She took her hand away. "And you?" she replied coldly. "Are your feelings changed?"

"I—oh, you know I love you," was his answer in a deliberately careless tone.

She laughed with an attempt at raillery. "You've been too long up at Windrift—you've been seeing too much of Theresa Howland," said she, merely for something to say; for Theresa was neither clever nor pretty, and Del hadn't it in her to suspect him of being mercenary.

He looked coldly at her. "I have never interfered with your many attentions from other men," said he stiffly. "On the contrary, I have encouraged you to enjoy yourself, and I thought you left me free in the same way."

The tears came to her eyes; and he saw, and proceeded to value still less highly that which was obviously so securely his.

"Whatever is the matter with you, Ross, this morning?" she cried. "Or is it I? Am I—"

"It certainly is not I," he interrupted icily. "I see you again after six months, and I find you changed completely."

A glance from her stopped him. "Oh!" she exclaimed, with a dangerous smile. "You are out of humor this morning and are seeking a quarrel."

"That would be impossible," he retorted. "I never quarrel. Evidently you have forgotten all about me."

Her pride would not let her refuse the challenge, convert in his words, frank in his eyes.

"Possibly," mocked she, forcing herself to look amusedly at him. "I don't bother much about people I don't see."

"You take a light view of our engagement," was his instant move.

"I should take a still lighter view," retorted she, "if I thought the way you're acting was a fair specimen of your real self."

This from Adelaide, who had always theretofore shared in his almost reverent respect for himself. Adelaide judging him, criticising him! All Ross's male instinct for unquestioning approval from the female was astir. "You wish to break our engagement?" he inquired, with a glance of cold anger that stiffened her pride and suppressed her impulse to try to gain time.

"You're free," said she, and her manner so piqued him, that to nerve himself to persist he had to think hard on the magnificence of Windrift and the many Howland millions and the rumored Ranger will. She, in a series of jerks and pauses, took off the ring; with an expression and a gesture that gave no further hint of how she had valued it, both for its own beauty and for what it represented, she handed it to him. "If that's all," she went on, "I'll go back to father." To perfect her pretense, she should have risen, shaken hands cheerfully with him, and sent him carelessly away. She knew it; but she could not.

He was not the man to fail to note that she made no move to rise, or to fail to read the slightly strained expression in her eyes and about the corners of her mouth. That betrayal lost Adelaide a triumph; for, seeing her again, feeling her beauty and her charm in all his senses, reminded of her superiority in brains and in taste to the women from whom he might choose, he was making a losing fight for the worldly wise course. "Anyhow, I must tame her a bit," he reflected, now that he was sure she would be his, should he find on further consideration that he wanted her rather than Theresa's fortune. He accordingly took his hat, drew himself up, bowed coldly.

"Good morning," he said. And he was off, down the drive—to the lower end where the stableboy was guarding his trap—he was seated—he was driving away—he was gone—gone!

She did not move until he was no longer in sight. Then she rushed into the house, darted up to her room, locked herself in and gave way. It was the first serious quarrel she had ever had with him; it was so little like a quarrel, so ominously like a—No; absurd! It could not be a finality. She rejected that instantly, so confident had beauty and position as a prospective heiress made her as to her powers over any man she chose to try to fascinate, so secure was she in the belief that Ross loved her and would not give her up in any circumstances. She went over their interview, recalled his every sentence and look—this with surprising coolness for a young woman as deeply in love as she fancied herself. And her anger rose against him—a curious kind of anger, to spring and flourish in a loving heart. "He has been flattered by Theresa until he has entirely lost his point of view," she decided. "I'll give him a lesson when he comes trying to make it up."

* * * * *

He drove the part of his homeward way that was through streets with his wonted attention to "smartness." True "man of the world," he never for many consecutive minutes had himself out of his mind—how he was conducting himself, what people thought of him, what impression he had made or was making or was about to make. He estimated everybody and everything instinctively and solely from the standpoint of advantage to himself. Such people, if they have the intelligence to hide themselves under a pleasing surface, and the wisdom to plan, and the energy to execute, always get just about what they want; for intelligence and energy are invincible weapons, whether the end be worthy or not. As soon, however, as he was in the road up to the Bluffs, deserted at that hour, his body relaxed, his arms and hands dropped from the correct angle for driving, the reins lay loose upon the horse's back, and he gave himself to dejection. He had thought—at Windrift—that, once he was free from the engagement which was no longer to his interest, he would feel buoyant, elated. Instead, he was mentally even more downcast a figure than his relaxed attitude and gloomy face made him physically. His mother's and his "set's" training had trimmed generous instincts close to the roots, and, also, such ideals as were not purely for material matters, especially for ostentation. But, being still a young man, those roots not only were alive, but also had an under-the-soil vigor; they even occasionally sent to the surface sprouts—that withered in the uncongenial air of his surroundings and came to nothing. Just now these sprouts were springing in the form of self-reproaches. Remembering with what thoughts he had gone to Adelaide, he felt wholly responsible for the broken engagement, felt that he had done a contemptible thing, had done it in a contemptible way; and he was almost despising himself, looking about the while for self-excuses. The longer he looked the worse off he was; for the more clearly he saw that he was what he called, and thought, in love with this fresh young beauty, so swiftly and alluringly developing. It exasperated him with the intensity of selfishness's avarice that he could not have both Theresa Howland's fortune and Adelaide. It seemed to him that he had a right to both. Not in the coldly selfish only is the fact of desire in itself the basis of right. By the time he reached home, he was angry through and through, and bent upon finding some one to be angry with. He threw the reins to a groom and, savagely sullen of face, went slowly up the terrace-like steps.

His mother, on the watch for his return, came to meet him. "How is Mr. Ranger this morning?" she asked.

"Just the same," he answered curtly.

"And—Del?"

No answer.

They went into the library; he lit a cigarette and seated himself at the writing table. She watched him anxiously but had far too keen insight to speak and give him the excuse to explode. Not until she turned to leave the room did he break his surly silence to say: "I might as well tell you. I'm engaged to Theresa Howland."

"O Ross, I'm so glad!" she exclaimed, lighting up with pride and pleasure. Then, warned by his expression, she restrained herself. "I have felt certain for a long time that you would not throw yourself away on Adelaide. She is a nice girl—pretty, sweet, and all that. But women differ from each other only in unimportant details. A man ought to see to it that by marrying he strengthens his influence and position in the world and provides for the standing of his children. And I think Theresa has far more steadiness; and, besides, she has been about the world—she was presented at court last spring a year ago, wasn't she? She is such a lady. It will be so satisfactory to have her as the head of your establishment—probably Mr. Howland will give her Windrift. And her cousin—that Mr. Fanning she married—is connected with all the best families in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. They are at the top of our aristocracy."

This recital was not to inform, but to inspire—to remind him what a wise and brilliant move he had made in the game of life. And it had precisely the effect she intended. Had she not herself created and fostered in him the nature that would welcome such stuff as a bat welcomes night?

"I'm going back to Windrift to-morrow," he said, still sullen, but with the note of the quarrel-seeker gone from his voice.

"When do you wish me to write to her?"

"Whenever you like," he said. The defiance in his tone was for Adelaide. "The engagement is to be announced as soon as I get back."

Mrs. Whitney was called away, and Ross tried to write to Theresa. But the words wouldn't come. He wandered restlessly about the room, ordered the electric, went to the Country Club. After an hour of bitterness, he called up his mother. "You needn't send that note we were talking about just yet," he said.

"But I've already sent it," his mother answered. In fact, the note was just then lying on the table at her elbow.

"What were you in such a devil of a hurry for?" he stormed—an unnecessary question, for he knew his mother was the sort of person that loses no time in settling an important matter beyond possibility of change.

"I'm sorry, Ross," she replied soothingly. "I thought I might as well send it, as you had told me everything was settled."

"Oh—all right—no matter." He could break with Theresa whenever he wished. Perhaps he would not wish to break with her; perhaps, after a few days he would find that his feeling for Adelaide was in reality no stronger than he had thought it at Windrift, when Theresa was tempting him with her huge fortune. There was plenty of time before it would be necessary to make final choice.

Nevertheless, he did not leave Saint X, but hung round, sour and morose, hoping for some sign from "tamed" Adelaide.

