"I hope you are not going to be pursued by that kind of thing."

"It's all in the day's work," said Jeffrey.

He was eating his breakfast with a careful attention to detail. Anne thought he seemed like a painstaking child not altogether sure of his manners. She thought, too, with her swift insight into the needs of man, that he was horribly hungry. She was not, like Lydia, on the verge of impulse all the time, but she broke out here, and then bit her lip:

"I don't believe you did have anything to eat last night."

Lydia gave a little jump in her chair. She didn't see how Anne dared bait the scowling martyr. He looked at Anne. His scowl continued. They began to see he perhaps couldn't smooth it out. But he smiled a little.

"Because I'm so hungry?" he asked. His voice sounded kind. "Well, I didn't."

Lydia, now conversation had begun, wanted to be in it.

"Why not?" asked she, and Anne gave a little protesting note.

"I don't know," said Jeffrey, considering. "I didn't feel like it."

This he said awkwardly, but they all, with a rush of pity for him, thought they knew what he meant. He had eaten his food within restraining walls, probably in silence, and to take up the kind ceremonial of common life was too much for him. Anne poured him another cup of coffee.

"Seen Jim Reardon?" Jeffrey asked his father.

Anne and Lydia could scarcely forbear another glance at him. Here was Reardon, the evil influence behind him, too soon upon the scene. They would not have had his name mentioned until it should be brought out in Jeffrey's vindication.

"No," said the colonel. "Alston Choate called."

"I wonder what Reardon's doing now?" Jeffrey asked.

But his father did not know.

Jeffrey finished rapidly, and then leaned back in his chair, looked out of the window and forgot them all. Lydia felt one of her disproportioned indignations. She was afraid the colonel was not going to have the beautiful time with him their hopes had builded. The colonel looked older still than he had an hour ago.

"What shall we do, my son?" he asked. "Go for a walk—in the orchard?"

A walk in the street suddenly occurred to him as the wrong thing to offer a man returned to the battery of curious eyes.

"If you like," said Jeffrey indifferently. "Do you take one after breakfast?"

He spoke as if it were entirely for his father, and Anne and Lydia wondered, Anne in her kind way and the other hotly, how he could forget that all their passionate interests were for him alone.

"Not necessarily," said the colonel. They were rising. "I was thinking of you—my son."

"What makes you call me that?" Jeffrey asked curiously.

They were in the hall now, looking out beyond the great sun patch on the floor, to the lilac trees.

"What did I call you?"

"Son. You never used to."

Lydia felt she couldn't be quick enough in teaching him how dull he was.

"He calls you so because he's done it in his mind," she said, "for years and years. Your name wasn't enough. Farvie felt so—affectionate."

The last word sounded silly to her, and her cheeks were so hot they seemed to scald her eyes and melt out tears in them. Jeffrey gave her a little quizzical look, and slipped his arm through his father's. Anne, at the look, was suddenly relieved. He must have some soft emotions, she thought, behind the scowl.

"Don't you like it?" the colonel asked him. He straightened consciously under the touch of his son's arm.

"Oh, yes," said Jeffrey. "I like it. Only you never had. Except in letters. Come in here and I'll tell you what I'm going to do."

He had piloted the colonel into the library, and Anne and Lydia were disappearing into the dining-room where Mary Nellen was now supreme. The colonel called them, imperatively. There was such a note of necessity in his voice that they felt sure he didn't know how to deal, quite by himself, with this unknown quantity of a son.

"Girls, come here. I have to have my girls," he said to Jeffrey, "when anything's going to be talked over. They're the head of the house and my head, too."

The girls came proudly, if unwillingly. They knew the scowling young man didn't need them, might not want them indeed. But they were a part of Farvie, and he'd got to accept them until they found out, at least, how safe Farvie was going to be in his hands. Jeffrey wasn't thinking of them at all. He was accepting them, but they hadn't any share in his perspective. Lydia felt they were the merest little dots there. She giggled, one brief note to herself, and then sobered. She was as likely to laugh as to fume, and it began to seem very funny to her that in this drama of The Prisoner's Return she and Anne were barely to have speaking parts. The colonel sat in his armchair at the orchard window, and Jeffrey stood by the mantel and fingered a vase. Lydia, for the first time seeing his hands with a recognising eye, was shocked by them. They were not gentleman's hands, she thought. They were worn, and had calloused stains and ill-kept nails.

"I thought you'd like to know as soon as possible what I mean to do," he said, addressing his father.

"I'm glad you've got your plans," his father said. "I've tried to make some, but I couldn't—couldn't."

"I want first to find out just how things are here," said Jeffrey. "I want to know how much you've got to live on, and whether these girls have anything, and whether they want to stay on with you or whether they're doing it because—" Jeffrey now had a choking sense of emotions too big for him—"because there's no other way out."

"Do you mean," said Lydia, in a burst, before Anne's warning hand could stop her, "you want us to leave Farvie?"

The colonel looked up with a beseeching air.

"Good God, no!" said Jeffrey irritably. "I only want to know the state of things here. So I can tell what to do."

The colonel had got hold of himself, and straightened in his chair. The girls knew that motion. It meant, "Come, come, you derelict old body. Get into form."

"I've tried to write you fully," he said. "I hoped I gave you a—a picture of the way we lived."

"You did. You have," said Jeffrey, still with that air of getting nowhere and being greatly irritated by it. "But how could I know how much these girls are sacrificing?"

"Sacrificing?" repeated the colonel helplessly, and Lydia was on the point of another explosion when Jeffrey himself held up his hand to her.

"Wait," he said. "Let me think. I don't know how to get on with people. They only make me mad."

That put a different face on it. Anne knew what he meant. Here he was, he for whom they had meant to erect arches of welcome, floored in a moment by the perplexities of family life.

"Of course," said Anne. She often said "of course" to show her sympathy. "You tell it your own way."

"Ah!" said Jeffrey, with a breath of gratitude. "Now you're talking. Don't you see——" he faced Anne as the only person present whose emotions weren't likely to get the upper hand——"don't you see I've got to know how father's fixed before I make any plans for myself?"

Anne nodded.

"We live pretty simply," she said, "but we can live. I keep the accounts. I can tell you how much we spend."

The colonel had got hold of himself now.

"I have twelve hundred a year," he said. "We do very well on that. I don't actually know how, except that Anne is such a good manager. She and Lydia have earned quite a little, dancing, but I always insisted on their keeping that for their own use."

Here Jeffrey looked at Anne and found her pinker than she had been. Anne was thinking she rather wished she had not been so free with her offer of accounts.

"Dancing," said he. "Yes. You wrote me. Do you like to dance?"

He had turned upon Lydia.

"Oh, yes," said she. "It's heavenly. Anne doesn't. Except when she's teaching children."

"What made you learn dancing?" he asked Anne.

"We wanted to do something," she said guiltily. She was afraid her tongue was going to betray her and tell the story of the lean year after their mother died when they found out that mother had lived a life of magnificent deception as to the ease of housekeeping on twelve hundred a year.

"Yes," said Jeffrey, "but dancing? Why'd you pick out that?"

"We couldn't do anything else," said Lydia impatiently. "Anne and I don't know anything in particular." She thought he might have been clever enough to see that, while too tactful to betray it. "But we look nice—together—and anybody can dance."

"Oh!" said Jeffrey. His eyes had a shade less of gravity, but he kept an unmoved seriousness of tone.

"About our living with Farvie," said Anne. "I can see you'd want to know."

"Yes," said he, "I do."

"We love to," said Anne. "We don't know what we should do if Farvie turned us out."

"My dear!" from the colonel.

"Why, he's our father," said Lydia, in a burst. "He's just as much our father as he is yours."

"Good!" said Jeffrey. His voice had warmed perceptibly. "Good for you. That's what I thought."

"If you'd rather not settle down here," said his father, in a tone of hoping Jeff would like it very much, "we shall be glad to let the house again and go anywhere you say. We've often talked of it, the girls and I."

Jeffrey did not thank them for that, or seem to hear it even.

"I want," said he, "to go West."

"Well," said Farvie, with a determined cheerfulness, "I guess the girls'll agree to that. Middle West?"

"No," said Jeffrey, "the West—if there is any West left. Somewhere where there's space." His voice fell, on that last word. It held wonder even. Was there such a thing, this man of four walls seemed to ask, as space?

"You'd want to go alone," said Anne softly. She felt as if she were breaking something to Farvie and adjuring him to bear it.

"Yes," said Jeffrey, in relief. "I've got to go alone."

"My son—" said the colonel and couldn't go on. Then he did manage. "Aren't we going to live together?"

"Not yet," said Jeffrey. "Not yet."

The colonel had thought so much about his old age that now he was near saying: "You know I haven't so very many years," but he held on to himself.

"He's got to go alone," said Anne. "But he'll come back."

