Kate blushed with sudden contrition.

"Oh, I'll not ask you to do it!" she cried. "Truth is best, of course. I'm not naturally a trimmer and a compromiser—but, poor Honora! I pity her so!"

Her lips quivered like a child's and the tears stood in her eyes. She had arisen to go and the President shook hands with her without making any promise. However the next day a paragraph appeared in the University Daily to the effect that Professor Fulham had been called to France upon important laboratory matters.

At the Caravansary they had scented tragedy, and Kate faced them with the paragraph. She laid a marked copy of the paper at each place, and when all were assembled, she called attention to it. They looked at her with questioning eyes.

"Of course," said Dr. von Shierbrand, flicking his mustache, "this isn't true, Miss Barrington."

"No," said Kate, and faced them with her chin tilted high.

"But you wish us to pretend to believe it?"

"If you please, dear friends," Kate pleaded.

"We shall say that Fulham is in France! And what are we to say about Miss Morrison?"

"Who will inquire? If any one should, say that a friend desired her as a traveling companion."

"Nothing," said Von Shierbrand, "is easier for me than truth."

"Please don't be witty," cried Kate testily, "and don't sneer. Remember that nothing is so terrible as temptation. I'm sure I see proof of that every day among my poor people. After all, doesn't the real surprise lie in the number that resist it?"

"I beg your pardon," said the young German gently. "I shall not sneer. I shall not even be witty. I'm on your side,—that is to say, on Mrs. Fulham's side,—and I'll say anything you want me to say."

"I beg you all," replied Kate, sweeping the table with an imploring glance, "to say as little as possible. Be matter-of-fact if any one questions you. And, whatever you do, shield Honora."

They gave their affirmation solemnly, and the next day Honora appeared among them, pallid and courageous. They were simple folk for all of their learning. Sorrow was sorrow to them. Honora was widowed by an accident more terrible than death. No mockery, no affected solicitude detracted from the efficacy of their sympathy. If they saw torments of jealousy in this betrayed woman's eyes, they averted their gaze; if they saw shame, they gave it other interpretations. Moreover, Kate was constantly beside her, eagle-keen for slight or neglect. Her fierce fealty guarded the stricken woman on every side. She had the imposing piano which Mary had rented carted back to the warehouse to lie in deserved silence with Mary's seductive harmonies choked in its recording fibre; she stripped from their poles the curtains Mary had hung at the drawing-room windows and burned them in the furnace; the miniatures, the plaster casts, all the artistic rubbish which Mary's exuberance had impelled her to collect, were tossed out for the waste wagons to cart away. The coquetry of the room gave way to its old-time austerity; once more Honora's room possessed itself.

* * * * *

A wire came from Karl Wander addressed to Kate.

"Fractured leg. Can't go to you. Honora and the children must come here at once. Have written."

That seemed to give Honora a certain repose—it was at least a spar to which to cling. With Kate's help she got over to the laboratory and put the finishing touches on things there. The President detailed two of Fulham's most devoted disciples to make a record of their professor's experiments.

"Fulham shall have full credit," the President assured Honora, calling on her and comforting her in the way in which he perceived she needed comfort. "He shall have credit for everything."

"He should have the Norden prize," Honora cried, her hot eyes blazing above her hectic cheeks. "I want him to have the prize, and I want to be the means of getting it for him. I told Miss Barrington I meant to have my revenge, and that's it. How can he stand it to know he ruined my life and that I got the prize for him? A generous man would find that torture! You understand, I'm willing to torture him—in that way. He's subtle enough to feel the sting of it."

The President looked at her compassionately.

"It's a noble revenge—and a poignant one," he agreed.

"It's not noble," repudiated Honora. "It's terrible. For he'll remember who did the work."

But shame overtook her and she sobbed deeply and rendingly. And the President, who had thought of himself as a mild man, left the house regretting that duels were out of fashion.

* * * * *

Then the letter came from the West. Kate carried it up to Honora, who was in her room crouched before the window, peering out at the early summer cityscape with eyes which tried in vain to observe the passing motors, and the people hastening along the Plaisance, but which registered little.

"Your cousin's letter, woman, dear," announced Kate.

Honora looked up quickly, her vagueness momentarily dissipated. Kate always had noticed that Wander's name had power to claim Honora's interest. He could make folk listen, even though he spoke by letter. She felt, herself, that whatever he said, she would listen to.

Honora tore open the envelope with untidy eagerness, and after she had read the letter she handed it silently to Kate. It ran thus:—

"COUSIN HONORA, MY DEAR AND PRIZED:—

"Rather a knock-out blow, eh? I shan't waste my time in telling you how I feel about it. If you want me to follow David and kill him, I will—as soon as this damned leg gets well. Not that the job appeals to me. I'm sensitive about family honor, but killing D. won't mend things. As I spell the matter out, there was a blunder somewhere. Perhaps you know where it was.

"Of course you feel as if you'd gone into bankruptcy. Women invest in happiness as men do in property, and to 'go broke' the way you have is disconcerting. It would overwhelm some women; but it won't you—not if you're the same Honora I played with when I was a boy. You had pluck for two of us trousered animals—were the best of the lot. I want you to come here and stake out a new claim. You may get to be a millionaire yet—in good luck and happiness, I mean.

"I'm taking it for granted that you and the babies will soon be on your way to me, and I'm putting everything in readiness. The fire is laid, the cupboard stored, the latchstring is hanging where you'll see it as you cross the state line.

"You understand I'm being selfish in this. I not only want, but I need, you. You always seemed more like a sister than a cousin to me, and to have you come here and make a home out of my house seems too good to be true.

"There are a lot of things to be learned out here, but I'll not give them a name. All I can say is, living with these mountains makes you different. They're like men and women, I take it. (The mountains, I mean.) The more they are ravaged by internal fires and scoured by snow-slides, the more interesting they become.

"Then it's so still it gives you a chance to think, and by the time you've had a good bout of it, you find out what is really important and what isn't. You'll understand after you've been here awhile.

"I mean what I say, Honora. I want you and the babies. Come ahead. Don't think. Work—pack—and get out here where Time can have a chance at your wounds.

"Am I making you understand how I feel for you? I guess you know your old playmate and coz,

"KARL WANDER.

"P.S. My dried-up old bach heart jumps at the thought of having the kiddies in the house. I'll bet they're wonders."

There was an inclosure for Kate. It read:—

"MY DEAR MISS BARRINGTON:—

"I see that you're one of the folk who can be counted on. You help Honora out of this and then tell me what I can do for you. I'd get to her some way even with this miserable plaster-of-Paris leg of mine if you weren't there. But I know you'll play the cards right. Can't you come with her and stay with her awhile till she's more used to the change? You'd be as welcome as sunlight. But I don't even need to say that. I saw you only a moment, yet I think you know that I'd count it a rich day if I could see you again. You are one of those who understand a thing without having it bellowed by megaphone.

"Don't mind my emphatic English. I'm upset. I feel like murdering a man, and the sensation isn't pleasant. Using language is too common out here to attract attention—even on the part of the man who uses it. Oh, my poor Honora! Look after her, Miss Barrington, and add all my pity and love to your own. It will make quite a sum. Yours faithfully,

"KARL WANDER."

"He wrote to you, too?" inquired Honora when Kate had perused her note.

"Yes, begging me to hasten you on your way."

"Shall I go?"

"What else offers?"

"Nothing," said Honora in her dead voice. "If I kept a diary, I would be like that sad king of France who recorded 'Rien' each day."

Kate made a practical answer.

"We must pack," she said.

"But the house—"

"Let it stand empty if the owner can't find a tenant. Pay your rent till he does, if that's in the contract. What difference does all that make? Get out where you'll have a chance to recuperate."

"Oh, Kate, do you think I ever shall? How does a person recuperate from shame?"

"There isn't really any shame to you in what others do," Kate said.

"But you—you'll have to go somewhere."

"So I shall. Don't worry about me. I shall take good care of myself."

Honora looked about her with the face of a spent runner.

"I don't see how I'm going to go through with it all," she said, shuddering.

So Kate found packers and movers and the breaking-up of the home was begun. It was an ordeal—even a greater ordeal than they had thought it would be. Every one who knew Honora had supposed that she cared more for the laboratory than for her home, but when the packers came and tore the pictures from the walls, it might have been her heart-strings that were severed.

Just before the last things were taken out, Kate found her in an agony of weeping on David's bed, which stood with an appalling emptiness beside Honora's. Honora always had wakened first in the morning, Kate knew, and now she guessed at the memories that wrung that great, self-obliterating creature, writhing there under her torment. How often she must have raised herself on her arm and looked over at her man, so handsome, so strong, so completely, as she supposed, her own, and called to him, summoning him to another day's work at the great task they had undertaken for themselves. She had planned to be a wife upon an heroic model, and he had wanted mere blitheness, mere feminine allure. Then, after all, as it turned out, here at hand were all the little qualities, he had desired, like violets hidden beneath their foliage.

Kate thought she never had seen anything more feminine than Honora, shivering over the breaking-tip of the linen-closet, where her housewifely stores were kept.

