatever assault Edith made upon her. This point was too vital, it touched too closely the core of her woman's nature, and although she retained perfectly her self-control, there was a pulse of passion in her voice when she spoke.

"Dr. Ashton," she said unflinchingly, "is my husband."

"What?" cried Edith.

"We have not found it convenient to live together," Helen continued, with increasing calmness, a faint tinge of contempt creeping into her voice, "and so since my return from Europe I have taken my mother's name to avoid gossip. Dr. Ashton and I are very good friends still."

"And did Mr. Fenton know this?" asked the other, very pale.

"Certainly; although you understand that it is not a matter which we discuss with the world at large. I pass, I believe, as a widow; though I have never done or said any thing to give color to that idea."

It is doubtful if Helen fully comprehended the effect of these words upon her guest. Every fiber of Edith's being tingled. All her most sacred principles seemed outraged. She in some remote way felt, moreover, as if to hear without protest so lax notions of the responsibilities of marriage was to stain her womanhood and dim the luster of her modesty.

"How dared he introduce you to me?" she cried. "You are the wife of a murderer and you defend his crime; you pretend to be a widow, you ignore your marriage——"

"Stop," the hostess said with dignity. "We need not go over the ground. Mr. Fenton made us acquainted, I presume, because he agrees with me in seeing nothing wrong in my position, however unconventional it may be. You will see that if I had been ashamed of the fact I could easily have kept it from your knowledge."

But Edith made her no answer. She was too much overwhelmed by the various emotions which the disclosure of the evening had aroused.

Edith was, from Helen's point of view, fatally narrow, it is true; but the latter might have reflected that the limitations of her friend's vision were the faiths of the Christian world, and that her tenacity arose not from obstinacy but sincerity. It is an age when belief and doubt are brought face to face so sharply that the shock disturbs by its jar the most ordinary affairs of life.

Edith was pure, high minded, simple souled, and for the rest she was honest and earnest. Her creeds were vitalized by the warm fervor with which she clung to them, and what more could be demanded of her?

She quitted the dining-room, and soon Helen heard the outer door close behind her. The night gathered, and the lonely woman left behind sat long in sad reverie, until the door was again opened to admit Dr. Ashton.



XXVII.

WEIGHING DELIGHT AND DOLE. Hamlet; i.—2.

Dr. Ashton came in too full of his own interview with Arthur to notice particularly if his wife showed signs of agitation.

"My dear," he said, throwing himself into a chair, "it is at once one of the latest and the wisest of my reflections that you had better consider a newly married man as an entire stranger and form his acquaintance quite from the foundation, wholly unbiased by any notion you had of him as a bachelor."

"His wife," responded Helen quietly, "has been dining with me, so I understand something of the situation. But how did Arthur behave?"

"Like any husband who does not care to quarrel with his wife even when he disapproves of her. It is upon that principle that matrimonial felicity depends. Do you say Mrs. Fenton has been here?"

"Yes; she came to me for sympathy and I administered it by telling her that I am your wife."

"The devil! I beg your pardon; but, Helen, it was precisely because I knew she was sure to remember this Frontier scrape that I wanted her not to know. She will be very hard on you."

"Christianity is always hard," returned she; "but what difference does it make; it was only a question of time. She is sweet and pure and good, Will, but her religion holds her in bands stronger than steel. I couldn't long keep step with one in chains. It might as well come now as any time."

Her husband looked at her with evident interest not unmixed with admiration.

"She provokes me to do and to say childish things," Helen continued, "just to shock her. I told her bluntly the other day that I had been telling a falsehood, and she had the impertinence to look shocked. I am not sure that I did not go so far as to say I 'lied,' a word that hardly holds the place in English that it did in the good days of Mrs. Opie. She would have been reconciled if I had said I told what I hoped was true."

"I should have told her," laughed Dr. Ashton, "that I only used truth as the Egyptians used straw in bricks, the smallest possible quantity that will hold the rest together."

"I cannot see why Arthur married her," Helen said musingly.

"Oh, as to that, an idle man will fall in love with any pretty woman who will snub him."

"But Arthur isn't idle, and she doesn't snub him."

"Very well; he married her because he fell in love for no reason but the weakness of our sex."

"Love seems generally to be regarded by the masculine mind in the light of a weakness."

