A five-year-old girl, lovely as a tea rose, stood doubtfully in the cedar-wood door, poised for flight either way, sucking in the dimple at the left of her mouth. Running at his call she flew into his arms and dropped her buttercup head on his shoulder. For the first time he smiled, and the wise wife slipped quietly away and watched them from the door, guessing at their murmurs, counting their kisses. Later she disturbed them reluctantly.

"I want to say you are not at home," she said, "but I daren't quite do that, for he is from the States, dear, and it is important business. His name," dropping her eyes to the white rectangle in her hand, "is Webb. Shall I send him out here?"

Weldon put the child down from his knees and half rose.

"Yes," he said, clearing his throat, "send him out here. And keep the children away."

So this was it. It had not been for nothing, that dream.

The tall, lank figure was before him, the ironical smile drooped on the tight lips. Ten years had left him as they found him, but for a thought of grey in the sandy hair.

"Sit down," said Weldon briefly, "what is it?"

"You've put on a little weight, I see," said Webb, nodding at the proffered chair, "but that's only proper in the president of a bank, I suppose. You've done well, Mr. Weldon."

Weldon bowed.

"You did not come to Bermuda to tell me this, Mr. Webb, I think?"

"No," said Webb, "I didn't. Ten years ago, Mr. Weldon, you called me a mind-reader when I had put two and two together once or twice, put myself in your place for ten minutes, complimented you by assuming that your course had been what mine would have been, and spoken to you accordingly. Can't you do a little mind-reading on your own account, now?"

"I confess myself unequal to it," Weldon said coldly.

Webb nodded indulgently.

"All right," he returned, "we'll take it that way, if you want to. Mr. Weldon, I don't know if you read our papers down here at all?"

"I have never opened an American newspaper since I left the country," said Weldon briefly.

"I see. I suppose you know that Blickenstern's dying, though?"

"Yes," Weldon answered indifferently, "we all know that, of course."

"Yes. Well, Mr. Weldon, I'm supposed to inherit his shoes. It's not much to you, of course, but a lot to me—and to a lot of other people, too. Now for something you don't know. In just about five days, Mr. Weldon, we're going to break through the crust and drop into the biggest panic since '93. That and Blickenstern's death—he must go soon, now—and this fearful railroad business—I won't bore you—will put me into a bad hole. A worse hole, I don't mind telling you, Mr. Weldon, than Blick's successor can afford to get into. It's all a matter of balance now; pretty fine balancing, too, for the next week. In six weeks there'll be enough for most of us, but just now—well, there'll be dozens of us in the Street who'll be grateful for ten thousand in cash around the corner. Think of it—ten thousand! Now I'll be short. I need some money—not stage money, Mr. Weldon, real money! I wouldn't take Blick's name on paper for what I want this week—and getting it or not getting it means the top of the heap for me, or three years' fight for it. I can't afford three years. I wasn't a bank president at forty, you know."

"You mean you want the ten thousand pounds you gave me?"

"Just so. I want fifty thousand dollars, Mr. Weldon—for six weeks. I hate to do it, honestly. Nothing but this infernal panic could have driven me to this. But I'm helpless. And it's worth millions to me to have no one suspect it. I can't touch a penny elsewhere—it's all tied up. I must be able to produce it without any fuss, or disturbing the jack-straws a particle. There's no use in going into the details."

"No use at all," said Weldon stiffly, "for it will be impossible for me to lend you such a sum, Mr. Webb, impossible. I have paid well for my position here."

"And a good move, too," said the other heartily. "You stand well, Weldon; none better."

"I have never been what you would call ambitious," Weldon went on, more passionately, now. "When you yourself asked me why I demanded no more than the ten—the fifty thousand, you remember my answer. I knew that it would buy me a good, respectable interest out here, assure me of a position I had every capacity to sustain honourably and efficiently, and give me the leisure and climate that I wanted. I shall never be a rich man—by your standards. I don't care. I thought my brains and initiative were worth what I asked, and you agreed with me. I promised utter silence and have kept my word. You promised the same and have broken yours. I can do nothing for you, even if I wished to. I'd rather not discuss it further."

"Manana! manana! manana!" the parrot shrilled. It still hung head down in the shining cage. Weldon could have wrung its neck. It was worse than a clock. Webb sighed regretfully and raised his heavy lids. As the old snakish glance reached him Weldon felt the old net-like sensation, the old baffled rage.

"I'm sorry, Weldon, but I can't let it go. It's no use—you can't afford it. It's all like a house you build out of cards, you see, and you can't slip out one without the whole thing caving in. Whatever I pull out I have to explain. How do you suppose I got you your fifty thousand, back there? You know I've never had much money—to call money. It's brains—what you call mind-reading, you other fellows—that I've matched against the rest of them. And I've got them where they're afraid of me. I can't drop back. Listen to me, Weldon!"

He drew his chair close and talked low and steadily for five minutes. The air seemed to grow dense; the rustling hiss of the foam on the creamy beach was the hiss and flicker of a sea-coal fire; the grotesque shadow of the wicker chair, black on the white verandah floor, was the spread, silent bulk of a dead man.

The low voice ceased.

"How about it, Weldon?" it added abruptly, "can you afford that?"

Weldon pushed away his chair roughly. "Come down to my room at the bank," he said.

Hours afterward he dragged himself into his bedroom, an older man by ten years than when he had quitted it. His body seemed heavier, his face hollower, with pinched lips and sunken eyes. The man who waited on him stared openly and mentioned the doctor, only to receive a curse for his pains—the first he had ever heard from his master.

In the late dusk his wife found him asleep in a long chair with an empty decanter beside him and heavy rugs dragged up to his chin. They tried, both of them, to make that nervous chill account for the change in him, but she watched him narrowly and he felt her eyes day and night.

Something tolled like a bell in him and never stopped for a moment: six weeks! six weeks! six weeks! all his waking movements went to that intolerable rhythm; he was like a man under a gallows, with a reprieve coming to him, at the mercy of all the elements. It was observed at the bank that he worked harder and longer and much alone: they said the American blood was coming out at last, and smiled at each other.

"Only mind you don't engage us in speculations, old man," said one of his colleagues jocosely, "'safe and sound,' you know! Look at the States—a pretty mess that!"

Weldon turned on him in a fury of anger.

"Speculation! speculation!" he cried harshly, "you know that I hate it like hell!"

They were genuinely anxious about him.

One morning he found his wife in his dressing-room, white-faced over something in her hand.

"Philip! Philip!" she whispered and clung to him.

He put the shining little steel-eyed thing behind him.

"My dear, don't be foolish," he said quietly, "if I have my reasons for wishing a certain sort of protection for a few days, will you make me regret my sparing you?"

"You—you mean the bank?" she gasped.

"What else could I mean?" he said steadily, and in some quaint woman's reasoning she was appeased.

At the end of three weeks the strain eased a little. He read a letter from Webb with a grim smile, bought an American newspaper, and passed an entire day away from the bank. His wife held her breath as she watched him, but affected not to notice the change, and he blessed her for it: his nerves were raw. Two days, three days went by. He sent out for another newspaper and later in the day raised the tiny salary of the page who had brought it to him. In the cool of the afternoon he rode with his wife, the boy on a shaggy pony beside them, and kissed her as she turned in the saddle in the shadow of the dusk.

"You are the best wife a man ever had," he said, looking deep into her honest brown eyes, and she galloped away from him to hide her happy tears.

The next day he told the servant to bring the parrot cage back to the verandah, where the little daughter liked to have it, and grimaced tolerantly at its strident cry:

"Manana! manana!"

Life is as it is, he thought, and can we hope to change it because we change? Surely not. Everything had its price, and he had really never paid the price of that ten-years-old bargain till now—he acknowledged it. Out of that blue-stained air the messenger of fate had dropped and taken his toll of youth and candour and elasticity, and departed again, and now the weight was slackening from his chest and there were but fourteen days to wait. The next day he found a second letter from Webb on his desk. To relieve him from needless anxiety, said the great financier, he wrote to inform Mr. Weldon that six weeks had proved too wide a margin and he promised himself the pleasure of a complete settlement six days from the date of writing. Weldon stared at the letter head: it had been three days on the way—that meant in three days—by the next boat! The letter was grave, but subtly jubilant. The railroads were subdued. Blickenstern was dead, the country hailed his successor. A foundation of millions lay firm beneath his feet.

The president left his bank early and went home on horseback to luncheon. His wife saw the husband of many days ago and asked no more of life, but sang among her flower jars.

"Will you come up to Government House this afternoon, dear? It's weeks since you've been," she said, and he smiled and promised. "I've a new frock," she confided shyly, like a girl, "and I think you'll like to see it—now."

"I'll be back before four," he told her, "a little late, but I promised one of our young fellows an appointment."

She pouted as she had done in her courtship days.

"A young man!"

"I can't disappoint him, sweetheart. Youngsters feel those things. He wants more money, and I really believe he's worth it."

As he entered his private room something struck him disagreeably. He glanced about—a sea-coal fire burned in the tiny English grate. He scowled and touched a bell. Asked to explain, the page confessed that he had promised Mrs. Weldon to put a fire there whenever any dampness should threaten, and that to-day being noticeably damp he had kept his word. The president nodded and the lad made his escape.

In another moment a slender young man entered, with a discreet knock, and faced him. He seemed unaccountably excited—even blustering, for a young man in his position.

The president took out his watch and counted the ticks to quiet his irritation. We must be kind to the young ones—promotion means so much to them.

"Let us look at all this a little quietly," he said, softened already, "believe me, I want to satisfy every reasonable claim. It is to my interest——"

He caught his breath. Something in the young man's attitude as he faced him, level eyed, hands between his knees, a contemptuous smile on his hard young face, smote him to the very marrow.

"What is he thinking of me?" flashed through him. The answer came like the shot from a cannon.

"Is it to your interest to satisfy every reasonable claim on the ten thousand pounds you borrowed from the bank last month, Mr. Weldon?"

The soft lines faded from his face and two grey streaks grew around his mouth. The ticking of the watch in his hand rose and swelled and filled the room—one, two! one, two! one, two!

So this was the end. Never a night of honest sleep again. Never a free swell of the chest. To go down in sight of land, to drop just outside the fort! All over! All over! All over!

