"Miss French," said he, with no hesitation before her name, "how is Jeff?"

The mere inquiry set Anne vainly to hoping that he need not come in. But he gave no quarter.

"I said I'd run over to-night, paper or no paper. I'm frightfully busy, you know, cruelly, abominably busy. But I just wanted to see Jeff."

"Won't you come in?" said Anne.

Even then he did not abandon his hat. He kept his hold on it, bearing it before him in a way that made Anne think absurdly of shields and bucklers. When, in the library, she turned to present him, as if he were an unpleasant find she had got to vouch for somehow, the men were already on their feet and Jeff was setting forward a chair. She could not help thinking it was a clever stage business to release him from the necessity of shaking hands. But Moore did not abet him in that informality. His small hand was out, and he was saying in a sharp, strained voice, exactly as if he were making a point of some kind, an oratorical point:

"Jeff, my dear fellow! I'm tremendously glad to see you."

Anne thought Jeff might not shake hands with him at all. But she saw him steal a shamefaced look at Miss Amabel and immediately, as if something radical had to be done when it came to the friend of a beloved old girl like her, strike his hand into Moore's, with an emphasis the more pronounced for his haste to get it over. Moore seemed enraptured at the handshake and breathless over the occasion. Having begun shaking hands he kept on with enthusiasm: the colonel, Miss Amabel and Lydia had to respond to an almost fervid greeting.

Only Choate proved immune. He had vouchsafed a cool: "How are you, Weedie?" when Moore began, and that seemed all Moore was likely to expect. Then they all sat down and there was, Lydia decided, as she glanced from one to another, no more pleasure in it. There was talk. Moore chatted so exuberantly, his little hands upon his fattish knees, that he seemed to squeeze sociability out of himself in a rapture of generous willingness to share all he had. He asked the colonel how he liked Addington, and was not abashed at being reminded that the colonel had known Addington for a good many years.

"Still it's changed," said Moore, regarding him almost archly. "Addington isn't the place it was even a year ago."

"I hope we've learned something," said Miss Amabel earnestly and yet prettily too.

"My theory of Addington," said Choate easily, "is that we all wish we were back in the Addington of a hundred years ago."

"You'd want to be in the dominant class," said Moore. There was something like the trammels of an unwilling respect over his manner to Choate; yet still he managed to be rallying. "When the old merchants were coming home with china and bales of silk and Paris shoes for madam. And think of it," said he, raising his sparse eyebrows and looking like a marionette moulded to express something and saying it with painful clumsiness, almost grotesquerie, "the ships are bringing human products now. They're bringing us citizens, bone and sinew of the republic, and we cry back to china and bales of silk."

"I didn't answer you, Moore," said Choate, turning to him and speaking, Lydia thought, with the slightest arrogance. "I should have wanted to belong to the governing class—of course."

"Now!" said Miss Amabel. She spoke gently, and she was, they saw, pained at the turn the talk had taken. "Alston, why should you say that?"

"Because I mean it," said Alston. His quietude seemed to carry a private message to Moore, but he turned to her, as he spoke and smiled as if to ask her not to interpret him harshly. "Of course I should have wanted to be in the dominant class. So does everybody, really."

"No, my dear," said Miss Amabel.

"No," agreed Choate, "you don't. The others like you didn't. I won't embarrass you by naming them. You want to sit submerged, you others, and be choked by slime, if you must be, and have the holy city built up on your shoulders. But the rest of us don't. Moore here doesn't, do you, Weedie?"

Weedon gave a quick embarrassed laugh.

"You're so droll," said he.

"No," said Choate quietly, "I'm not being droll. Of course I want to belong to the dominant class. So does the man that never dominated in his life. He wants to overthrow the over-lords so he can rule himself. He wants to crowd me so he can push into a place beside me."

Moore laughed with an overdone enjoyment.

"Excellent," he said, squeezing the words out of his knees. "You're such a humourist."

If he wanted to be offensive, that was the keenest cut he could have delivered.

"I have often thought," said the colonel, beginning in a hesitating, deferent way that made his utterance rather notable, "that we saddle what we call the lower orders with motives different from our own."

"Precisely," Choate clipped in. "We used to think, when they committed a perfectly logical crime, like stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread, that it was absolutely different from anything we could have done. Whereas in their places we should have tried precisely the same thing. Just as cleanliness is a matter of bathtubs and temperature. We shouldn't bathe if we had to break the ice over a quart of water and then go out and run a trolley car all day."

Lydia's face, its large eyes fixed upon him, said so plainly "I don't believe it" that he laughed, with a sudden enjoyment of her, and, after an instant of wider-eyed surprise, she laughed too.

"And here's Miss Amabel," Choate went on, in the voice it seemed he kept for her, "going to the outer extreme and believing, because the labouring man has been bled, that he's incapable of bleeding you. Don't you think it, Miss Amabel. He's precisely like the rest of us. Like me. Like Weedon here. He'll sit up on his platform and judge me like forty thousand prophets out of Israel; but put him where I am and he'll cling with his eyelids and stick there. Just as I shall."

Miss Amabel looked deeply troubled and also at a loss.

"I only think, Alston," she said, "that so much insight, so much of the deepest knowledge comes of pain. And the poor have suffered pain so many centuries. They've learned things we don't know. Look how they help one another. Look at their self-sacrifice."

"Look at your own self-sacrifice," said Choate.

"Oh, but they know," said she. The flame of a great desire was in her face. "I don't know what it is to be hungry. If I starved myself I shouldn't know, because in somebody's pantry would be the bread-box I could put my hand into. They know, Alston. It gives them insight. When they remember the road they've travelled, they're not going to make the mistakes we've made."

"Oh, yes, they are," said Choate. "Pardon me. There are going to be robbers and pirates and Napoleons and get-rich-quicks born for quite a while yet. And they're not going to be born in my class alone—nor Weedon's."

Weedon squirmed at this, and even Jeff thought it rather a nasty cut. But Jeff did not know yet how well Choate knew Weedon in the ways of men. And Weedon accepted no rebuff. He turned to Jeff, distinctly leaving Choate as one who would have his little pleasantries.

"Jeff," he said, "I want you to do something for the Argosy."

Jeff at once knew what.

"Queer," he said, "how you all think I've got copy out of jail."

Anne resented the word. It was not jail, she thought, a federal prison where gentlemen, when they have done wrong or been, like Jeff, falsely accused, may go with dignity.

"My dear," said Miss Amabel, in a manner at once all compassion and inexorable demand, "you've got so much to tell us. You men in that—place," she stumbled over the word and then accepted it—"discussed the ideal republic. You made it, by discussing it."

"Yes," said Choate, in voice of curious circumspection as if he hardly knew what form even of eulogy might hurt, "it was an astonishing piece of business. You can't expect people not to notice a thing like that."

"I can't help it," said Jeff. "I don't want such a row made over it."

Whether the thing was too intimate, too near his heart still beating sluggishly it might be, from prison air, could not be seen. But Miss Amabel, exquisitely compassionate, was yet inexorable, because he had something to give and must not withhold.

"The wonderful part of it is," she said, "that when you have built up your ideal government, prison ceases to be prison. There won't be punishment any more."

"Oh, don't you make that mistake," said Jeff, instantly, moved now too vitally to keep out of it. "There are going to be punishments all along the line. The big punishment of all, when you've broken a law, is that you're outside. If it's a small break, you're not much over the sill. If it's a big break, you're absolutely out. Outside, Amabel, outside!" He never used the civil prefix before her name, and Anne wondered again whether the intimacy of the letters accounted for this sweet informality. "You're banished. What's worse than that?"

"Oh, but," said she, her plain, beautiful face beaming divinity on him as one of the children of men, "I don't want them to be banished. If anybody has sinned—has broken the law—I want him to be educated. That's all."

"Look here," said Jeff, He bent forward to her and laid the finger of one trade-stained hand in the other palm. "You're emasculating the whole nation. Let us be educated, but let us take our good hard whacks."

"Hear! hear!" said Choate, speaking mildly but yet as a lawyer, who spent his life in presenting liabilities for or against punishment. "That's hot stuff."

"I believe in law," said Jeff rapidly. "Sometimes I think that's all I believe in now."

Anne and Lydia looked at him in a breathless waiting upon his words. He had begun to justify himself to their crescent belief in him, the product of the years. His father also waited, but tremulously. Here was the boy he had wanted back, but he had not so very much strength to accord even a fulfilled delight. Jeff, forgetful of everybody but the old sybil he was looking at, sure of her comprehension if not her agreement, went on.

"I'd rather have bad laws than no laws. I believe in Sparta. I believe in the Catholic Church, if only because it has fasts and penances. We've got to toe the mark. If we don't, something's got to give it to us good and hard, the harder the better, too. Are we children to be let off from the consequences of what we've done? No, by God! We're men and we've got to learn."

Suddenly his eyes left Miss Amabel's quickened face and he glanced about him, aware of the startled tensity of gaze among the others. Moore, with a little book on his knee, was writing rapidly.

"Notes?" Jeff asked him shortly. "No, you don't."

He got up and extended his hand for the book, and Moore helplessly, after a look at Miss Amabel, as if to ask whether she meant to see him bullied, delivered it. Jeff whirled back two leaves, tore them out, crumpled them in his hand and tossed them into the fireplace.