"Yes," said Lydia, from the habit they had learned of heartening Farvie, "he'll come back."

But she was hotly resolving that he should learn his duty and stay here. Let her get a word with him alone.

"What I'm going to do out there I don't know," said Jeffrey. "But I am going to work, and I'm going to turn in enough to keep you as you ought to be. I want to stay here a little while first."

The colonel was rejuvenated by delight. Lydia wondered how anybody could see that look on his face and not try to keep it there.

"I've got," said Jeffrey, "to write a book."

"Oh, my son," said the colonel, "that's better than I hoped. The newspapers have had it all, how you've changed the prison paper, and how you built up a scheme of prison government, and I said to myself, 'When he comes out, he'll write a book, and good will come of it, and then we shall see that, under Providence, my son went to prison that he might do that.'"

He was uplifted with the wonder of it. The girls felt themselves carried along at an equal pace. This was it, they thought. It was a part of the providences that make life splendid. Jeffrey had been martyred that he might do a special work.

"Oh, no," said he, plainly bored by the inference. "That's not it. I'm going to write the life of a fellow I know."

"Who was he?" Anne asked, with a serious uplift of her brows.

"A defaulter."

"In the Federal Prison?"

"Yes."



VI

He looked at them, quite unconscious of the turmoil he had wakened in them. Lydia was ready to sound the top note of revolt. Her thoughts were running a definite remonstrance: "Write the life of another man when you should be getting your evidence together and proving your own innocence and the injustice of the law?" Anne was quite ready to believe there must be a cogent reason for writing the life of his fellow criminal, but she wished it were not so. She, too, from long habit of thought, wanted Jeffrey to attend to his own life now he had a chance. The colonel, she knew, through waiting and hoping, had fallen into an attitude of mind as wistful and expectant as hers and Lydia's. The fighting qualities, it seemed, had been ground out of him. The fostering ones had grown disproportionately, and sometimes, she was sure, they made him ache, in a dull way, with ruth for everybody.

"Did the man ask you to write his life?" he inquired.

"No," said Jeffrey. "I asked him if I could. He agreed to it. Said I might use his name. He's no family to squirm under it."

"You feel he was unjustly sentenced," the colonel concluded.

"Oh, no. He doesn't either. He mighty well deserved what he got. Been better perhaps if he'd got more. What I had in mind was to tell how a man came to be a robber."

Lydia winced at the word. Jeffrey had been commonly called a defaulter, and she was imperfectly reconciled to that: certainly not to a branding more ruthless still.

"I've watched him a good deal," said Jeffrey. "We've had some talk together. I can see how he did what he did, and how he'd do it again. It'll be a study in criminology."

"When does he—come out?" Anne hesitated over this. She hardly knew a term without offence.

"Next year."

"But," said she, "you wouldn't want to publish a book about him and have him live it down?"

"Why shouldn't I?" asked Jeffrey, turning on her. "He's willing."

"He can't be willing," Lydia broke in. "It's frightful."

"Well, he is," said Jeffrey. "There's nothing you could do to him he'd mind, if it gave him good advertising."

"What does he want to do," asked the colonel, "when he comes out?"

"Get into the game again. Make big money. And if it's necessary, steal it. Not that he wants to bunco. He's had his dose. He's learned it isn't safe. But he'd make some dashing coup; he couldn't help it. Maybe he'd get nabbed."

"What a horrid person!" said Lydia. "How can you have anything to do with him?"

"Why, he's interesting," said Jeffrey, in a way she found brutal. "He's a criminal. He's got outside."

"Outside what?" she persisted.

"Law. And he wouldn't particularly want to get back, except that it pays. But I'm not concerned with what he does when he gets back. I want to show how it seemed to him outside and how he got there. He's more picturesque than I am, or I'd take myself."

Blessed Anne, who had no grasp, she thought, of abstract values, but knew how to make a man able for his work, met the situation quietly.

"You could have the blue chamber, couldn't he, Farvie? and do your writing there."

Lydia flashed her a reproachful glance. She would have scattered his papers and spilled the ink, rather than have him do a deed like that. If he did it, it was not with her good-will. Jeff had drawn his frown the tighter.

"I don't know whether I can do it," he said. "A man has got to know how to write."

"You wrote some remarkable things for the Nestor," said the colonel, now hesitating. It had been one of the rules he and the girls had concocted for the treatment of a returning prisoner, never to refer to stone walls and iron bars. But surely, he felt, Jeff needed encouragement.

Jeff was ruthless.

"That was all rot," he said.

"What was?" Lydia darted at him. "Didn't you mean what you said?"

"It was idiotic for the papers to take it up," said Jeff. "They got it all wrong. 'There's a man,' they said, 'in the Federal Prison, Jeffrey Blake, the defaulter. Very talented. Has revolutionised the Nestor, the prison organ. Let him out, pardon him, simply because he can write.'"

"As I understand," said his father, "you did get the name of the paper changed."

"Well, now," said Jeff, appealingly, in a candid way, "what kind of name was that for a prison paper? Nestor! 'Who was Nestor?' says the man that's been held up in the midst of his wine-swilling and money-getting. Wise old man, he remembers. First-class preacher. Turn on the tap and he'll give you a maxim. 'Gee!' says he, 'I don't want advice. I know how I got here, and if I ever get out, I'll see to it I don't get in again.'"

Lydia found this talk exceedingly diverting. She disapproved of it. She had wanted Jeff to appear a dashing, large-eyed, entirely innocent young man, his mouth, full of axioms, prepared to be the stay of Farvie's gentle years. But this rude torrent of perverse philosophy bore her along and she liked it, particularly because she felt she should presently contradict and show how much better she knew herself. Anne, too, evidently had an unlawful interest in it, and wanted him to keep on talking. She took that transparent way of furthering the flow by asking a question she could answer herself.

"You called it Prison Talk, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Jeff. "They called it Prison Talk."

"And all our newspapers copied your articles," said Anne, artfully guiding him forward, "the ones you called 'The New Republic.'"

"What d'they want to copy them for?" asked Jeff. "It was a fool thing to do. I'd simply written the letters to the men, to ask 'em if they didn't think the very devil of prison life was that we were outside. Not because we were inside, shut up in a jug. You could bear to be in a jug, if that was all. But you've got to have ties. You've got to have laws and the whole framework that's been built up from the cave man. Or you're desperate, don't you see? You're all alone. And a man will do a great deal not to be alone. If there's nothing for you to do but learn a trade, and be preached at by Nestor, and say to yourself, 'I'm outside'—why there's the devil in it."

He was trying to convince them as he had previously convinced others, those others who had lived with him under the penal law. He looked at Anne much as if she were a State or Federal Board and incidentally at Lydia, as if he would say:

"Here's a very young and insignificant criminal. We'll return to her presently. But she, too, is going to be convinced."

"And I don't say a man hasn't got to be infernally miserable when he's working out his sentence. He has. I don't want you to let up on him. Only I don't want him to get punky, so he isn't fit to come back when his term is over. I don't believe it's going to do much for him merely to keep the laws he's been chucked under, against his will, though he's got to keep 'em, or they'll know the reason why."

Lydia wondered who They were. She thought They might be brutal wardens and assembled before her, in a terrifying battalion, the strait-jackets and tortures she'd found in some of the older English novels.

"So I said to the men: 'We've got to govern ourselves. We haven't got a damned word'"—really abashed he looked at Anne—"I beg your pardon. 'We haven't got a word to say in this government we're under; but say we have. Say the only thing we can do is to give no trouble, fine ourselves, punish ourselves if we do. The worst thing that can happen to us,' I said, 'is to hate law. Well, the best law we've got is prison law. It's the only law that's going to touch us now. Let's love it as if it were our mother. And if it isn't tough enough, let's make it tougher. Let's vote on it, and publish our votes in this paper.'"

"I was surprised," said his father, "that so much plain speaking was allowed."

"Advertising! Of course they allowed us," said Jeff. "It advertised us outside. Advertised the place. Officials got popular. Inside conduct went up a hundred per cent, just as it would in school. Men are only boys. As soon as the fellows got it into their heads we were trying to work out a republic in a jail, they were possessed by it. I wish you could see the letters that were sent in to the paper. You couldn't publish 'em, some of 'em. Too illiterate. But they showed you what was inside the fellows. Sometimes they were as smug as a prayer-meeting."

"Did this man write?" Lydia asked scornfully, with a distaste she didn't propose to lessen. "The one you're going to do the book about?"

"Oh, he's a crook," said Jeff indifferently. "Crook all through. If we'd been trying to build up a monarchy instead of a republic he'd have hatched up a scheme for looting the crown jewels. Or if we'd been founding a true and only church, he'd have suggested a trick for melting the communion plate."

"And you want to write his life!" said Lydia's look.