The young man was still talking, quickly, definitely enough, but it grew blurred as it reached his brain. He found his tongue, dry and stiff in his mouth, asking questions mechanically?

Did any one know of this?

No, only the young man. He was not inclined to be rapacious. He had an interest in a bank in Gibraltar, and two thousand pounds would establish him there. He had thought it might be worth the president's while to put him in the way of two thousand pounds—considering everything. Promotion was slow in Bermuda ... dead men's shoes....

The tongue in Weldon's mouth asked, calmly enough, how he was to be protected against further demands. The young man explained very clearly. The president had managed thoroughly well: in a few days the recent transaction would be a ripple under water. But during those few days ... he smiled disagreeably.

The fire whistled in the grate; the bank was utterly still. They were alone in it. In one second of time, years and the future itself wheeled before Philip Weldon's sunken eyes. So the black drop had lasted, after all, and would tint his life as long as that life lasted on earth ... and longer? Anything was possible. Must the sordid drama play itself eternally, through the years and countries, till the final ripple hit the southern-most port of refuge? Would this young man sit before a sea-coal fire in Gibraltar, one day, frozen, his life and honour nipped at the root by the triumphant hound who had tracked down his one fault? Before God, it was his only one! He was white beside some others who lived and died respected. Prove the contrary, any one!

One, two! one, two! one, two! That watch. Either he was going mad or it could be heard in the street outside, it shouted so. Who was he, anyway—Deeping or himself? Who was that young man?

Suddenly his head cleared. He moistened his lips and leaned forward, the watch crystal shivered in his grasp.

"And you are going——"

"To Gibraltar," said the young man briskly. "I am glad that you——"

"No," said Weldon thoughtfully, "I am afraid you are not going to Gibraltar. You are going to die."

He pushed his hand back into his pocket and felt the precious hard little object there. His finger clasped it, when a heavy blow sent him reeling in his chair. A pain like a knife cut through his heart and he fell heavily backward on his bent arm.

* * * * *

His eyes opened. He drew a deep breath. A tall, carved clock in the corner struck, and a man, a lank, sandy man beside him, seemed to have said something, for his voice was in the air.

"He must have had some papers—if there is anything wrong—good God, Webb, what shall we do?"

This was a slender, foppish man, iron-grey. Weldon sprang to his feet, pulling his right arm from behind him, wide, wide awake now. He was free! He was free!

The clock struck again.

Thrusting his hand in his coat he drew out a sheaf of papers and pressed them upon Webb.

"Here, gentlemen," he cried breathlessly, "are the papers you want! And here," he threw a small folded slip on the floor, "is an explanation that may help you with them. I wish you good-day."

To get out! To get out! He burst through the portieres and the door, as four men, uniformed, with a black stretcher between them, entered it from without. In the moment of his withdrawal from them he saw, as one sees a stage group from his red plush seat, Potter, panting and terrified, Fayles, anguished, Dupont dazed and suspicious, their eyes fixed on Webb, who, calm as in his own office, ran over the sheaf with his snake-like eye. Even as he nodded shrewdly, the stretcher was in the room and the group dissolved.

Weldon found his hat in his hand; he polished it furiously as he strode down the corridor. He threw himself on the outside door and as he opened it, he heard through the unclosed door of the private room the great clock strike eleven. With a shudder he plunged across the threshold, out, out into the clean, free air.



THE LEGACY

Of course, it doesn't make any difference to me whether anybody believes this or not. It's only because Dr. Stanchon asked me to, that I'm writing it, anyway. And nobody needs to get the idea that I think I'm a writer, either: I'm not such a fool as all that. But there's not a nurse in the place who wouldn't lie down and let the doctor walk over her, if he wanted to—and he knows it, too. Not that he's cocky about it, though.

"You know I'm no magazine muck-rake, doctor," I said as I got out of the motor (he had taken me up through the Park to Morningside and back, while I was telling him), "and I'll probably be a little shy on style."

"Style be damned," he said. "You're long on facts, and that's all I want, my dear. And don't for heaven's sake work in any of that C——r's rot on me!"

I had to laugh, really, at that, because he was so funny about it. I took care of Mr. C——r, the novelist, when he had his appendix removed, and he used to dictate a lot to me, and Dr. Stanchon always insisted that my charts were made out in his style, after that. But of course they weren't.

"Just tell it as it happened, you know," he said, "and in your own language. I'd like to keep it."

And of course anybody can do that. Although Mr. C——r told me once that that was the hardest job he ever tackled. He said he could write like his heroes easy enough, but not like himself. But he was always joshing, that man.

"Why, Miss Jessop," he used to say to me, "if I could write like myself, I'd have won the Nobel prize any time this last ten years!"

But he wrote awfully well, I always thought. Hardly a patient I had that year, but if I offered to read, they'd say:

"Oh, well, what's the last C——r's?" and when I got to the parts I'd taken for him (I learned stenography before I took up nursing) it used to give me a queer sort of feeling, really!

It was Dr. Stanchon that got me the case. He 'phoned me to drop in at the office, and a patient of mine took me around in her car: I'd been shopping with her all the morning. She had just invited me to go out to her country place for a few days, and I was quite pleased with the idea, for I was a little tired: I was just off a hard pneumonia case that had been pretty sad in lots of ways, and I felt a little blue. It's an awfully funny thing, but nurses aren't supposed to have any feelings: when that poor girl died, I felt as bad as if it had been my own sister, almost. She was lovely.

But when the doctor asked if I was free, of course I had to say yes, though my suit-case was all packed for the country.

"That's good," he said, "for I specially want you. It's nothing to do, really, and you'll enjoy it, you're such a motor-fiend. There's a family I'm looking after wants a nurse to go along on a tour through the country—New England, I believe. They've got a big, dressy car, and they expect to be gone anywhere from two weeks to a month, if the weather's reasonably good."

"What do they want of a nurse?" I said.

"Oh, they just want one along, in case of anything happening," he said. "They can afford it, so why shouldn't they have it?"

Well, that sounded all right, and yet I got the idea that it wasn't the real reason, somehow. I don't know why. Those things are queer.

Of course, there was no reason why it shouldn't be so: I spent a month on a private yacht, one summer, just to be there in case of sickness, and nobody wanted me all the time we were gone, for a minute. As a matter of fact, the lady's maid took care of me the first three days out!

But I never happened to be asked on a motor-trip in that way, and it seemed a little different. For of course you could pick up a nurse almost anywhere, if you wanted one, on that sort of a tour, and every place in the tonneau counts.

"Isn't there anything the matter with any of them?" I asked.

"What a suspicious lot you nurses are!" he said, with his queer little chuckle (all the young doctors try to imitate it in the hospital). "The daughter's a little nervous, that's all. It's for her they're taking the trip, to give her a change."

"Now look here, Dr. Stanchon," I said, "I'm here to tell you that I don't want any of your old dope cases, and I might just as well say so first as last. That last young man of yours was about all I wanted. He was a sweet creature, wasn't he?"

This probably sounds very fresh to you, but everybody knows me: I speak right out, and if you want me, you have to stand it! And the way I slaved over that boy, and he getting morphine from his valet right along—it was simply disgusting.

"It's nothing like that—nothing at all," said he; "don't get so excited!"

"Oh, very well," I said, "then I suppose it's melancholia. Not for mine, if you please. Perhaps you remember that charming woman that jumped out of the window? I'm no clairvoyant, and that was enough for me, thank you."

"You're getting saucy, Jessop," he said, "but it's not melancholia. But you certainly had a hard time with that one."

And I should say I did. The foxy thing was as good as gold for three weeks, minded everything I said, fairly ate out of my hand, and got us so that we all believed she did better for me alone than when I had help handy. Of course I kept my eye on her, but nevertheless, the other nurse just above gave up the job, and used to be off learning French from the governess they had, most of the time. So when madam got us where she wanted us, she tied me to the door knob and jumped out of the window before my eyes! And I can tell you, the thirty dollars a week that would get me on a case like that again, never left the Treasury!

"I assure you it's not that at all," he said. "It's a case of nerves, that's all."

"Nerves! nerves!" I repeated (I was pretty snippy, I suppose). "That's all right for the family, doctor, but what's the matter with her? I've got to know, haven't I, some time?"

"Well, I must say you nurses are getting to be the limit," he said. "The truth is, I spoil you. But there's something in what you say, of course. Now here's the whole business. This girl, and she's a sweet, lovely girl, too, had a maid, that was a sort of nurse, I believe, when she was a child, and had seen her grow up, and was very much attached to her, and all that. Like all those old servants she was pretty well spoilt, I imagine, and seems to have had the girl under her thumb. She always slept in the room with her. Now; the maid had bad headaches and used to take all sorts of proprietary remedies for them—coal-tar, of course, and probably had weakened her heart with them. Anyway, she waked the girl up one night with her troubles and the girl gets up and gives her an overdose in the dark, and the maid's dead in her bed in the morning."

"Oh, I see," I said, trying to make up for my nasty attitude about that suicidal woman. "So she's blue about it, and thinks she's to blame. An automobile trip will certainly do her a lot of good."

"Well, there's a little more to it than that," he said. "As a matter of fact, she's a very sensible sort of girl and she knows she's not to blame, really. Of course it was pretty rough, but then, the maid had no business to expect her to wait on her, and she ought to have given careful directions about the dose, anyhow. She might have gone off any time, and the girl knows it. But the night of the funeral, after the girl was in bed, what does she see but the maid sitting on the foot of the bed, looking at her! Of course she was overwrought nervously. Only the trouble is, this was three months ago, and she swears the woman comes every night. She knows it's hallucination, optical delusion, anything you like, and she tries to treat it as such, but she's beginning to break down under it, and I don't know what to do. They've travelled, they've had her in a sanitarium, they've tried auto-suggestion—no use. She's all right through the day, but at night, in any bedroom, under any circumstances, this thing appears and she just has to go through with it till morning."

"Why doesn't she have some one sleep with her?" I asked.

"It doesn't make the slightest difference," he said. "One week she had a bed between her father's and mother's, but it was just the same, and of course they got pretty bad, out of sympathy. They'd spend two or three ordinary fortunes to cure her—but it's one of the cases where money doesn't talk, unfortunately. So there we are. It came over me last night that I'd like to have you try what you can do with her."