"You can't do that, Moore," he said indifferently, and Choate murmured a monosyllabic assent.

Moore never questioned the bullying he so prodigally got. He never had at college even; he was as ready to fawn the next day. It seemed as if the inner man were small, too small for sound resentment. Jeff sat down again. He looked depressed, his countenance without inward light. But Lydia and Anne had rediscovered him. Again he was their hero, reclothed indeed in finer mail. Miss Amabel rose at once. She shook hands with the colonel, and asked Anne and Lydia to come to see her.

"Don't you do something, you two girls?" she asked, with her inviting smile. "I'm sure Jeff wrote me so."

"We dance," said Lydia, in a bubbling bright voice, as if she had run forward to be sure to get the chance of answering. "Let us come and dance for you. We can dance all sorts of things."

And Lydia was so purely childlike and dear, after this talk of punishments and duties, that involuntarily they all laughed and she looked abashed.

"Perhaps you know folk-dances," said Miss Amabel.

"Oh, yes," said Lydia, getting back her spirit. "There isn't one we don't know."

And they laughed again and Miss Amabel tied on her bonnet and went away attended by Choate, with Weedon Moore a pace behind, holding his hat, until he got out of the house, as it might be at a grotesque funeral.

Miss Amabel had called back to Lydia:

"You must come and train my classes in their national dancing."

Lydia, behind the colonel and Jeff as they stood at the front door, seized Anne's hand and did a few ecstatic little steps.

The colonel was bright-eyed and satisfied with his evening. "Jeff," said he, before they turned to separate, "I always thought you were meant for a writer."

Jeff looked at him in a dull denial, as if he wondered how any man, life being what it is, could seek to bound the lot of another man. His face, flushed darkly, was seamed with feeling.

"Father," said he, in a voice of mysterious reproach, "I don't know what I was meant to be."



X

It was Lydia who found out what Jeff meant himself to be, for the next day, in course of helping Mary Nellen, she went to his door with towels. Mr. Jeffrey had gone out, Mary Nellen said. She had seen him spading in the orchard, and if Miss Lydia wanted to carry up the towels! there was the dusting, too. Lydia, at the open door, stopped, for Jeff was sitting at his writing table, paper before him. He flicked a look at her, absently, as at an intruder as insignificant as undesired, and because the sacredness of his task was plain to her she took it humbly. But Jeff, then actually seeing her, rose and put down his pen.

"I'll take those," he said.

It troubled him vaguely to find her and Anne doing tasks. He had a worried sense that he and the colonel were living on their kind offices, and he felt like assuring Lydia she shouldn't carry towels about for either of them long. Then, as she did not yield them but looked, housekeeper-wise, at the rack still loaded with its tumbled reserves, he added:

"Give them here."

"You mustn't leave your writing," said Lydia primly if shyly, and delivered up her charge.

Jeff stepped out after her into the hall. He had left dull issues at his table, and Lydia seemed very sweet, her faith in him chiefly, though he didn't want any more of it.

"Don't worry about my writing," said he.

"Oh, no," she answered, turning on him the clarity of her glance. "I shouldn't. Authors never want it talked about."

"That's not it," said he. She found him tremendously in earnest. "I'm not an author."

"But you will be when this is written."

"I don't know," he said, "how I can make you see. The whole thing is so foreign to your ideas about books and life. It only happened that I met a man—in there—" he hesitated over it, not as regarding delicacies but only as they might affect her—"a man like a million others, some of 'em in prison, more that ought to be. Well, he talked to me. I saw what brought him where he was. It was picturesque."

"You want other people to understand," said Lydia, bright-eyed, now she was following him. "For—a warning."

His frown was heavy. Now he was trying to follow her.

"No," he said, "you're off there. I don't take things that way. But I did see it so plain I wanted everybody to see it, too. Maybe that was why I did want to write it down. Maybe I wanted to write it for myself, so I should see it plainer. It fascinated me."

Lydia felt a helpless yearning, because things were being so hard for him. She wished for Anne who always knew, and with a word could help you out when your elucidation failed.

"You see," Jeff was going on, "there's this kind of a brute born into the world now, the kind that knows how to make money, and as soon as he's discovered his knack, he's got the mania to make more. It's an obligation, an obsession. Maybe it's only the game. He's in it, just as much as if he'd got a thousand men behind him, all looting territory. It might be for a woman. But it's the game. And it's a queer game. It cuts him off. He's outside."

And here Lydia had a simple and very childlike thought, so inevitable to her that she spoke without consideration.

"You were outside, too."

Jeff gave a little shake of the head, as if that didn't matter now he was here and explaining to her.

"And the devil of it is, after they're once outside they don't know they are."

"Do you mean, when they've done something and been found guilty and—"

"I mean all along the line. When they've begun to think they'll make good, when they've begun to play the game."

"For money?"

"Yes, for money, for pretty gold and dirty bills and silver. That's what it amounts to, when you get down to it, behind all the bank balances and equities. There's a film that grows over your eyes, you look at nothing else. You don't think about—" his voice dropped and he glanced out at the walled orchard as if it were even a sacred place—"you don't think about grass, and dirt, and things. You're thinking about the game."

"Well," said Lydia joyously, seeing a green pathway out, "now you've found it's so, you don't need to think about it any more."

"That's precisely it," said he heavily. "I've got to think about it all the time. I've got to make good."

"In the same way?" said Lydia, looking up at him childishly. "With money?"

"Yes," said he, "with money. It's all I know. And without capital, too. And I'm going to keep my head, and do it within the law. Yes, by God! within the law. But I hate to do it. I hate it like the devil."

He looked so hard with resolution that she took the resolution for pride, though she could not know whether it was a fine pride or a heaven-defying one.

"You won't do just what you did before?" asserted Lydia, out of her faith in him.

"Oh, yes, I shall."

She opened terrified eyes upon him.

"Be a promoter?"

"I don't know what I shall be. But I know the money game, and I shall have to play it and make good."

She ventured a question touching on the fancies that were in her mind, part of the bewildering drama that might attend on his return. She faltered it out. It seemed too splendid really to assault fortune like that. And yet perhaps not too splendid for him. This was the question.

"And pay back—" There she hesitated, and he finished for her.

"The money I lost in a hole? Well, we'll see." This last sounded indulgent, as if he might add, "little sister ".

Lydia plucked up spirit.

"There's something else I hoped you'd do first."

"What is it?"

"I want you to prove you're innocent."

She found herself breathless over the words. They brought her very near him, and after all she was not sure what kind of brother he was, save that he had to be supremely loved. He looked pale to her now, of a yellowed, unhappy hue, and he was staring at her fixedly.

"Innocent!" he repeated. "What do you mean by innocent?"

Lydia took heart again, since he really did invite her on.

"Why, of course," she said, "we all know—Farvie and Anne and I—we know you never did it."

"Did what?"

"Lost all that money. Took it away from people."

The softness of her voice was moving to him. He saw she meant him very well indeed.

"Lydia," said he, "I lost the money. Don't make any mistake about that."

"Yes, you were a promoter," she reminded him. "You were trying to get something on the market." She seemed to be assuring him, in an agonised way, of his own good faith. "And people bought shares. And you took their money. And—" her voice broke here in a sob of irrepressible sympathy—"and you lost it."

"Yes," said he patiently. "I found myself in a tight place and the unexpected happened—the inconceivable. The market went to pieces. And of course it was at the minute I was asked to account for the funds I had. I couldn't. So I was a swindler. I was tried. I was sentenced, and I went to prison. That's all."

"Oh," said Lydia passionately, "but do you suppose we don't know you're not the only person concerned? Don't you suppose we know there's somebody else to blame?"

Jeff turned on her a sudden look so like passion of a sort that she trembled back from him. Why should he be angry with her? Did he stand by Reardon to that extent?

"What do you mean?" he asked her. "Who's been talking to you?"

"We've all been talking," said Lydia, with a frank simplicity, "Farvie and Anne and I. Of course we've talked. Especially Anne and I. We knew you weren't to blame."

Jeff turned away from her and went back into his room. He shut the door, and yet so quietly that she could not feel reproved. Only she was sad. The way of being a sister was a harder one than she had looked for. But she felt bound to him, even by stronger and stronger cords. He was hers, Farvie's and Anne's and hers, however unlikely he was to take hold of his innocence with firm hands and shake it in the public face.

Jeff, in his room, stood for a minute or more, hands in his pockets, staring at the wall and absently thinking he remembered the paper on it from his college days. But he recalled himself from the obvious. He looked into his inner chamber of mind where he had forbidden himself to glance since he had come home, lest he see there a confusion of idea and desire that should make him the weaker in carrying out the inevitabilities of his return. There was one thing in decency to be expected of him at this point: to give his father a period of satisfaction before he left him to do what he had not yet clearly determined on. It was sufficiently convincing to tell Lydia he intended to make good, but he had not much idea what he meant by it. He was conscious chiefly that he felt marred somehow, jaded, harassed by life, smeared by his experience of living in a gentlemanly jail. The fact that he had left it did not restore to him his old feeling of owning the earth. He had, from the moment of his conviction and sentence, been outside, and his present liberty could not at once convey him inside.