But Jeff cared nothing about her look. He was, with a retrospective eye, regarding the work he had been doing, work that had perhaps saved his reason as well as bought his freedom. Now he was spreading it out and letting them consider it, not for praise, but because he trusted them. He felt a few rivets giving in the case he had hardened about himself for so long a time. He thought he had got very hard indeed, and was even willing to invite a knock or two, to test his induration. But there was something curiously softening in this little group sitting in the shade of the pleasant room while the sunshine outside played upon growing leaves. He was conscious, wonderingly, that they all loved him very much. His father's letters had told him that. It seemed simple and natural, too, that these young women, who were not his sisters and who gave him, in his rough habit of life, a curious pain with their delicacy and softness—it seemed natural enough that they should, in a way not understood, belong to him. He had got gradually accustomed to it, from their growing up in his father's house from little girls to girls dancing themselves into public favour, and then, again, he had been living "outside" where ordinary conventions did not obtain. He had got used to many things in his solitary thoughts that were never tested by other minds in familiar intercourse. The two girls belonged there among accepted things. He looked up suddenly at his father, and asked the question they had least of all expected to hear:

"Where's Esther?"

The two girls made a movement to go, but he glanced at them frowningly, as if they mustn't break up the talk at this moment, and they hesitated, hand in hand.

"She's living here," said the colonel, "with her grandmother."

"Has that old harpy been over lately?"

"Madame Beattie?"

"Yes."

"Not to my knowledge."

Anne and Lydia exchanged looks. Madame Beattie was a familiar name to them, but they had never heard she was a harpy.

"Was she Esther's aunt?" Lydia inquired, really to give the talk a jog. She was accustomed to shake up her watch when it hesitated.

"Great-aunt," said Jeffrey. "Step-sister to Esther's grandmother. She must be sixty-five where grandmother's a good ten years older."

"She sang," said the colonel, forgetting, as he often did, they seemed so young, that everybody in America must at least have heard tradition of Madame Beattie's voice. "She lived abroad."

"She had a ripping voice," said Jeff. "When she was young, of course. That wasn't all. There was something about her that took them. But she lost her voice, and she married Beattie, and he died. Then she came back here and hunted up Esther."

His face settled into lines of sombre thought, puzzled thought, it seemed to Anne. But to Lydia it looked as if this kidnapping of Madame Beattie from the past and thrusting her into the present discussion was only a pretext for talking about Esther. Of course, she knew, he was wildly anxious to enter upon the subject, and there might be pain enough in it to keep him from approaching it suddenly. Esther might be a burning coal. Madame Beattie was the safe holder he caught up to keep his fingers from it. But he sounded now as if he were either much absorbed in Madame Beattie or very wily in his hiding behind her.

"I've often wondered if she came back. I've thought she might easily have settled on Esther and sucked her dry. No news of her?"

"No news," said the colonel. "It's years since she's been here. Not since—then."

"No," said Jeff. There was a new line of bitter amusement near his mouth. "I know the date of her going, to a dot. The day I was arrested she put for New York. Next week she sailed for Italy." But if Lydia was going to feel more of her hot reversals in the face of his calling plain names, she found him cutting them short with another question: "Seen Esther?"

"No," said the colonel.

A red spot had sprung into his cheek. He looked harassed. Lydia sprang into the arena, to save him, and because she was the one who had the latest news.

"I have," she said. "I've seen her."

She knew what grave surprise was in the colonel's face. But no such thing appeared in Jeff's. He only turned to her as if she were the next to be interrogated.

"How does she look?" he asked.

The complete vision of her stretched at ease eating fruit out of a silver dish, as if she had arranged herself to rouse the most violent emotions in a little seething sister, stirred Lydia to the centre. But not for a million dollars, she reflected, in a comparison clung to faithfully, would she tell how beautiful Esther appeared to even the hostile eye.

"She looked," said she coldly, "perfectly well."

"Where d'you see her?" Jeff asked.

"I went over," said Lydia. Her colour was now high. She looked as if you might select some rare martyrdom for her—quartering or gridironing according to the oldest recipes—and you couldn't make her tell less than the truth, because only the truth would contribute to the downfall of Esther. "I went in without ringing, because Farvie'd been before and they wouldn't let him in."

"Lydia!" the colonel called remindingly.

"I found her reading—and eating." Lydia hadn't known she could be so hateful. Still she was telling the exact truth. "We talked a few minutes and I came away."

"Did she—" at last suddenly and painfully thrown out of his nonchalant run of talk, he stopped.

"She's a horrid woman," said Lydia, crimson with her own daring, and got up and ran out of the room.

Anne looked appealingly at Jeff, in a way of begging him to remember how young Lydia was, and perhaps how spoiled. But he wasn't disturbed. He only said to his father in a perfectly practical way:

"Women never did like her, you know."

So Anne got up and went out, thinking it was the moment for him and his father to pace along together on this road of masculine understanding. She found Lydia by the dining-room window, savagely drying her cheeks. Lydia looked as if she had cried hard and scrubbed the tears off and cried again, there was such wilful havoc in the pink smoothness of her face.

"Isn't he hateful?" she asked Anne, with an incredulous spite in her voice. "How could anybody that belonged to Farvie be so rough? I can't endure him, can you?"

Anne looked distressed. When there were disagreements and cross-purposes they made her almost ill. She would go about with a physical nausea upon her, wishing the world could be kind.

"But he's only just—free," she said.

They were still making a great deal of that word, she and Lydia. It seemed the top of earthly fortune to be free, and abysmal misery to have missed it.

"I can't help it," said Lydia. "What does he want to act so for? Why does he talk about such places, as if anybody could be in them?"

"Prisons?"

"Yes. And talking about going West as if Farvie hadn't just lived to get him back. And about her as if she wasn't any different from what he expected and you couldn't ask her to be anything else."

"But she's his wife," said Anne gently. "I suppose he loves her. Let's hope he does."

"You can, if you want to," said Lydia, with a wet handkerchief making another renovating attack on her face. "I sha'n't. She's a horrid woman."

They parted then, for their household deeds, but all through the morning Lydia had a fire of curiosity burning in her to know what Jeff was doing. He ought, she knew, to be sitting by Farvie, keeping him company, in a passionate way, to make up for the years. The years seemed sometimes like a colossal mistake in nature that everybody had got to make up for—make up to everybody else. Certainly she and Anne and Farvie had got to make up to the innocent Jeff. And equally they had all got to make up to Farvie. But going once noiselessly through the hall, she glanced in and saw the colonel sitting alone by the window, Mary Nellen's Virgil in his hand. He was well back from the glass, and Lydia guessed that it was because he wanted to command the orchard and not himself be seen. She ran up to her own room and also looked. There he was, Jeff, striding round in the shadow of the brick wall, walking like a man with so many laps to do before night. Sometimes he squared his shoulders and walked hard, but as if he knew he was going to get there—the mysterious place for which he was bound. Sometimes his shoulders sagged, and he had to drive himself. Lydia felt, in her throat, the aching misery of youth and wondered if she had got to cry again, and if this hateful, wholly unsatisfactory creature was going to keep her crying. As she watched, he stopped, and then crossed the orchard green directly toward her. She stood still, looking down on him fascinated, her breath trembling, as if he might glance up and ask her what business she had staring down there, spying on him while he did those mysterious laps he was condemned to, to make up perhaps for the steps he had not taken on free ground in all the years.

"Got a spade?" she heard him call.

"Yes." It was Anne's voice. "Here it is."

"Why, it's new," Lydia heard him say.

He was under her window now, and she could not see him without putting her head over the sill.

"Yes," said Anne. "I went down town and bought it."

Anne's voice sounded particularly satisfied. Lydia knew that tone. It said Anne had been able to accomplish some fit and clever deed, to please. It was as if a fountain, bubbling over, had said, "Have I given you a drink, you dog, you horse, you woman with the bundle and the child? Marvellous lucky I must be. I'll bubble some more."

Jeff himself might have understood that in Anne, for he said:

"I bet you brought it home in your hand."

"No takers," said Anne. "I bet I did."

"That heavy spade?"

"It wasn't heavy."

"You thought I'd be spading to keep from growing dotty. Good girl. Give it here."

"But, Jeff!" Anne's voice flew after him as he went. Lydia felt herself grow hot, knowing Anne had taken the big first step that had looked so impossible when they saw him. She had called him Jeff. "Jeff, where are you going to spade?"

"Up," said Jeff. "I don't care where. You always spade up, don't you?"

In a minute Lydia saw Anne, with the sun on her brown hair, the colonel, and Jeff with the shining spade like a new sort of war weapon, going forth to spade "up". Evidently Anne intended to have no spading at random in a fair green orchard. She was one of the conservers of the earth, a thrifty housewife who would have all things well done. They looked happily intent, the three, going out to their breaking ground. Lydia felt the tempest in her going down, and she wished she were with them. But her temper shut her out. She felt like a little cloud driven by some capricious wind to darken the face of earth, and not by her own willingness.