* * * * *

As soon as Theresa got Mrs. Whitney's note, she wrote to Adelaide. "I've promised not to tell," her letter began, "but I never count any promise of that kind as including you, dear, sweet Adelaide—"

Adelaide smiled as she read this; Theresa's passion for intimate confession had been the joke of the school. "Besides," Adelaide read on, "I think you'll be especially interested as Ross tells me there was some sort of a boy-and-girl flirtation between you and him. I don't see how you could get over it. Now—you've guessed. Yes—we're engaged, and will probably be married up here in the fall—Windrift is simply divine then, you know. And I want you to be my 'best man.' The others'll be Edna and Clarice and Leila and Annette and perhaps Jessie and Anita. We're to live in Chicago—father will give us a house, I'm sure. And you must come to visit us—"

It is hardly fair to eavesdrop upon a young woman in such an hour as this of Adelaide's. Only those might do so who are willing freely to concede to others that same right to be human which they themselves exercise, whether they will or no, when things happen that smash the veneer of "gentleman" or "lady" like an eggshell under a plowboy's heel, and penetrate to and roil that unlovely human nature which is in us all. Criticism is supercilious, even when it is just; so, without criticism, the fact is recorded that Adelaide paced the floor and literally raved in her fury at this double-distilled, double treachery. The sense that she had lost the man she believed she loved was drowned in the oceanic flood of infuriated vanity. She raged now against Ross and now against Theresa "She's marrying him just because she's full of envy, and can't bear to see anybody else have anything," she fumed. "Theresa couldn't love anybody but herself. And he—he's marrying her for her money. She isn't good to look at; to be in the house with her is to find out how mean and small and vain she is. It serves me right for being snob enough to have such a friend. If she hadn't been immensely rich and surrounded by such beautiful things I'd never have had anything to do with her. She's buying him; he's selling himself. How vile!"

But the reasons why they were betraying her did not change or mitigate the fact of betrayal; and that fact showed itself to proud, confident Adelaide Ranger in the form of the proposition that she had been jilted, and that all the world, all her world, would soon know it. Jilted! She—Adelaide Ranger—the all-conqueror—flung aside, flouted, jilted. She went back to that last word; it seemed to concentrate all the insult and treason and shame that were heaped upon her. And she never once thought of the wound to her heart; the fierce fire of vanity seemed to have cauterized it—if there was a wound.

What could she do to hide her disgrace from her mocking, sneering friends? For, hide it she must—must—must! And she had not a moment to lose.

A little thought, and she went to the telephone and called up her brother at the Country Club. When she heard his voice, in fear and fright, demanding what she wanted, she said:

"Will you bring Dory Hargrave to dinner to-night? And, of course, don't let him know I wanted you to."

"Is that all!" exclaimed Arthur in a tone of enormous relief, which she was too absorbed in her calamity to be conscious of.

"You will, won't you? Really, Arthur, it's very important; and don't say a word of my having telephoned—not to anybody."

"All right! I'll bring him." A pause, then. "Father's just the same?"

"Yes," she answered, in sudden confusion and shame.



CHAPTER VIII

A FRIEND IN NEED

In the turmoil of his own affairs Arthur forgot his promise almost while he was making it. Fortunately, as he was driving home, the sight of Dr. Hargrave, marching absent-mindedly along near the post office, brought it to his mind again. With an impatient exclamation—for he prided himself upon fidelity to his given word, in small matters as well as in larger—he turned the horse about. He liked Dory Hargrave, and in a way admired him; Dory was easily expert at many of the sports at which Arthur had had to toil before he was able to make even a passable showing. But Dory, somehow, made him uncomfortable. They had no point of view in common; Dory regarded as incidental and trivial the things which seemed of the highest importance to Arthur. Dory had his way to make in the world; Arthur had been spared that discomfort and disadvantage. Yet Dory persisted in pretending to regard Arthur as in precisely the same position as himself; once he had even carried the pretense to the impertinence of affecting to sympathize with Arthur for being so sorely handicapped. On that occasion Arthur had great difficulty in restraining plain speech. He would not have been thus tactful and gentlemanly had he not realized that Dory meant the best in the world, and was wholly unconscious that envy was his real reason for taking on such a preposterous pose. "Poor chap!" Arthur had reflected. "One shouldn't blame him for snatching at any consolation, however flimsy." In those days Arthur often, in generous mood, admitted—to himself—that fortune had been shamefully partial in elevating him, without any effort on his part, but merely by the accident of birth, far above the overwhelming majority of young men. He felt doubly generous—in having such broad views and in not aggravating the misfortunes of the less lucky by expressing them.

Dr. Hargrave and his son—his only child—and his dead wife's sister, Martha Skeffington, lived in a quaint old brick house in University Avenue. A double row of ancient elms shaded the long walk straight up from the gate. On the front door was a huge bronze knocker which Arthur lifted and dropped several times without getting response. "Probably the girl's in the kitchen; and old Miss Skeffington is so deaf she couldn't hear," he thought. He had known the persons and the habits of that household from earliest boyhood. He followed the path round the house and thus came in sight of a small outbuilding at the far corner of the yard, on the edge of the bank overlooking and almost overhanging the river—Dory's "workshop." Its door was open and Arthur could see the whole of the interior. Dory and a young woman were standing by a bench at the window, were bending over something in which they seemed to be absorbed. Not until Arthur stepped upon the doorsill did they lift their heads.

"Hello, Artie!" cried Dory, coming forward with extended hand.

Arthur was taking off his hat and bowing to the young woman. "Hello, Theo," said he. "How d'ye do, Estelle?"

Miss Wilmot shook hands with him, a shade constrainedly. "How are you, Arthur?" she said.

It was in his mouth to ask why she hadn't been to see Adelaide. He checked himself just in time. She and Adelaide were great friends as youngsters at the public school, but the friendship cooled into acquaintance as Adelaide developed fashionable ideas and tastes. Also, Estelle had been almost a recluse since she was seventeen. The rest of the Wilmots went into Saint X's newly developed but flourishing fashionable society. They had no money to give return entertainments or even to pay their share of the joint, dances and card parties Arthur decided to sheer off. "I came to ask you to the house for sup—dinner to-night," said he. "It's lonely—just mother and Del and me. Come and cheer us up. Come along with me now."

Dory looked confused. "I'm afraid I can't," he all but stammered.

"Of course, I can't blame you for not caring about coming." This a politeness, for Arthur regarded his invitation as an honor.

"Oh, you didn't understand me," protested Dory. "I was thinking of something entirely different." A pause during which he seemed to be reflecting. "I'll be glad to come," he finally said.

"You needn't bother to dress," continued Arthur.

Dory laughed—a frank, hearty laugh that showed the perfect white teeth in his wide, humorous-looking mouth. "Dress!" said he. "My other suit is, if anything, less presentable than this; and they're all I've got, except the frock—and I'm miserable in that."

Arthur felt like apologizing for having thus unwittingly brought out young Hargrave's poverty. "You look all right," said he.

"Thanks," said Dory dryly, his eyes laughing at Arthur.

And, as a matter of fact, though Arthur had not been sincere, Dory did look "all right." It would have been hard for any drapery not to have set well on that strong, lithe figure. And his face—especially the eyes—was so compelling that he would have had to be most elaborately overdressed to distract attention from what he was to what he wore.

On the way to the Rangers, he let Arthur do the talking; and if Arthur had been noticing he would have realized that Dory was not listening, but was busy with his own thoughts. Also Arthur would have noticed that, as they came round from the stables to the steps at the end of the front veranda, and as Dory caught sight of Adelaide, half-reclining in the hammock and playing with Simeon, his eyes looked as if he had been suddenly brought from the darkness into the light.

"Here's Dory Hargrave, Del," cried Arthur, and went on into the house, leaving them facing each other.

"So glad you've come," said Adelaide, her tone and manner at their friendliest.

But as she faced his penetrating eyes, her composure became less assured. He looked straight at her until her eyes dropped—this while they were shaking hands. He continued to look, she feeling it and growing more and more uncomfortable.

"Why did you send for me?" he asked.

She would have liked to deny or to evade; but neither was possible. Now that he was before her she recalled his habit of compelling her always to be truthful not only with him but—what was far worse—also with herself. "Did Arthur tell you I asked him to bring you?" she said, to gain time.

"No," was his reply. "But, as soon as he asked me, I knew."

It irritated her that this young man who was not at all a "man of the world" should be able so easily to fathom her. She had yet to learn that "man of the world" means man of a very small and insignificant world, while Dory Hargrave had been born a citizen of the big world, the real world—one who understands human beings, because his sympathies are broad as human nature itself, and his eyes clear of the scales of pretense. He was an illustration of the shallowness of the talk about the loneliness of great souls. It is the great souls that alone are not alone. They understand better than the self-conscious, posing mass of mankind the weakness and the pettiness of human nature; but they also appreciate its other side. And in the pettiest creature, they still see the greatness that is in every human being, in every living thing for that matter, its majesty of mystery and of potentiality—mystery of its living mechanism, potentiality of its position as a source of ever-ascending forms of life. From the protoplasmal cell descends the genius; from the loins of the sodden toiler chained to the soil springs the mother of genius or genius itself. And where little people were bored and isolated, Dory Hargrave could without effort pass the barriers to any human heart, could enter in and sit at its inmost hearth, a welcome guest. He never intruded; he never misunderstood; he never caused the slightest uneasiness lest he should go away to sneer or to despise. Even old John Skeffington was confidential with him, and would have been friendly had not Dory avoided him.