"I don't suppose you can understand, dear," she moaned to Kate. "But it's a sort of symbol—a linen-closet is. See, I hemmed all these things with my own hands before I was married, and embroidered the initials!"

How could any one have imagined that the masculine traits in her were getting the upper hand! She grew more feminine every hour. There was an increasing rhythm in her movements—a certain rich solemnity like that of Niobe or Hermione. Her red-brown hair tumbled about her face and festooned her statuesque shoulders. The severity of her usual attire gave place to a negligence which enhanced her picturesqueness, and the heaving of her troubled bosom, the lifting of her wistful eyes gave her a tenderer beauty than she ever had had before. She was passionate enough now to have suited even that avid man who had proved himself so delinquent.

"If only David could have seen her like this!" mused Kate. "His 'Blue-eyed One' would have seemed tepid in comparison. To think she submerged her splendor to so little purpose!"

She wondered if Honora knew how right Karl Wander had been in saying that some one had blundered, and if she had gained so much enlightenment that she could see that it was herself who had done so. She had renounced the mistress qualities which the successful wife requires to supplement her wifely character, and she had learned too late that love must have other elements than the rigidly sensible ones.

Honora was turning to the little girls now with a fierce sense of maternal possession. She performed personal services for them. She held them in her arms at twilight and breathed in their personality as if it were the one anaesthetic that could make her oblivious to her pain.

Kate hardly could keep from crying out:—

"Too late! Too late!"

There was a bleak, attic-like room at the Caravansary, airy enough, and glimpsing the lake from its eastern window, which Kate took temporarily for her abiding-place. She had her things moved over there and camped amid the chaos till Honora should be gone.

The day came when the two women, with the little girls, stood on the porch of the house which had proved so ineffective a home. Kate turned the key.

"I hope never to come back to Chicago, Kate," Honora said, lifting her ravaged face toward the staring blankness of the windows. "I'm not brave enough."

"Not foolish enough, you mean," corrected Kate. "Hold tight to the girlies, Honora, and you'll come out all right."

Honora refrained from answering. Her woe was epic, and she let her sunken eyes and haggard countenance speak for her.

Kate saw David Fulham's deserted family off on the train. Mrs. Hays, the children's nurse, accompanied them. Honora moved with a slow hauteur in her black gown, looking like a disenthroned queen, and as she walked down the train aisle Kate thought of Marie Antoinette. There were plenty of friends, as both women knew, who would have been glad to give any encouragement their presence could have contributed, but it was generally understood that the truth of the situation was not to be recognized.

When Kate got back on the platform, Honora became just Honora again, thinking of and planning for others. She thrust her head from the window.

"Oh, Kate," she said, "I do hope you'll get well settled somewhere and feel at home. Don't stay in that attic, dear. It would make me feel as if I had put you into it."

"Trust me!" Kate reassured her. She waved her hand with specious gayety. "Give my love to Mr. Wander," she laughed.



XVIII

Kate was alone at last. She had time to think. There were still three days left of the vacation for which she had begged when she perceived Honora's need of her, and these she spent in settling her room. It would not accommodate all of the furniture she had accumulated during those days of enthusiasm over Ray McCrea's return, so she sold the superfluous things. Truth to tell, however, she kept the more decorative ones. Honora's fate had taught her an indelible lesson. She saw clearly that happiness for women did not lie along the road of austerity.

Was it humiliating to have to acknowledge that women were desired for their beauty, their charm, for the air of opulence which they gave to an otherwise barren world? Her mind cast back over the ages—over the innumerable forms of seduction and subserviency which the instinct of women had induced them to assume, and she reddened to flame sitting alone in the twilight. Yet, an hour later, still thinking of the subject, she realized that it was for men rather than for women that she had to blush. Woman was what man had made her, she concluded.

Yet man was often better than woman—more generous, more just, more high-minded, possessed of a deeper faith.

Well, well, it was at best a confusing world! She seemed to be like a ship without a chart or a port of destination. But at least she could accept things as they were—even the fact that she herself was not "in commission," and was, philosophically speaking, a derelict.

"Other women seem to do things by instinct," she mused, "but I have, apparently, to do them from conviction. It must be the masculine traits in me. They say all women have masculine traits, that if they were purely feminine, they would be monstrous; and that all civilized men have much of the feminine in them or they would not be civilized. I suppose there's rather more of the masculine in me than in the majority of women."

Now Mary Morrison, she concluded, was almost pure feminine—she was the triumphant exposition of the feminine principle.

Some lines of Arthur Symons came to her notice—lines which she tried in vain not to memorize.

"'I am the torch,' she saith; 'and what to me If the moth die of me? I am the flame Of Beauty, and I burn that all may see Beauty, and I have neither joy nor shame, But live with that clear light of perfect fire Which is to men the death of their desire.

'"I am Yseult and Helen, I have seen Troy burn, and the most loving knight lies dead. The world has been my mirror, time has been My breath upon the glass; and men have said, Age after age, in rapture and despair, Love's few poor words before my mirror there.

"'I live and am immortal; in my eyes The sorrow of the world, and on my lips The joy of life, mingle to make me wise!'" ...

Was it wisdom, then, that Mary Morrison possessed—the immemorial wisdom of women?

Oh, the shame of it! The shame of being a woman!

Kate denied herself to McCrea when he called. She plunged into the development of her scheme for an extension of motherhood. State motherhood it would be. Should the movement become national, as she hoped, perhaps it had best be called the Bureau of Children.

It was midsummer by now and there was some surcease of activity even in "welfare" circles. Many of the social workers, having grubbed in unspeakable slums all winter, were now abroad among palaces and cathedrals, drinking their fill of beauty. Many were in the country near at hand. For the most part, neophytes were in charge at the settlement houses. Kate was again urged to domesticate herself with Jane Addams's corps of workers, but she had an aversion to being shut between walls. She had been trapped once,—back at the place she called home,—and she had not liked it. There was something free and adventurous in going from house to house, authoritatively rearranging the affairs of the disarranged. It suited her to be "a traveling bishop." Moreover, it left her time for the development of her great Idea. In a neighborhood house privacy and leisure were the two unattainable luxuries.

She was still writing at odd times'; and now her articles were appearing. They were keen, simple, full of meat, and the public liked them. As Kate read them over, she smiled to find them so emphatic. She was far from feeling emphatic, but she seemed to have a trick of expressing herself in that way. She was still in need of great economy. Her growing influence brought little to her in the way of monetary rewards, and it was hard for her to live within her income because she had a scattering hand. She liked to dispense good things and she liked to have them. A liberal programme suited her best—whatever gave free play to life. She was a wild creature in that she hated bars. Of all the prison houses of life, poverty seemed one of the most hectoring.

But poverty, to be completely itself, must exclude opportunity. Kate had the key to opportunity, and she realized it. In the letters she received and wrote bringing her into association with men and women of force and aspiration, she had a privilege to which, for all of her youth, she could not be indifferent. She liked the way these purposeful persons put things, and felt a distinct pleasure in matching their ideas with her own. As the summer wore on, she was asked to country homes of charm and taste—homes where wealth, though great, was subordinated to more essential things. There she met those who could further her purposes—who could lend their influence to aid her Idea, now shaping itself excellently. At the suggestion of Miss Addams, she prepared an article in which her plan unfolded itself in all its benevolent length and breadth—an article which it was suggested might yet form a portion of a speech made before a congressional committee. There was even talk of having Kate deliver this address, but she had not yet reached the point where she could contemplate such an adventure with calmness.

However, she was having training in her suffrage work, which was now assuming greater importance in her eyes. She addressed women audiences in various parts of the city, and had even gone on a few flying motor excursions with leading suffragists, speaking to the people in villages and at country schoolhouses.

There was an ever-increasing conviction in this department of her work. She had learned to count the ballot as the best bulwark of liberty, and she could find no logic to inform her why, if it was a protection for man,—for the least and most insignificant of men,—it was not equally a weapon which women, searching now as never before for defined and enduring forms of liberty, should be permitted to use. She not only desired it for other women,—women who were supposed to "need it" more,—but she wished it for herself. She felt it to be merely consistent that she, in whom service to her community was becoming a necessity, should have this privilege. It never would be possible for her to exercise murderous powers of destruction in behalf of her country. She would not be allowed to shoot down innocent men whose opinions were opposed to her own, or to make widows and orphans. She would be forbidden to stand behind cannon or to sink submarine torpedoes. But it was within her reach to add to the sum total of peace and happiness. She would, if she could get her Bureau of Children established, exercise a constructive influence completely in accord with the spirit of the time. This being the case, she thought she ought to have the ballot. It would make her stand up straighter, spiritually speaking. It would give her the authority which would point her arguments; put a cap on the sheaf of her endeavors. She wanted it precisely as a writer wants a period to complete a sentence. It had a structural value, to use the term of an architect. Without it her sentence was foolish, her building insecure.