She went down to the noon dinner quite chastened, with the expression Anne knew, of having had a temper and got over it. The three looked as if they had had a beautiful time, Lydia thought humbly. The colour was in their faces. Farvie talked of seed catalogues, and it became evident that Jeff was spading up the old vegetable garden on the orchard's edge. Anne had a soft pink in her cheeks. They had all, it appeared, begun a pleasant game.

Lydia kept a good deal to herself that day. She accepted a task from Anne of looking over table linen and lining drawers with white paper. Mary Nellen was excused from work, and sat at upper windows making a hum of study like good little translating bees. Anne went back and forth from china closet to piles of dishes left ready washed by Mary Nellen, and the colonel, in the library, drowsed off the morning's work. Lydia had a sense of peaceful tasks and tranquil pauses. Her own pulses had quieted with the declining sun, and it seemed as if they might all be settling into a slow-moving ease of life at last.

"Where is he?" suddenly she said to Anne, in the midst of their weaving the household rhythm.

"Jeff?" asked Anne, not stopping. "He's spading in the garden."

"Don't you want to go out?" asked Lydia. She felt as if they had on their hands, not a liberated prisoner, but a prisoner still bound by their fond expectations of him. He must be beguiled, distracted from the memory of his broken fetters.

"No," said Anne. "He'll be tired enough to sleep to-night."

"Didn't he sleep last night?" Lydia asked, that old ache beginning again in her.

"I shouldn't think so," said Anne. "But he's well tired now".

And it was Lydia that night at ten who heard long breaths from the little room when she went softly up the back stairs to speak to Mary Nellen. There was a light on his table. The door was open. He sat, his back to her, his arms on the table, his head on his arms. She heard the long labouring breaths of a creature who could have sobbed if he had not kept a heavy hand on himself. They were, Lydia thought, like the breaths of a dear dog she had known who used to put his nose to the crack of the shut door and sigh into it, "Please let me in." It seemed to her acutely sensitive mind, prepared like a chemical film to take every impression Jeff could cast, as if he were lying prone at the door of the cruel beauty and breathing, "Please let me in." She wanted to put her hands on the bowed head and comfort him. Now she knew how Anne felt, Anne, the little mother heart, who dragged up compassion from the earth and brought it down from the sky for unfriended creatures. And yet all the solace Lydia had to offer was a bitter one. She would only have said:

"Don't cry for her. She isn't worth it. She's a hateful woman."



VII

Madame Beattie was near, and had that morning telegraphed Esther. The message was explicit, and, in the point of affection, diffuse. Old-fashioned, too: she longed to hold her niece in her arms. A more terrified young woman could not easily have been come on that day than Esther Blake, as she opened the envelope, afraid of detectives, of reporters, of anything connected with a husband lately returned from jail. But this was worse than she could have guessed. In face of an ordinary incursion she might shut herself up in her room and send Sophy to tell smooth fictions at the door. Reporters could hardly get at her, and her husband himself, if he should try, could presumably be routed. Aunt Patricia Beattie was another matter. Esther was so panicky that she ran upstairs with the telegram and tapped at grandmother's door. Rhoda Knox came in answer. She was a large woman of a fine presence, red cheekbones with high lights, and smooth black hair brushed glossy and carefully coiled. She was grandmother's attendant, helplessly hated by grandmother but professionally unmoved by it, a general who carried on intricate calculations to avoid what she called "steps." In the matter of steps, she laid bonds on high and low. A deed that would have taken her five minutes to do she passed on to the next available creature, even if it required twenty minutes' planning to hocus him into accepting it. She had the intent look of the schemer: yet she was one who meant well and simply preferred by nature to be stationary. Grandmother feared her besides hating her, though loving the order she brought to pass.

Esther slipped by her, and went to the bed where grandmother was lying propped on pillows, an exceedingly small old woman who was even to life-long friends an enigma presumably without an answer. She had the remote air of hating her state of age, which did not seem a natural necessity but a unique calamity, a trap sprung on her and, after the nature of traps, most unexpectedly. When she was young she had believed the old walked into the trap deliberately because it was provided on a path they were tired of. But she wasn't tired, and yet the trap had clutched her. She had a small face beautifully wrought upon by lines, as if she had given a cunning artificer the preparation of a mask she was paying dearly for and yet didn't prize at all. An old-fashioned nightcap with a frill covered her head, and she had tied herself so tightly into it that he must be a bold adventurer who would get at the thoughts inside. Her little hands were shaded by fine frills. She looked, on the whole, like a disenchanted lingerer in the living world, a useless creature for whom fostering had done so much that you might ask: "What is this illustration of a clean old woman? What is it for? What does it teach?"

Esther, with her telegram, stood beside the bed.

"Grandmother," said she, in the perfect tone she used toward her, clear and not too loud, "Aunt Patricia Beattie is coming."

Grandmother lifted large black eyes dulled by the broken surface of age, to Esther's face. There was no envy in the gaze but wonder chiefly.

"Is that youth?" the eyes inquired. "Useless, not especially admirable—but curious."

Esther, waiting there for recognition, felt the discomfort grandmother always seemed to stir into her mood. Her rose-touched skin was a little more suffused, though not beyond a furtherance of beauty.

"Aunt Patricia is coming," she repeated. "When I heard from her last she was in Poland."

"Her name is Martha," said grandmother. "Don't let her come in here." She had a surprising voice, of a barbaric quality, the ring of metal. Hearing it you were mentally translated for an instant, and thought of far-off, palm-girt islands and savages beating strange instruments and chanting to them uncouth syllables. "Rhoda Knox, don't let her get up here."

"How can I keep her out?" asked Esther. "You'll have to see her. I can't live down there alone with her. I couldn't make her happy."

A satirical light shivered across grandmother's eyes.

"Where is your husband?" she inquired. "Here?"

"Here?" repeated Esther. "In this house?"

"Yes."

"He isn't coming here. It would be very painful for him."

The time had been when grandmother, newer to life, would have asked, "Why?" But she knew Esther minutely now; all her turns of speech and habits of thought were as a tale long told. Once it had been a mildly fascinating game to see through what Esther said to what she really meant. It was easy, once you had the clue, too easy, all certainties, with none of the hazards of a game. Esther, she knew, lived with a lovely ideal of herself. The imaginary Esther was all sympathy; she was even self-sacrificing. No shining quality lay in the shop window of the world's praise but the real Esther snatched it and adorned herself with it. The Esther that was talked in the language of the Esther that ought to be. If she didn't want to see you, she told you it would be inconvenient for you to come. If she wanted to tell you somebody had praised the rose of her cheek, she told you she was so touched by everybody's goodness in loving to give pleasure; then she proved her point by naive repetition of the pretty speech. Sometimes she even, in the humility of the other Esther, deprecated the flattery as insincere; but not before she had told you what it was.

"I haven't seen her since—I haven't seen her for years," she said. "She wasn't happy with me then. She'll be much less likely to be now."

"Older," said grandmother. "More difficult. Keep her out of here."

It seemed to Esther there was no sympathy for her in the world, even if she got drum and fife and went out to beat it up. One empty victory she had achieved: grandmother had at least spoken to her. Sometimes she turned her face to the wall and lay there, not even a ruffle quivering. Esther moved away, but Rhoda Knox was beforehand with her. Rhoda held a letter.

"Mrs. Blake, could you take this down?" she asked, in a faultless manner, and yet implacably. "And let it go out when somebody is going?"

Esther accepted the letter helplessly. She knew how Rhoda sat planning to get her errands done. Yet there was never any reason why you should not do them. She ran downstairs carrying the letter, hating it because it had got itself carried against her will, and went at once to the telephone. And there her voice had more than its natural appeal, because she was so baffled and angry and pitied herself so much.

"Could you come in? I'm bothered. Yes," in answer to his question, "in trouble, I'm afraid."

Alston Choate came at once; her voice must have told him moving things, for he was full of warm concern. Esther met him with a dash of agitation admirably controlled. She was not the woman to alarm a man at the start. Let him get into a run, let him forget the spectators by the way, and even the terrifying goal where he might be crowned victor even before he chose. Only whip up his blood until the guidance of them both was hers, not his. So he felt at once her need of him and at the same time her distance from him. It was a wonderfully vivifying call: nothing to fear from her, but exhilarating feats to be undertaken for her sake.

"I'm frightened at last," she told him. That she was a brave woman the woman she had created for her double had persuaded her. "I had to speak to somebody."

Choate looked really splendid in the panoply of his simplicity and restraints and courtesy. A man can be imposing in spite of a broken nose.