He was, he knew, for one thing, profoundly tired. Nothing, he felt sure, could give him back the old sense of air in his lungs. Confinement had not deprived him of air. He had smiled grimly to himself once or twice, as he thought what the sisters' idea of his prison was likely to be. They probably had conjured up fetid dungeons. There were chains of a surety, certainly a clank or two. As he remembered it, there was a clanking in his mind, quite sufficient to fulfil the prison ideal. And then he thought, with a sudden desire for man's company, the expectation that would take you for granted, that he'd go down and see old Reardon. Reardon had not been to call, but Jeff was too sick of solitariness to mind that.

He went out without seeing anybody, the colonel, he knew, being at his gentle task of cramming for Mary Nellen's evening lesson. Jeff had not been in the street since the walk he had cut short with Madame Beattie. He felt strange out in the world now, as if the light blinded him or the sun burned him, or there were an air too chill—all, he reflected, in a grim discovery, the consequence of being outside and not wanting houses to see you or persons to bow and offer friendly hands. Reardon would blow such vapours away with a breath of his bluff voice. But as he reached the vestibule of the yellow house, Reardon himself was coming out and Jeff, with a sick surprise, understood that Reardon was not prepared to see him.



XI

Reardon stood there in his middle-aged ease, the picture of a man who has nothing to do more hazardous than to take care of himself. His hands were exceedingly well-kept. His cravat, of a dull blue, was suited to his fresh-coloured face, and, though this is too far a quest for the casual eye, his socks also were blue, an admirable match. Jeff was not accustomed, certainly in these later years, to noting clothes; but he did feel actually unkempt before this mirror of the time. Yet why? For in the old days also Reardon had been rather vain of outward conformity. He had striven then to make up by every last nicety of dress and manner for the something his origin had lacked. It was not indeed the perfection of his dress that disconcerted; it was the kind of man Reardon had grown to be: for of him the clothes did, in their degree, testify. Jeffrey was conscious that every muscle in Reardon's body had its just measure of attention. Reardon had organised the care of that being who was himself. He had provided richly for his future, wiped out his past where it threatened to gall him, and was giving due consideration to his present. He meant supremely to be safe, and to that end he had entrenched himself on every side. Jeff felt a very disorganised, haphazard sort of being indeed before so complete a creature. And Reardon, so far from breaking into the old intimacy that Jeff had seen still living behind them in a sunny calm, only waiting for the gate to be opened on it again, stood there distinctly embarrassed and nothing more.

"Jeff!" said he. "How are you?" That was not enough. He found it lacking, and added, with a deepened shade of warmth, "How are you, old man?"

Now he put out his hand, but it had been so long in coming that Jeff gave no sign of seeing it.

"I'll walk along with you," he said.

"No, no." Reardon was calling upon reserves of decency and good feeling. "You'll do nothing of the sort. Come in."

"No," said Jeff. "I was walking. I'll go along with you."

Now Reardon came down the steps and put an insistent hand on his shoulder.

"Jeff," said he, "come on in. You surprised me. That's the truth. I wasn't prepared. I hadn't looked for you."

Jeff went up the steps; it seemed, indeed, emotional to do less. But at the door he halted and his eyes sought the chairs at hand.

"Can't we," said he, "sit down here?"

Reardon, with a courteous acquiescence, went past one of the chairs, leaving it for him, and dropped into another. Jeff took his, and found nothing to say. One of them had got to make a civil effort. Jeff, certain he had no business there, took his hand at it.

"This was the old Pelham house?"

Reardon assented, in evident relief, at so remote a topic.

"I bought it six years ago. Had it put in perfect repair. The plumbing cost me—well! you know what old houses are."

Jeff turned upon him.

"Jim," said he quietly, "what's the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter," said Reardon, blustering. "My dear boy! I'm no end glad to see you."

"Oh, no," said Jeff. "No, you're not. You've kicked me out. What's the reason? My late residence? Oh, come on, man! Didn't expect to see me? Didn't want to? That it?"

Suddenly the telephone rang, and the English man-servant came out and said, with a perfect decorum:

"Mrs. Blake at the telephone, sir."

Jeff was looking at Reardon when he got the message and saw his small blue eyes suffused and the colour hot in his cheeks. The blond well-kept man seemed to be swelling with embarrassment.

"Excuse me," he said, got up and went inside, and Blake heard his voice in brief replies.

When he came back, he looked harassed, fatigued even. His colour had gone down and left him middle-aged. Jeff had not only been awaiting him, but his glance had, as well. His eyes were fixed upon the spot where Reardon's face, when he again occupied his chair, would be ready to be interrogated.

"What Mrs. Blake?" Jeff asked.

Reardon sat down and fussed with the answer.

"What Mrs. Blake?" he repeated, and flicked a spot of dust from his trousered ankle lifted to inspection.

"Yes," said Jeff, with an outward quiet. "Was that my wife?"

Again the colour rose in Reardon's face. It was the signal of an emotion that gave him courage.

"Why, yes," he said, "it was."

"What did she want?"

"Jeff," said Reardon, "it's no possible business of yours what Esther wants."

"You call her Esther?"

"I did then."

An outraged instinct of possession was rising in Reardon. Esther suddenly meant more to him than she had in all this time when she had been meaning a great deal. Alston Choate had power to rouse this primitive rage in him, but he could always conquer it by reasoning that Alston wouldn't take her if he could get her. There were too many inherited reserves in Alston. Actually, Reardon thought, Alston wouldn't really want a woman he had to take unguardedly. But here was the man who, by every rigour of conventional life, had a right to her. It could hardly be borne. Reardon wasn't used to finding himself dominated by primal impulses. They weren't, his middle-aged conclusions told him, safe. But now he got away from himself slightly and the freedom of it, while it was exciting, made him ill at ease. The impulse to speak really got the better of him.

"Look here, Blake," he said—and both of them realised that it was the first time he had used that surname; Jeff had always been a boy to him—"it's very unwise of you to come back here at all."

"Very unwise?" Jeff repeated, in an unmixed amazement, "to come back to Addington? My father's here."

"Your father needn't have been here," pursued Reardon doggedly. Entered upon what seemed a remonstrance somebody ought to make, he was committed, he thought, to going on. "It was an exceedingly ill-judged move for you all, very ill-judged indeed."

Jeff sat looking at him from a sternness that made a definite setting for the picture of his wonder. Yet he seemed bent only upon understanding.

"I don't say you came back to make trouble," Reardon went on, pursued now by the irritated certainty that he had adopted a course and had got to justify it. "But you're making it."

"How am I making it?"

"Why, you're making her damned uncomfortable."

"Who?"

Reardon had boggled over the name. He hardly liked to say Esther again, since it had been ill-received, and he certainly wouldn't say "your wife". But he had to choose and did it at a jump.

"Esther," he said, fixing upon that as the least offensive to himself.

"How am I making my wife uncomfortable?" Jeff inquired.

"Why, here you are," Reardon blundered, "almost within a stone's throw. She can't even go into the street without running a chance of meeting you."

Jeff threw back his head and laughed.

"No," he said, "she can't, that's a fact. She can't go into the street without running the risk of meeting me. But if you hadn't told me, Reardon, I give you my word I shouldn't have thought of the risk she runs. No, I shouldn't have thought of it."

Reardon drew a long breath. He had, it seemed to him, after all done wisely. The note of human brotherhood came back into his voice, even an implication that presently it might be actually soothing.

"Well, now you do see, you'll agree with me. You can't annoy a woman. You can't keep her in a state of apprehension."

Jeff had risen, and Reardon, too, got on his feet. Jeff seemed to be considering, and very gravely, and Reardon, frowning, watched him.

"No," said Jeff. "No. Certainly you can't annoy a woman." He turned upon Reardon, but with no suggestion of resentment. "What makes you think I should annoy her?"

"Why, it isn't what you'd wilfully do." Now that the danger of violence was over, Reardon felt that he could meet his man with a perfect reasonableness, and tell him what nobody else was likely to. "It's your being here. She can't help going back. She remembers how things used to be. And then she gets apprehensive."

"How they used to be," Jeff repeated thoughtfully. He sounded stupid standing there and able, apparently, to do nothing better than repeat. "How was that? How do you understand they used to be?"

Reardon lost patience. You could afford to, evidently, with so numb an antagonist.

"Why, you know," he said. "You remember how things used to be."

Jeff looked full at him now, and there was a curious brightness in his eyes.

"I don't," he said. "I should have said I did, but now I hear you talk I give you my word I don't. You'll have to tell me."

"She never blamed you," said Reardon expansively. He was beginning to pity Jeff, the incredible density of him, and he spoke incautiously. "She understood the reasons for it. You were having your business worries and you were harassed and nervous. Of course she understood. But that didn't prevent her from being afraid of you."

"Afraid of me!" Jeff took a step forward and put one hand on a pillar of the porch. The action looked almost as if he feared to trust himself, finding some weakness in his legs to match this assault upon the heart. "Esther afraid of me?"

Reardon, feeling more and more benevolent, dilated visibly.

"Most natural thing in the world. You can see how it would be. I suppose her mind keeps harking back, going over things, you know; and here you are on the same street, as you might say."

"No," said Jeff, stupidly, as if that were the case in point, "it isn't the same street."