Adelaide soon fell under the spell of this genius of his for inspiring confidence. She had not fully disclosed her plans to herself; she hesitated at letting herself see what her fury against Theresa and Ross had goaded her on to resolve. So she had no difficulty in persuading herself that she had probably sent for Dory chiefly to consult with him. "There's something I want to talk over with you," said she; "but wait till after din—supper. Have you and Artie been playing tennis?"

"No, he found me at home. Estelle Wilmot and I were playing with a microscope."

"Estelle—she has treated me shamefully," said Adelaide. "I haven't seen her for more than a year—except just a glimpse as I was driving down Monroe Street one day. How beautiful she has become! But, then, she always was pretty. And neither her father nor her mother, nor any of the rest of the family is especially good-looking. She doesn't in the least resemble them."

"There probably was a time when her father and mother really loved," said Dory. "I've often thought that when one sees a beautiful man or woman, one is seeing the monument to some moment of supreme, perfect happiness. There are hours when even the meanest creatures see the islands of enchantment floating in the opal sea."

Adelaide was gazing dreamily into the sunset. It was some time before she came back, dropped from the impersonal to the personal, which is the normal attitude of most young people and of all the self-absorbed. Simeon, who had been inspecting Dory from the far upper end of the hammock, now descended to the floor of the veranda, and slowly advanced toward him. Dory put out his hand. "How are you, cousin?" he said, gravely shaking Simeon's extended paw. Simeon chattered delightedly and sprang into Dory's lap to nestle comfortably there.

"I always thought you would fall in love with Estelle, some day," Adelaide was saying.

Dory looked at Simeon with an ironical smile. "Why does she say those things to me?" he asked. Simeon looked at Adelaide with a puzzled frown that said, "Why, indeed?"

"You and Estelle are exactly suited to each other," explained she.

"Exactly unsuited," replied he. "I have nothing that she needs; she has nothing that I need. And love is an exchange of needs. Now, I have hurt your vanity."

"Why do you say that?" demanded Adelaide.

"You'd like to feel that your lover came to you empty-handed, asking everything, humbly protesting that he had nothing to give. And you know that I—" He smiled soberly. "Sometimes I think you have really nothing I need or want, that I care for you because you so much need what I can give. You poor pauper, with the delusion that you are rich!"

"You are frank," said she, smiling, but not liking it.

"And why shouldn't I be? I've given up hope of your ever seeing the situation as it is. I've nothing to lose with you. Besides, I shouldn't want you on any false terms. One has only to glance about him to shrink from the horrors of marriage based on delusions and lies. So, I can afford to be frank."

She gave him a puzzled look. She had known him all her life; they had played together almost every day until she was seventeen and went East, to school, with Janet Whitney. It was while she was at home on her first long vacation that she had flirted with him, had trapped him into an avowal of love; and then, having made sure of the truth which her vanity of conquest and the fascination of his free and frank manliness for her, though she denied it to herself, had led her on to discover beyond doubt, she became conscience-stricken. And she confessed to him that she loved Ross Whitney and was engaged to him; and he had taken the disclosure so calmly that she almost thought he, like herself, had been simply flirting. And yet—She dimly understood his creed of making the best of the inevitable, and of the ridiculousness of taking oneself too seriously. "He probably has his own peculiar way of caring for a woman," she was now reflecting, "just as he has his own peculiar way in every other respect."

Arthur came, and their mother; and not until long after supper, when her father had been got to bed, did she have the chance to continue the conversation. As soon as she appeared on the veranda, where Dory and Arthur were smoking, Arthur sauntered away. She was alone with Dory; but she felt that she had nothing to say to him. The surge of fury against Ross and Theresa had subsided; also, now that she had seen Theodore Hargrave again, she realized that he was not the sort of man one tries to use for the purpose she had on impulse formed, nor she the sort of woman who, in the deliberateness of the second thought, carries into effect an impulse to such a purpose.

When they had sat there in the moonlight several minutes in silence, she said: "I find I haven't anything especial to say to you, after all."

A wait, then from him: "I'm sorry. I had hoped—" He halted.

"Hoped—what?"

"Hoped it was off with you and Whitney."

"Has some one been saying it was?" she asked sharply.

"No. I thought I felt it when I first saw you."

"Oh!" she said, enormously relieved. A pause, then constrainedly, "Your guess was right."

"And was that why you sent for me?"

The assent of silence.

"You thought perhaps you might—care for—me?"

It seemed almost true, with him looking so earnestly and hopefully at her, and in the moonlight—moonlight that can soften even falsehood until true and false seem gently to merge. She hesitated to say No. "I don't know just what I thought," she replied.

But her tone jarred on the young man whose nerves were as sensitive as a thermostat. "You mean, when you saw me again, you felt you really didn't care," he said, drawing back so that she could not see his face.

"No," she replied, earnestly and honestly. "Not that." And then she flung out the truth. "Ross has engaged himself to Theresa Howland, a girl with a huge big fortune. And I—I—"

"You needn't say it," he interrupted, feeling how it was distressing her to confess. "I understand."

"I wasn't altogether—wicked," she pleaded. "I didn't think of you wholly because I thought you cared for me. I thought of you chiefly because I feel more at home with you than with anyone else. It has always seemed to me that you see me exactly as I am, with all the pretenses and meannesses—yet not unkindly, either. And, while you've made me angry sometimes, when you have refused to be taken in by my best tricks, still it was as one gets angry with—with oneself. It simply wouldn't last. And, as you see, I tell you anything and everything."

"You thought you'd engage yourself to me—and see how it worked out?"

"I'm afraid I did."

A pause. She knew what he was going to say next, and waited for him to say it. At last it came. "Well, now that there's no deception, why shouldn't you?"

"Somehow, I don't seem to mind—about Ross, so much. It—it was while I was in with father this evening. You haven't seen him since he became so ill, but you will understand why he is a rebuke to all mean thoughts. I suppose I'll be squirming again to-morrow, but to-night I feel—"

"That Ross has done you a great service. That you've lost nothing but a dangerous illusion; that you have been honorable with him, and all the wrong and the shame are upon him. You must feel it, for it is true."

Adelaide sighed. "I wish I were strong enough to feel it with my friends jeering at me, as I can feel it now, Dory."

He moved nearer the hammock in which she was sitting. "Del," he said, "shall we become engaged, with the condition that we'll not marry unless we both wish to, when the time comes?"

"But you're doing this only to help me—to help me in a weakness I ought to be ashamed of."

"Not altogether," he replied. "You on your part give me a chance to win you. You will look at me differently—and there's a great deal in that, a very great deal, Del."

She smiled—laughed. "I see what you mean."

But he looked gravely at her. "You promise to do your best to care? An engagement is a very solemn thing, Del. You promise?"

She put out her hand. "Yes," she answered. And, after a moment, in tones he would have known meant opportunity had he been less in love with her, less modest about his own powers where she was concerned, she went on: "The night you told me you loved me I did not sleep. What you said—what I saw when you opened your heart to me—oh, Dory, I believed then, and I believe now, that the reason I have not loved you is because I am not worthy of you. And I'm afraid I never can—for just that reason."

He laughed and kissed her hand. "If that's all that stands in the way," said he, "you'll love me to distraction."

Her spirits went soaring as she realized that she had gained honorably all she had been tempted to gain by artifice. "But you said a while ago," she reminded him mischievously, "that you didn't need me."

"So I did," said he, "but the fox shouldn't be taken too literally as he talks about the grapes that are out of reach."

Suddenly she was longing for him to take her in his arms and compel her to feel, and to yield to, his strength and his love. But he, realizing that he was in danger of losing his self-control, released her hand and drew away—to burn aloof, when he might have set her on fire.

Ross Whitney found his cousin, Ernest Belden, in the Chicago express next morning. When they were well on their way, Belden said: "I'm really sorry it's all off between you and Adelaide, Ross."

Ross was silent, struggling against curiosity. Finally curiosity won. "How did you know, Ernest?" he asked.

"On the way to the station I met Dory Hargrave looking like a sunrise. I asked him what was up—you know, he and I are like brothers. And he said: 'I've induced Adelaide Ranger to promise to marry me.' 'Why, I never knew you cared about her in that way,' said I. And he said: 'There's lots of things in this world you don't know, Ernest, a lot of important things, and this is one of 'em. I've never cared about anybody else.'"