"But, heavens and earth, what good will I be?" I said. "Am I a ghost-catcher? I never knew it."

"No," says he, "but I'm sorry for the ghost that would run up against you, Jessop—honestly, I am!"

"Much obliged, I'm sure," I said, "but why doesn't she take her sleep in the daytime? That would fool the ghost from her point of view—wouldn't it?"

I'll never forget the look he gave me. "Listen to me, my girl," he said, running out his jaw in the way he does when he's in dead earnest and means you to know it, "listen to me, now. If that young woman ever takes to living by night and sleeping by day, on that account, she's a gone goose!"

"What do you mean?" said I.

"I mean it's all up with her, and she might as well engage a permanent suite in Jarvyse's little hotel up the river," he says, very sharp and gruff. "I've staved that off for a month now, but they can't see it and they're bound to try it: Jarvyse himself half advises it. And I'll risk my entire reputation on the result. If she can't fight it out—she's gone."

He waited a moment and put out his jaw.

"She's gone," he said again, and I felt creepy when he said it, and I tell you I believed him.

"Well, I'll try my best," I said, and I went on the case the next morning.

As soon as I saw her I got the idea of her I've always had since: that's me, all over. I went to a palmist's once with a lot of the other nurses and that's the first thing he said to me.

"It's first impressions with you, young woman," he said. "Take care to trust 'em and act on 'em, and you'll never need to count on the old ladies' home!"

Well, as soon as I saw Miss Elton she put me in mind of one of Mr. C——r's heroines, looks and clothes and ways, and all, and I've never changed my mind. Her things were all plain, but they had the loveliest lines, and she always looked as if she'd been born in them, they suited her so! Her hair was that heavy, smooth blond kind that makes a Marcel wave look too vulgar to think about, and her eyes and complexion went with it. And with all her education she was as simple as a child: there were any number of things she didn't seem to know. She took to me directly, her mother said, and I could see she liked me, though she hardly spoke. She had big rings under her eyes and seemed very tired.

She got a nap after lunch—only two hours, by the doctor's orders—and it did seem a shame to wake her, she was off so sound, but of course I did, and then we walked for an hour in the park. I didn't talk much at first, but I saw that she liked it, and so gradually we got on to different subjects, and I think she was entertained. She seemed interested to hear about the nurses at the hospital and some of the funny things that happen there, and I could see that she was trying to keep her end up—oh, she was all right, Anne Elton was, and no mistake! There was nothing morbid about her: she was trying to help all she could.

When I came down for dinner there was a young man with them, a handsome, dark fellow, and he talked a great deal with me—I could see he was trying to size me up, and it was easy to see that he was pretty far gone as far as Miss Elton was concerned, and didn't care who knew it. We must have seemed a strange party to any one who didn't know the ins and outs of the thing—only the five of us in that big dining-room with the conservatory opening into it; the mother, one of those stringy, grey New York women, that always wear diamond dog-collars, worried to death and nervous as a witch; Mr. Elton—he was Commodore of the New York Yacht Club at that time—fat and healthy and reddish-purple in the face; young Mr. Ferrau (he was from an old French family and looked it, though a born New Yorker) and me in my white uniform and cap next to Miss Elton, all in white with a big rope of pearls and pearls on her fingers. She could wear a lower cut gown and look more decent in it than any woman I ever saw. All her evening dresses were like that, perfectly plain, just draped around her, with long trains and no trimmings: her skin was like cream-coloured marble, not a mark or line or vein on it, but just one brown mole on the right shoulder blade, and that, as her mother said, was really an addition.

Nobody talked much but Mr. Ferrau and the old gentleman—there's no doubt he had been a gay old boy in his day!—for I never do talk when I dine with the family, and the mother was too nervous for anything but complaining of the food. The Lord knows why, for it beat any French restaurant I ever ate in, or Delmonico's either, and Mr. Ferrau and I got quite jolly over how they put soft-boiled eggs into those round, soufflee sort of things with tomato sauce over them, without spilling the yolks. Then they asked if I'd play bridge a bit, and though I don't care for games much, I learned to play pretty well with my morphine-fiend and his mother, so of course I did, and the old gentleman and I played the young couple, and Madam Elton crocheted, sitting up straight as a poker on a gold sofa.

It always makes me laugh when I read what some persons' ideas are of how rich people amuse themselves. The nurses are always jollying me about my rich friends and playing the races and champagne suppers and high-flying generally, and I often wish they could have seen us those evenings at the Eltons, playing bridge—no money, mind you, and Apollinaris at ten! The Commodore had to have ginger-ale, the ladies hardly ever drank, and I never take anything but water when I'm on a case, so Mr. Ferrau had all the champagne there was at that dinner. At ten the masseuse came and rubbed Miss Elton to sleep, and I got into my bed next hers before she went off, not to risk disturbing her. There was a night lamp in her bath and I could just make out her long braid on the pillow—the pillow cases had real lace insertions and the monograms on the sheets were the most beautiful I ever saw.

I went off myself about eleven, for I was determined to act perfectly natural: I knew I'd wake if anything was wrong. And sure enough: all of a sudden I began to dream, a thing I seldom if ever do, and I dreamed that my suicidal case was clambering over me to jump out of the window, and woke with a start.

Miss Elton was sitting up in bed staring at me, breathing short.

"Can I do anything for you?" I asked quietly and she gave a sort of gasp and said,

"No—I think not, thank you. I'm sorry to bother you, but the doctor told me to."

"Why, of course," said I, "that's what I'm here for. Do you see anybody?"

I didn't say, "Do you think you see anybody?" for I never put things that way.

"Yes," she said, "she's there—Janet." I glanced about, and of course there was no one, and I tell you, I felt awfully sorry for her. It was all the worse that she was so pretty and calm and decent about it: I didn't like that a bit.

"Where is she?" said I.

"Right on the foot of the bed," she answered, in that grim, edgy kind of way they always talk when they're holding on to themselves. Oh, how that morphine boy of mine used to begin!

"Excuse me, Miss Jessop, but would you mind assuring me that there's nobody crouching under the bed?" he used to say. "Of course I know there's not, but there appears to be, and I'd be obliged if you'd look!"

If I went under that bed once, I went fifty times.

"Why, to tell you the truth, Miss Elton, I don't see a thing," I said. "Shall I turn on the light?"

"No—not yet," she said. "The doctor said to hold out as long as I could. Would you mind putting your hand there?"

"Not a bit," said I, and I pawed all over the foot of her bed. Finally I got up and sat there.

"What happens now?" I asked her.

"She just moves up and sits farther out," said she.

I couldn't think of much to say to that, she was so quiet and hopeless, so I waited awhile and finally I said,

"Would it help you any to talk about it?"

"Oh, if you didn't mind!" she cried out, and then the poor thing began. It makes me tired, the way people treat a patient like that. There was that girl just bottled up, you might as well say, because they all thought it would make her worse to talk about it. Her father pooh-poohed it, and her mother cried and asked her to send for their rector, and even Dr. Stanchon slipped up there, it seemed to me, for he advised her not to dwell on it. Not dwell on it! Why, how could she help it, I'd like to know?

"What I can't understand," she'd say, over and over, "is her coming, when it hurts me so. Why, Janet loved me, Miss Jessop, she loved the ground I walked on, everybody said! And she knows—she must know—that I wouldn't have hurt her for the world. Why should I? She took care of me since I was six years old—sixteen years! She said to put in those powders in the box and I put them in. How could I know?"

"Of course you couldn't know," I said, "she knows that."

"Then why does she do this?" she asked me, so pitifully, just like a child. "Why does she, Miss Jessop?"

"Well, you know, Miss Elton," I said, "you wouldn't believe me if I lied to you, now, would you? And so I must tell you that I don't think she does do it: none of us do. It's just your idea. If Janet's there, why don't I see her? You're overstrained and excited and you feel that she might not have died——"

"Ah, but I didn't feel that the night she came!" she broke out, "truly I didn't. Dr. Stanchon and all of them said I was very brave and sensible. He talked to me and made me see: if Janet had been sleeping with one of the maids and waked her up and told her not to turn on the light because it hurt her head, but just to give her the powders in the box, that maid would have done it. I can see that."

"Of course," said I.

"I didn't blame myself—really," she went on, and suddenly she looked straight to the foot of the bed.

"Janet," she said, "the doctor said never to speak to you, and I never will again, but I must, this once. Janet, do you blame me? Are you really there? Why do you come this way? You're killing me, you know. I can't sleep. You shouldn't have taken that strong medicine, and the doctor told you not to, you know, yourself. Won't you go, Janet? Not to please Nannie?"

Really, it would have melted a stone to hear her.

She was still a moment and then she began to cry and whimper, and I knew that it had made no difference.

"She won't go—she won't go," she said, crying, "not even for Nannie!"

Well, I talked to her and read to her and stroked her head, and by two o'clock or so she was off for an hour, and I got a nap myself. But from three till nearly five she was awake again, and I had to light up the room; she said she hardly saw her then—only felt her, and that wasn't so bad.

I don't know that anything different took place for a week after that. We went through the same business every night, and I took a nap every afternoon when she did. She told me, what I wasn't much surprised to hear, that she and Mr. Ferrau were engaged—or just about—when this precious Janet died, and that now she wouldn't hear of it and had refused to marry him till she was well again. And I must say I think she was right. Of course the old gentleman didn't see it that way, and we had many a discussion about it, he and I.

"God Almighty, Miss Jessop, my dear," he used to say to me, "you know as well as I do—I'm speaking, of course, to a woman of practical sense and experience, and therefore I speak plainly—you know as well as I do that the day after the wedding all this will be done for! We'll never hear of that damned Janet nonsense again. Now, would we?"

"Well, Commodore, maybe not, but you can't tell," I'd say. "It's a good bet, but—it's a bet, after all. It would be awkward if it didn't work out, you know."

"Oh, bosh, bosh!" he'd burst out, and roll off to the Yacht Club. People that live in big houses like that, I've noticed, always have to go out to get a little peace, they say, and privacy. It's funny.