He withdrew his hand from the pillar now with a decisiveness that indicated he had got to depend on his muscles at once, and started down the steps. Reardon made an indeterminate movement after him and called out something; but Jeff did not halt. He went along the driveway, past the proudly correct shrubs and brilliant turf and into the street. He had but the one purpose of getting to Esther as soon as possible. As he strode along, he compassed in memory all the seasons of passion from full bloom to withering since he saw her last. When he went away from her to fulfil his sentence, he had felt that identity with her a man must recognise for a wife passionately beloved. He had left her in a state of nervous collapse, an ignoble, querulous breakdown, due, he had to explain to himself, to her nature, delicately strung. There was nothing heroic about the way she had taken his downfall. But the exquisite music of her, he further tutored himself, was not set to martial strains. She was the loveliness of the twilight, of the evening star. And then, when his days had fallen into a pallid sequence, she had kept silence. It was as if there had been no wife, no Esther. At first he made wild appeals to her, to his father for the assurance that she was living even. Then one day in the autumn when he was watching a pale ray of sunshine that looked as if it had been strained through sorrow before it got to him, the verdict, so far as his understanding went, was inwardly pronounced. His mind had been working on the cruel problem and gave him, unsought, the answer. That was what she meant to do: to separate her lot from his. There never would be an Esther any more. There never had been the Esther that made the music of his strong belief in her.

At first he could have dashed himself against the walls in the impotence of having such bereavement to bear with none of the natural outlets to assauge it. Then beneficent healing passions came to his aid, though not, he knew, the spiritual ones. He descended upon scorn, and finally a cold acceptance of what she was. And then she seemed to have died, and in the inexorable sameness of the days and nights he dismissed her memory, and he meditated upon life and what might be made of it by men who had still the power to make. But now hurrying to her along the quiet street, one clarifying word explained her, and, unreasoningly, brought back his love. She had been afraid—afraid of him who would, in the old phrase, have, in any sense, laid down his life for her: not less willingly, the honourable name he bore among honourable men. A sense of renewal and bourgeoning was upon him, that feeling of waking from a dream and finding the beloved is, after all, alive. The old simple words came back to him that used to come in prison when they dropped molten anguish upon his heart:

—"After long grief and pain, To find the arms of my true love Round me once again."

At least, if he was never to feel the soft rapture of his love's acceptance, he might find she still lived in her beauty, and any possible life would be too short to teach her not to be afraid. He reached the house quickly and, with the haste of his courage, went up the steps and tried the latch. In Addington nearly every house was open to the neighbourly hand. But of late Esther had taken to keeping her bolt slipped. It had dated from the day Lydia made hostile entrance. Finding he could not walk in unannounced, he stood for a moment, his intention blank. It did not seem to him he could be named conventionally to Esther, who was afraid of him. And then, by a hazard, Esther, who had not been out for days, and yet had heard of nobody's meeting him abroad, longed for the air and threw wide the door. There she was, by a God-given chance. It was like predestined welcome, a confirming of his hardihood. In spite of the sudden blight and shadow on her face, instinctive recoil that meant, he knew, the closing of the door, he grasped her hands, both her soft white hands, and seemed, to his anguished mind, to be dragging himself in by them, and even in the face of that look of hers was over the threshold and had closed the door.

"Esther," he said. "Esther, dear!"

The last word he had never expected to use to her, to any woman again. Still she regarded him with that horrified aversion, not amazement, he saw. It was as if she had perhaps expected him, had anticipated this very moment, and yet was not ready, because, such was her hard case, no ingenuity could possibly prepare her for it. This he saw, and it ran on in a confirming horrible sequence from Reardon's speech.

"Esther!" he repeated. He was still holding her hands and feeling they had no possibility of escape from each other, she in the weakness of her fear and he in passionate ruth. "Are you afraid of me?"

That was her cue.

"Yes," she whispered.

"Were you always, dear?" he went on, carried by the tide of his despairing love. (Or was it love? It seemed to him like love, for he had not felt emotion such as this through the dry pangs of his isolation.) "Years ago, when we were together—why, you weren't afraid then?"

"Oh, yes, I was," she said. Now that she could translate his emotion in any degree, she felt the humility of his mind toward her, and began to taste her own ascendancy. He was suing to her in some form, and the instinct which, having something to give may yet withhold it, fed her sense of power.

"Why, we were happy," said Jeffrey, in an agony of wonder. "That's been my only comfort when I knew we couldn't be happy now. I made you happy, dear."

And since he hung, in a fevered anticipation, upon her answer, she could reply, still from that sense of being the arbitress of his peace:

"I never was happy, at the last. I was afraid."

He dropped her hands.

"What of?" he said to himself stupidly. "In God's name, what of?"

The breaking of his grasp had released also some daring in her. They were still by the door, but he was between her and the stairs. He caught the glance of calculation, and instinct told him if he lost her now he should never get speech of her again.

"Don't," he said. "Don't go."

Again he laid a hand upon her wrist, and anger came into her face instead of that first candid horror. She had heard something, a step upstairs, and to that she cried: "Aunt Patricia!" three times, in a piercing entreaty.

It was not Madame Beattie who came to the stair-head and looked down; it was Rhoda Knox. After the glance she went away, though in no haste, and summoned Madame Beattie, who appeared in a silk negligee of black and white swirls like witch's fires and, after one indifferent look, called jovially:

"Hullo, Jeff!"

But she came down the stairs and Esther, seeing his marauding entry turned into something like a visit under social sanction, beat upon his wrist with her other hand and cried two hot tears of angry impotence.

"For heaven's sake, Esther," Madame Beattie remarked, at the foot of the stairs, "what are you acting like this for? You look like a child in a tantrum."

Esther ceased to be in a tantrum. She had a sense of the beautiful, and not even before these two invaders would she make herself unfitting. She addressed Madame Beattie in a tone indicating her determination not to speak to Jeff again.

"Tell him to let me go."

Jeff answered. Passion now had turned him cold, but he was relentless, a man embarked on a design to which he cannot see the purpose or the end, but who means to sail straight on.

"Esther," he said, "I'm going to see you now, for ten minutes, for half an hour. You may keep your aunt here if you like, but if you run away from me I shall follow you. But you won't run away. You'll stay right here."

He dropped her wrist.

"Oh, come into the library," said Madame Beattie. "I can't stand. My knees are creaking. Come, Esther, ask your husband in."

Madame Beattie, billowing along in the witch-patterned silk and clicking on prodigiously high heels and Esther with her head haughtily up, led the way, and Jeff, following them, sat down as soon as they had given him leave by doing it, and looked about the room with a faint foolish curiosity to note whether it, too, had changed. Madame Beattie thrust out a pretty foot, and Esther, perched on the piano stool, looked rigidly down at her trembling hands. She was very pale. Suddenly she recovered herself, and turned to Madame Beattie.

"He had just come," she said. "He came in. I didn't ask him to. He had not—" a little note like fright or triumph beat into her voice—"he had not—kissed me."

She turned to him as if for a confirmation he could not in honesty refuse her, and Madame Beattie burst into a laugh, one of perfect acceptance of things as they are, human frailties among the first.

"Esther," she said, "you're a little fool. If you want a divorce what do you give yourself away for? Your counsel wouldn't let you."

The whole implication was astounding to Jeff; but the only thing he could fix definitely was the concrete possibility that she had counsel.

"Who is your counsel, Esther?" he asked her.

But Esther had gone farther than discretion bade.

"I am not obliged to say," she answered, with a stubbornness equal to his own, whatever that might prove. "I am not obliged to say anything. But I do think I have a right to ask you to tell Aunt Patricia that I have not taken you back, in any sense whatever. Not—not condoned."

She slipped on the word and he guessed that it had been used to her and that although she considered it of some value, she had not technically taken it in.

"What had you to condone in me, Esther?" he asked her gently. Suddenly she seemed to him most pathetic in her wilful folly. She had always been, she would always be, he knew, a creature who ruled through her weakness, found it an asset, traded on it perhaps, and whereas once this had seemed to him enchanting, now, in the face of ill-fortune it looked pitifully inadequate and base.

"I was afraid of you," she insisted. "I am now."

"Well!" said Jeff. He found himself smiling at Madame Beattie, and she was answering his smile. Perhaps it was rather the conventional tribute on his part, to conceal that he might easily have thrown himself back in his chair behind the shelter of his hands, or gone down in any upheaval of primal emotions; and perhaps he saw in her answer, if not sympathy, for she was too impersonal for that, a candid understanding of the little scene and an appreciation of its dramatic quality. "Then," said he, after his monosyllable, "there is nothing left me but to go." When he had risen, he stood looking down at his wife's beautiful dusky head. Incredible to think it had ever lain on his breast, or that the fact of its cherishing there made no difference to her embryo heart! A tinge of irony came into his voice. "And I am willing to assure Madame Beattie," he proceeded, "in the way of evidence, that you have not in any sense taken me back, nor have you condoned anything I may have done."

As he was opening the outer door, in a confusion of mind that communicated itself disturbingly to his eyes and ears, he seemed to hear Madame Beattie adjuring Esther ruthlessly not to be a fool.