Belden had been thinking that the engagement between Ross and Adelaide was dissolved by mutual consent. A glance at Ross and he changed his mind; for, Ross was so amazed at Adelaide's thus challenging him—it could be nothing more than an audacious challenge—that he showed it. "I beg your pardon, old man," Belden said impulsively. "I didn't appreciate that I was making a prying brute of myself."

Ross decided that a "gentleman" would be silent under the suspicion of having been jilted, and that therefore he must be silent—on that subject. "Not at all," said he. "I suppose you haven't heard yet that I'm engaged to Miss Howland, of Chicago."

"Ah—Really—I congratulate you," said Belden.

And Ross, seeing that his cousin understood precisely what he had intended he should, felt meaner than ever.



CHAPTER IX

THE LONG FAREWELL

Not until Adelaide told Arthur and saw the expression that succeeded his first blank stare of incredulity did she realize what the world, her "world," would think of her engagement to Theodore Hargrave. It was illuminative of her real character and of her real mind as to Ross, and as to Dory also, that, instead of being crushed by her brother's look of downright horror, she straightway ejected the snobbish suggestions with which her vanity had been taunting her, and called her heart, as well as her pride, to the defense of Dory.

"You're joking," said Arthur, when he was able to articulate; "and a mighty poor joke it is. Dory! Why, Del, it's ridiculous. And in place of Ross Whitney!"

"Be careful what you say, Artie," she warned in a quiet, ominous tone, with that in her eyes which should in prudence have halted him. "I am engaged to Dory, remember."

"Nonsense!" cried Arthur. "Why, he hasn't a cent, except his beggarly salary as professor at that little jay college. And even if he should amount to something some day, he'll never have anything or any standing in society. I thought you had pride, Del. Just wait till I see him! I'll let him know what I think of his impudence. Of course, I don't blame him. Naturally, he wants to get up in the world. But you—" Arthur's laugh was a sneer—"And I thought you were proud!"

From Del's eyes blazed that fury which we reserve for those we love when they exasperate us. "Shame on you, Arthur Ranger!" she exclaimed. "Shame on you! See what a snob you have become. Except that he's poor, Dory Hargrave has the advantage of any man we know. He's got more in his head any minute than you or your kind in your whole lives. And he is honorable and a gentleman—a real gentleman, not a pretender. You aren't big enough to understand him; but, at least, you know that if it weren't for your prospects from father, you wouldn't be in the same class with him. He is somebody in himself. But you—and—and your kind—what do you amount to, in yourselves?"

Arthur lowered at her. "So this is what you've been leading up to, with all the queer talk you've been giving me on and off, ever since we came home."

That remark seemed to Adelaide for an instant to throw a flood of light in amazing revelation upon her own innermost self. "I believe it is!" she exclaimed, as if dazed. Then the light seemed to go, seemed to have been only imaginary. It is not until we are much older than Del then was, that we learn how our acts often reveal us to ourselves.

"So you're in love with Dory," scoffed Arthur. "You're a wonder—you are! To go about the world and get education and manners and culture, and then to come back to Saint X and take up with a jay—a fellow that's never been anywhere."

"Physically, he hasn't traveled much," said Del, her temper curiously and suddenly restored. "But mentally, Artie, dear, he's been distances and to places and in society that your poor brain would ache just at hearing about."

"You've lost your senses!"

"No, dear," replied Del sweetly; "on the contrary, I've put myself in the way of finding them."

"You needn't 'bluff' with me," he retorted. He eyed her suspiciously. "There's some mystery in this."

Del showed that the chance shot had landed; but, instantly recovering herself, she said: "It may interest you to know that a while ago, when I told you I was engaged to him, I felt a little uneasy. You see, I've had a long course at the same school that has made such a gentleman of you. But, as the result of your talk and the thoughts it suggested, I haven't a doubt left. I'd marry Dory Hargrave now, if everybody in the world opposed me. Yes, the more opposition, the prouder I'll be to be his wife!"

"What's the matter, children?" came in their mother's voice. "What are you quarreling about?" Mrs. Ranger was hurrying through the room on her way to the kitchen; she was too used to heated discussions between them to be disturbed.

"What do you think of this, mother?" almost shouted Arthur. "Del here says she's engaged to Dory Hargrave!"

Mrs. Ranger stopped short. "Gracious!" she ejaculated.

She felt for her "specs," drew them down from her hair, and hastily adjusted them for a good look, first at Arthur, then at Del. She looked long at Del, who was proudly erect and was at her most beautiful best, eyes glittering and cheeks aglow. "Have you and Ross had a falling out, Del?" she asked.

"No, mother," replied Adelaide; "but we—we've broken our engagement, and—What Artie says is true."

No one spoke for a full minute, though the air seemed to buzz with the thinking and feeling. Then, Mrs. Ranger: "Your father mustn't hear of this."

"Leave me alone with mother, Artie," commanded Adelaide.

Arthur went, pausing in the doorway to say: "I'm sorry to have hurt you, Del. But I meant every word, only not in anger or meanness. I know you won't do it when you've thought it over."

When Arthur had had time to get far enough away, Adelaide said: "Mother, I want you to hear the whole truth—or as much of it as I know myself. Ross came and broke off our engagement so that he could marry Theresa Howland. And I've engaged myself to Dory—partly to cover it, but not altogether, I hope. Not principally, I believe. I'm sick and ashamed of the kind of things I've been so crazy about these last few years. Before this happened, before Ross came, being with father and thinking over everything had made me see with different eyes. And I—I want to try to be—what a woman ought to be."

Ellen Ranger slowly rolled her front hair under her fingers. At length she said: "Well—I ain't sorry you've broke off with Ross. I've been noticing the Whitneys and their goings on for some time. I saw they'd got clean out of my class, and—I'm glad my daughter hasn't. There's a common streak in those Whitneys. I never did like Ross, though I never would have said anything, as you seemed to want him, and your father had always been set on it, and thought so high of him. He laid himself out to make your pa think he was a fine character and full of business—and I ain't denying that he's smart, mighty smart—too smart to suit me." A long reflective pause, then: "But—Dory—Well, my advice is to think it over before you jump clear in. Of course, you'll have enough for both, but I'd rather see you taking up with some man that's got a good business. Teachin' 's worse than preachin' as a business. Still, there's plenty of time to think about that. You're only engaged."

"Teachin' 's worse than preachin'"—Adelaide's new, or, rather, revived democracy was an aspiration rather than an actuality, was—as to the part above the soil, at least—a not very vigorous looking forced growth through sordid necessity. In this respect it was like many, perhaps most, human aspirations—and, like them, it was far more likely to wither than to flourish. "Teachin' 's worse than preachin'"—Del began to slip dismally down from the height to which Arthur's tactless outburst had blown her. Down, and down, and down, like a punctured balloon—gently, but steadily, dishearteningly. She was ashamed of herself, as ashamed as any reader of these chronicles is for her—any reader with one standard for judging other people and another for judging himself. To the credit of her character must be set down her shame at her snobbishness. The snobbishness itself should not be set down to her discredit, but should be charged up to that class feeling, as old as property, and fostered and developed by almost every familiar fact in our daily environment.

"I shouldn't be surprised but your father'd be glad, if he knew," her mother was saying. "But it's no use to risk telling him. A shock might—might make him worse." She started up. "I must go to him. I came to send you, while I was looking after Mary and the dinner, and I clean forgot."

She hurried away. Adelaide sat thinking, more and more forlorn, though not a whit less determined. "I ought to admire him more than I did Ross, and I ought to want to marry him—and I will!"

The birds had stopped singing in the noonday heat. The breeze had died down. Outdoors, in the house, there was not a sound. She felt as if she must not, could not breathe. The silence, like a stealthy hand, lifted her from her chair, drew her tiptoeing and breathless toward the room in which her father was sitting. She paused at its threshold, looked. There was Hiram, in his chair by the window, bolt upright, eyes open and gazing into the infinite. Beside that statue of the peace eternal knelt Ellen, a worn, wan, shrunken figure, the hands clasped, the eyes closed, the lips moving.

"Mother! Mother!" cried Del.

Her mother did not hear. She was moaning, "I believe, Lord, I believe! Help Thou my unbelief!"



CHAPTER X

"THROUGH LOVE FOR MY CHILDREN"

On the day after the funeral, Mrs. Ranger and the two children and young Hargrave were in the back parlor, waiting for Judge Torrey to come and read the will. The well-meant intrusions, the services, the burial—all those barbarous customs that stretch on the rack those who really love the dead whom society compels them publicly to mourn—had left cruel marks on Adelaide and on Arthur; but their mother seemed unchanged. She was talking incessantly now, addressing herself to Dory, since he alone was able to heed her. Her talk was an almost incoherent stream, as if she neither knew nor cared what she was saying so long as she could keep that stream going—the stream whose sound at least made the voice in her heart, the voice of desolation, less clear and terrible, though not less insistent.