The weather was bad, so we didn't go on the motor trip at all, and that was just as well, for if we had, I should never have gone up to the hospital that day and never seen old Margaret. She was an old darky woman that used to come in to clean the wards when they were short of help, and all the nurses knew her, because she used to tell fortunes with cards and a glass ball she looked into—pretty fair fortunes, too. I've known of some awfully queer things she told different nurses that were only too true. She always liked me because I used to jolly her up, and I stopped to speak to her, and she asked me where I was working.

"Oh, a grand place on the Avenue, Margaret," I told her, "marble stairs and a fountain in the hall."

"What's the sickness, honey?" she asked, for those darkies are always curious.

"The patient's got a ghost, Margaret," I said, just to see what she'd say, "and I'm sorry to say we can't seem to cure her."

"Co'se you cayn't cure her," says she, "no stuff in bottles for that, honey! What the ghos' want?"

"Nothing at all," said I. "It just sits on the bed and looks."

"Laws, honey, Miss Jessop, but that yer kine's the wors' of all," says she, staring at me. "She'll jes' have ter leave it onto somebody else, that's all."

"Why, can you do that?" I asked.

"Sure you can do it," she says. "Was it one that loved her?"

"They all say so," said I.

She struck her hands together.

"I knew it—I knew it!" she cried out. "It's always that-a-way. My ole mudder she had that ha'nt fer ten years, and it was her half-sister that brung her up from three years ole! She'll jes' have ter leave it onto some one."

"Well, I'll tell her so," said I, just in joke, of course.

"You do," says she, solemn as the grave, "you do, Miss Jessop, honey, an' she'll bless you all her life. You get some one ter say they'll take that ha'nt off her right w'ile it's there, so it hears 'em, and w'ile there's a witness there ter hear bofe sides, an' you hear to me, now, she'll go free!"

"I'll certainly tell her, Margaret," I said, and I went on and never gave it another thought, of course.

We went up to the Elton's camp in Maine all of a sudden, for Miss Elton got the idea she'd feel better there, and though it was cold as Greenland, it did seem for a little as if she got a bit more sleep. But not for long. We slept out on pine-bough beds around a big fire, for that made more light, and that precious Janet seemed to be fainter, but she was there, just the same, and the poor girl had lost eighteen pounds and I felt pretty blue about it. It didn't really look as if we got ahead any, as I told the doctor, and she hardly spoke all day. I'm not much for the country, as a rule, it always smells so damp at night, but the Lord knows I'd have lived there a year if it would have helped her any.

Then came the night when Mr. Ferrau ran up to see how she was getting along. It was too cold for Madam and the Commodore, so we were there alone except for a gang of guides and servants and chauffeurs and masseuses. She had a bad night that night, for she got the idea that this lovely Janet was sitting up nearer and nearer to her, and she had it in her head that when she got to a certain point it would be all up with her. And when I told the doctor that, over the telephone, all he said was:

"Too bad, too bad!" So I knew how he felt.

Well, she got talking rather hysterically for her, and I began to wish somebody else was around, when Mr. Ferrau jumps out of his door in the bachelor quarters and dashes over to us in a heavy bathrobe, white as a sheet.

"For God's sake, Miss Jessop, do something!" he said, but I just shrugged my shoulders. There was nothing to do, you see. She was all bundled up in a seal-skin sleeping-bag with a wool helmet over her head; her eyes certainly looked bad. I just about gave up hope, then. The moon made everything a sort of bluish-white and we all must have looked pretty ghastly.

"I think I'll give her a little codeine," I said. "Just stay here a moment, will you?"

He knelt down by her bunk while I began to unwind myself from all the stuff you have to get into up there.

"Oh, Anne, my dearest, dearest girl," he said, "if only I could take this instead of you! If only I could see her, and you not!"

"Would you—would you, really, Louis?" I heard her say. "You do love me, don't you? But that would be too dreadful. I couldn't allow that to happen."

"Heavens, my dear girl, I'd take it in a minute, if I could!" he cried. "Oh, Anne, do try to look at it in that way—try to give it to me! Perhaps if you used your will-power enough for that——"

"That can't be, Louis," she said, "this is just my fate. I must bear it—till it kills me. But if it could be, I'll tell you this: I would give it to you, dearest, for you are stronger, and maybe a man could fight it better."

I was off to the main camp then, but when I got back with the codeine she was asleep with her head on his shoulder, and he kneeled there till four without moving—he was game, that Mr. Ferrau, and no mistake!

She slept right through till eight, and I left them together all day, as much as I could, and I let her off her nap, she begged so. I could see from the solemn way she talked that she was saying good-bye to him, as much as he'd let her. She told me that as soon as it began to get on her brain, really, and she got worse (we always called it "getting worse"), she was going up to Dr. Jarvyse's place, and he wasn't to see her at all.

"I want him to remember me—as I was," she said. It certainly was tough. I used to cry about it, when I was alone, sometimes. You get awfully fond of some patients.

He stayed the next night, too, and I took my regular nap from ten to one. I could nearly always count on that, and I'd got so I woke the moment she did. I was fast asleep when I felt her touch me, and I woke, feeling scared, for she almost never did that.

"What is it?" I said, half awake. "Is she coming nearer?"

"Miss Jessop, dear Miss Jessop, she isn't here at all!" she said, shaking and crying. "I've been awake an hour, and she hasn't come to-night! Oh, do you think, do you——"

"Yes, I do," I said, though I was pretty excited myself, I can tell you. "I believe you're getting better, Miss Elton, and now I think I'll have Miss Avidson rub you, and see if we can get through the night all right."

The Swedish woman put her right to sleep, working over her head, and we never opened our eyes till nine. One of the guides told me that Mr. Ferrau had been called to the city early, and had left quietly, not to disturb us, but we were both so delighted and yet so anxious not to be delighted too soon, that we didn't notice his going much. She ate three good meals that day, besides her tea, and we walked five or six miles—I wanted to wear her out. And that night she slept right through!

We waited one night more, to be certain, and then I 'phoned the doctor.

"Hurray!" he yelled, so I nearly dropped the receiver. "Bully for you! Keep out for a week and then move in—with a light. Drop the light in another week. Then I'll send 'em all off to Beachmount." This was their Long Island place.

Well, it all worked out perfectly. She gained nine pounds in three weeks, and I don't know when I've been so pleased. The old people came up to see her, and I spent most of my time convincing them that it was no case for tiaras and sunbursts, as I never wore them. Mrs. Elton really looked almost human. She cried so that I finally had to take a little string of pearls. They were small, but all matched, and she said I could wear them under my blouse and I could always sell them. You'd have thought that I'd cured the girl, when, as I told them, the thing had just run its natural course, and her youth and good sense and the outdoor life had done the rest.

Of course, there was no more use for me, and I went right off on a big operation case—a very interesting one, indeed. I promised to come to the wedding, if I possibly could; she told me she would be married just as soon as Mr. Ferrau wished, she felt she'd made him go through so much in the last four months. And it seemed that he had felt the strain more than they thought, for her mother told me that just as Anne recovered, he seemed to give way and got very nervous and had gone off on a yacht with some of his college friends to the south somewhere. I was rather surprised not to see him at the house, and so was Miss Anne, I thought; but he sent the loveliest flowers every day and telegrams, and of course they were working on the trousseau and pretty busy, anyway.

I couldn't get to the wedding, after all, for my patient was taken to Lakewood and simply refused to let me off, which was rather mean of her, for I could have run up for the afternoon as well as not. But that's what you have to expect, if you go into nursing, and you get used to it.

Mrs. Elton called me up once at the hotel, to see if I couldn't get away (they were going to send the car for me if I could), and I asked if Mr. Ferrau was all right again.

"Really, Miss Jessop," said she—and I could just see how she must have looked, from her voice—"really, my dear, I am terribly, terribly worried about Louis. He looks frightfully, so pale and nervous and run down. And he simply won't see a doctor, and when I earnestly begged him to consult Dr. Stanchon, he flew out at me—he really flew out!"

"What can it be?" said I. "What does Miss Elton think?"

"Why, how can she know, my dear?" says the old lady. "Only he assures her that it will be all right once they're married, and begs her so not to put it off, that she won't, though I don't entirely approve, myself. Really, you'd scarcely know Louis, Miss Jessop."

It did seem too bad, but then, those things will happen, and I just thought to myself that probably there was more to that southern trip than the old lady knew, and let it go at that. The doctor says that all the nurses have dime-novel imaginations—but where do we get them, I'd like to know, if not from what we see and hear? The Lord knows we don't have to invent things.

Miss Elton was dreadfully disappointed that I couldn't be there for the wedding, and promised me they'd stop a minute at the hotel on their wedding journey and see me. They were going on a motor trip, nobody knew just where, and Lakewood would only be a few miles out of their way. Wasn't that nice of them? But it was just like both of them. So I was quite excited, of course, and when it poured rain all day, and got worse and worse, I did feel so sorry for them and never expected they'd leave town. But, lo and behold, about five o'clock didn't the boy bring up their cards, and for a wonder my patient was decent and said she wouldn't want me till next morning—she had her own maid with her and really didn't need me but once a day.

I ran down to one of the little reception rooms—I must say I like those big hotels—and when I saw them I nearly collapsed, for though she was looking perfectly beautiful and well as could be, poor Mr. Ferrau certainly did give me a shock. He was all tanned, well enough, but as thin as a rail, and dreadful around the eyes. And yet he looked very happy and seemed quite glad to see me.

"Isn't she looking magnificent?" he asked me, and I said—I just have to say right out what I think—"Yes, she is, but I can't say the same for you."

"Oh, I shall be all right—after a bit," he said, turning red and not meeting my eyes. "Just let me get away with Anne for a while, and you'll see."

They insisted on my having tea with them, and I couldn't help but think that she didn't realise how bad he looked and acted: his hand shook so that his tea-spoon jingled. And yet he was as straight as a string, I was sure.

It kept on pouring so dreadfully that they gave up the idea of going on anywhere, and he engaged a suite at the hotel for that night, and I said good-bye to them, then, for they were to have their dinner served by themselves and I knew they'd want to get off quietly in the morning. My patient kept her word and didn't bother me, and I listened to the music for a while and then went up to my room and wrote some letters. About ten I put my boots outside the door and happened to notice the boots opposite and saw that they were Mr. Ferrau's—they were patent leather, with rather queer cloth tops. So I knew that they had the suite opposite ours; there were only those two for the one little hall.