"Why is it," she demanded of the women of Lake Geneva when, in company with a veteran suffragist, she addressed them there, "that you grow weary in working for your town? It is because you cannot demonstrate your meaning nor secure the continuation of your works by the ballot. Your efforts are like pieces of metal which you cannot weld into useful form. You toil for deserted children, indigent mothers, for hospitals and asylums, starting movements which, when perfected, are absorbed by the city. What happens then to these benevolent enterprises? They are placed in the hands of politicians and perfunctorily administered. Your disinterested services are lost sight of; the politicians smile at the manner in which you have toiled and they have reaped. You see sink into uselessness, institutions, which, in the compassionate hands of women, would be the promoters of good through the generations. The people you would benefit are treated with that insolent arrogance which only a cheap man in office can assume. Causes you have labored to establish, and which no one denies are benefits, are capriciously overthrown. And there is one remedy and one only: for you to cast your vote—for you to have your say as you sit in your city council, on your county board, or in your state legislature and national congress.

"You may shrink from it; you may dread these new responsibilities; but strength and courage will come with your need. You dare not turn aside from the road which opens before you, for to tread it is now the test of integrity."

"Ought you to have said that?" inquired the older suffragist, afterward looking at Kate with earnest and burning eyes from her white spiritual face. "I dare say I care much more about suffrage than you. I have been interested in it since I was a child, and I am now no longer a young woman. Yet I feel that integrity is not allied to this or that opinion. It is a question of sincerity—of steadfastness of purpose."

"There, there," said Kate, "don't expect me to be too moderate. How can I care about anything just now if I have to be moderate? I love suffrage because it gives me something to care about and to work for. The last generation has destroyed pretty much all of the theology, hasn't it? Service of man is all there is left—particularly that branch of it known as the service of woman. Isn't that what all of the poets and playwrights and novelists are writing about? Isn't that the most interesting thing in the world at present? You've all urged me to go into it, haven't you? Very well, I have. But I can't stay in it if I'm to be tepid. You mustn't expect me to modify my utterance and cut down my climaxes. I've got to make a hot propaganda of the thing. I want the exhilaration of martyrdom—though I'm not keen for the discomforts of it. In other words, dear lady, because you are judicious, don't expect me to be. I don't want to be judicious—yet. I want to be fervid."

"You are a dear girl," said the elder woman, "but you are an egotist, as of course you know."

"If I had been a modest violet by a mossy stone," laughed Kate, "should I have taken up this work?"

"I'm free to confess that you would not," said the other, checking a sigh as if she despaired of bringing this excited girl down to the earth. "Yet I am bound to say—" She hesitated and Kate took up the word.

"I do know—I really understand," she cried contritely. "You are not an egotist at all, dear lady. Though you have held many positions of honor, you have never thought of yourself. Your sacrifices have been bona fide. You who are so delicate and tender have done things which men might have shrunk from. I know what you mean by sincerity, and I am aware that you have it completely and steadily, whereas I have more enthusiasm than is good either for myself or the cause. But you wouldn't want me to form myself on you, would you now? Temperament is just as much a fact as physique. I've got to dramatize woman's disadvantages if I am to preach on the subject. Though I really think there are tragedies of womanhood which none could exaggerate."

"Oh, there are, there are, Miss Barrington."

"How shall I make you understand that I am to be trusted!" Kate cried. "I know I'm avid. I want both pain and joy. I want to suffer with the others and enjoy with the others. I want my cup of life full and running over with a brew of a thousand flavors, and I actually believe I want to taste of the cup each neighbor holds. I have to know how others feel and it's my nature to feel for them and with them. When I see this great wave of aspiration sweeping over women,—Chinese and Persian women as well as English and American,—I feel magnificent. I, too, am standing where the stream of influence blows over me. It thrills me magnificently, and I am meaning it when I say that I think the women who do not feel it are torpid or cowardly."

The elder woman smiled patiently. After all, who was she that she should check her flaming disciple?



XIX

Whenever Kate had a free Sunday, she and Mrs. Dennison, the mistress of the Caravansary, would go together to the West Side to visit George and Marna Fitzgerald. It amused and enchanted Kate to think that in the midst of so much that was commonplace, with dull apartment buildings stretching around for miles, such an Arcadia should have located itself. It opened her eyes to the fact that there might be innumerable Arcadians concealed in those monotonous rows of three-and four-story flat buildings, if only one had the wisdom and wit to find them. Marna seemed to know of some. She had become acquainted with a number of these happy unknown little folk, to whom it never had occurred that celebrity was an essential of joy, and she liked them mightily. Marna, indeed, liked high and low—always providing she didn't dislike them. If they were Irish, her inclination toward them was accelerated. There were certain wonders of Marna's ardent soul which were for "Irish faces only"—Irish eyes were the eyes she liked best to have upon her. But she forgave Kate her Anglo-Saxon ancestry because of her talent for appreciating the Irish character.

Time was passing beautifully with Marna, and her Bird of Hope was fluttering nearer. She told Kate that now she could see some sense in being a woman.

"If you'd ask me," she said with childish audacity, "if such a foolish little thing as I could actually have a wonderful, dear little baby, I'd have said 'no' right at the start. I'm as flattered as I can be. And what pleases me so is that I don't have to be at all different from what I naturally am. I don't have to be learned or tremendously good; it isn't a question of deserts. It has just come to me—who never did deserve any such good!"

Next door to Marna there was a young Irishwoman of whom the Fitzgeralds saw a good deal, the mother of five little children, with not more than sixteen months between the ages of any of them. Mary Finn had been beautiful—so much was evident at a glance. But she already wore a dragged expression; and work, far beyond her powers to accomplish, was making a sloven of her. She was petulant with the children, though she adored them—at least, sporadically. But her burden tired her patience out. Timothy Finn's income had not increased in proportion to his family. He was now in his young manhood, at the height of his earning capacity, and early middle-age might see him suffering a reduction.

Mrs. Finn dropped in Sunday afternoon to share the cup of tea which Marna was offering her guests, and as she looked wistfully out of her tangle of dark hair,—in which lines of silver already were beginning to appear,—she impressed herself upon Kate's mind as one of the innumerable army of martyrs to the fetish of fecundity which had borne down men and women through the centuries.

She had her youngest child with her.

"It was a terrible time before I could get up from the last one," she said, "me that was around as smart as could be with the first. I'm in living terror all the time for fear of what's coming to me. A mother has no business to die, that's what I tell Tim. Who'd look to the ones I have, with me taken? I'm sharp with them at times, but God knows I'd die for 'em. Blessed be, they understand my scolding, the dears. It's a cuff and a kiss with me, and I declare I don't know which they like best. They may howl when I hurt them, but they know it's their own mother doing the cuffing, and in their hearts they don't care. It's that way with cubs, ye see. Mother bear knows how hard to box the ears of 'em. But it's truth I'm saying, Mrs. Fitzgerald; there's little peace for women. They don't seem to belong to themselves at all, once they're married. It's very happy you are, looking forward to your first, and you have my good wishes. More than that, I'll be proud to be of any service to you I can when your time comes—it's myself has had experience enough! But, I tell you, the joy runs out when you're slaving from morning to night, and then never getting the half done that you ought; and when you don't know what it is to have two hours straight sleep at night; and maybe your husband scolding at the noise the young ones make. Love 'em? Of course, you love 'em. But you can stand only so much. After that, you're done for. And the agony of passing and leaving the children motherless is something I don't like to think about."

She bared her thin breast to her nursing babe, rocking slowly, her blue eyes straining into the future with its menace.

"But," said Marna, blushing with embarrassment, "need there be such—such a burden? Don't you think it right to—to—"

"Neither God nor man seems to have any mercy on me," cried the little woman passionately. "I say I'm in a trap—that's the truth of it. If I was a selfish, bad mother, I could get out of it; if I was a mean wife, I could, too, I suppose. I've tried to do what was right,—what other people told me was right,—and I pray it won't kill me—for I ought to live for the children's sake."

The child was whining because of lack of nourishment, and Mrs. Finn put it to the other breast, but it fared little better there. Mrs. Dennison was looking on with her mild, benevolent aspect.

"My dear," she said at last with an air of gentle authority, "I'm going out to get a bottle and good reliable infant food for that child. You haven't strength enough to more than keep yourself going, not to say anything about the baby."

She took the child out of the woman's arms and gave it to Kate.

"But I don't think I ought to wean it when it's so young," cried Mrs. Finn, breaking down and wringing her thin hands with an immemorial Hibernian gesture. "Tim wouldn't like it, and his mother would rage at me."

"They'll like it when they see the baby getting some flesh on its bones," insisted Mrs. Dennison. "There's more than one kind of a fight a mother has to put up for her children. They used to think it fine for a woman to kill herself for her children, but I don't think it's so much the fashion now. As you say, a mother has no business to die; it's the part of intelligence to live. So you just have a set-to with your old-fashioned mother-in-law if it's necessary."

"Yes," put in Kate, "the new generation always has to fight the old in the interests of progress."

Marna broke into a rippling laugh.

"That's her best platform manner," she cried. "Just think, Mrs. Finn, my friend talks on suffrage."

"Oh!" gasped the little Irishwoman, involuntarily putting out her hands as if she would snatch her infant from such a contaminating hold.

But Kate drew back smilingly.

"Yes," she said significantly, "I believe in woman's rights."

She held on to the baby, and Mrs. Dennison, putting on her hat and coat, went in search of a nursing-bottle.