"What's gone wrong?" he asked.

"Aunt Patricia is coming."

Choate had quite forgotten Aunt Patricia. She had been too far in the depths of Poland for Esther to summon up her shade. Possibly it was a dangerous shade to summon, lest the substance follow. But now she sketched Aunt Patricia with hesitating candour, but so that he lost none of her undesirability, and he listened with a painstaking courtesy.

"You say you're afraid of her?" he said, at the end. "Let her come. She may not want to stay."

"She is so—different," faltered Esther. She looked at him with humid eyes. It was apparent that Aunt Patricia was different in a way not to be commended.

Now Choate thought he saw how it was.

"You mean she's been banging about Europe," he said, "living in pensions, trailing round with second-rate professionals. I get that idea, at least. Am I right?"

"She's frightfully bohemian, of course," said Esther. "Yes, that's what I did mean."

"But she's not young, you know," said Choate, in an indulgent kindliness Esther was quite sure he kept for her alone. "She won't be very rackety. People don't want the same things after they're sixty."

"She smokes," said Esther, in a burst of confidence. "She did years ago when nice women weren't doing it."

He smiled at this, but tenderly. He didn't leave Addington very often, but he did know what a blaze the vestals of the time keep up.

"No matter," said he, "so long as you don't."

"She drinks brandy," said Esther, "and tells things. I can't repeat what she tells. She's different from anybody I ever met—and I don't see how I can make her happy."

By this time Choate saw there was nothing he could do about Aunt Patricia, and dismissed her from his orderly mind. She was not absolutely pertinent to Esther's happiness. But he looked grave. There was somebody, he knew, who was pertinent.

"I haven't succeeded in seeing Jeff yet," he began, with a slight hesitation. It seemed to him it might be easier for her to hear that name than the formal words, "your husband". She winced. Choate saw it and pitied her, as she knew he would. "Is he coming—here?"

She looked at him with large, imploring eyes.

"Must I?" he heard her whispering, it seemed really to herself.

"I don't see how you can help it, dear," he answered. The last word surprised him mightily. He had never called her "dear". She hadn't even been "Esther" to him. But the warmth of his compassion and an irritation that had been working in him with Jeff's return—something like jealousy, it might even be—drove the little word out of doors and bade it lodge with her and so betray him. Esther heard the word quite clearly and knew what volumes of commentary it carried; but Choate, relieved, thought it had passed her by. She was still beseeching him, even caressing him, with the liquid eyes.

"You see," she said, "he and I are strangers—almost. He's been away so long."

"You haven't seen him," said Choate, like an accusation. He had often had to bruise that snake. He hoped she'd step on it for good.

"No," said Esther. "He didn't wish it."

Choate's sane sense told him that no man could fail to wish it. If Jeff had forbidden her to come at the intervals when he could see his kin, she should have battered down his denials and gone to him. She should have left on his face the warm touch of hers and the cleansing of her tears. Choate had a tremendous idea of the obligations of what he called love. He hid what he thought of it in the fastnesses of a shy heart, but he took delight and found strength, too, in the certainty that there is unconquerable love, and that it laughs at even the locksmiths that fasten prison doors. He knew what a pang it would have been to him if he had seen Esther Blake going year after year to carry her hoarded sweetness to another man. But he wished she had done it. Some hardy, righteous fibre in him would have been appeased.

"He's happier away from me," said Esther, shaking her head. "His father understands him. I don't. Why, before he went away we weren't so very happy. Didn't you know that?"

Choate was glad and sorry.

"Weren't you?" he responded. "Poor child!"

"No. We'd begun to be strangers, in a way. And it's gone on and on, and of course we're really strangers now."

The Esther she meant to be gave her a sharp little prick here—that Esther seemed to carry a needle for the purpose of these occasional pricks, though she used it less and less as time went on—and said to her, "Strangers before he went away? Oh, no! I'd like to think that. It makes the web we're spinning stronger. But I can't. No. That isn't true."

"So you see," said the real Esther to Choate, "I can't do anything. I sit here alone with my hands tied, and grandma upstairs—of course I can't leave grandma—and I can't do anything. Do you think—" she looked very challenging and pure—"do you think it would be wicked of me to dream of a divorce?"

Choate got up and walked to the fireplace. He put both hands on the mantel and gripped it, and Esther, with that sense of implacable mastery women feel at moments of sexual triumph, saw the knuckles whiten.

"Wouldn't it be better," she said, "for him? I don't care for myself, though I'm very lonely, very much at sea; but it does seem to me it would be better for him if he could be free and build his life up again from the beginning."

Choate answered in a choked voice that made him shake his head impatiently:

"It isn't better for any man to be free."

"Not if he doesn't care for his wife?" the master torturer proceeded, more and more at ease now she saw how tight she had him.

Choate turned upon her. His pale face was scarred with an emotion as deep as the source of tears, though she exulted to see he had no tears to show her. Men should, she felt, be strong.

"Don't you know you mustn't say that kind of thing to me?" he asked her. "Don't you see it's a temptation? I can't listen to it. I can't consider it for a minute."

"Is it a temptation?" she asked, in a whisper, born, it seemed, of unacknowledged intimacies between them. The whisper said, "If it is a temptation, it is not a temptation to you alone."

Choate was not looking at her, but he saw her, with the eyes of the mind: the brown limpid look, the uplift of her quivering face, the curve of her throat and the long ripple to her feet. He walked out of the room; it was the only thing for a decent man to do, in the face of incarnate appeal, challenge, a vitality so intense, and yet so unconscious of itself, he knew, that it was, in its purity, almost irresistible. In the street he was deaf to the call of a friend and passed another without seeing him. They chaffed him about it afterward. He was, they told him, thinking of a case.

Esther went about the house in an exhilarated lightness. She sang a little, in a formless way. She could not manage a tune, but she had a rhythmic style of humming that was not unpleasant to hear and gave her occasional outlet. It was the animal in the desert droning and purring to itself in excess of ease. She felt equal to meeting Aunt Patricia even.

About dusk Aunt Patricia came in the mediaeval cab with Denny driving. There was no luggage. Esther hoped a great deal from that. But it proved there was too much to come by cab, and Denny brought it afterward, shabby trunks of a sophisticated look, spattered with labels. Madame Beattie alighted from the cab, a large woman in worn black velvet, with a stale perfume about her. Esther was at the door to meet her, and even in this outer air she could hardly help putting up her nose a little at the exotic smell. Madame Beattie was swarthy and strong-featured with a soft wrinkled skin unnatural from over-cherishing. She had bright, humorously satirical eyes; and her mouth was large. Therefore you were surprised at her slight lisp, a curious childishness which Esther had always considered pure affectation. She had forgotten it in these later years, but now the sound of it awakened all the distaste and curiosity she had felt of old. She had always believed if Aunt Patricia spoke out, the lisp would go. The voice underneath the lisp was a sad thing when you remembered it had once been "golden ". It was raucous yet husky, a gin voice, Jeffrey had called it, adding that she had a gin cough. All this Esther remembered as she went forward prettily and submitted to Aunt Patricia's perfumed kiss. The ostrich feathers in the worn velvet travelling hat cascaded over them both, and bangles clinked in a thin discord with curious trinkets hanging from her chatelaine. Evidently the desire to hold her niece in her arms had been for telegraphic purposes only.

When they had gone in and Aunt Patricia was removing her gloves and accepting tea—she said she would not take her hat off until she went upstairs—she asked, with a cheerful boldness:

"Where's your husband?"

Esther shrank perceptibly. No one but Lydia had felt at liberty to pelt her with the incarcerated husband, and she was not only sensitive in fact but from an intuition of the prettiest thing to do.

"Oh, I knew he was out," said Madame Beattie. "I keep track of your American papers. Isn't he here?"

"He's in town," said Esther, in a low voice. Her cheeks burned with hatred of the insolence of kin which could force you into the open and strip you naked.

"Where?"

"With his father."

"Does his father live alone?"

"No. He has step-daughters."

"Children of that woman that married him out of hand when he was over sixty? Ridiculous business! Well, what's Jeff there for? Why isn't he with you?"

Madame Beattie had a direct habit of address, and, although she spoke many other languages fluently, in the best of English. There were times when she used English with an extreme of her lisping accent, but that was when it seemed good business so to do. This she modified if she found herself cruising where New England standards called for plain New England speech.

"Why isn't he with you?" she asked again.

The tea had come and Madame Beattie lifted her cup in a manner elegantly calculated to display, though ingenuously, a hand loaded with rings.

"Dear auntie," said Esther, widening eyes that had been potent with Alston Choate but would do slight execution among a feminine contingent, "Jeffrey wouldn't be happy with me."

"Nonsense," said Aunt Patricia, herself taking the teapot and strengthening her cup. "What do you mean by happy?"