"Isn't it?" her husband returned. "Love is the condition of desiring the impossible, and if that is not a weakness, what becomes of logic?"

"I am tired of logic," she said, rising abruptly. "I am tired of every thing. Let us have supper. I want a glass of wine. I am sure I tried to be kind to Mrs. Fenton. I would have helped her if I could; but how could I assist her unless she chose to let me, and that, too, knowing who I am."

"I never knew you to be other than kind," was the grave reply, which brought to Helen's cheek a faint flush of pleasure.

The servant came in with supper, and the slender glasses were filled with Rhine wine.

"I could not help thinking," Dr. Ashton said, lifting his glass,—"I drink to your very good health, my dear—I could not help thinking of my wedding gift to Arthur, that he asked me for it, I mean."

"I thought of it, too, when his wife told me the story. It is well she does not know that of you."

"Oh, it wouldn't matter," he said carelessly. "She couldn't feel a greater horror of me than she does already. Do you see the mark of Cain on my forehead, Helen?"

"Isn't it droll," she returned, with a smile half pensive, half humorous, "to feel ourselves suddenly tried by new standards and found so wanting. I am not sure but dramatic propriety demands that I should poison Mrs. Fenton. I have that vial, you know."

"Did you notice the inscription on the vial?"

"No; is there one?"

"See for yourself," he answered, refilling his glass.

She rose from the table and brought from a small cabinet the morocco case, unopened since Arthur had given it to her. A certain dread and distaste had prevented her examining it. Now she sat down again in her place, a beautiful woman, with the light falling upon her from above, shining upon her golden hair, and bringing out the hues of her sea-blue dress. Her husband watched her as she held the case a moment in her delicate, firm fingers before unclasping it. He had learned within these last weeks that his old love for Helen had re-awakened; or more truly that a new affection had been born. The knowledge had come to him through thinking upon the relations between Helen and Arthur and in speculating concerning her feeling for Grant Herman, and it had been in his mind when he described love as the desire for the impossible. He had determined to speak his passion, but as he looked at his wife sitting within arm's length yet as remote as if half the world lay between them, he hesitated. Helen unclasped the case and lifted the tiny cut-glass vial from its velvet bed.

"How extravagant you were in your vial," she said, involuntarily lifting it to her nostrils.

"Don't!" Dr. Ashton exclaimed, leaning forward suddenly.

"Is it so deadly as that!" she asked in some dismay, holding it off.

"It is simply pure prussic acid," he replied. "But it might be loosely stopped."

She examined carefully the minute writing engraved upon the glass.

"'Death foils the gods,'" she read. "Is it one of your own wickednesses, Will?" "I don't know. By the way, we might send it to Mrs. Fenton now as a souvenir of the two desirable acquaintances she has lost."

"What a brood of vipers she must think us, Will. I think it is pathetic, probably; but I cannot help being amused. It is rather an odd sensation to find that instead of being the harmless, insignificant body I have always supposed, I am really a hardened and abandoned reprobate."

"Oh, I've always known it, but I did not tell you for fear of destroying your peace of mind."

"I'm afraid," sighed Helen, rather absently, "that—if you don't mind the slang—Arthur has an elephant on his hands."

"Yes," assented the other, "himself."

She laughed musically, toying with the little cut-glass vial.

"How familiarity takes away the dread of any thing," she remarked. "We become accustomed to any thing; and, while I dare say it is the shallowest of sophistry, that ought to be an argument in favor of the theory that vice and fearfulness are alike only strangeness."

"That is rather a sophistical bit of logic; so perfectly so that it ought to be theology. Excuse me, but could you let me have a morsel of cheese."

"There does not seem to be any for you to have," she said, glancing over the table.

"Isn't there," returned he, as carelessly as if he had not noted that fact. "It is of no consequence."

"Oh, I can easily get it; I suppose Hannah forgot it."

She restored the vial to its place, laying the closed case by her plate, and left the room. The instant the door closed behind her, Dr. Ashton reached across the table, possessed himself of the vial, returning the case to its former position. His wife turned just outside the door, and came back with a meaning smile to take up the empty case and lock it again in the cabinet.

"I cannot trust you," she remarked with a smile; "you are too eager to foil the gods."

He smiled in return, holding his wine-glass up to the light.

"There is more where that came from," he said. "You forget my profession."

"Of what are you musing so intently?" Helen queried, half an hour later, while, the supper being ended, her husband was enjoying his cigar.