On the way home, Mrs. Dennison, who was of the last generation, and Kate, who was of the present one, talked the matter over.

"She didn't seem to understand that she had been talking 'woman's rights,'" mused Kate, referring to Mrs. Finn. "The word frightened the poor dear. She didn't see that fatal last word of her 'love, honor, and obey' had her where she might even have to give her life in keeping her word."

"Well, for my part," said Mrs. Dennison, in her mellow, flowing tones, "I always found it a pleasure to obey my husband. But, then, to be sure, I don't know that he ever asked anything inconsiderate of me."

"You were a well-shielded woman, weren't you?" asked Kate.

"I didn't need to lift my hand unless I wished," said Mrs. Dennison in reminiscence.

"And you had no children—"

"But that was a great sorrow."

"Yes, but it wasn't a living vexation and drain. It didn't use up your vitality and suck up your brain power and make a slattern and a drudge of you as having five children in seven years has of little Mrs. Finn. It's all very well to talk of obeying when you aren't asked to obey—or, at least, when you aren't required to do anything difficult. But good Tim Finn, I'll warrant, tells his Mary when she may go and where, and he'd be in a fury if she went somewhere against his desire. Oh, she's playing the old medieval game, you can see that!"

"Dear Kate," sighed Mrs. Dennison, "sometimes your expressions seem to me quite out of taste. I do hope you won't mind my saying so. You're so very emphatic."

"I don't mind a bit, Mrs. Dennison. I dare say I am getting to be rather violent and careless in my way of talking. It's a reaction from the vagueness and prettiness of speech I used to hear down in Silvertree, where they begin their remarks with an 'I'm not sure, but I think,' et cetera. But, really, you must overlook my vehemence. If I could spend my time with sweet souls like you, I'd be a different sort of woman."

"I can't help looking forward, Kate, to the time when you'll be in your own home. You think you're all bound up in this public work, but I can tell by the looks of you that you're just the one to make a good wife for some fine man. I hope you don't think it impertinent of me, but I can't make out why you haven't taken one or the other of the men who want you."

"You think some one wants me?" asked Kate provokingly.

"Oh, we all know that Dr. von Shierbrand would rather be taking you home to see his old German mother than to be made President of the University of Chicago; and that nice Mr. McCrea is nearly crazy over the way you treat him."

"But it would seem so stale—life in a home with either of them! Should I just have to sit at the window and watch for them to come home?"

"You know you wouldn't," said Mrs. Dennison, almost crossly. "Why do you tease me? What's good enough for other women ought to be good enough for you."

"Oh, what a bad one I am!" cried Kate. "Of course what is good enough for better women than I ought to be good enough for me. But yet—shall I tell the truth about myself?"

"Do," said Mrs. Dennison, placated. "I want you to confide in me, Kate."

"Well, you see, dear lady, suppose that I marry one of the gentlemen of whom you have spoken. Suppose I make a pleasant home for my husband, have two or three nice children, and live a happy and—well, a good life. Then I die and there's the end."

"Well, of course I don't think that's the end," broke in Mrs. Dennison.

Kate evaded the point.

"I mean, there's an end of my earthly existence. Now, on the other hand, suppose I get this Bureau for Children through. Suppose it becomes a fact. Let us play that I am asked to become the head of it, or, if not that, at least to assist in carrying on its work. Then, suppose that, as a result of my work, the unprotected children have protection; the education of all the children in the country is assured—even of the half-witted, and the blind and the deaf and the vicious. Suppose that the care and development of children becomes a great and generally comprehended science, like sanitation, so that the men and women of future generations are more fitted to live than those we now see about us. Don't you think that will be better worth while than my individual happiness? They think a woman heroic when she sacrifices herself for her children, but shouldn't I be much more heroic if I worked all my life for other people's children? For children yet to be born? I ask you that calmly. I don't wish you to answer me to-day. I'm in earnest now, dear Mrs. Dennison, and I'd like you to give me a true answer."

There was a little pause. Mrs. Dennison was trifling nervously with the frogs on her black silk jacket. When she spoke, it was rather diffidently.

"I could answer you so much better, my dear Kate," she said at length, "if I only knew how much or how little vanity you have."

"Oh!" gasped Kate.

"Or whether you are really an egotist—as some think."

"Oh!" breathed Kate again.

"As for me, I always say that a person can't get anywhere without egotism. The word never did scare me. Egotism is a kind of yeast that makes the human bread rise. I don't see how we could get along without it. As you say, I'd better wait before answering you. You've asked me an important question, and I'd like to give it thought. I can see that you'd be a good and useful woman whichever thing you did. But the question is, would you be a happy one in a home? You've got the idea of a public life in your head, and very likely that influences you without your realizing it."

"I don't say I'm not ambitious," cried Kate, really stirred. "But that ought to be a credit to me! It's ridiculous using the word 'ambitious' as a credit to a man, and making it seem like a shame to a woman. Ambition is personal force. Why shouldn't I have force?"

"There are things I can't put into words," said Mrs. Dennison, taking a folded handkerchief from her bead bag and delicately wiping her face, "and one of them is what I think about women. I'm a woman myself, and it doesn't seem becoming to me to say that I think they're sacred."

"No more sacred than men!" interrupted Kate hotly. "Life is sacred—if it's good. I can't say I think it sacred when it's deleterious. It's that pale, twilight sort of a theory which has kept women from doing the things they were capable of doing. Men kept thinking of them as sacred, and then they were miserably disappointed when they found they weren't. They talk about women's dreams, but I think men dream just as much as women, or more, and that they moon around with ideas about angel wives, and then are horribly shocked when they find they've married limited, commonplace, selfish creatures like themselves. I say let us train them both, make them comrades, give them a chance to share the burdens and the rewards, and see if we can't reduce the number of broken hearts in the world."

"There are some burdens," put in Mrs. Dennison, "which men and women cannot share. The burden of child-bearing, which is the most important one there is, has to be borne by women alone. You yourself were talking about that only a little while ago. It's such a strange sort of a thing,—so sweet and so terrible,—and it so often takes a woman to the verge of the grave, or over it, that I suppose it is that which gives a sacredness to women. Then, too, they'll work all their lives long for some one they love with no thought of any return except love. That makes them sacred, too. Most of them believe in God, even when they're bad, and they believe in those they love even when they ought not. Maybe they're right in this and maybe they're not. Perhaps you'll say that shows their lack of sense. But I say it helps the world on, just the same. It may not be sensible—but it makes them sacred."

Mrs. Dennison's face was shining. She had pulled the gloves from her warm hands, and Kate, looking down at them, saw how work-worn they now were, though they were softly rounded and delicate. She knew this woman might have married a second time; but she was toiling that she might keep faith with the man she had laid in his grave. She was expecting a reunion with him. Her hope warmed her and kept her redolent of youth. She was still a bride, though she was a widow. She was of those who understood the things of the spirit. The essence of womanhood was in her—the elusive poetry of womanhood. To such implications of mystic beauty there was no retort. Kate saw in that moment that when women got as far as emancipation they were going to lose something infinitely precious. The real question was, should not these beautiful, these evanishing joys be permitted to depart in the interests of progress? Would not new, more robust satisfactions come to take the place of them?

They rode on in silence, and Kate's mind darted here and there—darted to Lena Vroom, that piteous little sister of Icarus, with her scorched wings; darted to Honora Fulham with her shattered faith; to Mary Morrison with her wanton's wisdom; to Mary Finn, whose womanhood was her undoing; to Marna, who had given fame for love and found the bargain good; to Mrs. Leger, who had turned to God; to her mother, the cringing wife, who could not keep faith with herself and her vows of obedience, and who had perished of the conflict; to Mrs. Dennison, happy in her mid-Victorian creed. Then from these, whom she knew, her mind swept on to the others—to all the restless, disturbed, questioning women the world over, who, clinging to beautiful old myths, yet reached out diffident hands to grasp new guidance. The violence and nurtured hatred of some of them offended her deeply; the egregious selfishness of others seemed to her as a flaming sin. Militant, unrestrained, avid of coarse and obvious things, they presented a shameful contrast to this little, gentle, dreaming keeper of a boarding-house who sat beside her, her dove's eyes filled with the mist of memories.

And yet—and yet—



XX

The next day, as it happened, she was invited to Lake Forest to attend a "suffrage tea." A distinguished English suffragette was to be present, and the more fashionable group of Chicago suffragists were gathering to pay her honor.

It was a torrid day with a promise of storm, and Kate would have preferred to go to the Settlement House to do her usual work, which chanced just now to be chiefly clerical. But she was urged to meet the Englishwoman and to discuss with her the matter of the Children's Bureau, in which the Settlement House people were now taking the keenest interest. Kate went, gowned in fresh linen, and well pleased, after all, to be with a holiday crowd riding through the summer woods. Tea was being served on the lawn. It overlooked the lake, and here were gathered both men and women. It was a company of rather notable persons, as Kate saw at a glance. Almost every one there was distinguished for some social achievement, or as the advocate of some reform or theory, or perhaps as an opulent and fashionable patron. It was at once interesting and amusing.