"He is completely estranged," said Esther. "He is a different man from what he used to be."

"Of course he's different. You're different. So am I. He can't take up things where he left them, but he's got to take them up somewhere. What's he going to do?"

"I don't know," said Esther. She drank her tea nervously. It seemed to her she needed a vivifying draught. "Auntie, you don't quite understand. We are divorced in every sense."

That sounded complete, and she hoped for some slight change of position on the part of the inquisitor.

"Of course you went to see him while he was in prison?" auntie pursued inexorably.

"No," said Esther, in a voice thrillingly sweet. "He didn't wish it."

Auntie helped herself to tea. Esther made a mental note that an extra quantity must be brewed next time.

"You see," said Madame Beattie, putting her cup down and settling back into her chair with an undue prominence of frontal velvet, "you have to take these things like a woman of the world. What's all this talk about feelings, and Jeff's being unhappy and happy? He's married you, and it's a good thing for you both you've got each other to turn to. This kind of sentimental talk does very well before marriage. It has its place. You'd never marry without it. But after the first you might as well take things as they come. There was my husband. I bore everything from him. Then I kicked over the traces and he bore everything from me. But when we found everybody was doing us and we should be a great deal stronger together than apart, we came together again. And he died very happily."

Esther thought, in her physical aversion to auntie, that he must indeed have been happy in the only escape left open to him.

"Where is Susan?" auntie inquired, after a brief interlude of coughing. It could never be known whether her coughs were real. She had little dry coughs of doubt, of derision, of good-natured tolerance; but perhaps she herself couldn't have said now whether they had their origin in any disability.

"Grandma is in her room," said Esther faintly. She felt a savage distaste for facing the prospect of them together, auntie who would be sure to see grandmother, and grandmother who would not be seen. "She lies in bed."

"All the time?"

"Yes."

"Not all the time!"

"Why, yes, auntie, she lies in bed all the time."

"What for? Is she crippled, or paralysed or what?"

"She says she is old."

"Old? Susan is seventy-six. She's a fool. Doesn't she know you don't have to give up your faculties at all unless you stop using them?"

"She says she is old," repeated Esther obstinately. It seemed to her a sensible thing for grandmother to say. Being old kept her happily in retirement. She wished auntie had a similar recognition of decencies.

"I'll go to my room now," said Madame Beattie. "What a nice house! This is Susan's house, isn't it?"

"Yes." Esther had now retired to the last defences. She saw auntie settling upon them in a jovial ease. It might have been different, she thought, if Alston Choate had got her a divorce years ago and then married her. "Come," she said, with an undiminished sweetness, "I'll take you to your room."



VIII

Addington, so Jeffrey Blake remembered when he came home to it, was a survival. Naive constancies to custom, habits sprung out of old conditions and logical no more, and even the cruder loyalties to the past, lived in it unchanged. This was as his mind conceived it. His roots had gone deeper here than he knew while he was still a part of it, a free citizen. The first months of his married life had been spent here, but as his prosperity burned the more brilliantly, he and Esther had taken up city life in winter, and for the summer had bought a large and perfectly equipped house in a colony at the shore. That, in the crash of his fortunes, had gone with other wreckage, and now he never thought of it with even a momentary regret. It belonged to that fevered time when he was always going fast and faster, as if life were a perpetual speeding in a lightning car. But of Addington he did think, in the years that were so much drear space for reflection, and though he felt no desire to go back, the memory of it was cool and still. The town had distinct social strata, the happier, he felt, in that. There were the descendants of old shipbuilders and merchants who drew their sufficient dividends and lived on the traditions of times long past. All these families knew and accepted one another. Their peculiarities were no more to be questioned than the eccentric shapes of clouds. The Daytons, who were phenomenally ugly in a bony way, were the Daytons. Their long noses with the bulb at the base were Dayton noses. The Madisons, in the line of male descent from distinguished blood, drank to an appalling extent; but they were Madisons, and you didn't interdict your daughters' marrying them. The Mastertons ate no meat, and didn't believe in banks. They kept their money in queer corners, and there was so much of it that they couldn't always remember where, and the laundress had orders to turn all stockings before wetting, and did indeed often find bills in the toe. But the laundress, being also of Addington, though of another stratum, recognised this as a Masterton habit, and faithfully sought their hoarded treasure for them, and delivered it over with the accuracy of an accountant. She wouldn't have seen how the Mastertons could help having money in their clothes unless they should cease being Mastertons. Nor was it amazing to their peers, meeting them in casual talk, to realise that they were walking depositories of coin and bills. A bandit on a lonely road would, if he were born in Addington, have forborne to rob them. These and other personal eccentricities Jeffrey Blake remembered and knew he should find them ticking on like faithful clocks. It was all restful to recall, but horrible to meet. He knew perfectly what the attitude of Addington would be to him. Because he was Addington born, it would stand by him, and with a double loyalty for his father's sake. That loyalty, beautiful or stupid as you might find it, he could not bear. He hoped, however, to escape it by making his father the briefest visit possible and then getting off to the West. Anne had reminded him that Alston Choate had called, and he had commented briefly:

"Oh! he's a good old boy."

But she saw, with her keen eyes gifted to read the heart, that he was glad he had not seen him. The first really embarrassing caller came the forenoon after Madame Beattie had arrived at Esther's, Madame Beattie herself in the village hack with Denny, uncontrollably curious, on the box. Madame Beattie paid twenty-five cents extracted from the tinkling chatelaine, and dismissed Denny, but he looked over his shoulder regretfully until he had rounded the curve of the drive. Meantime she, in her plumes and black velvet, was climbing the steps, and Jeffrey, who was on the side veranda, heard her and took down his feet from the rail, preparatory to flight. But she was aware of him, and stepped briskly round the corner. Before he reached the door she was on him.

"Here, Jeff, here!" said she peremptorily and yet kindly, as you might detain a dog, and Jeff, pausing, gazed at her in frank disconcertment and remarked as frankly:

"The devil!"

Madame Beattie threw back her head on its stout muscular neck and laughed, a husky laugh much like an old man's wheeze.

"No! no!" said she, approaching him and extending an ungloved hand, "not so bad as that. How are you? Tell its auntie."

Jeffrey laughed. He took the hand for a brief grasp, and returned to the group of chairs, where he found a comfortable rocker for her.

"How in the deuce," said he, "did you get here so quick?"

Madame Beattie rejected the rocker and took a straight chair that kept her affluence of curves in better poise.

"Quick after what?" she inquired, with a perfect good-nature.

Jeffrey had seated himself on the rail, his hands, too, resting on it, and he regarded her with a queer terrified amusement, as if, in research, he had dug up a strange object he had no use for and might find it difficult to place. Not to name: he could name her very accurately.

"So quick after I got here," he replied, with candour. "I tell you plainly, Madame Beattie, there isn't a cent to be got out of me. I'm done, broke, down and out."

Madame Beattie regarded him with an unimpaired good-humour.

"Bless you, Jeff," said she, "I know that. What are you going to do, now you're out?"

The question came as hard as a stroke after the cushioned assurance preceding it. Jeff met it as he might have met such a query from a man to whom he owed no veilings of hard facts.

"I don't know," said he. "If I did know I shouldn't tell you."

Madame Beattie seemed not to suspect the possibility of rebuff.

"Esther hasn't changed a particle," said she.

Jeff scowled, not at her, but absently at the side of the house, and made no answer.

"Aren't you coming down there?" asked Madame Beattie peremptorily, with the air of drumming him up to some task that would have to be reckoned with in the end. "Come, Jeff, why don't you answer? Aren't you coming down?"

Jeffrey had ceased scowling. He had smoothed his brows out with his hand, indeed, as if their tenseness hurt him.

"Look here," said he, "you ask a lot of questions."

She laughed again, a different sort of old laugh, a fat and throaty one.

"Did I ever tell you," said she, "what the Russian grand duke said when I asked him why he didn't marry?"

"No," said Jeff, quite peaceably now. She was safer in the company of remembered royalties.

Madame Beattie sought among the jingling decorations of her person for a cigarette, found it and offered him another.

"Quite good," she told him. "An Italian count keeps me supplied. I don't know where the creature gets them."