"Why, he's a man, you little fool," he heard her say, not with passion but a negligent scorn ample enough to cover all the failings of their common sex. "He's more of a man than he was when he went into that hideous place. And after all, who sent him there?"

Jeff walked out and closed the door behind him with an exaggerated care. It hardly seemed as if he had the right, except in a salutary humbleness, even to touch a door which shut in Esther to the gods of home. He went back to his father's house, and there was Lydia singing as she dusted the library. He walked in blindly not knowing whether she was alone; but here was a face and a voice, and his heart was sore. Lydia, at sight of him, laid down her cloth and came to meet him. Neither did she think whether they were alone, though she did remember afterward that Farvie had gone into the orchard for his walk. Seeing Jeff's face, she knew some mortal hurt was at work within him, and like a child, she went to him, and Jeff put his face down on her cheek, and his cheek, she felt, was wet. And so they stood, their arms about each other, and Lydia's heart beat in such a sick tumult of rage and sorrow that it seemed to her she could not stand so and uphold the heavy weight of his grief. In a minute she whispered to him:

"Have you seen her?"

"Yes."

"Was she—cruel?"

"Don't! don't!" Jeff said, in a broken voice.

"Do you love her?" she went on, in an inexorable fierceness.

"No! no! no!" And then a voice that did not seem to be his and yet was his, came from him and overthrew all his old traditions of what he had been and what he must therefore be: "I only love you."

Then, Lydia knew, when she thought of it afterward, in a burning wonder, they kissed, and their tears and the kiss seemed as one, a bond against the woman who had been cruel to him and an eternal pact between themselves. And on the severing of the kiss, terrible to her in her innocence, she flung herself away from him and ran upstairs. Her flight was noiseless, as if now no one must know, but he heard the shutting of a door and the sound of a turning key.



XII

That night Anne was wakened from her sleep by a wisp of a figure that came slipping to her bedside, announced only by the cautious breathing of her name:

"Anne! Anne!" her sister was whispering close to her cheek.

"Why, Lyd," said Anne, "what is it?"

The figure was kneeling now, and Anne tried to rise on her elbow to invite Lydia in beside her. But Lydia put a hand on her shoulder and held her still.

"Whisper," she said, and then was silent so long that Anne, waiting and hearing her breathe, stared at her in the dark and wondered at her.

"What is it, lovey?" she asked at length, and Lydia's breathing hurried into sobs, and she said Anne's name again, and then, getting a little control of herself, asked the question that had brought her.

"Anne, when people kiss you, is it different if they are men?"

Now Anne did rise and turned the clothes back, but Lydia still knelt and shivered.

"You've been having bad dreams," said Anne. "Come in here, lovey, and Anne'll sing 'Lord Rendal.'"

"I mean," said Lydia, from her knees, "could anybody kiss me, except Farvie, and not have it like Farvie—I mean have it terrible—and I kiss him back—and—Anne, what would it mean?"

"That's a nightmare," said Anne. "Now you've got all cool and waked up, you run back to bed, unless you'll get in here."

Lydia put a fevered little hand upon her.

"Anne, you must tell me," she said, catching her breath. "Not a nightmare, a real kiss, and neither of us wanting to kiss anybody, and still doing it and not being sorry. Being glad."

She sounded so like herself in one of her fiercenesses that Anne at last believed she was wholly awake and felt a terror of her own.

"Who was it, Lydia?" she asked sternly. "Who is it you are thinking about?"

"Nobody," said Lydia, in a sudden curt withdrawal. She rose to her feet. "Yes, it was a nightmare."

She padded out of the room and softly closed the door, and Anne, left sitting there, felt unreasoning alarm. She had a moment's determination to follow her, and then she lay down again and thought achingly of Lydia who was grown up and was yet a child. And still, Anne knew, she had to come to woman's destiny. Lydia was so compact of sweetnesses that she would be courted and married, and who was Anne, to know how to marry her rightly? So she slept, after a troubled interval; but Lydia lay awake and stared the darkness through as if it held new paths to her desire. What was her desire? She did not know, save that it had all to do with Jeff. He had been cruelly used. He must not be so dealt with any more. Her passion for his well-being, germinating and growing through the years she had not seen him, had come to flower in a hot resolve that he should be happy now. And in some way, some headlong, resistless way, she knew she was to make his happiness, and yet in her allegiance to him there was trouble and pain. He had made her into a new creature. The kiss had done it.

He would not, Lydia thought, have kissed her if it were wrong, and yet the kiss was different from all others and she must never tell. Nor must it come again. She was plighted to him, not as to a man free to love her, but to his well-being; and it was all most sacred and not to be undone. She was exalted and she was shuddering with a formless sense of the earth sway upon her. She had ever been healthy-minded as a child; even the pure imaginings of love had not beguiled her. But now something had come out of the earth or the air and called to her, and she had answered; and because it was so inevitable it was right—yet right for only him to know. Who else could understand?



XIII

Lydia did not think she dreaded seeing him next morning. The fabric they had begun to weave together looked too splendid for covering trivial little fears like that. Or was it strong enough to cover anything? Yet when he came into the room where they were at breakfast she could not look at him with the same unwavering eyes. She had, strangely, and sadly too, the knowledge of life. But if she had looked at him she would have seen how he was changed. He had pulled himself together. Whether what happened or what might happen had tutored him, he was on guard, ready—for himself most of all. And after breakfast where Anne and the colonel had contributed the mild commonplaces useful at least in breaking such constraints, he followed the colonel into the library and sat down with him. The colonel, from his chair by the window, regarded his son in a fond approval. Even to his eyes where Jeff was always a grateful visitant, the more so now after he had been so poignantly desired, he was this morning the more manly and altogether fit. But Jeff was not going to ingratiate himself.

"Father," said he, "I've got to get out."

Trouble of a wistful sort sprang into the colonel's face. But he spoke with a reasonable mildness, desirous chiefly of meeting his boy half way.

"You said so. But not yet, I hope."

"At once," said Jeffrey. "I am going at once. To-day perhaps. To-morrow anyway. I've simply got to get away."

The colonel, rather impatiently, because his voice would tremble, asked as Lydia had done:

"Have you seen Esther?"

This Jeff found unreasonably irritating. Bitter as the sight of her had been and unspeakable her repudiation, he felt to-day as if they did not pertain. The thing that did pertain with a biting force was to remove himself before innocent young sisterly girls idealised him to their harm. But he answered, and not too ungraciously:

"Yes, I've seen Esther. But that's nothing to do with it. Esther is—what she's always been. Only I've got to get away."

The colonel, from long brooding over him, had a patience comparable only to a mother's. He was bitterly hurt. He could not understand. But he could at least attain the only grace possible and pretend to understand. So he answered with a perfect gentleness:

"I see, Jeff, I see. But I wish you could find it possible to put it off—till the end of the week, say."

"Very well," said Jeff, in a curt concession, "the end of this week."

He got up and went out of the room and the house, and the colonel, turning to look, saw him striding down the slope to the river. Then the elder man's hands began to tremble, and he sat pathetically subject to the seizure. Anne, if she had found him, would have known the name of the thing that had settled upon him. She would have called it a nervous chill. But to him it was one of the little ways of his predestined mate, old age. And presently, sitting there ignominiously shuddering, he began to be amused at himself, for he had a pretty sense of humour, and to understand himself better than he had before. Face to face with this ironic weakness, he saw beyond the physiologic aspect of it, the more deeply into his soul. The colonel had been perfectly sure that he had taken exquisite care of himself, these last years, because he desired to see his son again, and also because Jeff, while suffering penalty, must be spared the pain of bereavement. So he had formed a habit, and now it was his master. He had learned self-preservation, but at what a cost! Where were the sharp sweet pangs of life that had been used to assail him before he anchored in this calm? Daring was a lost word to him. Was it true he was to have no more stormy risings of hot life, no more passions of just rage or even righteous hate, because he had taught himself to rule his blood? Now when his heart ached in anticipatory warning over his son's going, why must he think of ways to be calm, as if being calm were the aim of man? Laboriously he had learned how not to waste himself, and the negation of life which is old age and then death had fallen upon him. He laughed a little, bitterly, and Anne, coming to find him as she did from time to time, to make sure he was comfortable, smiled, hearing it, and asked:

"What is it, Farvie?"

He looked up into her kind face as if it were strange to him. At that moment he and life were having it out together. Even womanly sweetness could not come between.

"Anne," said he, "I'm an old man."

"Oh, no, Farvie!" She was smoothing his shoulder with her slender hand. "No!"

But even she could not deny it. To her youth, he knew, he must seem old. Yet her service, her fostering love, had only made him older. She had copied his own attitude. She had helped him not to die, and yet to sink into the ambling pace of these defended years.

"Damn it, Anne!" he said, with suddenly frowning brow, and now she started. She had never heard an outbreak from courtly Farvie. "I wish I'd been more of a man."

She did not understand him, and her eyes questioned whether he was ill. He read the query. That was it, he thought impotently. They had all three of them been possessed by that, the fear that he was going to be ill.

"Yes," he said, "I wish I'd been more of a man. I should be more of a man now."