I couldn't seem to sleep that night at all. I kept dreaming about that suicide of mine, even when I did sleep, and finally I put on my wrapper and decided to take a few turns up and down the corridor. I opened the door softly and stepped out—and ran right into Mr. Ferrau! He was stalking along in a bathrobe, his arms spread out, and tears rolling down his cheeks, and he was chattering to himself like a monkey. His eyes rolled, and I could see he was just on the verge of a regular smash-up.

"Why, Mr. Ferrau, what's the matter?" I asked.

He stared at me like a crazy man. "You here!" he said. "For God's sake! Go up to her—go to Anne—I'm all in," he said. "Oh, Miss Jessop, it didn't work! It didn't work!"

He pointed to his door, and I went through the private dining-room and the sitting-room and a dressing-room and a big marble bath, and there she was, crying like a baby in one of the beds.

"Why, Miss Elton—I beg your pardon, Mrs. Ferrau—what is the matter?" I said, running up to her and taking hold of her hand. "Are you ill?"

She only sobbed and held on to me and suddenly something struck me and I said, "You haven't seen Janet again, have you?"

"No, no—but I wish I had! I wish I'd never stopped!" she gulped at me. "Oh, Miss Jessop, Louis sees her! He sees her all the time; that's what makes him look so ill! Ever since she stopped coming to me, he's seen her, and he never told."

"For heaven's sake!" said I.

"She sits on the bed, but she doesn't look at him—he only sees her profile. He walked twenty miles a day—he did boxing and fencing and riding—it was no use—he thought when we—when—he hoped if we were married—oh, Miss Jessop, she came just the same!"

"For heaven's sake!" I said again. It wasn't very helpful, but I simply couldn't think of anything else. She was so pretty and sweet, and he was so plucky, and who would have supposed it would have got on his nerves so!

Her night gown was solid real lace, and the front of it was sopping wet where she'd cried, and the top of the sheet, too.

"I gave her to him, and he won't give her back—I can't make him!" she went on, gasping and sobbing. "I begged him on my knees, but he wouldn't."

"And don't you see her?" I asked.

"No, no, I can't!" she cried. "I try, but I can't."

"Well, that's something, anyway," I said. "You wait till I go and speak to him again, and put some cold water on your eyes, why don't you?"

For it just occurred to me that maybe I could do something with him, after all. He was leaning against the window at the end of the corridor, and I never like to see excited people near windows, after my suicide woman, so I sprinted along till I got to him. But I really don't believe there was any need for it—he wasn't that kind.

"See here, Mr. Ferrau," I said, "do you really believe that Miss Elton—I beg your pardon, Mrs. Ferrau—really gave that old Janet ghost to you?"

"Believe it? believe it?" he said, staring at me out of his red eyes. "No, I don't believe it, Miss Jessop—I know it! I tell you I see the damned thing, in a brown dress, on the edge of my bed every night!"

"Well, then," I said, "do you think you could give it to anybody else?"

And just at that moment, and not before, I remembered old Margaret!

"Why—why, I never thought of that," he said. "I—I wouldn't put any one else through such a hell, though——"

"Oh, come, now," I said. "Maybe they wouldn't think it was so bad as you do, Mr. Ferrau."

"But who would—oh, it's too crazy!" he said, half angry, but all broken up, so he didn't much care how it sounded.

"Oh, lots of people," I told him. "Why, you might easily find some one with an incurable disease, you know, that hadn't long to live and wanted money——"

Of course, this was all nonsense, but anything to humour people in his condition—it's the only way. And what do you think? He turned around like a shot and stared at me as if I'd been a ghost, myself.

"That might be possible," he said, very slowly; "it's just possible I know ... excuse me, I'll go in and speak to my wife a moment!"

He left me there and in a few minutes he came for me again, and I went into their parlour. She had on a beautiful pale rose negligee all covered with lace and her braids were wound around her head: she'd wiped her eyes.

"Would you perhaps play a little bridge with us, Miss Jessop?" says he, trying to keep calm. "We think we'd better have some one with us."

So there we sat till four in the morning, playing three-handed bridge, and if anybody knows of a funnier wedding-night, I'd like to hear of it!

I suppose anybody would have thought us all crazy if they could have seen us, the next night, sitting, all three of us, by the bed of that queer old man that lived in old Greenwich Village. (My patient let me off, for I told her it was a case of a young bride and groom, and she was delighted to oblige the Eltons. She told me she should call on them after that! She was a climber, if there ever was one, that woman.)

He was an old valet of Mr. Ferrau's father, and Mr. Ferrau was supporting him till he died in a little cottage there. He had angina and was likely to go off any minute, and the Lord knows what Master Louis paid the old monkey—I'll bet it was no thirty cents! He only talked French, but I could see he thought Mr. Ferrau was crazy—he looked at me so queerly out of his little wrinkled eyes and nodded his head as if to say, "What a pity all this is! But we must humour him."

Mrs. Ferrau told me afterward that her husband promised him solemnly to take Janet back if he couldn't stand her—and he would have, too, and don't forget it! He was a game one. But the old fellow just kept saying:

"Bon, m'sieu, bon, bon!" and kept reaching for his envelope. He was only afraid they'd change their mind, you see.

Then Mr. Ferrau lay down on a cot next the old fellow's—he was kept very clean and neat by the woman that boarded him—and I stayed in the room while Master Louis gave that darned old Janet away. He insisted that I should witness it, and to tell you the truth, when I remembered what black Margaret had said about having a witness, I did feel rather queer, for a moment. But of course they were all crazy—as crazy as loons—so far as that one thing went. You see, it was what Dr. Stanchon calls an idee fixe. They had to be humoured.

Mrs. Ferrau and I went out, then, and walked up and down for an hour through the village with the chauffeur behind us, a little way, and I really thought I'd be dippy myself, before long, if I had to pretend to be serious about it much longer. It's no wonder to me the doctors in asylums get touched themselves, after what I went through with those two.

In just about an hour he came dashing out and pushed us into the car. We didn't need to ask him—he looked ashamed, but oh, so different!

"Let's get back to town," was all he said, and I never mentioned it to him again, any of it. Of course, a sensible fellow like him would feel too ridiculous; knowing he had that silly idea in his head, yet not being able to get over it without such childishness—I felt sorry for him.

I know that they didn't go back to Lakewood, for her maid packed up there, and a week after that the old lady wrote me from Long Island that they'd gone for a honeymoon tour in the car through Southern France, so I knew that father-in-law's valet hadn't gone back on his bargain. I never knew what that old monkey made on it, but Mrs. Ferrau told me he was going to leave it to the Catholic church in Normandy, where he was born. I hope it did some good.

I went up to Greenwich that summer with a little boy who had tuberculosis of the spine (the sweetest little fellow, and so clever!) and on one of my afternoons out with him I stopped at the old cottage where the valet lived, just to ask after him. The woman there told me he had passed away about ten days after I was there before.

"In the night?" I asked, more for something to say than any real reason.

"No, in his sleep, in the afternoon," she said. "He didn't sleep much at night, after his young gentleman came, I noticed. He seemed to have bad dreams. He'd be praying away and clicking those rosary beads half the night, sometimes. But he went out easy, at the last. I learned a little French when I was lady's maid to a party, once, so I could get along pretty well with him. But I couldn't make out about those dreams, exactly; they seemed to be about something brown, with its back to him, on the bed. But he was pretty contented by day, when he was awake; he kept telling me of all he was leaving to his church."

... When you think about it, it was queer, wasn't it?



THE MIRACLE

"And are they all really insane?"

He looked at me curiously.

"'Insane'?" he repeated, "'really'?"

He was very young, but very clever, and I had known his mother well and listened to his letters from school many a time; she was intensely proud of him.

"I tell you what it is, aunty," he began, selecting a cigarette with the deft manual gesture of a born surgeon (he was only twelve years younger than I, and his phenomenal record of almost impossible accomplishment made him seem far older than his years; but we kept to the habits of his perambulator days, when I had been tremendously pleased with the title). "I tell you what it is, aunty—I'm hanged if I know!"

He peered slit-eyed through the clouds of smoke, and I waited eagerly for what would come; when his eyes took on that look the boy seemed to me, frankly, inspired. Twenty-three years (he had finished Harvard at nineteen) appeared so pitifully inadequate to account for him! One was forced to the belief that he had directly inherited that marvelous "intuition" of his: that it was actually part of his famous father's experience—for he was Richard Stanchon's only son.

"Of course, you know," he said quietly, "I see what they mean—most of 'em. I always do, somehow. And the more you do that, the less insane they get to seem to you. It's only you and I, a little warped, a little exaggerated. My idea is that fewer and fewer of them will be sent to places like this, and more and more put out among families—oh, don't shiver, aunty, there's nothing to shiver at, I assure you.

"Look here—do you see that tall girl in the blue silk shirtwaist?"

I saw her—she was reading Punch before the big library fire (it was furnished like a wealthy private club, the library), and just because she was so calm and high bred and Madonna-faced, I flattered myself that I could jump in the right direction.

"Does she murder babies?" I asked resignedly.

"Not at all," he replied, with a tiny grin for my cleverness, "not a bit of it. She only insists on taking five baths a day and never touching any washable thing that's been handled. She wears five changes a day and cleans the piano keys before she plays—plays very well, too."

"But—but, is that all?"

"Every bit."

"Then why must she come here?"

"Oh, well, there are practical complications, of course. She thinks most people are pigs, and says so. Then her family is nervous—I notice most of them come from very nervous families—and they simply couldn't rub on. She shampoos her head every day. It's my firm belief, aunty, that if some steady-going German-American family without any nerves would give her two rooms and a bath and put up with her for a few months, she'd be all right. Honestly, as it is, she's fretting herself crazy. She's no fool, you know."

"Heavens, Will! Why, I can perfectly understand——"

"Of course you can. Not mother, though. Mother won't hear about her—and the joke of it is, you know, aunty, mother takes her three tubs a day all summer and never shakes hands in warm weather!"

I gasped.

"But, Will, this is awful! Why, we're all on the verge, if you look at it that way!"

He shrugged and put out his hand to a heavy-faced, ordinary woman of the well-groomed New York type.