There was the beat of a man's footsteps on the side veranda. Mrs. Ranger started up, listened, sat again. "Oh," she said, in the strangest tone, and with a hysterical little laugh, "I thought it was your father coming home to dinner!" Then from her throat issued a stifled cry like nothing but a cry borne up to the surface from a deep torture-chamber. And she was talking on again—with Adelaide sobbing and Arthur fighting back the tears. Hargrave went to the door and admitted the old lawyer.

He had a little speech which he always made on such occasions; but to-day, with the knowledge of the astounding contents of that will on his mind, his lips refused to utter it. He simply bowed, seated himself, and opened the document. The old-fashioned legal phrases soon were steadying him as the harness steadies an uneasy horse; and he was monotonously and sonorously rolling off paragraph after paragraph. Except the judge, young Hargrave was the only one there who clearly understood what those wordy provisions meant. As the reading progressed Dory's face flushed a deep red which slowly faded, leaving him gray and haggard. His father's beloved project! His father's! To carry out his father's project, Arthur and Adelaide, the woman he loved and her brother, were to lose their inheritance. He could not lift his eyes. He felt that they were all looking at him, were hurling reproaches and denunciations.

Presently Judge Torrey read: "I make this disposal of my estate through my love for my children and because I have firm belief in the soundness of their character, and in their capacity to do and to be. I feel they will be better off without the wealth which would tempt my son to relax his efforts to make a useful man of himself and would cause my daughter to be sought for her fortune instead of for herself."

At the words "without the wealth," Arthur shifted sharply in his chair, and both he and Adelaide looked at Judge Torrey in puzzled wonder. The judge read on, read the names of signer and witnesses, then laid the will down and stared gloomily at it. Mrs. Ranger said: "And now, judge, can you tell us in plain words just what it means?"

With many a pause and stammer the old lawyer made it clear: the house and its contents and appurtenances, and seven thousand a year to the widow for life; two thousand a year to Adelaide; five thousand in cash to Arthur and the chance to earn the mill and factory; the rest, practically the whole estate, to Tecumseh University.

"Any further questions?" he asked, breaking the silence that followed his explanation.

No one spoke.

Still without looking at anyone, he put away his glasses? "Then I guess I'll be going. It won't be necessary to do anything further for a day or two."

And, with face like that of criminal slinking from scene of crime, he got himself to the door by a series of embarrassed bows and shuffling steps. Outside, he wiped the streaming sweat from his forehead. "It wasn't my fault," he muttered, as if some one were accusing him. Then, a little further from the house, "I ain't sure Hiram hasn't done right. But, God help me, I couldn't never save my children at such a price."

He was clear of the grounds before Adelaide, the first to move, cast a furtive glance at her brother. Her own disaster was swallowed up for her in the thought of how he had been struck down. But she could read nothing in his face. He was simply gazing straight ahead, and looking so like his father at his most unfathomable. As soon as he had fully realized what the will meant, his nerves had stopped feeling and his brain had stopped thinking. Adelaide next noted Dory, and grew cold from head to foot. All in a rush it came over her how much she had relied upon her prospective inheritance, how little upon herself. What would Dory think of her now? And Ross—what a triumph for him, what a narrow escape! Had he suspected? Had others in the town known that of which they of the family were in complete ignorance? Oh, the horror of the descent—the horror of the rude snatching away of the golden aureole! "Father, father, how could you do it? How could you hurt us so?" she muttered. Then, up before her rose his face with that frightful look in the eyes. "But how doing it made him suffer!" she thought. And the memory of those hours on hours she had spent with him, buried alive, flooded over her. "Doing it killed him!" she said to herself.

She felt cruel fingers grinding into her arm. With a sharp cry she sprang up. Her brother was facing her, his features ablaze with all the evil passions in his untrained and unrestrained nature. "You knew!" he hissed. "You traitor! You knew he was doing this. You honeyfugled him. And you and Hargrave get it all!"

Adelaide shrank as she would not have shrunk under a lash.

"O Arthur! Arthur!" she cried, clasping her hands and stretching them toward him.

"You admit it, do you?" he shouted, seizing her by the shoulders like a madman. "Yes, your guilty face admits it. But I'll undo your work. I'll break the will. Such an outrage as that, such a robbery, won't stand in court for a minute."

Dory had risen, was moving to fling the brother from the sister; but Mrs. Ranger was before him. Starting up from the stupor into which Judge Torrey's explanation had thrown her, she thrust herself between her children. "Arthur!" she said, and her voice was quiet and solemn. "Your father is dead." She drew herself up, and facing her son in her widow's black, seemed taller than he. "If I had needed any proof that he was right about what he did with his own," she went on, "I'd have found it in your face and in what you just said to your sister. Go to the glass there, boy! Look at your face and remember your words!"

Young Hargrave left the room, went to the garden where they could see him from the windows and call him if they wished. Arthur hung his head before his mother's gaze. "It isn't his will," he muttered. "Father in his right mind would never have made such a will."

"He never would have made such a will if his children had been in their right mind," replied his mother sternly; and sternness they had never before seen in those features or heard in that voice. "I know now what he was broodin' over for weeks. Yes—" and her voice, which rose shrill, was the shriek of the tempest within her—"and I know now what made him break so sudden. I noticed you both driftin' off into foolishness, ashamed of the ways of your parents, ashamed of your parents, too. But I didn't give no attention to it, because I thought it was the silliness of children and that you'd outgrow it. But he always did have a good head on him, and he saw that you were ridin' loose-rein to ruin—to be like them Whitneys. Your pa not in his right mind? I see God in that will."

She paused, but only for breath to resume: "And you, Arthur Ranger, what was in your head when you came here to-day? Grief and love and willingness to carry out your dead father's last wishes? No! You came thinking of how you were to benefit by his death. Don't deny! I saw your face when you found you weren't going to get your father's money."

"Mother!" exclaimed Arthur.

She waved him down imperiously; and he was afraid before her, before her outraged love for her outraged dead. "Take care how you stamp on my Hiram's grave, Arthur Ranger!"

"He didn't mean it—you know he didn't," pleaded Adelaide. At that moment she could not think of this woman as her mother, but only as the wife, the widow.

But Ellen's instinct told her that her son, though silent, was still in traitorous rebellion against her idol. And she kept on at him: "With Hiram hardly out of the house, you've forgot all he did for you, all he left you—his good name, his good example. You think only of his money. I've heard you say children owe nothing to their parents, that parents owe everything to the children. Well, that's so. But it don't mean what you think. It don't mean that parents ought to ruin their children. And your pa didn't spare himself to do his duty by you—not even though it killed him. Yes, it killed him! You'd better go away and fall on your knees and ask God to forgive you for having shortened your father's life. And I tell you, Arthur Ranger, till you change your heart, you're no son of mine."

"Mother! Mother!" cried Arthur, rushing from the room.

Mrs. Ranger looked vacantly at the place where he had been, dropped into a chair and burst into a storm of tears.

"Call him back, mother," entreated Del.

"No! no!" sobbed Ellen Ranger. "He spoke agin' my dead! I'll not forgive him till his heart changes."

Adelaide knelt beside her mother and tried to put her arms around her. But her mother shrank away. "Don't touch me!" she cried; "leave me alone. God forgive me for having bore children that trample on their father's grave. I'll put you both out of the house—" and she started up and her voice rose to a shriek. "Yes—I'll put you both out! Your foolishness has ate into you like a cancer, till you're both rotten. Go to the Whitneys. Go among the lepers where you belong. You ain't fit for decent people."

She pushed Adelaide aside, and with uncertain steps went into the hall and up toward her own room.



CHAPTER XI

"SO SENSITIVE"

Adelaide was about to go in search of her brother when he came hunting her. A good example perhaps excepted, there is no power for good equal to a bad example. Arthur's outburst before his mother and her, and in what seemed the very presence of the dead, had been almost as potent in turning Adelaide from bitterness as the influence her father's personality, her father's character had got over her in his last illness. And now the very sight of her brother's face, freely expressing his thoughts, since Ellen was not there to shame him, gave double force to the feelings her mother's denunciations had roused in her. "We've got to fight it, Del," Arthur said, flinging himself down on the grass at her feet. "I'll see Torrey to-morrow morning."

Adelaide was silent.

He looked fiercely at her. "You're going to help me, aren't you?"

"I must have time to think," she replied, bent on not provoking him to greater fury.

He raised himself to a sitting posture. "What has that Hargrave fellow been saying to you?" he cried. "You'll have to break off with him. His father—the old scoundrel!—got at father and took advantage of his illness and his religious superstition. I know just how it was done. We'll bring it all out."

Adelaide did not answer.

"What did Dory say to you?" repeated Arthur.