"Of two things which I have to communicate. One is a folly and the other—or perhaps I should say each—is a misfortune."

"The folly," returned she, "I forgive; the misfortune I regret. What are they?" "I am glad you forgive the folly. That gives me boldness to tell it. I have fallen in love."

"You, Will! With whom?"

"That is the madness of it. With my wife."

"Will!"

"It is the truth," he went on, half whimsically, but with a certain ring of earnestness in his tone. "I acknowledge the madness, the poor taste of a man's falling in love with his own wife, but the fact stubbornly remains. I have been in love with you for a long time, but I stood back for Arthur like a good fellow."

"I never was in love with Arthur," she interrupted.

"It is no matter," he continued. "The question is, can't you get up a grain of grace for me, old lady?"

He leaned over the table, his dark eyes shining as she had never seen them before. She was fascinated by his gaze; she felt as if the ground were slipping from beneath her feet, and as though he were casting upon her an evil spell. A wave of despair swept over her. Must she again submit to his power; were the old days of bitter bondage to return; was she nothing but a puppet to his will?

In this extremity a memory saved her. Unable to withdraw her gaze from her husband's face, there came to her suddenly the look in the eyes of Grant Herman that day when he told her his love. The blood surged to her cheeks, but her calmness returned.

"It is of no use, Will," she said with gentle firmness. "All that is past forever between us. We had better not speak of it," she added wistfully. "I have so few friends that I cannot bear to lose any one of them."

"My folly is then my misfortune," he responded, with no appearance of diminished good humor. "It is the pleasure of the gods to torment me; I suppose it amuses them. The old Romans were only aping them in their blood-thirsty sports, and I fancy that is the secret of their deification, for nothing seems so much to the liking of the gods as to torment humanity."

The evident endeavor which the speaker made to appear flippant and at his ease showed her how deeply he was moved. His wife felt this without fully reasoning it out, and the consciousness that this self-controlled man was so stirred awoke in her a strange and powerful excitement. She turned a shade paler, as she looked silently down into her wine-glass. Her own life had been too sad for her not to feel some emotion at his words. She strove to repress the thoughts which made her bosom swell and heave, yet it was from them her words came when she broke the silence.

"It is bitterest to find one's self mistaken. To find that our gods are only clay like the rest of humanity. I could forgive a friend for neglect, abuse or any cruelty; but I could never forgive him for falling below my ideal of him."

"You do not mean me," he returned placidly, "for of me you never had an ideal; but waiving that for a moment, I should like to tell you of my second misfortune—if it isn't to be reckoned a blessing."

She looked at him without speaking. If this disclosure were but a repetition in varied form of the other, she had no wish to help him put it into words. Yet even as this thought passed through her mind, she fancied she had detected in his tone some new gravity.

"I've discovered," continued Dr. Ashton, with the same light manner he had used throughout the interview, "that I have a cancer gayly but with grim persistency developing under my arm."

"Oh, Will," Helen cried, clasping her hands, "you are not in earnest!"

"I assure you it is a very earnest matter with me, and has been for some time. I might have an operation, I suppose, if it were worth while; though it is so near the heart that it would be uncomfortably risky."

Helen became suddenly calm. The color faded slowly from her cheeks, and her husband, watching her narrowly, saw her beautiful lips assume a new expression of firmness and determination. She unconsciously lifted her head into a more erect carnage. Her eyes were moist and full of feeling. Slowly in her mind formed a resolve, and with a full knowledge of the renunciation of self which it involved, she called up all the nobility of her soul to aid her in living up to it. Creeds were little to this woman, yet her life was formed upon the principles which give to creeds their stability, and by which the moral is removed from the animal.

"Will," she at length said, slowly and gravely, "could it not be arranged for me to live with you? You did not tell me you were fond of me without having thought out the possibilities."

"I should have hesitated to ask so much," was his reply, "even of your love; I shall certainly not take it of your pity."

"My pity?" she murmured, not raising her eyes. "What do you mean?"

"You know. You cannot think me so dull as not to see that your proffer comes not from affection, but from generosity. I thank you, but I will accept no sacrifices."

He rose as he spoke, and put out his hand.