"Good afternoon, Miss Vint—let me present you to my aunt, Mrs. Ba—oh, come, now, aunty's a woman of the world and she's married, too. There's no reason on earth why you shouldn't."

"But, doctor, you know what I am——"

"I know," he said kindly, and the real sympathy in his boy's eyes struck moisture into my own, "I know. But you're living it down—no woman could do more."

"Really?" she begged, her features working, "really, doctor? Heaven knows I try!"

"And you never slip back. You never slip back!" he said slowly and emphatically. "Just think what that: means, Miss Vint!"

We nodded at each other and she hurried off, almost smiling.

"She looks no more insane than I do," I suggested, and again he shrugged.

"There's where it is," he answered quietly; "she's just a little over the line, that's all. She's Levi B. Vint's daughter, you know."

"Really!"

"I'd hate to think what she pays a week. What she's really worrying about, I believe, is the old man's money. She insists he was all right, you know, and all this exposure business, though it couldn't shake her trust in the old scoundrel, got on her nerves and she got worrying over herself. Everybody argued with her—the whole Vint gang are a set of bronze mules, you know—and finally she arrived at a definite idee fixe: I'm sure it could have been prevented. Anyway, she thinks she's—she's all sorts of a bad lot, you know. She won't speak to the girls here—not even to the maids. She says she might corrupt them."

"How absurd—I mean how sad! But she's so healthy; she'll soon recover?"

"I don't know," he said briefly, and something scared me in his voice. "She's a very hard case. A bad age."

We walked in silence through a long glass-walled hall, a sort of conservatory, with palms and caged canaries chirping and trilling.

"I hate those birds!" I cried nervously; he stopped and looked thoughtfully into me—it was no less than that.

"That's interesting," he said abruptly, "I don't like 'em, either. And you're one of the best-balanced women I know. Mother, too—she doesn't care for them. No—nor Beatrix."

Beatrix was the hardy young woman who contemplated marrying him—a tremendous venture, it seemed to me!

"But they seem to like 'em here. The crazier they are (there's nobody bad here, you know) the more they like 'em, ... Did you know mediums and spiritualists and all that sort can't live without 'em? I never heard anybody mention it, but it's so. When I went over to Lourdes, last year, I made a point of looking up the families of the people that had the visions, and they all kept larks in cages——"

I saw he was following some train of thought and kept silence. At length he shrugged his shoulders.

"But that isn't what I asked you out for," he began. "I thought you'd be interested in seeing—Oh, Mrs. Leeth, how are you?"

"Very well, thank you, doctor."

A busy, quiet, elderly woman, plainly dressed, cut across our path through the long conservatory.

"Everything all right to-day?"

"Everything, I think, thank you, doctor."

There was nothing to remark about her until she lifted her eyes, and then the curious, intense depth of them (like a dog who could speak, I thought), held me almost breathless with sympathy. She looked, somehow, as if she had gone through more than would be right for her to tell.

"Poor creature," I said as she disappeared through a baize door. "Tell me about her. What is her trouble?"

"She has none that I know of," he replied quietly. "She's the housekeeper."

"Good Heavens, Will! I think I should go mad myself, if I lived here! How does one tell them apart?"

"I don't think one does, always," he remarked placidly. "I sometimes think that accounts for a good deal! There's a man, now—see that fussy little fellow getting out of his motor coat? That's Jarvyse."

"The Jarvyse? The great specialist?"

"That's it," he grunted with a disrespectful grin. "From my point of view, you know, aunty, he might about as well stay in, now he's here. I wouldn't go too near him, if I were you—he'll say you're a paranoiac, if you mention your prejudice against free silver or thick soup at dinner or steam heat. Everything's been paranoia with him since 1902. It's just as much an idee fixe as anybody's here. If you object to anything he says, he diagnoses you immediately. You couldn't build asylums fast enough to hold all Jarvyse's paranoiacs! That's why I'm here, by the way; the case I want you to see is really father's. But he loses his temper so, when he meets Jarvyse, that he sends me up, instead. The old boy doesn't bother me—'Morning, doctor."

We stepped into a noiseless lift and he ran it to the fourth floor. At the end of the corridor an open door showed a pleasant little interior; a window full of red geraniums, goldfish in a globe, an immense grey cat by a little Franklin stove with brass balls atop, and in the centre a round old-fashioned mahogany table piled high with various household linen. We walked directly into this little home-like picture—a great relief after the lavish publicity of the immense halls—and as I greeted the housekeeper, who stood by the heaped table (with an actual note of apology in my voice for having mistaken her!) I noticed a little elderly man, a vague pepper-and-salt effect, sitting by a business-like desk in the corner, his hat and stick on the chair beside him, a book and pencil on his knee.

"Good morning, Mr. Vail, I rather hoped you might be here; let me present you to my aunt, Mrs.——"

"Good heavens!" I almost said it aloud, for the vague pepper-and-salt took on familiar lines suddenly, and the matter-of-fact little features scattered so indistinguishably, as it were, though the boyishly round face became obviously one with the much-photographed trader-prince; it was Absolom Vail, the multimillionaire! When had he...

"Mrs. Leeth used to be Mr. Vail's housekeeper for many years," my young doctor's voice sounded reprovingly (had my jaw dropped?) "and he often looks in on her like this."

"Oh!" I recalled the hat and stick and breathed again. Not that I had any interest in the old gentleman, but he seemed a sort of public character, he and his "old stocking savings-bank," his "millions for deposit, but not a cent for speculation," his "every penny earned in honest trade," and all the rest of it.

"Never forgot an old friend yet," he chirruped, and the housekeeper smiled gravely. It was very decent and kindly and quite what one would have expected; I remembered that every employee always received a personally selected gift at Christmas and that he had stood godfather for seventeen (or was it twenty-seven?) children of labourers, born on the great eight thousand acre estate on the Hudson.

My boy listened a moment to a call from the house-telephone, turned on his heel and swung hurriedly down the corridor. I appeared to have been abandoned.

The housekeeper's lips moved silently as she fingered the napkins on the further corner of the table; it was unnecessary, evidently, to include her in the social situation, though she would be perfectly capable of the inclusion if it should be thought best.

"I had the pleasure of meeting your daughter in London last spring, Mr. Vail," I said.

"Minnie?" he inquired, his shrewd little eyes on me.

"I think so—the Countess of Barkington."

"Yes, that's Minnie. Well, Minnie's a good girl, I guess. I haven't seen her much lately. Not for some years, but once or twice. Ever see Irene?"

"I don't think so. She married——"

"She took an Italian. She's a countess, too—contessa they call it over there. The Contessa di Abbriglia. Hannibal, her husband's name is—always seemed like a Newfoundland dog's name, to me. He hasn't any such amount of land as Barkington, but the family's older, I believe. Hannibal's old enough, anyhow. How old was the count, Mrs. Leeth, when Irene married him?"

"Miss Irene was twenty-one, Mr. Vail, and Count Hannibal was forty."

"You knew them both?" I asked her, caught by a sudden curiosity to see those deep, secret brown eyes once more. The famous Absolom was just what I had supposed he would be, neither more nor less; the most interesting thing I could see in him was this simple, friendly kindness to an old retainer.

"I dressed both the young ladies for their weddings," she replied quietly.

"It must be very pleasant to you—these talks of old times," I hazarded.

"It is," she answered.

I thought of a number of remarks suitable to one or both of my old companions, but they all, somehow, seemed banal and excessive as I marshalled them to my lips. A quaint, almost hypnotic quiet rose like the tide around us: all seemed said and agreed to. A tiny fire flickered on the Franklin hearth; the iridescent fan-tailed fish bent and flattened and glided in the translucent globe; an old clock ticked restfully somewhere. The two elderly friends there—for they were friends; one felt it. And why not? They were from the same class, undoubtedly, the hardware king and the housekeeper, the solid bourgeoisie that is essentially alike in all countries and centuries—these two friends exhaled an atmosphere of contented trust in each other and what life had left for them that spread like a visible cloud, a sort of sunset autumn haze, quite through the little, homely room, and took me under it, with them. No wonder he liked to come there: it did not require much imaginative faculty to infer that neither Barkington nor di Abbriglia had been able to offer such an asylum to their father-in-law....

Asylum! How unconsciously I had fitted the original sense of the kindly old word to its technical uses! Asylum: that was what it was, a refuge, a shelter, a little back-water in the great whirlpool of overstrained, nervous modern life. And Absolom Vail had found one here, it seemed. For he was unmistakably at home here; this was not the first nor the second visit, that was plain. Such atmospheres do not grow from casual encounters.

We exchanged comfortable, old commonplaces from time to time, while Mrs. Leeth sorted, and the hardware lord actually jotted down her notes as to necessary darning and replacing, in a worn red account book—it was almost too quaint for belief! He chuckled at it a little, but not much; it was, after all, such a practical, sane sort of interlude in all the horrid, morbid confusion that the place, with all its conservatories and old mahogany and spacious vistas, necessarily included. They were more than common normal, this simple, middle-class pair, on their friendly little housekeeping island, with this treacherous sea of pain and revolt forever lapping at the edges.

I don't remember how he got to telling me of his early life, but I believe it is a habit of all that sort, and Absolom was no exception to his class and stratum. I was particularly impressed by one little incident, the foundation, really, of his fortune—if any event can be selected in those lives which seem destined to exhibit the farthest possibilities of accumulation.

"I had just exactly one hundred dollars," he said (he had the characteristic superstitious reverence for set sums, even decimal multiples of the national symbol) "that I'd saved up as carpenter's assistant in Greenwich, Connecticut. I took it out of the savings-bank and I came to New York with a clean shirt and a tooth brush and my old mother's Bible, packed in a little basket with some boiled ham and bread. I looked out a verse just as I stepped onto the train—what do you think it was?"

"I have no idea, Mr. Vail."

"No. You wouldn't have. Well, it was this: Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. D'you see—basket! And I always intended to keep a store."

He fixed me triumphantly with his twinkling Santa Claus eyes.

"It's in Deuteronomy," he said.

"The coincidence must have seemed very comforting to you," I suggested gravely.

"It did. It did," he answered, "and from that moment on, I never had a doubt. Barkington didn't care much for that story, though—he says that the old fellows that translated the Bible away back in some king's time—King——"

"King James," said the housekeeper quietly.