She slipped away out of the room. He thought he had frightened her. But in a moment she was back with some whiskey, hot, in a glass. The colonel wanted to order her off and swear his nerves would be as taut without it. But how could he? There was the same traitorous trembling in his legs, and he put out his hand and took the glass, and thanked her. The thanks sounded like the courteous, kind father she knew; but when she had carried the glass into the kitchen she stood a moment, her hand on the table, and thought, the lines of trouble on her forehead: what had been the matter with him?

Jeff, when he got out of the house, walked in a savage hurry down to the end of the lot, and there, feeling no more at ease with himself, skirted along the bank bordered by inlets filled with weedy loveliness, and came to the lower end of the town where the cotton mills were. He glanced up at them as he struck into the street past their office entrance, and wondered what the stock was quoted at now, and whether an influx of foreigners had displaced the old workmen. It had looked likely before he went away. But he had no interest in it. He had no interest in Addington, he thought: only in the sad case of Lydia thrown up against the tumultuous horde of his released emotions and hurt by them and charmed by them and, his remorseful judgment told him, insulted by them. He could not, even that morning, have told how he felt about Lydia, or whether he had any feeling at all, save a proper gratitude for her tenderness to his father. But he had found her in his path, when his hurt soul was crying out to all fostering womanhood to save him from the ravening claw of woman's cruelty. She had felt his need, and they had looked at each other with eyes that pierced defences. And then, incarnate sympathy, tender youth, she had rested in his arms, and in the generosity of her giving and the exquisiteness of the gift, he had been swept into that current where there is no staying except by an anguish of denial. It was chaos within him. He did not think of his allegiance to Esther, nor was he passionately desirous, with his whole mind, of love for this new Lydia. He was in a whirl of emotion, and hated life where you could never really right yourself, once you were wrong.

He kept on outside the town, and presently walked with exhilaration because nobody knew him and he was free, and the day was of an exquisite beauty, the topmost flower of the waxing spring. The road was marked by elms, aisled and vaulted, and birds called enchantingly. He was able to lay aside cool knowledge of the fight whereby all things live and, such was the desire of his mind, to partake of pleasure, to regard them as poets do and children and pitiful women: the birds as lumps of free delight, winged particles of joy. The song-birds were keen participants of sport, killing to eat, and bigger birds were killing them. But because they sang and their feathers were newly painted, he let himself ignore that open scandal and loved them for an angel choir.

Coming to another village, though he knew it perfectly he assumed it was undiscovered land, and beyond it lay in a field and dozed, his hat over his eyes, and learned how blessed it is to be alone in freedom, even afar from Lydias and Esthers. Healing had not begun in him until that day. Here were none to sympathise, none to summon him to new relations or recall the old. The earth had taken him back to her bosom, to cherish gravely, if with no actual tenderness, that he might be of the more use to her. If he did not that afternoon hear the grass growing, at least something rose from the mould that nourished it, into his eyes and ears and mouth and the pores of his skin, and helped him on to health. At five he remembered his father, who had begged him not to go away, got up and turned back on his steps. Now he was hungry and bought rolls and cheese at a little shop, and walked on eating them. The dusk came, and only the robin seemed of unabated spirit, flying to topmost twigs, and giving the evening call, the cry that was, he thought, "grief! grief!" and the following notes like a sob.

Jeffrey came into Addington by another road, one that would take him into town along the upland, and now he lingered purposely and chose indirect ways because, although it was unlikely that any one would know him, he shrank from the prospect of demanding eyes. At nine o'clock even he was no farther than the old circus ground, and, nearing it, he heard, through the evening stillness, a voice, loud, sharp, forensic. It was hauntingly familiar to him, a voice he might not know at the moment, yet one that had at least belonged to some part of his Addington life. The response it brought from him, in assaulted nerves and repugnant ears, was entirely distasteful. Whatever the voice was, he had at some time hated it. Why it was continuing on that lifted note he could not guess. With a little twitch of the lips, the sign of a grim amusement, he thought this might even be an orator, some wardroom Demosthenes, practising against the lonely curtain of the night.

"You have no country," the voice was bastinadoing the air. "And you don't need one. Your country is the whole earth and it belongs to you."

Jeff halted a rod before the nearer entrance to the field. He had suddenly the sense of presences. The nerves on his skin told him humanity was near. He went on, with an uncalculated noiselessness, for the moment loomed important, and since what humanity was there was silent—all but that one hateful voice—he, approaching in ignorance, must be still. The voice, in its strident passion, rose again.

"The country for a man to serve is the country that serves him. The country that serves him is the one without a king. Has this country a king? It has a thousand kings and a million more that want to be. How many kings do you want to reign over you? How many are you going to accept? It is in your hands."

It ceased, and another voice, lower but full of a suppressed passion, took up the tale, though in a foreign tongue. Jeff knew the first one now: Weedon Moore's. He read at once the difference between Moore's voice and this that followed. Moore's had been imploring in its assertiveness, the desire to convince. The other, in the strange language, carried belief and sorrow even. It also longed to convince, but out of an inner passion hot as the flame of love or grief. The moon, riding superbly, and coming that minute out of her cloud, unveiled the scene. An automobile had halted on a slight elevation and in it stood Moore and a taller man gesticulating as he spoke. And about them, like a pulsing carpet lifted and stirred by a breeze of feeling, were the men Jeff's instinct had smelled out. They were packed into a mass. And they were silent. Weedon Moore began again.

"Kill out this superstition of a country. Kill it out, I say. Kill out this idea of going back to dead men for rules to live by. The dead are dead. Their Bibles and their laws are dead. There's more life in one of you men that has tasted it through living and suffering and being oppressed than there is in any ten of their kings and prophets. They are dead, I tell you. We are alive. It was their earth while they lived on it. It's our earth to-day."

Jeff was edging nearer, skirting the high fence, and while he did it, the warm voice of the other man took up the exposition, and now Jeff understood that he was Moore's interpreter. By the time he had finished, Jeff was at the thin edge of the crowd behind the car, and though one or two men turned as he moved and glanced at him, he seemed to rouse no uneasiness. Here, nearer them in the moonlight, he saw what they were: workmen, foreign evidently, with bared throats and loosely worn hair, some, their caps pushed back, others without hats at all, seeking, it seemed, coolness in this too warm adjuration.

"Their symbol," said Moore, "is the flag. They carry it into foreign lands. Why? For what they call religion? No. For money—money—money. When the flag waves in a new country, blood begins to flow, the blood of the industrial slave. Down with the flag. Our symbol is the sword."

The voice of the interpreter, in an added passion, throbbed upon the climbing period. Moore had moved him and, forgetful of himself, he was dramatically ready to pass his ardour on. Jeff also forgot himself. He clove like a wedge through the thin line before him, and leaped on the running-board.

"You fool," he heard himself yelling at Moore, who in the insecurity of his tubbiness was jarred and almost overturned, "you're robbing them of their country. You're taking away the thing that keeps them from falling down on all-fours and going back to brute beasts. My God, Moore, you're a traitor! You ought to be shot."

He had surprised them. They did not even hustle him, but there were interrogatory syllables directed to the interpreter. Moore recovered himself. He gave a sharp sound of distaste, and then, assuming his civilised habit, said to Jeff in a voice of specious courtesy, yet, Jeff knew, a voice of hate:

"These are mill operatives, Blake, labourers. They know what labour is. They know what capitalists are. Do you want me to tell 'em who you are?"

Who you are? Jeff knew what it meant. Did he want Moore to tell them that he was a capitalist found out and punished?

"Tell and be damned," he said. "See here!" He was addressing the interpreter. "You understand English. Fair play. Do you take me? Fair play is what English men and American men work for and fight for. It's fair play to give me a chance to speak, and for you to tell these poor devils what I say. Will you?"

The man nodded. His white teeth gleamed in the moonlight. Jeff fancied his eyes gleamed, too. He was a swarthy creature and round his neck was knotted a handkerchief, vivid red. Jeff, with a movement of the arm, crowded Moore aside. Moore submitted. Used, as he was, to being swept out of the way, all the energies that might have been remonstrant in him had combined in a controlling calm to serve him until the day when he should be no longer ousted. Jeff spoke, and threw his voice, he hoped, to the outskirts of the crowd, ingenuously forgetting it was not lungs he wanted but a bare knowledge of foreign tongues.

"This man," said he, "tells you you've no country. Don't you let him lie to you. Here's your country under your feet. If you can't love it enough to die for it, go back to your own country, the one you were born in, and love that, for God's sake." He judged he had said enough to be carried in the interpreter's memory, and turned upon him. "Go on," said he imperatively. "Say it."

But even then he had no idea what the man would do. The atmosphere about them was not thrilling in responsive sympathy. Silence had waited upon Moore, and this, Jeff could not help feeling, was silence of a different species. But the interpreter did, slowly and cautiously, it seemed, convey his words. At least Jeff hoped he was conveying them. When his voice ceased, Jeff took up the thread.

"He tells you you've no country. He says your country is the world. You're not big enough to need the whole world for your country. I'm not big enough. Only a few of them are, the prophets and the great dead men he thinks so little of. Dig up a tract of ground and call it your country and make it grow and bloom and have good laws—why, you fools!" His patience broke. "You fools, you're being done. You're being led away and played upon. A man's country isn't the spot where he can get the best money to put into his belly. His country is his country, just as his mother is his mother. He can worship the Virgin Mary, but he loves his mother best."