"He went as soon as I came out from mother," she replied. She thought it best not to tell him that Dory had stopped long enough to urge her to go to her brother, and to make and keep peace with him, no matter what he might say to anger her. "Don't you think," she continued, "that you ought to see Janet and talk with her?"

Artie sank back and stared somberly at the ground.

"When is she coming?" asked his sister.

"I don't know," he answered surlily. "Not at all, perhaps. The Whitneys won't especially care about having any of us in the family now." He looked furtively at Adelaide, as if he hoped she would protest that he was mistaken, would show him that Janet would be unchanged.

"Mrs. Whitney won't," said Adelaide. "But Janet—she's different, I think. She seems to be high-minded, and I believe she loves you."

Arthur looked relieved, though Adelaide was too honest to have been able to make her tone as emphatic as her words. Yes, Janet was indeed high-minded, he said to himself; did indeed love him. Her high-mindedness and the angel purity of her love had often made him uneasy, not to say uncomfortable. He hated to be at the trouble of pretenses; but Janet, living on a far higher plan than he, had simply compelled it. To let her see his human weaknesses, to let her suspect that he was not as high-minded as she told him he was, to strip from himself the saintly robes and the diadem with which she had adorned him—well, he would put it off until after marriage, he had always told himself, and perhaps by that time he would feel a little less like a sinner profaning a sanctuary when he kissed her. He had from time to time found in himself a sinful longing that she were just a little less of an angel, just a little more of a fellow sinner—not too much, of course, for a man wants a pure wife, a pure mother for his children. But, while the attitudes of worship and of saintliness were cramped, often severely so, still on the whole Arthur had thought he was content with Janet just as she was.

"Why don't you go to Chicago and see her?" suggested Adelaide. "You ought to talk with her before anyone else has a chance. I wouldn't put anything past her mother."

"That's a good idea!" exclaimed Arthur, his face clearing before the prospect of action. "I'll take the night train. Yes, I must be the one to tell her."

Adelaide had a sense of relief. Arthur would see Janet; Janet would pour balm upon his wounds, would lift him up to a higher, more generous view. Then, whatever he might do would be done in the right spirit, with respect for the memory of their father, with consideration for their mother.

"You had better not see mother again until you come back," she suggested.

His face shadowed and shame came into it that was from the real Arthur Ranger, the son of Hiram and Ellen. "I wish I hadn't burst out as I did, Del," he said. "I forgot everything in my own wrongs. I want to try to make it all right with mother. I can't believe that I said what I remember I did say before her who'd be glad to die for us."

"Everything'll be all right when you come back, Artie," she assured him.

As they passed the outbuilding where the garden tools were kept they both glanced in. There stood the tools their father had always used in pottering about the garden, above them his old slouch and old straw hats. Arthur's lip quivered; Adelaide caught her breath in a sob. "O Artie," she cried brokenly, "He's gone—gone—gone for ever." And Artie sat on the little bench just within the door and drew Del down beside him, and, each tightly in the other's arms, they cried like the children that they were, like the children that we all are in face of the great tragedy.

A handsome and touching figure was Arthur Ranger as he left his cab and slowly ascended the lawn and the steps of the Whitney palace in the Lake Drive at eleven the next morning. His mourning garments were most becoming to him, contrasting with the fairness of his hair, the blue of his eyes, and the pallor of his skin. He looked big and strong and sad, and scrupulously fashionable, and very young.

The Whitneys were leading in Chicago in building broad and ever broader the barriers, not between rich and poor, but between the very, very rich and all the rest of the world. Mrs. Whitney had made a painstaking and reverent study of upper-class life in England and on the Continent, and was endeavoring to use her education for the instruction of her associates, and for the instilling of a proper awe into the multitude. To enter her door was at once to get the impression that one was receiving a high privilege. One would have been as greatly shocked as was Mrs. Whitney herself, could one have overheard "Charley" saying to her, as he occasionally did, with a grin which he strove to make as "common" as he knew how, "Really, Tillie, if you don't let up a little on this putting on dog, I'll have to take to sneaking in by the back way. The butler's a sight more of a gent than I am, and the housekeeper can give you points on being a real, head-on-a-pole-over-the-shoulder lady." A low fellow at heart was Charley Whitney, like so many of his similarly placed compatriots, though he strove as hard as do they, almost as hard as his wife, to conceal the deficiencies due to early training in vulgarly democratic ways of living and thinking.

Arthur, ushered by the excruciatingly fashionable butler into the smallest of the series of reception salons, fell straightway into the most melancholy spirits. He felt the black, icy shadow of the beginnings of doubt as to his right to admittance on terms of equality, now that his titles to nobility had been torn from him and destroyed. He felt that he was in grave danger of being soon mingled in the minds of his fashionable friends and their servants with the vulgar herd, the respectable but "impossible" middle classes. Indeed, he was not sure that he didn't really belong among them. The sound of Janet's subdued, most elegant rustle, drove out of his mind everything but an awful dread of what she would say and think and feel when he had disclosed to her the hideous truth. She came sweeping in, her eyes full of unshed tears, her manner a model of refined grief, sympathetic, soothing. She was tall and slim, a perfect figure of the long, lithe type; her face was small and fine and dreamy; her hair of an unusual straw color, golden, yet pale, too, like the latest autumn leaves in the wan sun of November; her eyes were hazel, in strange and thrilling contrast to her hair. To behold her was to behold all that man finds most fascinating in woman, but so illumined by the soul within that to look on it with man's eye for charms feminine seemed somewhat like casting sensuous glances upon beauty enmarbled in a temple's fane. Janet was human, but the human that points the way to sexless heaven.

"Dear Artie!" she said gently. "Dear Artie!" And she took both his hands and, as she looked at him, her tears fell. Arthur, in his new humility of poverty, felt honored indeed that any loss of his could cause her matchless soul thus to droop upon its dazzling outer walls the somber, showery insignia of grief. "But," she went on, "you have him still with you—his splendid, rugged character, the memory of all he did for you."

Arthur was silent. They were seated now, side by side, and he was, somewhat timidly, holding one of her hands.

"He was so simple and so honest—such a man!" she continued. "Does it hurt you, dear, for me to talk about him?"

"No—no," he stammered, "I came to you—to—to—talk about him." Then, desperately, seizing her other hand and holding both tightly, "Janet, would it make any difference with you if I—if I—no—What am I saying? Janet, I release you from our engagement. I—I—have no prospects," he rushed on. "Father—They got round him and wheedled him into leaving everything to the college—to Tecumseh. I have nothing—I must give you up. I can't ask you to wait—and—"

He could not go on. He longed for the throbbing, human touch that beauty of hers could make so thrilling. But she slowly drew away her hands. Her expression made him say:

"What is it, Janet? What have I said that hurt you?"

"Did you come," she asked, in a strange, distant voice, "because you thought your not having money would make a difference with me?"

"No," he protested, in wild alarm. "It was only that I feel I—"

"You feel that there could be a question of money between us?" she interrupted.

"Not between us, Janet," he said eagerly; "but there is your—your mother."

"I beg you," she replied coldly, "not to speak of mamma in that way to me, even if you have such unjust thoughts of her."

Arthur looked at her uncertainly. He had an instinct, deep down, that there was something wrong—something in her that he was not fathoming. But in face of that cloud-dwelling beauty, he could only turn and look within himself. "I beg your pardon, dear," he said. "You know so little of the practical side of life. You live so apart from it, so high above it, that I was afraid I'd be doing wrong by you if I did not put that side of it before you, too. But in the bottom of my heart I knew you would stand by me."

She remained cold. "I don't know whether I'm glad or sorry, Arthur, that you let me see into your real self. I've often had doubts about our understanding each other, about our two natures being in that perfect harmony which makes the true marriage. But I've shut out those doubts as disloyal to you. Now, you've forced me to see they were only too true!"

"What do you mean, Janet? Of course, I'm not good enough for you—no one is, for that matter; but I love you, and—Do you care for me, Janet?"

"Yes," she replied mournfully. "But I must conquer it. O Arthur, Arthur!" Her voice was tremulous now, and her strange hazel eyes streamed sorrowful reproach. "How could you think sordidly of what was sacred and holy to me, of what I thought was holy to us both? You couldn't, if you had been the man I imagined you were."

"Don't blame a fellow for every loose word he utters when he's all upset, Janet," he pleaded. "Put yourself in my place. Suppose you found you hadn't anything at all—found it out suddenly, when all along you had been thinking you'd never have to bother about money? Suppose you—But you must know how the world, how all our friends, look on that sort of thing. And suppose you loved—just as I love you. Wouldn't you go to her and hope she'd brace you up and make you feel that she really loved you and—all that? Wouldn't you, Janet?"

She looked sadly at him. "You don't understand," she said, her rosebud mouth drooping pathetically. "You can't realize how you shook—how you shattered—my faith in you."