Kate greeted her hostess, and looked about her for the guest of honor. It transpired that the affair was quite informal, after all. The Englishwoman was sitting in a tea-tent discoursing with a number of gentlemen who hung over her with polite attentions. They were well-known bachelors of advanced ideas—men with honorary titles and personal ambitions. The great suffragist was very much at home with them. Her deep, musical voice resounded like a bell as she uttered her dicta and her witticisms. She—like the men—was smoking a cigarette, a feat which she performed without coquetry or consciousness. She was smoking because she liked to smoke. It took no more than a glance to reveal the fact that she was further along in her pregnancy than Marna—Marna who started back from the door when a stranger appeared at it lest she should seem immodest. But the suffragette, having acquired an applauding and excellent husband, saw no reason why she should apologize to the world for the processes of nature. Quite as unconscious of her condition as of her unconventionality in smoking, she discoursed with these diverted men, her transparent frock revealing the full beauties of her neck and bust, her handsome arms well displayed—frankly and insistently feminine, yet possessing herself without hesitation of what may be termed the masculine attitude toward life.

For some reason which Kate did not attempt to define, she refrained from discussing the Bureau of Children with the celebrated suffragette, although she did not doubt that the Englishwoman would have been capable of keen and valuable criticism. Instead, she returned to the city, sent a box of violets to Marna, and then went on to her attic room.

A letter was awaiting her from the West. It read:

"MY DEAR MISS BARRINGTON:—

"Honora and the kiddies are here. I have given my cousin a room where she can see the mountains on two sides, and I hope it will help. I've known the hills to help, even with pretty rough customers. It won't take a creature like Honora long to get hold of the secret, will it? You know what I mean, I guess.

"I wish you had come. I watched the turn in the drive to see if you wouldn't be in the station wagon. There were two women's heads. I recognized Honora's, and I tried to think the second one was yours, but I really knew it wasn't. It was a low head—one of that patient sort of heads—and a flat, lid-like hat. The nurse's, of course! I suppose you wear helmet-shaped hats with wings on them—something like Mercury's or Diana's. Or don't they sell that kind of millinery nowadays?

"Honora tells me you're trying to run the world and that you make up to all kinds of people—hold-up men as well as preachers. Do you know, I'm something like that myself? I can't help it, but I do seem to enjoy folks. One of the pleasantest nights I ever spent was with a lot of bandits in a cave. I was their prisoner, too, which complicated matters. But we had such a bully time that they asked me to join them. I told them I'd like the life in some respects. I could see it was a sort of game not unlike some I'd played when I was a boy. But it would have made me nervous, so I had to refuse them.

"Well, I'm talking nonsense. What if you should think I counted it sense! That would be bad for me. I only thought you'd be having so may pious and proper letters that I'd have to give you a jog if I got you to answer this. And I do wish you would answer it. I'm a lonely man, though a busy one. Of course it's going to be a tremendous comfort having Honora here when once she gets to be herself. She's wild with pain now, and nothing she says means anything. We play chess a good deal, after a fashion. Honora thinks she's amusing me, but as I like 'the rigor of the game,' I can't say that I'm amused at her plays. The first time she thinks before she moves I'll know she's over the worst of her trouble. She seems very weak, but I'm feeding her on cream and eggs. The kiddies are dears—just as cute as young owls. They're not afraid of me even when I pretend I'm a coyote and howl.

"Do write to me, Miss Barrington. I'm as crude as a cabbage, but when I say I'd rather have you write me than have any piece of good fortune befall me which your wildest imagination could depict, I mean it. Perhaps that will scare you off. Anyway, you can't say I didn't play fair.

"I'm worn out sitting around with this fractured leg of mine in its miserable cast. (I know stronger words than 'miserable,' but I use it because I'm determined to behave myself.) Honora says she thinks it would be all right for you to correspond with me. I asked her.

"Yours faithfully,

"KARL WANDER."

"What a ridiculous boy," said Kate to herself. She laughed aloud with a rippling merriment; and then, after a little silence, she laughed again.

"The man certainly is naif," she said. "Can he really expect me to answer a letter like that?"

She awoke several times that night, and each time she gave a fleeting thought to the letter. She seemed to see it before her eyes—a purple eidolon, a parallelogram in shape. It flickered up and down like an electric sign. When morning came she was quite surprised to find the letter was existent and stationary. She read it again, and she wished tremendously that she might answer it. It occurred to her that in a way she never had had any fun. She had been persistently earnest, passionately honest, absurdly grim. Now to answer that letter would come under the head of mere frolic! Yet would it? Was not this curious, outspoken man—this gigantic, good-hearted, absurd boy—giving her notice that he was ready to turn into her lover at the slightest gesture of acquiescence on her part? No, the frolic would soon end. It would be another of those appalling games-for-life, those woman-trap affairs. And she liked freedom better than anything.

She went off to her work in a defiant frame of mind, carrying, however, the letter with her in her handbag.

What she did write—after several days' delay—was this:—

"MY DEAR MR. WANDER:—

"I can see that Honora is in the best place in the world for her. You must let me know when she has checkmated you. I quite agree that that will show the beginning of her recovery. She has had a terrible misfortune, and it was the outcome of a disease from which all of us 'advanced' women are suffering. Her convictions and her instincts were at war. I can't imagine what is going to happen to us. We all feel very unsettled, and Honora's tragedy is only one of several sorts which may come to any of us. But an instinct deeper than instinct, a conviction beyond conviction, tells me that we are right—that we must go on, studying, working, developing. We may have to pay a fearful price for our advancement, but I do not suppose we could turn back now if we would.

"You ask if I will correspond with you. Well, do you suppose we really have anything to say? What, for example, have you to tell me about? Honora says you own a mine, or two or three; that you have a city of workmen; that you are a father to them. Are they Italians? I think she said so. They're grateful folk, the Italians. I hope they like you. They are so sweet when they do, and so—sudden—when they don't.

"I have had something to do with them, and they are very dear to me. They ask me to their christenings and to other festivals. I like their gayety because it contrasts with my own disposition, which is gloomy.

"Upon reflection, I think we'd better not write to each other. You were too explicit in your letter—too precautionary. You'd make me have a conscience about it, and I'd be watching myself. That's too much trouble. My business is to watch others, not myself. But I do thank you for giving such a welcome to Honora and the babies. I hope you will soon be about again. I find it so much easier to imagine you riding over a mountain pass than sitting in the house with a leg in plaster.

"Yours sincerely,

"KATE BARRINGTON."

He wrote back:—

"MY DEAR MISS BARRINGTON:—

"I admire your idea of gloom! Not the spirit of gloom but of adventure moves you. I saw it in your eye. When I buy a horse, I always look at his eye. It's not so much viciousness that I'm afraid of as stupidity. I like a horse that is always pressing forward to see what is around the next turn. Now, we humans are a good deal like horses. Women are, anyway. And I saw your eye. My own opinion is that you are having the finest time of anybody I know. You're shaping your own life, at least,—and that's the best fun there is,—the best kind of good fortune. Of course you'll get tired of it after a while. I don't say that because you are a woman, but I've seen it happen over and over again both with men and women. After a little while they get tired of roving and come home.

"You may not believe it, but, after all, that's the great moment in their lives—you just take it from me who have seen more than you might think and who have had a good deal of time to think things out. I do wish you had seen your way to come out here. There are any number of matters I would like to talk over with you.

"You mustn't think me impudent for writing in this familiar way. I write frankly because I'm sure you'll understand, and the conventionalities have been cast aside because in this case they seem so immaterial. I can assure you that I'm not impudent—not where women are concerned, at any rate. I'm a born lover of women, though I have been no woman's lover. I haven't seen much of them. Sometimes I've gone a year without seeing one, not even a squaw. But I judge them by my mother, who made every one happy who came near her, and by some others I have known; I judge them by you, though I saw you only a minute. I suppose you will think me crazy or insincere in saying that. I'm both sane and honest—ask Honora.

"You speak of my Italians. They are making me trouble. We have been good friends and they have been happy here. I gave them lots to build on if they would put up homes; and I advanced the capital for the cottages and let them pay me four per cent—the lowest possible interest. I got a school for their children and good teachers, and I interested the church down in Denver to send a priest out here and establish a mission. I thought we understood each other, and that they comprehended that their prosperity and mine were bound up together. But an agitator came here the other day,—sent by the unions, of course,—and there's discontent. They have lost the friendly look from their eyes, and the men turn out of their way to avoid speaking to me. Since I've been laid up here, things have been going badly. There have been meetings and a good deal of hard talk. I suppose I'm in for a fight, and I tell you it hurts. I feel like a man at war with his children. As I feel just now, I'd throw up the whole thing rather than row with them, but the money of other men is invested in these mines and I'm the custodian of it. So I've no choice in the matter. Perhaps, too, it's for their own good that they should be made to see reason. What do you say?

"Faithfully,

"WANDER."

Honora wrote the same day and to her quiet report of improved nights and endurable days she added:—

"I hope you will answer my cousin's letter. I can't tell you what a good man he is, and so boyish, in spite of his being strong and perfectly brave—oh, brave to the death! He's very lonely. He always has been. You'll have to make allowances for his being so Western and going right to the point in such a reckless way. He hasn't told me what he's written you, but I know if he wants to be friends with you he'll say so without any preliminaries. He's very eager to have me talk of you, so I do. I'm eager to talk, too. I always loved you, Kate, but now I put you and Karl in a class by yourselves as the completely dependable ones.