"Yes, King James. Well, he says that they didn't mean that kind of a store. Maybe not. But it did the job for me, that verse, just the same."

The whole incident seemed very characteristic, very national, somehow, and I reflected gently upon it as we sat in silence, broken only by Mrs. Leeth's practical, dry voice as she announced:

"Greek Key, Irish weave, spring, 1908, six dozen, fair order.

"Thistle pattern, fall, 1906, four dozen, eight darned, ten badly worn."

It seemed that I had been there a long time....

At length I heard Will's quick, nervous step, and as it neared the door I rose, really reluctantly, and met him.

"I am quite in the doctor's hands," I said, "and I see that he thinks it time for me to leave. Good-bye, Mr. Vail"—he put his hand out for his gloves and cane—"if you are going, too, perhaps, can I take you back in town with me? I motored out."

"I'm afraid you can't," he replied, with his twinkling smile, "because I'm one of the ones that don't get out!"

I stared at him blankly.

"'That don't get out'!" I repeated stupidly. "That don't get out? Why?"

"Because I'm insane," he said placidly.

* * * * *

I don't pretend to any unusual share of equanimity, and it was not till we were back in the shelter of my own home, with the comfort of my own tea-tray before me and my own little applewood fire snapping on the hearth, that I brought myself to discuss the matter with Emily's boy. He had come back with me and we were going to the opera together later.

"I suppose that was what you wanted me to see?" I said abruptly.

He nodded.

"Just that. I wanted your idea. It's one of the most interesting cases—with all its complications—I ever knew. Father's turned it over to me, practically. He knows all about it."

"But, Will, the man's as sane as I am!"

"How much did you talk with him?"

"Quite as much as with hundreds of other people!"

He smiled thoughtfully.

"Talk much with Mrs. Leeth?"

"Oh, yes—she seems much more ordinary than her eyes, doesn't she?"

"What did she say?"

"Oh, just commonplaces—I don't recall anything special...."

"Well, try, won't you? What were the commonplaces?"

I applied myself to recollection. What, after all, had she said? As a matter of fact, beyond her linen tabulation I could not recall more than a dozen words.

"Anyway," I remonstrated, "she makes you feel as if she talked! She doesn't seem silent."

"No," he admitted thoughtfully, "that's true. But she never talks. She hardly speaks to the servants—they're all under her, you know—but they all seem to know what she wants. I've tested lots of them: the cook, the laundresses, the furnace man, the steward—and when they come to consider, they can't recall a dozen words a day. But they always insist, at first, that she gives them detailed orders and criticises them constantly. It's funny."

"Oh, well," I broke in impatiently, "never mind her! Tell me about Mr. Vail—how long has he been there?"

"He's been there six months!" Will announced triumphantly, suppressing a delighted smile at my amazement.

"Six months! And nobody knows?"

"Nobody but the family. Oh, he gets out, now and then: I or one of the doctors goes with him and he puts in a day at the office. Everybody thinks he's travelling or taking electric light baths for his liver or Roentgen rays for his lungs or osteopathy for a cold in the head—Lord knows what!"

"A day at the office? But how can he, if he's insane?"

"He's not too insane to make money." His smile was deliberately intended to intrigue me, I thought.

"He's no more insane than I am!" I cried. "Who put him there?"

"The Countess of Barkington—primarily. Abbriglia agreed, but they'd never have done it alone—Irene's too fond of the old fellow."

"Do you mean to say——"

"Oh, don't get excited, aunty—he committed himself. Nobody roped and gagged him."

"But what doctor——"

"Two besides me."

"Besides you? Why, Will!"

"Oh, I didn't say that I recommended him to an asylum. Not at all. If he had fought it, I could have found reasons on the other side."

"Like a corporation lawyer!"

"Oh, well...."

He began rolling cigarettes; they were his one weakness.

"The question is," he said slowly, "what is insanity? Medical insanity's one job, legal insanity's another.... Suppose your butler was convinced of the fact that he was Napoleon: would you care a continental, provided he buttlered as per contract? So long as he didn't shout, 'Tete d'armee!' as he passed the salad, what would you care? It's quite possible that he has some such delusion, for all you know."

"Of course, I see that."

"There was that old nurse of ours—Esther, you know? To the day of her death she swore that the druggist on the corner of Hartwell Street was Charley Ross—the child that was abducted long ago. You couldn't argue her out of it nor laugh her out of it—she said she had a feeling. She brought us up in it, you know, and for years I believed that he was Charley Ross and regarded him with veneration. She was a perfectly good nurse, just the same. But that idiotic fancy was part of her life—strengthened with every year of her life. It was an idee fixe."

"Well?"

"Well. Esther died a poor woman, but if she had left fifty thousand to—to a home for blind mulattoes, say, the first thing her nephews would have brought forward was that idea of Charley Ross."

"Brought forward?"

"To break her will. They would have said that it proved her mentally incapable."

"But it doesn't, Will, does it?"

"That's just as you see it. She wasn't incapable of looking after us and dressing mother and doing the marketing and keeping the accounts and making all her own clothes and some of ours. But if you ask me if she had a perfectly normal mind, I should have to say no."

"I see, Will."

I was extremely interested: I seemed to see, glimmering far off, what we were getting to, and it was gripping, absorbing. But I had no idea what we really were getting to—not then.

"Now, we'll take another case," he said, at another cigarette.

"I was at Lourdes last year, as you know, studying the Pilgrimage. Curious thing. Not an atom of proof, you see, that anybody was ever cured of a headache there. Not even sense enough to use the immense suggestive power that's massed there to do real good to neurasthenics and hysterics—in fact, they try to bar them. They prefer goitre, which is not cured by dirty baths, unfortunately. The people who go away from there think they were cured from this, that and the other; whole business founded on a perfectly authenticated case of dementia praecox—as much a pathological condition as gout or insomnia. I interviewed a prize case; she appeared before their bluff at a scientific council and presented affidavits of cure from consumption, a year previous. I examined her later. It was—as the man said—interesting if true, but the trouble was, it wasn't true, for she was nearly gone, then. I gave her three months, and she died, I took pains to learn, in ten weeks. Well: that was her delusion. Was she sane?"

"She was misinformed—mistaken."

"Quite so—but she knew she was cured, remember. She felt it. The rest of us didn't.

"Now let's go a step farther, if you don't mind. Beatrix tells me that the Almighty God, the creator of the universe, is the father of the son of a young Jewess, and sacrificed his son in order to save the world. This seems to me fantastic, frankly. But mind you, aunty, though I know that druggist wasn't Charley Ross, and though I know that the miraculous baths of Lourdes didn't cure poor Marie Tremplin of her tuberculosis, I can't say that what Beatrix assures me she knows about the Deity isn't so! It appears to me quite incapable of demonstration, but maybe it all happened as she says. Only I don't believe with her that she knows it. I say she believes it. If it helps her, as she says it does, to be the good and lovely girl she is, all right. It might help Parrott to stand straight to think he was Napoleon. All right."

"That's pragmatism," I suggested.

"Oh, well," he said, with one of his curious old smiles, "they call it different things different years, I suppose."

He drew himself up, and I could see something was coming.

"Now, aunty, attend to me. I couldn't put Beatrix in an asylum for what I and many, many others consider her delusion, could I?"

"Why, Will, of course not!"

"No, nor Marie Tremplin."

"Equally of course not. She has a right to her miracle, legally, I suppose, as well as Beatrix."

"Precisely. Well, here comes along Absolom Vail, and says he's had a miracle, too. He hasn't millions of people behind him, like Beatrix, nor thousands like Marie, nor even half a dozen, as our old Esther had—she converted all the servants and us children. He has only one—himself. A poor miracle, perhaps, but his own. And Barkington lands him in an asylum. The day of miracles is over."

"Why, Will! Why, Will..." I murmured. I seemed to feel myself on the edge of something very big and cloudy and confusing, but very necessary, somehow, to be understood. The trap he had led me into so neatly had fastened softly, but with almost an actual click, upon me.

"What—what is his miracle?" I inquired, in a subdued voice. I was beginning to feel a little afraid of this boy of ours.

"I had hoped he'd tell you himself. He will, if you ask him.... We ought to go and dress, oughtn't we?"

There was no more to be got out of him that night: he was passionately fond of music and had no mind to lose the prelude to Tristan.

But through all that evening the big, shadowy something he had stirred up in my mind grew and grew and troubled me increasingly.

"A poor miracle, but his own..." it haunted me. I went up with him again in two days' time, as he had expected me to, I have no doubt.

In the little room with the gold fish and the Franklin grate everything was the same except that the piled linen on the table was new: it was being listed and stamped. And at the little desk in the corner, his gloves and stick beside him on the floor, sat Absolom Vail, the hardware king, in a pepper-and-salt suit.

"I brought my nephew up with me and thought I'd look in for another little chat, Mr. Vail," I said. The housekeeper lifted her unfathomable eyes to mine for a moment, then dropped them.

"Six dozen snow-drop twenty-eight inch breakfast napkins," she said quietly, but my mind received—I cannot explain how—a totally different impression from what the sound of these words conveyed. Afterward, I realized that I thought suddenly of the sea, great clouds, unheard of, enormous fish, and myself driving like the wind across high, tumbling waves ... it was extraordinary. I had been literally lost in her eyes.

"Always glad to see the doctor's friends," he chirped, and soon, as Will had said, he was talking.

It was all very simple—simple and pathetic and typical enough. The hall bedroom, the rising clerk, the new branch in Kansas City, the young, fresh wife, the little story-and-a-half frame house, the bigger one on a better street, the partnership, the two daughters, the private school, the invention of the new time-lock, the great factory, the Trust, the vice-presidency, the clear head in the panic, the board of directors, the mass of capital, the amazing power.

"And of course we brought the girls up very different from what we'd had."

"Of course."

The old epic of America; the wonderful, cruel destiny of its sons and daughters ... I seemed to see them, climbing, climbing, their dainty feet on the bent, grey heads of the human stairway love had built and thrift had mortared and habit had hardened there!