He caught her by the arms roughly. "Look here, Janet Whitney. Do you love me or don't you? Do you intend to throw me over, now that I have lost my money, or do you intend to be all you've pretended to be?"

The sadness in her sweet face deepened. "Let me go, Arthur," she said quietly. "You don't understand. You never will."

"Yes or no?" he demanded, shaking her. Then suddenly changing to tenderness, with all his longing for sympathy in his eyes and in his voice, "Janet—dear—yes or no?"

She looked away. "Don't persist, Arthur," she said, "or you will make me think it is only my money that makes you, that made you, pretend to—to care for me."

He drew back sharply. "Janet!" he exclaimed.

"Of course, I don't think so," she continued, after a constrained silence. "But I can't find any other reason for your talking and acting as you have this morning."

He tried to see from her point of view. "Maybe it's true," he said, "that other things than our love have had too much to do with it, with both of us, in the past. But I love you for yourself alone, now, Janet. And, you haven't a fortune of your own, but only expectations—and they're not always realized, and in your case can't be for many a year. So we don't start so unevenly. Give yourself to me, Janet. Show that you believe in me, and I know I shall not disappoint you."

Very manly his manner was as he said this, and brave and convincing was the show of his latent, undeveloped powers in his features and voice. She hesitated, then lowered her head, and, in a sad, gentle voice, said, "I don't trust you, Arthur. You've cut away the foundation of love. It would be fine and beautiful for us to start empty-handed and build up together, if we were in sympathy and harmony. But, doubting you—I can't."

Again he looked at her uneasily, suspicious, without knowing why or what. But one thing was clear—to plead further with her would be self-degradation. "I have been tactless," he said to her. "Probably, if I were less in earnest, I should get on better. But, perhaps you will judge me more fairly when you think it over. I'll say only one thing more. I can't give up hope. It's about all I've got left—hope of you—belief in you. I must cling to that. I'll go now, Janet."

She said nothing, simply looked unutterable melancholy, and let her hand lie listlessly in his until he dropped it. He looked back at her when he reached the door. She seemed so sad that he was about to return to her side. She sighed heavily, gazed at him, and said, "Good-by, Arthur." After that he had no alternative. He went. "I must wait until she is calm," he said to himself. "She is so delicately strung."

As he was driving toward the hotel, his gloom in his face, he did not see Mrs. Whitney dash past and give him an anxious searching glance, and sink back in her carriage reassured somewhat. She had heard that he was on the Chicago express—had heard it from her masseuse, who came each morning before she was up. She had leaped to the telephone, had ordered a special train, and had got herself into it and off for her Chicago home by half-past eight. "That sentimental girl, full of high ideals—what mayn't she do!" she was muttering, almost beside herself with anxiety. "No doubt he'll try and induce her to run away with him." And the rushing train seemed to creep and crawl.

She burst into the house like a dignified whirlwind. "Where's Miss Janet?" she demanded of the butler.

"Still in the blue salon, ma'am, I think," he replied. "Mr. Arthur Ranger just left a few moments ago."

Clearing her surface of all traces of agitation, Mrs. Whitney went into the presence of her daughter. "Mamma!" cried Janet, starting up. "Has anything happened?"

"Nothing, nothing, dear," replied her mother, kissing her tenderly. "I was afraid my letter might have miscarried. And, when I heard that Arthur had slipped away to Chicago, I came myself. I've brought you up so purely and innocently that I became alarmed lest he might lead you into some rash sentimentality. As I said in my letter, if Arthur had grown up into a strong, manly character, I should have been eager to trust my daughter to him. But my doubts about him were confirmed by the will. And—he is simply a fortune-hunter now."

Janet had hidden her face in her handkerchief. "Oh, no!" she exclaimed. "You wrong him, mother."

"You haven't encouraged him, Janet!" cried Mrs. Whitney. "After what I've been writing you?"

"The loss of his money hasn't made any difference about him with me," said Janet, her pure, sweet face lighting up with the expression that made her mother half-ashamed of her own worldliness.

"Of course not! Of course not, Janet," said she. "No child of mine could be mercenary without being utterly false to my teachings."

Janet's expression was respectful, yet not confirmatory. She had often protested inwardly against the sordid views of life which her mother unconsciously held and veiled with scant decency in the family circle in her unguarded moments. But she had fought against the contamination, and proudly felt that her battle for the "higher plane" was successful.

Her mother returned, somewhat awkwardly, to the main point. "I hope you didn't encourage him, Janet."

"I don't wish to talk of it, mother," was Janet's reply. "I have not been well, and all this has upset me."

Mrs. Whitney was gnawing her palms with her nails and her lip with her teeth. She could scarcely restrain herself from seizing her daughter and shaking the truth, whatever it was, out of her. But prudence and respect for her daughter's delicate soul restrained her.

"You have made it doubly hard for me," Janet went on. "Your writing me to stay away because there was doubt about Arthur's material future—oh, mother, how could that make any difference? If I had not been feeling so done, and if father hadn't been looking to me to keep him company, I'd surely have gone. For I hate to have my motive misunderstood."

"He has worked on her soft-heartedness and inexperience," thought Mrs. Whitney, in a panic.

"And when Arthur came to-day," the girl continued, "I was ready to fly to him." She looked tragic. "And even when he repulsed me—"

"Repulsed you!" exclaimed Mrs. Whitney. She laughed disagreeably. "He's subtler than I thought."

"Even when he repulsed me," pursued Janet, "with his sordid way of looking at everything, still I tried to cling to him, to shut my eyes."

Mrs. Whitney vented an audible sigh of relief. "Then you didn't let him deceive you!"

"He shattered my last illusion," said Janet, in a mournful voice. "Mother, I simply couldn't believe in him, in the purity of his love. I had to give him up."

Mrs. Whitney put her arms round her daughter and kissed her soothingly again and again. "Don't grieve, dear," she said. "Think how much better it is that you should have found him out now than when it was too late."

And Janet shuddered.

* * * * *

Ross dropped in at the house in the Lake Drive the next morning on his way East from the Howlands. As soon as he was alone with his mother, he asked, "How about Janet and Arthur?"

Mrs. Whitney put on her exalted expression. "I'm glad you said nothing before Janet," said she. "The child is so sensitive, and Arthur has given her a terrible shock. Men are so coarse; they do not appreciate the delicateness of a refined woman. In this case, however, it was most fortunate. She was able to see into his true nature."

"Then she's broken it off? That's good."

"Be careful what you say to her," his mother hastened to warn him. "You might upset her mind again. She's so afraid of being misunderstood."

"She needn't be," replied Ross dryly.

And when he looked in on Janet in her sitting room to say good-by, he began with a satirical, "Congratulations, Jenny."

Jenny looked at him with wondering eyes. She was drooping like a sunless flower and was reading poetry out of a beautifully bound volume. "What is it, Ross?" she asked.

"On shaking Artie so smoothly. Trust you to do the right thing at the right time, and in the right way. You're a beauty, Jen, and no mistake," laughed Ross. "I never saw your like. You really must marry a title—Madame la Duchesse! And nobody's on to you but me. You aren't even on to yourself!"

Janet drew up haughtily and swept into her bedroom, closing the door with almost coarse emphasis.



CHAPTER XII

ARTHUR FALLS AMONG LAWYERS

Arthur ended his far from orderly retreat at the Auditorium, and in the sitting room of his suite there set about re-forming his lines, with some vague idea of making another attack later in the day—one less timid and blundering. "I'd better not have gone near her," said he disgustedly. "How could a man win when he feels beaten before he begins?" He was not now hazed by Janet's beauty and her voice like bells in evening quiet, and her mystic ideas. Youth, rarely wise in action, is often wise in thought; and Arthur, having a reasoning apparatus that worked uncommonly well when he set it in motion and did not interfere with it, was soon seeing his situation as a whole much as it was—ugly, mocking, hopeless.