"I must be going," he said in an indifferent tone. "I have letters to write that must be mailed by midnight. I am not more than half as bad, Helen, as you have always persisted in thinking. I never made very profound pretensions, but I've treated every body squarely from my own point of view. If they have regarded my blessings as curses, it wasn't my fault, and I am not sufficiently hypocritical to pretend that I think it was. Good night."

He gave her hand a warmer and more lingering pressure than usual.

"I've had a very pleasant evening," he added, "despite the admixture of truth. Young people don't like any bitters, but we old, shattered wrecks need a dash of it in the wine of life to help digestion. Good night."



XXVIII.

LIKE COVERED FIRE. Much Ado about Nothing; iii.—I.

That night marked an epoch in the married life of Arthur and Edith Fenton.

The results of matrimony upon character are for the most part slow and hardly perceptible, yet even so not without certain well-defined stages by which their progression forces itself into recognition; and in fervid temperaments like that of the artist, any change is sure to be rapid, and marked by sharp and sudden crises.

Edith returned from Helen with her soul in a tumult. Grant Herman had described more than her face when he applied to her the epithet nun-like. It was a source of perpetual wonderment to many of her friends that such a girl could be so strongly attracted by Arthur Fenton; but those who knew his marvelous flexibility, the unconscious hypocrisy with which he adapted himself to any nature with which he came in contact, and on the other hand his fascinating manner, at once brilliant and sympathetic, felt Edith's love to be the perfectly natural consequence. She believed him to be what she wished, and he, without conscious deceit, became for the time being what she believed him to be.

It was a theory of Dr. Ashton's that what Arthur Fenton became was so purely a question of environment as to leave the artist all but irresponsible. This fatalistic view he had laid before his wife with some detail, at once explaining and defending his position.

"If a chameleon is put upon a black tree," he said on one occasion when the matter was under discussion, "you have really no right to blame him for becoming black too; it is simply his nature. If Arthur is like that it isn't his fault. He wasn't consulted, I fancy, about how he should be made at all. He is self-indulgent, and if a point hurts him he glides away from it. He cannot help it."

"There is something in what you say," Helen had reluctantly assented, "but I think you put it far too strongly."

"Oh, very likely," was the careless reply. "His strongest instinct, though, is to escape pain. We are none of us better than our instincts."

To such a decision as this, had she heard it, Edith, too religious to acknowledge any thing tending towards fatalism, would not for a moment have agreed; yet it embodied a truth destined to cause her deepest sorrow, and which was gradually forcing itself upon her. Already, although they had been married so few weeks, even her love-blinded eyes could not but perceive much in her husband which shocked and pained her. She had not considered deeply enough, never having had the experience which would have taught her the need of considering, how great was the gulf between her moral standpoint and that of her betrothed. He had seemed so yielding that she had failed to perceive that his compliances were merely outward, and left his mental attitude unchanged. Now when it became necessary, as in every wedded life it must sooner or later, for her to appeal to his ultimate moral belief, she was startled to find nothing with which she was in sympathy. A cynic—or, indeed, her husband himself—would have assured her that it was, after all, a question of standards merely, and that difference of judgment was natural and inevitable, and that measured by his own convictions Arthur was quite well enough. Her answer to such a proposition would have been that there was but one standard, and that what differed from that were not moral principles at all, but excuses for immoral obliquity.

Outwardly, it is true, there was little in her husband's life of which Edith could complain. He accompanied her to church, and if he quizzed the preacher after returning home, she was ready to excuse this as the natural result of a keen appreciation of the ludicrous. He allowed her to do as she chose in the matter of charity work, and he even refrained from going to his studio on Sunday, a sacrifice whose magnitude she had no means of estimating, and which she therefore thought would be continuous. It was when some ethical question arose between them that Edith was disquieted, feeling sometimes as if she were looking into black deeps of immorality. The principles which to her were most sacred, were to him light subjects upon which, she was well aware, only her presence prevented his jesting. The most obvious laws of rectitude were but thistle-down before the whirlwind of his subversive theories; and Edith found argument impossible with one who denied her every premise.

His old acquaintances found in Arthur Fenton a change more subtle but none the less distasteful. It was a trait of his nature to assume the character he was half unconsciously acting, as a player may between the scenes still feel the personality he is simulating upon the stage; and there was about Fenton when he came in contact with the Pagans, a vague air of remonstrance and disapproval, even when he was as bold as ever in his own cynical utterances.