"The babies send kisses. Don't worry about me. I'm beginning to see that it's not extraordinary for trouble to have come to me. Why not to me as well as to another? I'm one of the great company of sad ones now. But I'm not going to be melancholy. I know how disappointed you'd be if I were. I'm beginning to sleep better, and for all of this still, dark cavern in my heart, so filled with voices of the past and with the horrible chill of the present, I am able to laugh a little at passing things. I find myself doing it involuntarily. So at least I've got where I can hear what the people about me are saying, and can make a fitting reply. Yes, do write Karl. For my sake."



XXI

Meantime, Ray McCrea had neglected to take his summer vacation. He was staying in the city, and twice a week he called on Kate. Kate liked him neither more nor less than at the beginning. He was clever and he was kind, and it was his delight to make her happy. But it was with the surface of her understanding that she listened to him and the skimmings of her thoughts that she passed to him. He had that light, acrid accent of well-to-do American men. Reasonably contented himself, he failed to see why every one else should not be so, too. He was not religious for the same reason that he was not irreligious—because it seemed to him useless to think about such matters. Public affairs and politics failed to interest him because he believed that the country was in the hands of a mob and that the "grafters would run things anyway." He called eloquence spell-binding, and sentiment slush,—sentiment, that is, in books and on the stage,—and he was indulgently inclined to suspect that there was something "in it" for whoever appeared to be essaying a benevolent enterprise. Respectable, liberal-handed, habitually amused, slightly caustic, he looked out for the good of himself and those related to him and considered that he was justified in closing his corporate regards at that point. He had no cant and no hypocrisy, no pose and no fads. A sane, aggressive, self-centered, rational materialist of the American brand, it was not only his friends who thought him a fine fellow. He himself would have admitted so much and have been perfectly justified in so doing.

Kate received flowers, books, and sweets from him, and now and then he asked her why he had lost ground with her. Sometimes he would say:—

"I can see a conservative policy is the one for me, Kate, where you're concerned. I'm going to lie low so as not to give you a chance to send me whistling."

Once, when he grew picturesquely melancholy, she refused to receive his offerings. She told him he was making a villainess out of her, and that she'd end their meetings. But at that he promised so ardently not to be ardent that she forgave him and continued to read the novels and to tend the flowers he brought her. They went for walks together; sometimes she lunched with him in the city, and on pleasant evenings they attended open-air concerts. He tried to be discreet, but in August, with the full moon, he had a relapse. Kate gave him warning; he persisted,—the moon really was quite wonderful that August,—and then, to his chagrin, he received a postcard from Silvertree. Kate had gone to see her father.

* * * * *

She would not have gone but for a chance word in one of Wander's letters.

"I hear your father is still living," he wrote. "That is so good! I have no parents now, but I like to remember how happy I was when I had them. I was young when my mother died, but father lived to a good age, and as long as he was alive I had some one to do things for. He always liked to hear of my exploits. I was a hero to him, if I never was to any one else. It kept my heart warmed up, and when he went he left me very lonely, indeed."

Kate reddened with shame when she read these words. Had Honora told him how she had deserted her father—how she had run from him and his tyranny to live her own life, and was he, Wander, meaning this for a rebuke? But she knew that could not be. Honora would have kept her counsel; she was not a tattler. Karl was merely congratulating her on a piece of good fortune, apparently. It threw a new light on the declaration of independence that had seemed to her to be so fine. Was old-time sentiment right, after all? The ancient law, "Honor thy father and thy mother," did not put in the proviso, "if they are according to thy notion of what they should be."

So Kate was again at Silvertree and in the old, familiar and now lifeless house. It was not now a caressed and pampered home; there was no longer any one there to trick it out in foolish affectionate adornments. In the first half-hour, while Kate roamed from room to room, she could hardly endure the appalling blankness of the place. No stranger could have felt so unwelcomed as she did—so alien, so inconsolably homeless.

She was waiting for her father when he came home, and she hoped to warm him a little by the surprise of her arrival. But it was his cue to be deeply offended with her.

"Hullo, Kate," he said, nodding and holding out his hand with a deliberately indifferent gesture.

"Oh, see here, dad, you know you've got to kiss me!" she cried.

So he did, rather shamefacedly, and they sat together on the dusty veranda and talked. He had been well, he said, but he was far from looking so. His face was gray and drawn, his lips were pale, and his long skillful surgeon's hands looked inert and weary. When he walked, he had the effect of dragging his feet after him.

"Aren't you going to take a vacation, dad?" Kate demanded. "If ever a man appeared to be in need of it, you do."

"What would I do with a vacation? And where could I go? I'd look fine at a summer resort, wouldn't I, sitting around with idle fools? If I could only go somewhere to get rid of this damned neurasthenia that all the fool women think they've got, I'd go; but I don't suppose there's such a place this side of the Arctic Circle."

Kate regarded him for a moment without answering. She saw he was almost at the end of his strength and a victim of the very malady against which he was railing. The constant wear and tear of country practice, year in and year out, had depleted him of a magnificent stock of energy and endurance. Perhaps, too, she had had her share of responsibility in his decline, for she had been severe with him; had defied him when she might have comforted him. She forgot his insolence, his meanness, his conscienceless hectoring, as she saw how his temples seemed fallen in and how his gray hair straggled over his brow. It was she who assumed the voice of authority now.

"There's going to be a vacation," she announced, "and it will be quite a long one. Put your practice in the hands of some one else, let your housekeeper take a rest, and then you come away with me. I'll give you three days to get ready."

He cast at her the old sharp, lance-like look of opposition, but she stood before him so strong, so kind, so daughterly (so motherly, too), that, for one of the few times in his life of senseless domination and obstinacy, he yielded. The tears came to his eyes.

"All right, Kate," he said with an accent of capitulation. He really was a broken old man.

She passed a happy evening with him looking over advertisements of forest inns and fishing resorts, and though no decision was reached, both of them went to bed in a state of pleasant anticipation. The following day she took his affairs in hand. The housekeeper was delighted at her release; a young physician was pleased to take charge of Dr. Barrington's patients.

Kate made him buy new clothes,—he had been wearing winter ones,—and she set him out in picturesque gear suiting his lank length and old-time manner. Then she induced him to select a place far north in the Wisconsin woods, and the third day they were journeying there together.

It seemed quite incredible that the dependent and affectionate man opposite her was the one who had filled her with fear and resentment such a short time ago. She found herself actually laughing aloud once at the absurdity of it all. Had her dread of him been fortuitous, his tyranny a mere sham? Had he really liked her all the time, and had she been a sensitive fool? She would have thought so, indeed, but for the memory of the perplexed and distracted face of her mother, the cringing and broken spirit of her who missed truth through an obsession of love. No, no, a tyrant he had been, one of a countless army of them!

But now he leaned back on his seat very sad of eye, inert of gesture, without curiosity or much expectancy. He let her do everything for him. She felt her heart warming as she served him. She could hardly keep herself from stooping to kiss his great brow; the hollows of his eyes when he was sleeping moved her to a passion of pity. After all, he was her own; and now she had him again. The bitterness of years began to die, and with it much of that secret, instinctive aversion to men—that terror of being trapped and held to some uninspiring association or dragging task.

For now, when her father awoke from one of his many naps, he would turn to her with: "Have I slept long, Kate?" or "We'll be going in to lunch soon, I suppose, daughter?" or "Will it be very long now before we reach our destination?"

It was reached at dawn of an early autumn day, and they drove ten miles into the pine woods. The scented silence took them. They were at "God's green caravansarie," and the rancor that had poisoned their hearts was gone. They turned toward each other in common trust, father and daughter, forgiving, if not all forgetting, the hurt and angry years.

"It really was your cousin who brought it about," Kate wrote Honora. "He reminded me that I was fortunate to have a father. You see, I hadn't realized it! Oh, Honora, what a queer girl I am—always having to think things out! Always making myself miserable in trying to be happy! Always going wrong in striving to be right! I should think the gods would make Olympus ring laughing at me! I once wrote your cousin that women of my sort were worn out with their struggle to reconcile their convictions and their instincts. And that's true. That's what is making them so restless and so strange and tumultuous. But of course I can't think it their fault—merely their destiny. Something is happening to them, but neither they nor any one else can quite tell what it is."

* * * * *

Dr. Barrington was broken, no question about that. Even the stimulation of the incomparable air of those Northern woods could not charge him with vitality. He lay wrapped in blankets, on the bed improvised for him beneath the trees, or before the leaping fire in the inn, with the odors of the burning pine about him, and he let time slip by as it would.