Then, after they had lighted up, she returned to her grand duke, and Jeff found the story sufficiently funny and laughed at it, and she pulled another out of her well-stored memory, and he laughed at that. Madame Beattie told her stories excellently. She knew how little weight they carry smothered in feminine graces and coy obliquities from the point. Graces had long ceased to interest her as among the assets of a life where man and woman have to work to feed themselves. Now she sat down with her brother man and emulated him in ready give and take. Jeffrey forsook the rail which had subtly marked his distance from her; he took a chair, and put his feet up on the rail. Madame Beattie's neatly shod and very small feet went up on a chair, and she tipped the one she was sitting in at a dangerous angle while she exhaled luxuriously, and so Lydia, coming round the corner in a simple curiosity to know who was there, found them, laughing uproariously and dim with smoke. Lydia had her opinions about smoking. She had seen women indulge in it at some of the functions where she and Anne danced, but she had never found a woman of this stamp doing it with precisely this air. Indeed, Lydia had never seen a woman of Madame Beattie's stamp in her whole life. She stopped short, and the two could not at once get hold of themselves in their peal of accordant mirth. But Lydia had time to see one thing for a certainty. Jeff's face had cleared of its brooding and its intermittent scowl. He was enjoying himself. This, she thought, in a sudden rage of scorn, was the kind of thing he enjoyed: not Farvie, not Anne's gentle ministrations, but the hooting of a horrible old woman. Madame Beattie saw her and straightened some of the laughing wrinkles round her eyes.

"Well, well!" said she. "Who's this?"

Then Jeffrey, becoming suddenly grave, as if, Lydia thought, he ought to be ashamed of laughing in such company, sprang to his feet, and threw away his cigarette.

"Madame Beattie," said he, "this is Miss Lydia French."

Madame Beattie did not rise, as who, indeed, so plumed and black-velveted should for a slip of a creature trembling with futile rage over a brother proved wanting in ideals? She extended one hand, while the other removed the cigarette from her lips and held it at a becoming distance.

"And who's Miss Lydia French?" said she. Then, as Lydia, pink with embarrassment and disapproval, made no sign, she added peremptorily, "Come here, my dear."

Lydia came. It was true that Madame Beattie had attained to privilege through courts and high estate. When she herself had ruled by the prerogative of a perfect throat and a mind attuned to it, she had imbibed a sense of power which was still dividend-paying even now, though the throat was dead to melody. When she really asked you to do anything, you did it, that was all. She seldom asked now, because her attitude was all careless tolerance, keen to the main chance but lax in exacting smaller tribute, as one having had such greater toll. But Lydia's wilful hesitation awakened her to some slight curiosity, and she bade her the more commandingly. Lydia was standing before her, red, unwillingly civil, and Madame Beattie reached forward and took one of her little plump work-roughened hands, held it for a moment, as if in guarantee of kindliness, and then dropped it.

"Now," said she, "who are you?"

Jeffrey, seeing Lydia so put about, answered for her again, but this time in terms of a warmth which astonished him as it did Lydia.

"She is my sister Lydia."

Madame Beattie looked at him in a frank perplexity.

"Now," said she, "what do you mean by that? No, no, my dear, don't go." Lydia had turned by the slightest movement. "You haven't any sisters, Jeff. Oh, I remember. It was that romantic marriage." Lydia turned back now and looked straight at her, as if to imply if there were any qualifying of the marriage she had a word to say. "Wasn't there another child?" Madame Beattie continued, still to Jeff.

"Anne is in the house," said he.

He had placed a chair for Lydia, with a kindly solicitude, seeing how uncomfortable she was; but Lydia took no notice. Now she straightened slightly, and put her pretty head up. She looked again as she did when the music was about to begin, and her little feet, though they kept their decorous calm, were really beating time.

"Well, you're a pretty girl," said Madame Beattie, dropping her lorgnon. She had lifted it for a stare and taken in the whole rebellious figure. "Esther didn't tell me you were pretty. You know Esther, don't you?"

"No," said Lydia, in a wilful stubbornness; "I don't know her."

"You've seen her, haven't you?"

"Yes, I've seen her."

"You don't like her then?" said Madame astutely. "What's the matter with her?"

Something gave way in Lydia. The pressure of feeling was too great and candour seethed over the top.

"She's a horrid woman."

Or was it because some inner watchman on the tower told her Jeff himself had better hear again what one person thought of Esther? Madame Beattie threw back her plumed head and laughed, the same laugh she had used to annotate the stories. Lydia immediately hated herself for having challenged it. Jeffrey, she knew, was faintly smiling, though she could not guess his inner commentary:

"What a little devil!"

Madame Beattie now turned to him.

"Same old story, isn't it?" she stated. "Every woman of woman born is bound to hate her."

"Yes," said Jeff.

Lydia walked away, expecting, as she went, to be called back and resolving that no inherent power in the voice of aged hatefulness should force her. But Madame Beattie, having placed her, had forgotten all about her. She rose, and brushed the ashes from her velvet curves.

"Come," she was saying to Jeffrey, "walk along with me."

He obediently picked up his hat.

"I sha'n't go home with you," said he, "if that's what you mean."

She took his arm and convoyed him down the steps, leaning wearily. She had long ago ceased to exercise happy control over useful muscles. They even creaked in her ears and did strange things when she made requests of them.

"You understand," said Jeffrey, when they were pursuing a slow way along the street, he with a chafed sense of ridiculous captivity. "I sha'n't go into the house. I won't even go to the door."

"Stuff!" said the lady. "You needn't tell me you don't want to see Esther."

Jeff didn't tell her that. He didn't tell her anything. He stolidly guided her along.

"There isn't a man born that wouldn't want to see Esther if he'd seen her once," said Madame Beattie.

But this he neither combated nor confirmed, and at the corner nearest Esther's house he stopped, lifted the hand from his arm and placed it in a stiff rigour at her waist. He then took off his hat, prepared to stand while she went on. And Madame Beattie laughed.

"You're a brute," said she pleasantly, "a dear, sweet brute. Well, you'll come to it. I shall tell Esther you love her so much you hate her, and she'll send out spies after you. Good-bye. If you don't come, I'll come again."

Jeffrey made no answer. He watched her retreating figure until it turned in at the gate, and then he wheeled abruptly and went back. An instinct of flight was on him. Here in the open street he longed for walls, only perhaps because he knew how well everybody wished him and their kindness he could not meet.

Madame Beattie found Esther at the door, waiting. She was an excited Esther, bright-eyed, short of breath.

"Where have you been?" she demanded.

Madame Beattie took off her hat and stabbed the pin through it. Her toupee, deranged by the act, perceptibly slid, but though she knew it by the feel, that eccentricity did not, in the company of a mere niece, trouble her at all. She sank into a chair and laid her hat on the neighbouring stand.

"Where have you been?" repeated Esther, a pulse of something like anger beating through the words.

Madame Beattie answered idly: "Up to see Jeff."

"I knew it!" Esther breathed.

"Of course," said Madame Beattie carelessly. "Jeff and I were quite friends in old times. I was glad I went. It cheered him up."

"Did he—" Esther paused.

"Ask for you?" supplied Madame Beattie pleasantly. "Not a word."

Here Esther's curiosity did whip her on. She had to ask:

"How does he look?"

"Oh, youngish," said Madame. "Rather flabby. Obstinate. Ugly, too."

"Ugly? Plain, do you mean?"

"No. American for ugly—obstinate, sore-headed. He's hardened. He was rather a silly boy, I remember. Had enthusiasms. Much in love. He isn't now. He's no use for women."

Esther looked at her in an arrested thoughtfulness. Madame Beattie could have laughed. She had delivered the challenge Jeff had not sent, and Esther was accepting it, wherever it might lead, to whatever duelling ground. Esther couldn't help that. A challenge was a challenge. She had to answer. It was a necessity of type. Madame Beattie saw the least little flickering thought run into her eyes, and knew she was involuntarily charting the means of summons, setting up the loom, as it were, to weave the magic web. She got up, took her hat, gave her toupee a little smack with the hand, and unhinged it worse than ever.

"You'll have to give him up," she said.

"Give him up!" flamed Esther. "Do you think I want—"

There she paused and Madame Beattie supplied temperately:

"No matter what you want. You couldn't have him."

Then she went toiling upstairs, her chained ornaments clinking, and only when she had shut the door upon herself did she relax and smile over the simplicity of even a feminine creature so versed in obliquity as Esther. For Esther might want to escape the man who had brought disgrace upon her, but her flying feet would do her no good, so long as the mainspring of her life set her heart beating irrationally for conquest. Esther had to conquer even when the event would bring disaster: like a chieftain who would enlarge his boundaries at the risk of taking in savages bound to sow the dragon's teeth.



IX

That evening the Blake house had the sound and look of social life, voices in conversational interchange and lights where Mary Nellen excitedly arrayed them. Alston Choate had come to call, and following him appeared an elderly lady whom Jeffrey greeted with more outward warmth than he had even shown his father. Alston Choate had walked in with a simple directness as though he were there daily, and Anne impulsively went forward to him. She felt she knew him very well. They were quite friends. Alston, smiling at her and taking her hand on the way to the colonel and Jeff, seemed to recognise that, and greeted her less formally than the others. The colonel was moved at seeing him. The Choates were among the best of local lineage, men and women distinguished by clear rigidities of conduct. Their friendship was a promissory note, bound to be honoured to the full. Lydia was for some reason abashed, and Jeff, both she and Anne thought, not adequately welcoming. But how could he be, Anne considered. He was in a position of unique loneliness. He lacked fellowship. Nobody but Alston, in their stratum at least, had come in person. No wonder he looked warily, lest he assume too much.