"An expression of virtuous indignation isn't becoming in you, Fenton," Rangely said to him one day. "Especially in a discussion which you started yourself by the most shocking piece of wickedness I ever heard."

And among all the Pagans there existed a yet unspoken feeling that Fenton was ceasing to be one of them.

On returning from Helen's, Edith found her husband still engaged with Dr. Ashton, but as soon as the latter had gone Arthur came to her room.

"Well," he said, sinking leisurely into a chair. "Do you feel any milder? Have you had your dinner?"

"Yes," she returned, not leaving her seat on the opposite side of the room. "I have been dining with Mrs. Ashton."

"What!" cried Arthur, as if a bomb had exploded at his feet. Then he sank back into his languid position. "So she has told you," he remarked carelessly.

"Yes, she has told me. Did you know, Arthur, when you brought us together, that she was living under a false name, and under false pretenses?"

"I knew certainly," replied her husband with a coolness that marked his inward irritation, "that her legal name was Ashton. I have still to learn that she is living under false pretenses."

"Is it not false," retorted Edith, with difficulty controlling her voice, her indignation increasing with every word, "to pass as widow, to live separated from her husband?"

"Oh, false? Why, in your stiff, conventional definition of the word that calls the letter every thing, the spirit nothing, I dare say it is false; but what of that? She has a right to do as she pleases, has she not?"

Edith drew herself back in her chair and looked at him across the dimly lighted chamber. It is but justice to her husband to consider that he could not dream of the anguish she suffered. It was, as he so often said, a question of standards. By his, she was narrow, uncharitable, even bigoted; tried by the code of more orthodox circles she was simply high-minded, true and noble in her devotion to principle. She was neither bigoted nor prudish, however the alien circumstances in which she was placed made her appear so. To her it was a vital question of right and purity of which Arthur disposed with such contemptuous lightness. True as the sunlight herself, no pang could be more bitter than the knowledge that the truth was not sacred to the man she loved. Her husband's words pierced her like a dagger. It was some minutes before she answered him. He rose moodily, lit a cigar at the gas jet and sat down again before she broke the silence.

"Arthur," she said in a voice which was sad and full of the solemnity of deep feeling, "have you no regard for truth?"

"Truth!" retorted he. "To go back to Pilate's conundrum, 'What is truth?' If you mean a strict and fantastic adherence to facts and to stiff conventional rules, no, I haven't the slightest regard for truth. If you mean the eternal verities as a man's own nature and the occasion interpret them, yes, I have the highest."

"But that is only a confusion of words, Arthur. What do you mean by 'eternal verities' if not adherence to facts? The eternal verities cannot be whatever it pleases any one to say. Doesn't all human intercourse depend upon faith in one another that we will adhere to facts? Even if you do not look at the right and the wrong, there are surely reasons enough why the truth should be sacred."

Her husband whiffed his cigar, idly blowing a succession of graceful rings.

"You are quite a metaphysician. Did you have a pleasant dinner?"

"But, Arthur," Edith persisted, ignoring his attempt to break away, according to his habit, from a discussion which did not please him, "but, Arthur, do you think it right for Mrs. Greyson—Mrs. Ashton, I mean, to live so?"

"Right? Oh, that is the same old question in another shape. Mr. Candish will answer all those theological riddles; it is his business to. They don't interest me."

He threw away his half smoked cigar, dusted his coat sleeve of a stray fleck of ash, settled his cravat before the glass, and humming a tune walked towards his wife, his hands clasped behind him.

"We do not agree, Edith," he said with cold deliberation, "and unless you broaden your views, I am afraid we never shall. You are a dozen decades behind the day, and are foolish enough to take all your church teaches you in earnest. Religion should no more be taken without salt than radishes. The church inculcates it to excuse its own existence, but you certainly are reasonable enough to outgrow this old-fashioned Puritanism."

"Arthur," was her answer, "we do not agree, and if you wait for me to come to your standards, I am afraid you are right in saying that we never shall; and, indeed, I hope you are right. It makes me more unhappy than you can think," she continued, her eyes swimming with bitter tears, "that we are so far apart on what I must believe to be vital points; on truths which I believe, Arthur, with my whole soul—as you would, too, had you not carefully educated yourself into a doubt which cannot make you better or happier."

She had risen as she spoke, and stood facing him, her pure, pale face confronting his with a look of pathos which touched him despite himself. She came a step nearer, and put her arms about his neck.