Whether the name hit them like blasphemy, whether the interpreter caught fire from it or Moore gave a signal, he could not tell. But suddenly he was being hustled. He was pulled down from the car with a gentle yet relentless force, was conscious that he was being removed and must submit. There were sounds now, the quick syllables of the southern races, half articulate to the uninstructed ear but full of idiom and passion, and through his own silent struggle he was aware that the interpreter was soothing, directing, and inexorably guiding the assault. They took him, a resistless posse of them, beyond the gap, and the automobile followed slowly and passed him just outside. It halted, and Moore addressed him hesitatingly:

"I could take you back to town."

Moore didn't want to say this, but he remembered Miss Amabel and the two charming girls, all adoring Jeff, and his ever-present control bade him be civilised. Jeff did not answer. He was full of a choking rage and blind desire for them to get their hands off him. Not in his imprisonment even had he felt such debasement under control as when these lithe creatures hurried him along. Yet he knew then that his rage was not against them, innocent servitors of a higher power. It was against the mean dominance of Weedon Moore.

The car passed swiftly on and down the road to town.

Then the men left him as suddenly as trained dogs whistled from their prey. He felt as if he had been merely detained, gently on the whole, at the point the master had designated, and looked about for the interpreter. It seemed to him if he could have speech with that man he could tell him in a sentence what Weedon Moore was, and charge him not to deliver these ignorant creatures of another race into his mucky hands. But if the interpreter was there he could not be distinguished. Jeff called, a word or two, not knowing what to say, and no one answered. The crowd that had been eagerly intent on a common purpose, to get him out of the debating place, split into groups. Individuals detached themselves, silently and swiftly, and melted away. Jeff heard their footsteps on the road, and now the voices began, quietly but with an eager emphasis. He was left alone by the darkened field, for even the moon, as if she joined the general verdict, slipped under a cloud.

Jeff stood a moment nursing, not his anger, but a clearheaded certainty that something must be done. Something always had to be done to block Weedon Moore. It had been so in the old days when Moore was not dangerous: only dirty. Now he was debasing the ignorant mind. He was a demagogue. The old never-formulated love for Addington came back to Jeff in a rush, not recognised as love an hour ago, only the careless affection of usage, but ready, he knew, to spring into something warmer when her dear old bulwarks were assailed. You don't usually feel a romantic passion for your mother. You allow her to feed you and be patronised by you and stand aside to let victorious youth pass on. But see unworthy hands touching her worn dress—the hands of Weedon Moore!—and you snatch it from their grasp.

Jeff still stood there thinking. This, the circus-ground was where he and the other boys had trysted in a delirious ownership of every possible "show", where they had met the East and gloated on nature's poor eccentricities. Now here he was, a man suddenly set in his purpose to deliver the old town from Weedon Moore. They couldn't suffer it, he and the rest of the street of solid mansions dating back to ancient dignities. These foreign children who had come to work for them should not be bred in disbelief in Addington traditions which were as good as anything America had to offer. Jeff was an aristocrat from skin to heart, because he was sensitive, because he loved beauty and he didn't want the other man to come too close; he didn't like tawdry ways to press upon him. But while he had been shut into the seclusion of his own thoughts, these past years, he had learned something. He had strengthened passions that hardly knew they were alive until now events awoke them. One was the worship of law, and one was that savage desire of getting to the place where we love law so much that we welcome punishment. He recalled himself from this dark journey back into his cell, and threw up his head to the heavens and breathed in air. It was the air of freedom. Yet it was only the freedom of the body. If he forgot now the beauty of that austere goddess, the law, then was he more a prisoner than when he had learned her face in loneliness and pain. He walked out of the grounds and along the silent road, advised through keen memory, by sounds and scents, of spots he had always known, and went into the town and home. There were lights, but for all the sight of people Addington might have been abed.

He opened the front door softly and out of the library Anne came at once as if she had been awaiting him.

"Oh," she said, in a quick trouble breaking bounds, though gently, now there was another to share it, "I'm afraid Farvie's sick."



XIV

"What is it?" said he. "What's the matter?"

But Anne, after a second glance at his tired face, was all concern for him.

"Have you had something to eat?" she asked.

He put that aside, and said remindingly:

"What is it about father?"

Anne stood at the foot of the stairs. She had the air of defending the way, lest he rush up before he was intelligently prepared.

"We don't know what it is. He went all to pieces. It was just after you had gone. I found him there, shaking. He just said to me: 'I'll go to bed.' So I helped him. That's all I know."

Jeff felt an instant and annoyed compunction. He had dashed off, to the tune of his own wild mood, and left his father to the assaults of emotions perhaps as overwhelming and with no young strength to meet them.

"I'll go up," said he. "Did you call a doctor?"

"No. He wouldn't let me."

Jeff ran up the stairs and found Lydia in a chair outside the colonel's door. She looked pathetically tired and anxious. And so young: if she had arranged herself artfully to touch the sympathies she couldn't have done it to more effect. Her round arms were bare to the elbow, her hands were loosely clasped, and she was sitting, like a child, with her feet drawn up under her on the rung of the chair. She looked at him in a solemn relief but, he saw with a relief of his own, no sensitiveness to his presence apart from the effect it might have on her father.

"He's asleep," she said, in a whisper. "I'm sitting here to listen."

Jeffrey nodded at her in a bluff way designed to express his certainty that everything was going to be on its legs again now he had come home. For the first time he felt like the man in the house, and the thin tonic braced him. He opened the door of his father's room and went in. The colonel's voice came at once:

"That you, Jeff?"

"Yes," said Jeff. He sat down by the bedside in the straight-backed chair that had evidently been comfortable enough for the sisters' anxious watch. "What's the matter, father?"

The colonel moved slightly nearer the edge of the bed. His eyes brightened, Jeff noted by the light of the shaded lamp. He was glad to get his son home again.

"Jeff," said he, "I've been lying here making up my mind I'd tell you."

Jeffrey rose and closed the door he had left open a crack out of courtesy to the little watcher there. He came back to the bed, not with a creaking caution, but like a man bringing a man's rude solace. He could not believe his father was seriously undone. But, whatever was the matter, the colonel was glad to talk. Perhaps, loyal as he was, even he could scarcely estimate his own desire to turn from soft indulgences to the hard contact of a man's intelligence.

"Jeff," said he, "I'm in a bad place. I've met the last enemy."

"Oh, no, you haven't," said Jeff, at random. "The last enemy is Death. That's what they say, don't they? Well, you're years and years to the good. Don't you worry."

"Ah, but the last enemy isn't Death," said the colonel wisely. "Don't you think it. The last enemy is Fear. Death's only the executioner. Fear delivers you over, and then Death has to take you, whether or no. But Fear is the arch enemy."

Sane as he looked and spoke, this was rather impalpable, and Jeffrey began to doubt his own fitness to deal with psychologic quibbles. But his father gave short shrift for questioning.

"I'm afraid," he said quite simply.

"What are you afraid of?" Jeff felt he had to meet him with an equal candour.

"Everything."

They looked at each other a moment and then Jeff essayed a mild, "Oh, come!" because there was nothing more to the point.

"I've taken care of myself," said the colonel, with more vigour, "till I'm punk. I can't stand a knockdown blow. I couldn't stand your going away. I went to bed."

"Is my going a knockdown blow?"

There was something pathetic in hearing that, but pleasurable, too, in a warm, strange way.

"Why, yes, of course it is."

"Well, then," said Jeff, "don't worry. I won't go."

"Oh, yes, you will," said the colonel instantly, "or you'll be punk. I'd rather go with you. I told you that. But it wouldn't do. I should begin to pull on you. And you'd mother me as they do, these dear girls."

"Yes," said Jeffrey thoughtfully. "Yes. They're dear girls."

"There's nothing like them," said the colonel. "There never was anything like their mother." Then he stopped, remembering she was not Jeff's mother, too. But Jeff knew all about his own mother, the speed and shine and bewildering impulse of her, and how she was adored. But nobody could have been soothed and brooded over by her, that gallant fiery creature. Whatever she might have become if she had lived, love of her then was a fight and a devotion, flowers and stars and dreams. "And it isn't a thing for me to take, this sort of attachment, Jeff. I ought to give it. They ought to be having the kind of time girls like. They ought not to be coddling an old man badly hypped."

Jeff nodded here, comprehendingly. Yes, they did need the things girls like: money, clothes, fun. But he vaulted away from that disquieting prospect, and faced the present need.

"Have you had anything to eat?"

"Oh, yes," the colonel said. "Egg-nog. Anne makes it. Very good."

"See here," said Jeff, "don't you want to get up and slip your clothes on, and I'll forage round and fish out cold hash or something, and we'll have a kind of a mild spree?"

A slow smile lighted the colonel's face, rather grimly.

He admired the ease with which Jeff grasped the situation.

"Don't you start them out cooking," he advised.

"No, I'll find a ham-bone or something. Only slip into your trousers. Get your shoes on your feet. We'll smoke a pipe together."

"You're right," said the colonel, with vigour. "We'll put on our shoes."