"It was all right while mother was with us," he went on. "I used to get home late after one of those big dinners, and she'd be sitting up and warm me a little soup or something on the alcohol lamp (she'd never touch electricity, mother wouldn't) and I'd get my coat off and sit awhile; she'd send the servants to bed. Minnie never liked that, but while mother lived, Minnie didn't have so much say. Not but that Minnie wasn't a good girl and a good daughter, for a minute, mind you! Wasn't she?"

He turned to his old housekeeper.

"Miss Vail had a very fine mind," she said quietly, "a great deal of faculty."

"That's it—faculty," he repeated contentedly. "But Irene was easier to get along with. A good deal easier. You said you'd never met Irene?"

"I never had that pleasure."

"She was married over in Italy. The Queen of Italy asked for it to be that way, and with mother gone, I didn't see it mattered much, though Minnie didn't like it. But the Queen was Hannibal's godmother. She was at the wedding. We didn't think, when Irene used to lie in her little crib in the front bedroom in Kansas City, sucking on that rubber doll, that a queen would be at her wedding, did we?"

I looked out of the window for a minute, frowning a little in the effort to adjust my ideas to the surprise of the Vails' having had a housekeeper in those early days. When I turned my face to the room again, Mrs. Leeth was gone.

"Minnie got me to give up the business, and after a while I did. So long as I was working for mother and the girls, I'd never have stopped, but with them gone, and the rest I had to take, after the pneumonia, I sort of let things slide. What's the use? There's Vint, now—he kept at it till he died. No one to do for, really—his girl had all her mother's money, too, and she gives it all to foreign missions, anyhow.

"She's here, you know. Thinks she's—well, I guess I couldn't tell a lady just what she thinks she is, poor thing!"

"I see why she's here, Mr. Vail; but tell me, why do you stay here?" I cried suddenly; the quiet, sensible little man forced it out of me, fairly.

He looked whimsically up at me—I sat higher in my chair than he.

"Didn't the doctor tell you?" he asked quietly.

"No, he said you would, perhaps."

"Well, I don't mind. It happened when she died."

"Mrs. Vail?"

"No, Mrs. Leeth."

I jumped—I couldn't help it.

"Wh—what?" I gasped. What a horrible thing—like a bomb thrown into the quiet room!

"Yes," he said placidly, "sounds queer to you, doesn't it? Well, it is queer, I guess."

It was with the greatest difficulty that I held myself to my chair. My throat went perfectly dry, suddenly, and if I did not scream, it was merely because I have a fairly strong will and a horror of making a scene. The little room had turned dreadful to me, all at once—dreadful and unnatural; Absolom Vail, in his pepper-and-salt, a nightmare.

He seemed to read my thoughts and put his hand out reassuringly.

"Oh, I don't think she's dead, now!" he explained, "I'm not so crazy as all that comes to! Goodness, no!"

"Oh...," I faltered, soothed in spite of myself by his kindly smile.

"No, no. It was this way."

He leaned forward slightly and tapped the arms of his chair rhythmically.

"After mother left me, there wasn't much to keep going for, you see. Then Irene, she went off, and though she was mighty kind about it, and there'd always be a room for me, and all that, and I liked Hannibal well enough, still, I'd never be happy in Italy. Hannibal saw it himself. In a good many ways Hannibal used to see what I meant, now and again—funny, wasn't it, with him so foreign? You'd have thought Barkington, now ... but that's neither here nor there.

"Well, we stayed in the house together, Mrs. Leeth and me, and we got on very well. She knew all mother's ways, and we used to talk about her, evenings, and she as good as gave me her promise she'd never leave me while I wanted her.

"Then I had pneumonia. We had three trained nurses, but I guess there's no doubt she pulled me through. She was up all the nights.

"Irene and Hannibal came right over—it seems they cabled. Irene was expecting to have her baby, too, and it was in March, the worst time to cross the water. But she came. And Hannibal listened to the doctors and the nurses and then he turned to Mrs. Leeth—'How do you find Mr. Vail to-day?' he said.

"'He'll live, sir,' she said, and he said, 'All right,' and that was all there was to it. There was always something about Hannibal ...

"Then she came down. Pleurisy. I'd been South and got back, and I was well enough, you understand, but when they told me that they couldn't save her, something turned right over inside me, and I knew I couldn't bear it. It was too much—everything just slipping away from me, one by one, and me all alone—no, I wasn't good for it, that's all. I suppose it sounds dreadfully weak to you, but there it is: I wasn't good for it.

"I was sitting by her bed, looking at her, thinking of all the old days she could remember with me, and the girls she'd seen grow up, and mother, and all, and all of a sudden she opened her eyes and she knew me. She was sinking fast, but she knew me for the first time in days.

"'Mrs. Leeth,' I said, 'it's no use. If you go, I'll go too. I can't stick it out alone! Must you?' I said. 'Must you? Isn't there any way?'

"'Wait!' she sort of whispered to me, 'wait! There'll be a way, Mr. Vail—a way'll be found!'

"And then her eyes closed.

"I just sat there, staring ahead. I was too miserable to notice anything different about her, though I knew she was very still.

"By and by one of the nurses came in very soft and lifted up one of her hands—I had mine over the other. She was a nice girl, that nurse—we both liked her real well. Dr. Stanchon—the old doctor, not the boy, here—brought her, and he said to me, 'Now, Mr. Vail, here's the best nurse in New York: trust her.' And we did. She looked sharp at me, Miss Jessop did, and listened over her heart, then she put her cheek down to the lips.

"'Why, she's gone!' she said. 'Mr. Vail, when did it happen?'

"And then she called the doctor and he said yes, she was gone. That's why I say Mrs. Leeth died."

He looked calmly at me and I found to my surprise that during this story I had grown as calm as he and had quite forgotten, in my sympathy for the little man, just why he had begun to tell it. It was most perplexing. The room had taken on its homely comfort again: the horror had disappeared.

"So I sat there. The doctor said to let me stay, if I felt so. And I just saw my whole life pass right by me like pictures in a book—if you see what I mean. I saw Min when she graduated and Irene playing tunes to her mamma and me on the piano, and the day the new gold furniture came in, and Mrs. Leeth leading me by the hand out of mother's room after I'd sat all day and all night by her....

"And I looked at the face lying so quiet there, and while I looked, it sort of shook—more like when you throw a little pebble into a pond—and the eyes opened. And I knew mother was looking at me. That's all."

Poor, lonely little man! How could I have felt afraid of him? It was not difficult to see how it had been.

"Then she—Mrs. Leeth—had not really died at all, had she?" I said hastily, only to bite my lips at my tactlessness.

But he smiled tolerantly.

"That's what they said," he answered quietly. "It was very interesting, they said. The doctor was pretty hard on Miss Jessop, I thought. But I guess they always lay it off on them.

"They were all so excited about it, they didn't seem to notice what had happened. And by and by I saw they never would notice it, anyway. I just spoke a little about it to Irene and it frightened her, so I kept quiet. She said she saw Mrs. Leeth was different, somehow, but it was the sickness, she thought. They had to go right back. He wanted the baby to be born in Italy. That was all right, of course."

"And Mrs. Leeth—what did she say?"

"Oh, she was never one to talk, Mrs. Leeth. She talks less than ever, now. I don't know as I put it very clear to you: it's a pretty hard thing to put clear."

He looked appealingly at me.

"Of course, of course," I said soothingly. "Those things are not to be set down in black and white."

"That's just it. When I say that mother looks out at me from her eyes, it seems to be more what I mean. I seem to have 'em both by me, if you can see.... And when I look in her eyes, I understand it all—and I can wait," he added simply. "You've noticed her eyes?"

I nodded.

"Does she ever speak...?"

"I couldn't make you see what I mean very well, about that," he said contentedly. "She just looks at me. It's all plain, then. Maybe that's how we'll all do, in the next life. Don't you think so?"

I found my way to Will's office through a mist of tears.

"Well, what about it?" he asked abruptly.

"I think it's one of the most touching things I ever heard."

"Believe it?"

"Why, Will!"

"Oh! Then you don't blame me any more for committing him?"

"Certainly not. What else could you do?"

"Um-m-m. That's what Minnie, Countess of Barkington, said. She put it stronger than that. When a man of that age spends half of his time in the housekeeper's room, sorting linen, she suggested, there's something wrong. We shall certainly question the will—if he alters it."

"Alters it?"

"In favor of Mrs. Leeth, of course. The fair Minnie hasn't lived among the English aristocracy for nothing."

"Why, Will, how ludicrous—you mean that she suspects——"

"Certainly she does. And very hard-headed of her, too. Stranger things have been."

"But one has only to look at them!"

"That's what Irene thought. But not Barkington. He suggested an asylum. The doctor called me in. (The doctor, by the way, swears the woman died, aunty. 'Only, of course, she couldn't have,' he always adds.) To everybody's surprise Absolom agrees quietly, immediately.

"'I wouldn't have Irene worried, as she is now, for anything,' he said. 'I never meant to leave Mrs. Leeth a penny more than the thousand a year mother and I always planned, but if Minnie can't believe me, all right.'

"Now, here's an odd thing, aunty. No one of that family ever heard of this place, including Absolom himself. Precious few people know about it, anyhow, you see. It pays every one not to. Well. Mrs. Leeth is dismissed, arrangements made, I take him in a motor out here. We walk through the hall, and the first person we meet here—Mrs. Leeth. New housekeeper. It seems the old one died of heart failure overnight. Dr. Jarvyse finds this one, by great good luck just out of a job. Highly recommended by Mr. Absolom Vail. Never occupied just this post, apparently, but Jarvyse feels perfectly certain she's just the woman for it. I don't know how he knew it, but she certainly is. Best woman we ever had."

"How perfectly extraordinary! Was Mr. Vail surprised?"

"Not at all. He just smiled politely, and neither of 'em has ever discussed it."

"What did the Countess have to say?"

"Oh, she was furious, till I pointed out that we couldn't have the woman in a safer place, because every employee signs a bond on entering, never to receive by bequest or otherwise a penny from any patient. We all sign."

"What does the Italian Count think of it all?"

"Hannibal? He's all right, Hannibal. He and I and Barkington had a little session in this very room about a fortnight ago. I was saying something about the question of Mr. Vail's insanity.

"'Question?' says Barkington. 'Question? Why there is no question! As a man of science, Count Hannibal, you know as well as I do——'