"Oh, Arthur!" she pleaded, "I love you, and how can I help mourning that you wrong your better nature; that you resist the impulses of your own best self?"

He yielded to her caresses in silence. He remembered that Helen had used this same phrase.

"Women always appeal to one's best self," he commented inly, with a mental shrug, "which means a man's inclination to do whatever a woman asks of him."

But he kissed his wife's lips, and said, tolerantly:

"We will talk it over some other time, my dear. We are both tired to-night. But you are right, I suppose, as you always are."

And she loosened her arms from his neck, recognizing that he had put her appeal aside and waived the whole matter.



XXIX.

A NECESSARY EVIL. Julius Caesar; ii.—2.

At the St. Filipe Club, somewhere in the small hours of that same night, half-a-dozen members were lingering. One was at the piano, recalling snatches from various composers, the air being clouded alike with music and smoke wreaths.

"I think you fellows are hard on Fenton," the musician protested, in response to some remark of Ainsworth's. "I don't see what he's done to make you all so down on him."

"It isn't any thing that he has done," Tom Bently replied, "it is what he has become. He has developed an entirely new side of his nature, and a deucedly unpleasant one, too."

"I always had a mental reservation on Fenton," remarked another. "He was always insisting that his soul was his own, don't you know; and when a man keeps that up I always conclude that he has his private doubts on the subject; or if he hasn't, I have."

"That's about the case with all the musical rowing we've been having for the last year or two; every musician has been in a fever lest he should be thought to be truckling to somebody."

"What rubbish all this concert business is," remarked Tom. "In Boston a concert interests a little clique of people, and another bigger clique pretend to be interested. The nonsense that is talked about music here is nauseating. The public doesn't really care any thing about it. In Boston a concert is given in Music Hall; but in Paris it is given in the whole city. It is an event there, not a trifling incident."

"What do you know about music?" retorted the player, clashing a furious discord with his elbow as he turned towards the speaker. "I'll attend to you presently. Now I want to know about Fenton. What has he done that you are all blackguarding him?"

"I think he's got a creed," said Ainsworth, scowling and smiling together, according to his wont. "I hate to charge a man with any thing so black, but I think Fenton's wife has made him take a creed, and a pretty damned narrow one at that."

"By Jove!" the musician observed, solemnly. "It's too bad. Fenton is a mighty bright fellow, and no end obliging."

"If it's only a creed," swore Bently, "what's all this fuss about? Every body has a creed, hasn't he? A man's temperament is his creed."

"It isn't his having a creed that I object to," remarked Grant Herman; "it is the question of his sincerity that troubles me. If he has taken up some collection of dogmas merely to please his wife—who seems a very sweet, quiet body—that is of course against him; but if he believes it, I don't see why we should object."

"Believes it!" sniffed Ainsworth, in great contempt. "That is worse than any thing I've said. I don't think Fenton is quite such an idiot as that comes to. The idea of his believing in Puritanism! Oh, good Lord!"

"Puritanism," Bently threw in irrelevantly, and because he liked the sound of it, "Puritanism is the preliminary rottenness of New England. If he is struck with that by all means let him go; the further the better."

"Isn't it his night for the Pagans this month?" somebody inquired.

"Yes," returned Bently, "but I took the liberty of going to him and asking if he would let me take it this turn. I hope you fellows don't mind." The talk thus flowed on in a desultory fashion amid ever thickening clouds of tobacco smoke, and Grant Herman, sitting for the most part quiet, had a whimsical idea in looking at his half-extinguished cigar. Certain excellent cigars, his thoughts ran, have a way of burning sluggishly about the middle, and without actually going out, yet need to be relighted; and in the same way a man's life goes on better for the kindling flame of a fresh attachment in middle life. He fell into reverie, thinking of Helen and of Ninitta. He had not seen the Italian since her flight, but from Mrs. Greyson he had learned the story of the finding and recovery of the fugitive; and his heart kindled with gratitude toward the woman who had prevented consequences which he should have fruitlessly regretted. He became so absorbed in his thoughts that only the entrance of Fred Rangely aroused him.

"Hallo, Rangely," the new comer was greeted, "where do you come from at this time of night?"

"Oh, from the office of the Daily Day-before-yesterday. I had an article in, and I wanted to read the proof. I can stand any thing in the world better than I can endure a compositor's blunders. Do any of you know Dr. Ashton?"