The people at the inn thought they never had seen a more devoted daughter than his. She sat beside him while he slept; she read or talked to him softly when he awakened; she was at hand with some light but sustaining refreshment whenever he seemed depressed or too relaxed. But there were certain things which the inn people could not make out. The sick man had the air of having forgiven this fine girl for something. He received her service like one who had the right to expect it. He was tender and he was happy, but he was, after all, the dominator. Nor could they quite make out the girl, who smiled at his demands,—which were sometimes incessant,—and who obeyed with the perfect patience of the strong. They did not know that if he had once been an active tyrant, he was now a supine one. As he had been unable, for all of his intelligence, to perceive the meaning of justice from the old angle, so he was equally unable to get it from his present point of view. He had been harsh with his daughter in the old days; so much he would have admitted. That he would have frustrated her completely, absorbed and wasted her power, he could not perceive. He did not surmise that he was now doing in an amiable fashion what he hitherto had tried to do in a masterful and insolent one. He did not realize that the tyranny of the weak is a more destructive thing when levelled at the generous than the tyranny of the strong.

Had he been interrupted in mid-career—in those days when his surgery was sure and bold—to care for a feeble and complaining wife, he would have thought himself egregiously abused. That Kate, whose mail each day exceeded by many times that which he had received in his most influential years, whose correspondence was with persons with whom he could not at any time have held communication, should be taken from her active duties appeared to him as nothing. He was a sick father. His daughter attended him in love and dutifulness. He was at peace—and he knew she was doing her duty. It really did not occur to him that she or any one else could have looked at the matter in a different light, or that any loving expression of regret was due her. Such sacrifices were expected of women. They were not expected of men, although men sometimes magnificently performed them.

To tell the truth, no such idea occurred to Kate either. She was as happy as her father. At last, in circumstances sad enough, she had reached a degree of understanding with him. She had no thought for the inconvenience under which she worked. She was more than willing to sit till past the middle of the night answering her letters, postponing her engagements, sustaining her humbler and more unhappy friends—those who were under practical parole to her—with her encouragement, and always, day by day, extending the idea of the Bureau of Children. For daily it took shape; daily the system of organization became more apparent to her. She wrote to Ray McCrea about it; she wrote to Karl Wander on the same subject. It seemed to suffice or almost to suffice her. It kept her from anticipating the details of the melancholy drama which was now being enacted before her eyes.

For her father was passing. His weakness increased, and his attitude toward life became one of gentle indifference. He was homesick for his wife, too. Though he had seemed to take so little satisfaction in her society, and had not scrupled when she was alive to show the contempt he felt for her opinions, now he liked to talk of her. He had made a great outcry against sentiment all of his life, but in his weakness he found his chief consolation in it. He had been a materialist, denying immortality for the soul, but now he reverted to the phrases of pious men of the past generation.

"I shall be seeing your mother soon, Kate," he would say wistfully, holding his daughter's hand. Kate was involuntarily touched by such words, but she was ashamed for him, too. Where was all his hard-won, bravely flaunted infidelity? Where his scientific outlook?

It was only slowly, and as the result of her daily and nightly association with him, that she began to see how his acquired convictions were slipping away from him, leaving the sentiments and predilections which had been his when he was a boy. Had he never been a strong man, really, and had his violence of opinion and his arrogance of demeanor been the defences erected by a man of spiritual timidity and restless, excitable brain? Had his assertiveness, like his compliance, been part and parcel of a mind not at peace, not grounded in a definite faith? Perhaps he had been afraid of the domination of his gentle wife with her soft insistence, and had girded at her throughout the years because of mere fanatic self-esteem. But now that she had so long been beyond the reach of his whimsical commands, he turned to the thought of her like a yearning child to its mother.

"If you hadn't come when you did, Kate," he would say, weeping with self-pity, "I should have died alone. I wouldn't own to any one how sick I was. Why, one night I was so weak, after being out thirty-six hours with a sick woman, that I had to creep upstairs on my hands and knees." He sobbed for a moment piteously, his nerves too tattered to permit him to retain any semblance of self-control. Kate tried in vain to soothe him. "What would your mother have thought if you had let me die alone?" he demanded of her.

It was useless for her to say that he had not told her he was ill. He was in no condition to face the truth. He was completely shattered—the victim of a country physician's practice and of an unrestrained irritability. Her commiseration had been all that was needed to have him yield himself unreservedly to her care.

It had been her intention to stay in the woods with him for a fortnight, but the end of that time found his lassitude increasing and his need for her greater than ever. She was obliged to ask for indefinite leave of absence. A physician came from Milwaukee once a week to see him; and meantime quiet and comfort were his best medicines.

The autumn began to deepen. The pines accentuated their solemnity, and out on the roadways the hazel bushes and the sumac changed to canary, to russet, and to crimson. For days together the sky would be cloudless, and even in the dead of night the vault seemed to retain its splendor. There are curious cloths woven on Persian and on Turkish looms which appear to the casual eye to be merely black, but which held in sunlight show green and blue, purple and bronze, like the shifting colors on a duck's back. Kate, pacing back and forth in the night after hours of concentrated labor,—labor which could be performed only when her father was resting,—noted such mysterious and evasive hues in her Northern sky. Never had she seen heavens so triumphant. True, the stars shone with a remote glory, but she was more inspired by their enduring, their impersonal magnificence, than she could have been by anything relative to herself.

A year ago, had she been so isolated, she might have found herself lonely, but it was quite different now. She possessed links with the active world. There were many who wanted her—some for small and some for great things. She felt herself in the stream of life; it poured about her, an invisible thing, but strong and deep. Sympathy, understanding, encouragement, reached her even there in her solitude and heartened her. Weary as she often was physically, drained as she could not but be mentally, her heart was warm and full.

October came and went bringing little change in Dr. Barrington's condition. It did not seem advisable to move him. Rest and care were the things required; and the constant ministrations of a physician would have been of little benefit. Kate prayed for a change; and it came, but not as she had hoped. One morning she went to her father to find him terribly altered. It was as if some blight had fallen upon him in the night. His face was gray in hue, his pulse barely fluttering, though his eyes were keener than they had been, as if a sudden danger had brought back his old force and comprehension. Even the tone in which he addressed her had more of its old-time quality. It was the accent of command, the voice he had used as a physician in the sick-room, though it was faint.

"Send for Hudson," he said. "We'll be needing him, Kate. The fight's on. Don't feel badly if we fail. You've done your best."

It was six hours before the physician arrived from Milwaukee.

"I couldn't have looked for anything like this," he said to Kate. "I thought he was safe—that six months' rest would see him getting about again."

They had a week's conflict with the last dread enemy of man, and they lost. Dr. Barrington was quite as much aware of the significance of his steady decline as any one. He had practical, quiet, encouraging talks with his daughter. He sent for an attorney and secured his property to her. Once more, as in his brighter days, he talked of important matters, though no longer with his old arrogance. He seemed to comprehend at last, fully and proudly, that she was the inheritor of the best part of him. Her excursive spirit, her inquisitive mind, were, after all, in spite of all differences, his gift to her. He gave her his good wishes and begged her to follow whatever forces had been leading her. It was as if, in his weakness, he had sunk for a period into something resembling childhood and had emerged from it into a newer, finer manhood.

"I kept abreast of things in my profession," he said, "but in other matters I was obstinate. I liked the old way—a man at the helm, and the crew answering his commands. No matter how big a fool the man was, I still wanted him at the helm." He smiled at her brightly. There was, indeed, a sort of terrible brilliancy about him, the result, perhaps, of heroic artificial stimulation. But these false fires soon burned themselves out. One beautiful Sunday morning they found him sinking. He himself informed his physician that it was his day of transition.

"I've only an hour or two more, Hudson," he whispered cheerfully. "Feel that pulse!"

"Oh, we may manage to keep you with us some time yet, Dr. Barrington," said the other with a professional attempt at optimism.

But the older man shook his head.

"Let's not bother with the stock phrases," he said. "Ask my daughter to come. I'd like to look at her till the last."

So Kate sat where he could see her, and they coaxed the fluttering heart to yet a little further effort. Dr. Barrington supervised everything; counted his own pulse; noted its decline with his accustomed accuracy.

The sunlight streamed into the room through the tall shafts of trees; outside the sighing of the pines was heard, rising now and then to a noble requiem. It lifted Kate's soul on its deep harmonies, and she was able to bear herself with fortitude.

"It's been so sweet to be with you, dear," she murmured in the ears which were growing dull to earthly sounds. "Say that I've made up to you a little for my willfulness. I've always loved you—always."

"I know," he whispered. "I understand—everything—now!"

In fact, his glance answered hers with full comprehension.

"The beat is getting very low now, Doctor," he murmured, the fingers of his right hand on his left wrist; "very infrequent—fifteen minutes more—"

Dr. Hudson tried to restrain him from his grim task of noting his own sinking vitality, but the old physician waved him off.

"It's very interesting," he said. It seemed so, indeed. Suddenly he said quite clearly and in a louder voice than he had used that day: "It has stopped. It is the end!"

Kate sprang to her feet incredulously. There was a moment of waiting so tense that the very trees seemed to cease their moaning to listen. In all the room there was no sound. The struggling breath had ceased. The old physician had been correct—he had achieved the thing he had set himself to do. He had announced his own demise.



XXII

Kate had him buried beside the wife for whom he had so inconsistently longed. She sold the old house, selected a few keepsakes from it, disposed of all else, and came, late in November, back to the city. Marna's baby had been born—a little bright boy, named for his father. Mrs. Barsaloux, relenting, had sent a layette of French workmanship, and Marna was radiantly happy.