Before they settled down, the elderly lady, with a thud of feet softly shod, walked through the hall and stood at the library door regarding them benignantly. And then Jeff, with an outspoken sound of pleasure and surprise, got up and drew her in, and Choate smiled upon her as if she were delightfully unlike anybody else. The colonel, with a quick, moved look, just said her name:

"Amabel!"

She gave warm, quick grasps from a firm hand, gave them all round, not seeming to know she hadn't met Anne and Lydia, and at once took off her bonnet. It had strings and altogether belonged to an epoch at least twenty years away. The bonnet she "laid aside" on a table with a certain absent care, as ladies were accustomed to treat bonnets before they got into the way of jabbing them with pins. Then she sat down, earnestly solicitous and attentive as at a consultation. Anne thought she was the most beautiful person she had ever seen. It was a pity Miss Amabel Bracebridge could not have known that impetuous verdict. It would have brought her a surprised, spontaneous laugh: nothing could have convinced her it was not delicious foolery. She was tall and broad and heavy. When she stood in the doorway, she seemed to fill it. Now that she sat in the chair, she filled that, a soft, stout woman with great shoulders and a benign face, a troubled face, as if she were used to soothing ills, yet found for them no adequate recompense. Her dark grey dress was buttoned in front, after the fashion of a time long past. It was so archaic in cut, with a little ruffle at neck and sleeves, that it did more than adequate service toward maturing her. Indeed, there was no youth about Miss Amabel, except the youth of her eyes and smile. There were childlike wistfulness and hope, but experience chiefly, of life, of the unaccounted for, the unaccountable. She had, above all, an expression of well-wishing. Now she sat and looked about her.

"Dear me!" she said, "how pleasant it is to see this house open again."

"But it's been open," Lydia impulsively reminded her.

"Yes," said Miss Amabel. "But not this way." She turned to Jeff and regarded him anxiously. "Don't you smoke?" she asked.

He laughed again. He was exceedingly pleased, Anne saw, merely at seeing her. Miss Amabel was exactly as he remembered her.

"Yes," said he. "Want us to?"

She put up her long eyebrows and smiled as if in some amusement at herself.

"I've learned lately," she said, "that gentlemen are so devoted to it they feel lost without it."

"Light up, Choate," said Jeffrey. "My sisters won't mind. Will you?" He interrogated Anne. "They get along with me."

No, Anne didn't mind, and she rose and brought matches and little trays. Lydia often wondered how Anne knew the exact pattern of man's convenience. But though Choate accepted a cigar, he did not light it.

"Not now," he said, when Jeffrey offered him a light; he laid the cigar down, tapping it once or twice with his fine hand, and Anne thought he refrained in courtesy toward her and Lydia.

"This is very pleasant," said the colonel suddenly. "It's good to see you, Amabel. Now I feel myself at home."

But what, after the first settling was over, had they to say? The same thought was in all their minds. What was Jeffrey going to do? He knew that, and moved unhappily. Whatever he was going to do, he wouldn't talk about it. But Miss Amabel was approaching him with the clearest simplicity.

"Jeff, my dear," she said, "I can't wait to hear about your ideal republic."

And then, all his satisfaction gone and his scowl come back, Jeff shook his head as if a persistent fly had lighted on him, and again he disclaimed achievement.

"Amabel," said he, "I'm awfully sick of that, you know."

"But, dear boy, you revolutionised—" she was about to add, "the prison," but stumbled lamely—"the place."

"The papers told us that," said Choate. It was apparent he was helping somebody out, but whether Jeff or Miss Amabel even he couldn't have said.

"It isn't revolutionised," said Jeff. He turned upon Choate brusquely. "It's exactly the same."

"They say it's revolutionised," Miss Amabel offered anxiously.

"Who says so?" he countered, now turning on her.

"The papers," she told him. "You didn't write me about it. I asked you all sorts of questions and you wouldn't say a word."

"But you wrote me," said Jeff affectionately, "every week. I got so used to your letters I sha'n't be able to do without them; I shall have to see you every day."

"Of course we're going to see each other," she said. "And there's such a lot you can do."

She looked so earnestly entreating that Choate, who sat not far from her, gave a murmured: "Ah, Miss Amabel!" In his mind the half-despairing, wholly loving thought had been: "Good old girl! You're spending yourself and all your money, but it's no use—no use."

She was going on with a perfect clarity of purpose.

"Oh, you know, Jeff can do more for us than anybody else."

"What do you want done for you?" he inquired.

His habit of direct attack gave Lydia a shiver. She was sure people couldn't like it, and she was exceedingly anxious for him to be liked. Miss Amabel turned to Farvie.

"You see," she said, "Addington is waking up. I didn't dwell very much on it," she added, now to Jeff, "when I wrote you, because I thought you'd like best to think of it as it was. But now—"

"Now I'm out," said Jeff brutally, "you find me equal to it."

"I think," said Miss Amabel, "you can do so much for us." Nothing troubled her governed calm. It might almost be that, having looked from high places into deep ones, no abyss could dizzy her. "Weedon Moore feels as I do."

"Weedon Moore?" Jeffrey repeated, in a surprised and most uncordial tone. He looked at Choate.

"Yes," said Choate, as if he confirmed not only the question but Jeff's inner feeling, "he's here. He's practising law, and besides that he edits the Argosy."

"Owns it, too, I think," said Farvie. "They told me so at the news-stand."

"Well," said Choate pointedly, "it's said Miss Amabel owns it."

"Then," said Jeff, including her abruptly, "you've the whip-hand. You can get Moore out of it. What's he in it for anyway? Did you have to take him over with the business?"

Miss Amabel was plainly grieved.

"Now why should you want to turn him out of it?" she asked, really of Choate who had started the attack. "Mr. Moore is a very able young man, of the highest ideals."

Jeff laughed. It was a kindly laugh. Anne was again sure he loved Miss Amabel.

"I can't see Moore changing much after twenty-five," he said to Choate, who confirmed him briefly:

"Same old Weedie."

"Mr. Moore is not popular," said Miss Amabel, with dignity, turning now to Farvie. "He never has been, here in Addington. He comes of plain people."

"That's not it, Miss Amabel," said Choate gently. "He might have been spawned out of the back meadows or he might have been—a Bracebridge." He bowed to her with a charming conciliation and Miss Amabel sat a little straighter. "If we don't accept him, it's because he's Weedon Moore."

"We were in school with him, you know: in college, too," said Jeff, with that gentleness men always accorded her, men of perception who saw in her the motherhood destined to diffuse itself, often to no end: she was so noble and at the same time so helpless in the crystal prison of her hopes. "We knew Weedie like a book."

Miss Amabel took on an added dignity, proportioned to the discomfort of her task. Here she was defending Weedon Moore whom her outer sensibilities rejected the while his labelled virtues moved her soul. Sometimes when she found herself with people like these to-night, manifestly her own kind, she was tired of being good.

"I don't know any one," said she, "who feels the prevailing unrest more keenly than Weedon Moore."

At that instant, Mary Nellen, her eyes brightening as these social activities increased, appeared in the doorway, announcing doubtfully:

"Mr. Moore."

Jeffrey, as if actually startled, looked round at Choate who was unaffectedly annoyed. Anne, rising to receive the problematic Moore, thought they had an air of wondering how they could repel unwarranted invasion. Miss Amabel, in a sort of protesting, delicate distress, was loyally striving to make the invader's path plain.

"I told him I was coming," she said. "It seems he had thought of dropping in." Then Anne went out on the heels of Mary Nellen, hearing Miss Amabel conclude, as she left, with an apologetic note unfamiliar to her soft voice, "He wants you to write something, Jeff, for the Argosy."

Anne, even before seeing him, became conscious that Mary Nellen regarded the newcomer as undesirable; and when she came on him standing, hat in hand, she agreed that Weedon Moore was, in his outward integument, exceedingly unpleasant: a short, swarthy, tubby man, always, she was to note, dressed in smooth black, and invariably wearing or carrying, with the gravity of a funeral mourner, what Addington knew as a "tall hat". When the weather gave him countenance, he wore a black coat with a cape. One flashing ring adorned his left hand, and he indulged a barbaric taste in flowing ties. Seeing Anne, he spoke at once, and if she had not been prepared for him she must have guessed him to be a man come on a message of importance. There was conscious emphasis in his voice, and there needed to be if it was to accomplish anything: a high voice, strident, and, like the rest of him, somehow suggesting insect life. He held out his hand and Anne most unwillingly took it.