"I do," somebody answered. "What of him?"

"Rather clever fellow, wasn't he?"

"Why, yes; I think he is. He's rather odd sometimes. What about him?"

"Dead."

"Nonsense! I saw him myself not three hours ago, posting a letter in the box opposite his office."

"He is dead, though. Heart disease. They just got the news at the Advertiser office."

"Where was he?"

"In his office. The night porter of the building heard him fall against the door. They say he must have died without a struggle."



XXX.

HOW CHANCES MOCK. II Henry IV.; in.—I.

Early on the following forenoon Helen took her way to the studio. She was in unusually good spirits that day, for no especial reason that she could have told, although indeed it is possible that the prospect of meeting Grant Herman may have subtly contributed to the buoyancy of her mood.

She walked briskly through the bracing morning across the Common, her mind full of bright fancies. A thin column of smoke arose from the chimney of the lodge in the deer-park, rising straight in the clear air, and cheerfully suggestive that some tiny family, not too large for the building, were at breakfast within. It might even be the deer themselves; and Helen smiled at her whim, almost laughing outright as a picture arose of a matronly doe preparing coffee, while a solemn buck sat in his easy chair before the fire, reading his morning paper and now and then glancing at his wife over his spectacles.

In this joyous mood she came to the studio. A sudden thought darted through her mind, with no apparent connection, of the talk of the night previous, and for an instant her face clouded; but the exhilaration of the morning and the reaction from the sad, overstrained state in which her husband had left her, both helped her to throw off all mournful thoughts. Ninitta had not arrived, and Mrs. Greyson busied herself about the bas-relief, preparing for work. Suddenly the tap of Grant Herman sounded upon her door.

"Good morning," he said, entering in response to her invitation. "I knew by your step that you were in good spirits, and it gave me so much pleasure to think you were glad to be back, that I had to come up."

"I am in good spirits," she returned. "It is such a glorious morning, and Ninitta has kept me away from my work long enough for me to be very glad to return to it."

"What of Ninitta?" he asked, a shadow coming over his fine face. "She is not still with you?"

"No, but she is coming to pose this morning, though I hardly think she is strong enough."

The sculptor took in his hands a bit of clay and began nervously to model it into various shapes.

"Why did you take her home, Mrs. Greyson?" he asked after a moment's silence.

"Because she needed me," Helen answered. "And besides," she added hesitatingly, "I thought you would like her to be under my care."

"Did you?" he returned eagerly. "I was more grateful to you than you would let me tell you! I—"

He broke off abruptly as if determined to keep himself from any dangerous demonstrativeness.

"Come into my studio a moment," said he, throwing down the clay he held. "I have something to show you."

Helen followed willingly, glad to avoid the chance of their being interrupted by the arrival of Ninitta, whose jealousy might easily be aroused again. The sculptor led the way through a couple of chambers, bringing her out at the top of the stairs leading down in the corner of his studio. The morning sun shone in through the window far up in the side wall, tinged to rich colors by the stained glass which Herman had set there. The statues and casts looked in the light coming from above them, as if they had just emerged from garments of shadows which yet lay fallen about their feet. Helen uttered an exclamation of admiration.

"How charming the studio is in this light," she said. "It is like looking down into a ghost world."

"It is a ghost world," was the response. "It has long been haunted, but I had not supposed that any eyes but my own saw the wraiths which dwell here."

The vibratory quality in his voice warned her not to answer. She felt that she stood upon the brink of a significant interview, yet she lacked the resolution to turn back.

She descended the first flight of steps into the gallery, the sculptor following closely. She could not have defined to herself what she wished or intended. Somewhat paradoxically she wished to escape from Herman, yet had she fled she would have been unhappy had he not pursued. Nothing is more contradictory than a nascent passion, and, indeed, the tenderness of any woman for a man is not very profound if unmixed with some desire to escape from him.

All sorts of artistic rubbish had accumulated in the little gallery; broken casts, fragments of statues and vases, pieces of time discolored marble, and the thousand objects which make up the debris of a sculptor's studio. A bit of warm colored though faded tapestry hung dustily over the railing of the little balcony, making the white-plaster goddess appear doubly wan. Against it stood a small antique altar, around whose base a train of garland-bearing Cupids danced in immortal glee.