"If only tante will come over for Christmas," Marna lilted to Kate, "I shall be almost too happy to live. How good she was to me, and how ungrateful I seemed to her! Write her to come, Kate, mavourneen. Tell her the baby won't seem quite complete till she's kissed it."

So Kate wrote Mrs. Barsaloux, adding her solicitation to Marna's. Human love and sympathy were coming to seem to her of more value than anything else in the world. To be loved—to be companioned—to have the vast loneliness of life mitigated by fealty and laughter and tenderness—what was there to take the place of it?

Her heart swelled with a desire to lessen the pain of the world. All her egotism, her self-assertion, her formless ambitions had got up, or down, to that,—to comfort the comfortless, to keep evil away from little children, to let those who were in any sort of a prison go free. Yet she knew very well that all of this would lack its perfect meaning unless there was some one to say to her—to her and to none other: "I understand."

* * * * *

Mrs. Barsaloux did not come to America at Christmas time. Karl Wander did not—as he had thought he might—visit Chicago. The holiday season seemed to bring little to Kate except a press of duties. She aspired to go to bed Christmas night with the conviction that not a child in her large territory had spent a neglected Christmas. This meant a skilled cooeperation with other societies, with the benevolently inclined newspapers, and with generous patrons. The correspondence involved was necessarily large, and the amount of detail to be attended to more than she should have undertaken, unaided, but she was spurred on by an almost consuming passion of pity and sisterliness. That sensible detachment which had marked her work at the outset had gradually and perhaps regrettably disappeared. So far from having outgrown emotional struggle, she seemed now, because of something that was taking place in her inner life, to be increasingly susceptible to it.

Her father's death had taken from her the last vestige of a home. She had now no place which she could call her own, or to which she would instinctively turn at Christmas time. To be sure, there were many who bade her to their firesides, and some of these invitations she accepted with gratitude and joy. But she could, of course, only pause at the hearthstones of others. Her thoughts winged on to other things—to the little poor homes where her wistful children dwelt, to the great scheme for their care and oversight which daily came nearer to realization.

A number of benevolent women—rich in purse and in a passion for public service—desired her to lecture. She was to explain the meaning of the Bureau of Children at the state federations of women's clubs, in lyceum courses, and wherever receptive audiences could be found. They advised, among other things, her attendance at the biennial meeting of the General Federation of Women's Clubs which was meeting that coming spring in Southern California.

The time had been not so far distant when she would have had difficulty in seeing herself in the role of a public lecturer, but now that she had something imperative to say, she did not see herself in any "role" at all. She ceased to think about herself save as the carrier of a message.

Her Christmas letter from Wander was at once a disappointment and a shock.

* * * * *

"I've made a mess of things," he wrote, "and do not intend to intrude on you until I have shown myself more worthy of consideration. I try to tell myself that my present fiasco is not my fault, but I've more than a suspicion that I'm playing the coward's part when I think that. You can be disappointed in me if you like. I'm outrageously disappointed. I thought I was made of better stuff.

"I don't know when I'll have time for writing again, for I shall be very busy. I suppose I'll think about you more than is good for me. But maybe not. Maybe the thoughts of you will be crowded out. I'm rather curious to see. It would be better for me if they would, for I've come to a bad turn in the road, and when I get around it, maybe all of the old familiar scenes—the window out of which your face looked, for example—will be lost to me. I send my good wishes to you all the same. I shall do that as long as I have a brain and a heart.

"Faithfully,

"WANDER."

"That means trouble," reflected Kate, and had a wild desire to rush to his aid.

* * * * *

That she did not was owing partly—only partly—to another letter which, bearing an English postmark, indicated that Ray McCrea, who had been abroad for a month on business, was turning his face toward home. What he had to say was this:—

"DEAREST KATE:—

"I'm sending you a warning. In a few days I'll be tossing on that black sea of which I have, in the last few days, caught some discouraging glimpses. It doesn't look as if it meant to let me see the Statue of Liberty again, but as surely as I do, I'm going to go into council with you.

"I imagine you know mighty well what I'm going to say. For years you've kept me at your call—or, rather, for years I have kept myself there. You've discouraged me often, in a tolerant fashion, as if you thought me too young to be dangerous, or yourself too high up to be called to account. I've been patient, chiefly because I found your society, as a mere recipient of my awkward attentions, too satisfactory to be able to run the risk of foregoing it. But if I were to sit in the outer court any longer I would be pusillanimous. I'm coming home to force you to make up that strange mind of yours, which seems to be forever occupying itself with the thing far-off and to-be-hoped-for, rather than with what is near at hand.

"You'll have time to think it over. You can't say I've been precipitate.

"Yours—always,

"RAY."

At that she flashed a letter to Colorado.

"What is your cousin's trouble?" she asked Honora. "Is it at the mines?"

"It's at the mines," Honora replied. "Karl's life has been and is in danger. Friends have warned me of that again and again. There's no holding these people—these several hundred Italians that poor Karl insisted upon regarding as his wards, his 'adopted children.' They're preparing to leave their half-paid-for homes and their steady work, and to go threshing off across the country in the wave of a hard-drinking, hysterical labor leader. He has them inflamed to the explosive point. When they've done their worst, Karl may be a poor man. Not that he worries about that; but he's likely to carry down with him friends and business associates. Of course this is not final. He may win out, but such a catastrophe threatens him.

"But understand, all this is not what is tormenting him and turning him gaunt and haggard. No, as usual, the last twist of the knife is given by a woman. In this case it is an Italian girl, Elena Cimiotti, the daughter of one of the strikers and of the woman who does our washing for us. She's a beautiful, wild creature, something as you might suppose the daughter of Jorio to be. She has come for the washing and has brought it home again for months past, and Karl, who is thoughtful of everybody, has assisted her with her burden when she was lifting it from her burro's back or packing it on the little beast. Sometimes he would fetch her a glass of water, or give her a cup of tea, or put some fruit in her saddle-bags. You know what a way he has with all women! I suppose it would turn any foolish creature's head. And he has such an impressive way of saying things! What would be a casual speech on the tongue of another becomes significant, when he has given one of his original twists to it. I think, too, that in utter disregard of Italian etiquette he has sometimes walked on the street with this girl for a few steps. He is like a child in some ways,—as trusting and unconventional,—and he wants to be friends with everybody. I can't tell whether it is because he is such an aristocrat that it doesn't occur to him that any one can suspect him of losing caste, or because he is such a democrat that he doesn't know it exists.

"However that may be, the girl is in love with him. These Italian girls are modest and well-behaved ordinarily, but when once their imagination is aroused they are like flaming meteors. They have no shame because they can't see why any one should be ashamed of love (and, to tell the truth, I can't either). But this girl believes Karl has encouraged her. I suppose she honestly believed that he was sweethearting. He is astounded and dismayed. At first both he and I thought she would get over it, but she has twice been barely prevented from killing herself. Of course her countrymen think her desperately ill-treated. She is the handsomest girl in the settlement, and she has a number of ardent admirers. To the hatred which they have come to bear Karl as members of a strike directed against him, they now add the element of personal jealousy.

"So you see what kind of a Christmas we are having! I have had Mrs. Hays take the babies to Colorado Springs, and if anything happens to us here, I'll trust to you to see to them. You, who mean to look after little children, look after mine above all others, for their mother gave you, long since, her loving friendship. I would rather have you mother my babies, maiden though you are, than any woman I know, for I feel a great force in you, Kate, and believe you are going on until you get an answer to some of the questions which the rest of us have found unanswerable.

"Karl wants me to leave, for there is danger that the ranch house may be blown up almost any time. These men play with dynamite as if it were wood, anyway, and they make fiery enemies. Every act of ours is spied upon. Our servants have left us, and Karl and I, obstinate as mules and as proud as sheiks, after the fashion of our family, hold the fort. He wants me to go, but I tell him I am more interested in life than I ever dared hope I would be again. I have been bayoneted into a fighting mood, and I find it magnificent to really feel alive again, after crawling in the dust so long, with the taste of it in my mouth. So don't pity me. As for Karl—he looks wild and strange, like the Flying Dutchman with his spectral hand on the helm. But I don't know that I want you to pity him either. He is a curious man, with a passionate soul, and if he flares out like a torch in the wind, it will be fitting enough. No, don't pity us. Congratulate us rather."

"Now what," said Kate aloud, "may that mean?"

"Congratulate us!"

The letter had a note of reckless gayety. Had Honora and Karl, though cousins, been finding a shining compensation there in the midst of many troubles? It sounded so, indeed. Elena Cimiotti might swing down the mountain roads wearing mountain flowers in her hair if she pleased, and Kate would not have thought her dangerous to the peace of Karl Wander. If the wind were wild and the leaves driving, he might have kissed her in some mad mood. So much might be granted—and none, not even Elena, be the worse for it. But to live side by side with Honora Fulham, to face danger with her, to have the exhilaration of conflict, they two together, the mountains above them, the treacherous foe below, a fortune lost or gained in a day, all the elements of Colorado's gambling chances of life and fortune at hand, might mean—anything.