"Maybe Janet knows the real reason why she's acting this way, maybe she don't," thought he, with the disposition of the inexperienced to give the benefit of even imaginary doubt. "No matter; the fact is, it's all up between us." This finality, unexpectedly staring at him, gave him a shock. "Why," he muttered, "she really has thrown me over! All her talk was a blind—a trick." And, further exhibiting his youth in holding the individual responsible for the system of which the individual is merely a victim, usually a pitiable victim, he went to the opposite extreme and fell to denouncing her—cold-hearted and mercenary like her mother, a coward as well as a hypocrite—for, if she had had any of the bravery of self-respect, wouldn't she have been frank with him? He reviewed her in the flooding new light upon her character, this light that revealed her as mercilessly as flash of night-watchman's lantern on guilty, shrinking form. "She—Why, she always was a fakir!" he exclaimed, stupefied by the revelation of his own lack of discernment, he who had prided himself on his acuteness, especially as to women. "From childhood up, she has always made herself comfortable, no matter who was put out; she has gotten whatever she wanted, always pretending to be unselfish, always making it look as if the other person were in the wrong." There he started up in the rate of the hoodwinked, at the recollection of an incident of the previous summer—how she had been most gracious to a young French nobleman, in America in search of a wife; how anybody but "spiritual" Janet would have been accused of outrageous flirting—no, not accused, but convicted. He recalled a vague story which he had set down to envious gossip—a story that the Frenchman had departed on learning that Charles Whitney had not yet reached the stage of fashionable education at which the American father appreciates titles and begins to listen without losing his temper when the subject of settlements is broached. He remembered now that Janet had been low-spirited for some time after the Frenchman took himself and title and eloquent eyes and "soulful, stimulating conversation" to another market. "What a damn fool I've been!" Arthur all but shouted at his own image in a mirror which by chance was opposite him. A glance, and his eyes shifted; somehow, it gave him no pleasure, but the reverse, to see that handsome face and well-set-up, well-dressed figure.

"She was marrying me for money," he went on, when he had once more seated himself, legs crossed and cigarette going reflectively. The idea seemed new to him—that people with money could marry for money, just as a capitalist goes only where he hopes to increase his capital. But on examining it more closely, he was surprised to find that it was not new at all. "What am I so virtuous about?" said he. "Wasn't I after money, too? If our circumstances were reversed, what would I be doing?" He could find but one honest answer. "No doubt I'd be trying to get out of it, and if I didn't, it'd be because I couldn't see or make a way." To his abnormally sensitized nerves the whole business began to exude a distinct, nauseating odor. "Rotten—that's the God's truth," thought he. "Father was right!"

But there he drew back; he must be careful not to let anger sweep him into conceding too much. "No—life's got to be lived as the world dictates," he hastened to add. "I see now why father did it, but he went too far. He forgot my rights. The money is mine. And, by God, I'll get it!" And again he started up; and again he was caught and put out of countenance by his own image in the mirror. He turned away, shamefaced, but sullenly resolute.

Base? He couldn't deny it. But he was desperate; also, he had been too long accustomed to grabbing things to which his conscience told him he had doubtful right or none. "It's mine. I've been cheated out of it. I'll get it. Besides—" His mind suddenly cleared of the shadow of shame—"I owe it to mother and Del to make the fight. They've been cheated, too. Because they're too soft-hearted and too reverent of father's memory, is that any reason, any excuse, for my shirking my duty by them? If father were here to speak, I know he'd approve." Before him rose the frightful look in his father's eyes in the earlier stage of that second and last illness. "That's what the look meant!" he cried, now completely justified. "He recovered his reason. He wanted to undo the mischief that old sneak Hargrave had drawn him into!"

The case was complete: His father had been insane when he made the will, had repented afterward, but had been unable to unmake it; his only son Arthur Ranger, now head of the family, owed it to the family's future and to its two helpless and oversentimental women to right the wrong. A complete case, a clear case, a solemn mandate. Interest and duty were synonymous—as always to ingenious minds.

He lost no time in setting about this newly discovered high task of love and justice. Within twenty minutes he was closeted with Dawson of the great law firm, Mitchell, Dawson, Vance & Bischoffsheimer, who had had the best seats on all the fattest stranded carcasses of the Middle West for a decade—that is, ever since Bischoffsheimer joined the firm and taught its intellects how on a vast scale to transubstantiate technically legal knowledge into technically legal wealth. Dawson—lean and keen, tough and brown of skin, and so carelessly dressed that he looked as if he slept in his clothes—listened with the sympathetic, unwandering attention which men give only him who comes telling where and how they can make money. The young man ended his story, all in a glow of enthusiasm for his exalted motives and of satisfaction with his eloquence in presenting them; then came the shrewd and thorough cross-examination which, he believed, strengthened every point he had made.

"On your showing," was Dawson's cautious verdict, "you seem to have a case. But you must not forget that judges and juries have a deep prejudice against breaking wills. They're usually fathers themselves, and guard the will as the parent's strongest weapon in keeping the children in order after they're too old for the strap or the bed slat, as the case may be. Undue influence or mental infirmity must be mighty clearly proven. Even then the court may decide to let the will stand, on general principles. Your mother and sister, of course, join you?"

"I—I hope so," hesitated Arthur. "I'm not sure." More self-possessedly: "You know how it is with women—with ladies—how they shrink from notoriety."

"No, I can't say I do," said Dawson dryly. "Ladies need money even more than women do, and so they'll usually go the limit, and beyond, to get it. However, assuming that for some reason or other, your mother and sister won't help, at least they won't oppose?"

"My sister is engaged to the son of Dr. Hargrave," said Arthur uneasily.

"That's good—excellent!" exclaimed Dawson, rubbing his gaunt, beard-discolored jaw vigorously.

"But—he—Theodore Hargrave is a sentimental, unpractical chap."

"So are we all—but not in money matters."

"He's an exception, I'm afraid," said Arthur. "Really—I think it's almost certain he'll try to influence her to take sides against me. And my mother was very bitter when I spoke of contest. But, as I've shown you, my case is quite apart from what they may or may not do."

"Um—um," grunted Dawson. He threw himself back in his chair; to aid him in thinking, he twisted the only remaining crown-lock of his gray-black hair, and slowly drew his thin lips from his big sallow teeth, and as slowly returned them to place. "Obviously," he said at length, "the doctor is the crucial witness. We must see to it that"—a significant grin—"that the other side does not attach him. We must anticipate them by attaching him to us. I'll see what can be done—legitimately, you understand. Perhaps you may have to engage additional counsel—some such firm as, say, Humperdink & Grafter. Often, in cases nowadays, there is detail work of an important character that lawyers of our standing couldn't think of undertaking. But, of course, we work in harmony with such other counsel as our client sees fit to engage."

"Certainly; I understand," said Arthur, with a knowing, "man-of-the-world" nod. His cause being good and its triumph necessary, he must not be squeamish about any alliances it might be necessary to make as a means to that triumph, where the world was so wicked. "Then, you undertake the case."

"We will look into it," Dawson corrected. "You appreciate that the litigation will be somewhat expensive?"

Arthur reddened. No, he hadn't thought of that! Whenever he had wanted anything, he had ordered it, and had let the bill go to his father; whenever he had wanted money, he had sent to his father for it, and had got it. Dawson's question made the reality of his position—moneyless, resourceless, friendless—burst over him like a waterspout. Dawson saw and understood; but it was not his cue to lessen that sense of helplessness.

At last Arthur sufficiently shook off his stupor to say: "Unless I win the contest, I shan't have any resources beyond the five thousand I get under the will, and a thousand or so I have in bank at Saint X—and what little I could realize from my personal odds and ends. Isn't there some way the thing could be arranged?"

"There is the method of getting a lawyer to take a case on contingent fee," said Dawson. "That is, the lawyer gets a certain per cent of what he wins, and nothing if he loses. But we don't make such arrangements. They are regarded as almost unprofessional; I couldn't honestly recommend any lawyer who would. But, let me see—um—urn—" Dawson was reflecting again, with an ostentation which might have roused the suspicions of a less guileless person than Arthur Ranger at twenty-five. "You could, perhaps, give us a retainer of say, a thousand in cash?"

"Yes," said Arthur, relieved. He thought he saw light ahead.

"Then we could take your note for say, five thousand—due in eighteen months. You could renew it, if your victory was by any chance delayed beyond that time."

"Your victory" was not very adroit, but it was adroit enough to bedazzle Arthur. "Certainly," said he gratefully.

Dawson shut his long, wild-looking teeth and gently drew back his dry, beard-discolored lips, while his keen eyes glinted behind his spectacles. The fly had a leg in the web!

Business being thus got into a smooth way, Dawson and Arthur became great friends. Nothing that Dawson said was a specific statement of belief in the ultimate success of the suit; but his every look and tone implied confidence. Arthur went away with face radiant and spirit erect. He felt that he was a man of affairs, a man of consequence, he had lawyers, and a big suit pending; and soon he would be rich. He thought of Janet, and audibly sneered. "I'll make the Whitneys sick of their treachery!" said he. Back had come his sense of strength and superiority; and once more he was "gracious" with servants and with such others of the "peasantry" as happened into or near his homeward path.

Toward three o'clock that afternoon, as he was being whirled toward Saint X in the Eastern Express, his lawyer was in the offices of Ramsay & Vanorden, a rival firm of wreckers and pirate outfitters on the third floor of the same building. When Dawson had despatched his immediate business with Vanorden, he lingered to say: "Well, I reckon we'll soon be lined up on opposite sides in another big suit."