Jeff, on his way to the door, heard him throwing off the bedclothes. His own was the harder part. He had to meet the tired, sweet servitors without and announce a man's fiat. There they were, Lydia still in her patient attitude, and Anne on the landing, her head thrown back and the pure outline of her chin and throat like beauty carved in the air. At the opening of the door they were awake with an instant alertness. Lydia's feet came noiselessly to the floor, and Jeff understood, with a pang of pity for her, that she had perched uncomfortably to keep herself awake. This soft creature would never understand. He addressed himself to Anne, who believed in the impeccable rights of man and could take uncomprehended ways for granted.

"He's going to get up."

Anne made a movement toward the door.

"No," said Jeffrey. He was there before her, and, though he smiled at her, she knew she was not to pass. "I'll see to him. You two run off to bed."

They were both regarding him with a pale, anxious questioning. But Anne's look cleared.

"Come, Lydia," said she, and as Lydia, cramped with sleep, trudged after her, she added wisely, "It'll be better for them both."

When they were gone, Jeffrey did go down to the kitchen, rigid in the order Mary Nellen always left. He entered boldly on a campaign of ruthless ravaging, found bread and cheese and set them out, and a roast most attractive to the eye. He lighted candles, and then a lamp with a gay piece of red flannel in its glass body, put there by Mary Nellen, who, though on Homeric knowledge bent, kept religiously all the ritual of home. The colonel's slippered step was coming down the stairs. Jeffrey went out into the hall and beckoned. He looked stealth and mischief, and the colonel grimaced wisely at him. They went into the kitchen and sat down to their meal like criminals. The colonel had to eat, in vying admiration of Jeff, ravenous from his day's walk. When they drew back, Jeff pulled out his pipe. He was not an incessant smoker, but in this first interval of his homecoming all small indulgences were sweet. He paused in filling, finger on the weed.

"Where's yours?" he asked.

The colonel shook his head.

"Don't smoke?" Jeff inquired.

"I haven't for a year or so." He was shamefaced over it. "The fact is—Jeff, I'm nothing but a malingerer. I thought—my heart—"

"Very wise," said Jeffrey, his eyes half-closed in a luxurious lighting up. "Very wise indeed. But just to-night—don't you think you'd better have a whiff to-night?" The colonel shook his head, but Jeff sent out an advance signal of blue smoke. "Where is it?" said he.

"Oh, I suppose it's in my bureau drawer," said the colonel, with impatience. "Left hand. I kept it; I don't know why."

"Yes," said Jeffrey. "Of course you kept your pipe."

He ran softly upstairs, opening and shutting doors with an admirable quiet, and put his hand on the old briarwood. From Anne's room he heard a low crooning. She was awake then, but with mind at ease or she wouldn't sing like that. He could imagine how Lydia had dropped off to sleep, like a burden of sweet fragrances cast on the bosom of the night, an unfinished prayer babbled on her lips. But to think of Lydia now was to look trouble in the face, and he returned to his father not so thoroughly in the spirit of a specious gaiety. It did him good, though, to see the colonel's fingers close on the old pipe, with a motion of the thumb, indicating a resumed habit, caressing a smooth, warm boss. The colonel soberly but luxuriously lighted up, and they sat and puffed a while in silence. Jeffrey drew up a chair for his father's feet and another for his own.

"What's your idea," he said,' at length, "of Weedon Moore?"

The colonel took his pipe out and replaced it.

"Rather a dirty fellow, wasn't he?"

"Yes. That is, in college."

"What d' he do?"

The colonel had never been told at the time. He knew Moore was an outcast from the gang.

"Everything," said Jeffrey briefly. "And told of it," he added.

The colonel nodded. Jeffrey put Moore aside for later consideration, and made up his mind pretty generously to talk things over. The habit of his later years had been all for silence, and the remembered confidences of the time before had involved Esther. Of that sweet sorcery he would not think. As he stood now, the immediate result of his disaster had been to callous surfaces accessible to human intercourse and at the same time cause him, in the sensitive inner case of him, to thank the ruling powers that he need never again, seeing how ravaging it is, give himself away. But now because his father had got to have new wine poured into him, he was giving himself away, just as, on passionate impulse, he had given himself away to Lydia. He put his question desperately, knowing how inexorably it committed him.

"Do you suppose there's anything in this town for me to do?"

The colonel produced at once the possibility he had been privately cherishing.

"Alston Choate—"

"I know," said Jeffrey. "I sha'n't go to Choate. You know what Addington is. Before I knew it, I should be a cause. Can't you and I hatch up something?"

The colonel hesitated.

"It would be simple enough," he said, "if I had any capital."

"You haven't," said Jeff, rather curtly, "for me to fool away. What you've got you must save for the girls."

The same doubt was in both their minds. Would Addington let him earn his living in the bald give and take of everyday commerce? Would it half patronise and half distrust him? He thought, from old knowledge of it, that Addington would behave perfectly but exasperatingly. It was passionate in its integrity, but because he was born out of the best traditions in it, a temporary disgrace would be condoned. If he opened a shop, Addington would give him a tithe of its trade, from duty and, as it would assuredly tell itself, for the sake of his father. But he didn't want that kind of nursing. He was sick enough at the accepted ways of life to long for wildernesses, ocean voyages on rough liners, where every man is worked hard enough to let his messmate alone. He was hurt, irremediably hurt, he knew, in what stands in us for the affections. But here were affections still, inflexibly waiting. They had to be reckoned with. They had to be nurtured and upheld, no matter how the contacts of life hit his own skin. He tried vaguely, and still with angry difficulty, to explain himself.

"I want to stand by you, father. But you won't get much satisfaction out of me."

The colonel thought he should get all kinds of satisfaction. His glance told that. How much of the contentment of it, Jeffrey wondered, with a cynical indulgence for life as it is, came from tobacco and how much from him?

"You see I'm not the chap I was," he blundered, trying to open his father's eyes to the abysmal depth of his futility.

"You're older," said the colonel. "And—you'll let me say it, won't you, Jeff?" He felt very timid before his rough-tongued, perhaps coarsened son. "You seem to me to have got a lot out of it."

Out of his imprisonment! The red mounted to Jeffrey's forehead. He took out his pipe, emptied it carefully and laid it down.

"Father," he said slowly, "I'm going to tell you the truth. When we're young we're full of yeast. We know it all. We think we're going to do it all. But we're only seething and working inside. It's a dream, I suppose. We live in it and we think we've got it all. But it's a horribly uncomfortable dream."

The colonel gave his little acquiescing nod.

"I wouldn't have it again," he said. "No, I wouldn't go back."

"And I give you my word," said Jeffrey, slowly thinking out his way, though it looked to him as if there were really no way, "I'm as much at sea as I was then. It's not the same turmoil, but it's a turmoil. I was pulled up short. I was given plenty of time to think. Well, I thought—when I hadn't the nerve to keep myself from doing it."

"You said some astonishing things in the prison paper," his father ventured. The whole thing seemed so gravely admirable to him—Jeff and the prison as the public knew them—that he wished Jeff himself could get comfort out of it.

"Some few things I believe I settled, so far as I understand them." Jeff was frowning at the table where his hand beat an impatient measure. "I saw things in the large. I saw how the nations—all of 'em, in living under present conditions—could go to hell quickest. That's what they're bent on doing. And I saw how they could call a halt if they would. But how to start in on my own life, I don't know. You'd think I'd had time enough to face the thing and lick it into shape. I haven't. I don't know any more what to do than if I'd been born yesterday—on a new planet—and not such an easy one."

While the colonel had bewailed his own limitations a querulous discontent had ivoried his face. Now it had cleared and left the face sedate and firm in a gravity fitted to its nobility of line.

"Jeff," he said. He leaned over the table and touched Jeffrey's hand.

Jeff looked up.

"What is it?" he asked.

"The reason you're not prepared to go on is because you don't care. You don't care a hang about yourself."

Jeffrey debated a moment. It was true. His troublesome self did not seem to him of any least account.

"Well," said he, "let's go to bed."

But they shook hands before they parted, and the colonel did not put his pipe away in the drawer. He left it on the mantel, conveniently at hand.



XV

Next morning Anne, after listening at the colonel's door and hearing nothing, decided not to tap. She went on downstairs to be saluted by a sound she delighted in: a low humming. It came from the library where her father was happily and most villainously attacking the only song he knew: "Lord Lovell." Anne's heart cleared up like a smiling sky. She went in to him, and he, at the window, his continued humming like the spinning of a particularly eccentric top, turned and greeted her, and he seemed to be very well and almost gay. He showed no sign of even remembering yesterday, and when presently Jeffrey came in and then Lydia, they all behaved, Anne thought, like an ordinary family with no queer problems round the corner.

After breakfast Jeffrey turned to Lydia and said quite simply: "Come into the orchard and walk a little."

But to Lydia, Anne saw, with a mild surprise, his asking must have meant something not so simple. Her face flushed all over, and a misty sweetness, like humility and gratitude, came into her eyes. Jeffrey, too, caught that morning glow, only to find his task the sadder. How to say things to her! and after all, what was it possible to say? They went down into the orchard, and Lydia, by his side, paced demurely. He saw she was trying to fit her steps to his impatient stride, and shortened up on it. He felt very tender toward Lydia. At last, when it seemed as if they might be out of range of the windows, and, he unreasonably felt, more free, he broke out abruptly: