Something of all this Olivia guessed. She guessed it with a feeling of being on his side—on the American side—which a month ago would have astonished her. She guessed, too, on Davenant's part, that feeling of irritation which the calm assumptions of the Old World are likely to create when in contact with the aggressive unpretentiousness of the New, and if need were she was ready to stand by him. All she could say, however, for the moment was:

"Won't you sit down? Perhaps I ought to ring for tea."

She made the latter remark from habit. It was what she was accustomed to think of when on an autumn day the sun went behind the distant rim of Brookline hills and dusk began to gather in the oval room, as it was gathering now. If she did not ring, it was because of her sense of the irony of offering hospitality in a house where not even a cup of tea was paid for.

She seated herself beside the round table in the chair she had occupied a half-hour earlier, facing inward to the room instead of outward to the portico. Ashley backed to the curving wall of the room, while Davenant scarcely advanced beyond the doorway. In his slow, careful approach the latter reminded her somewhat of a big St. Bernard dog responding to the summons of a leopard.

"Been up to see—?" Ashley nodded in the direction of what he took to be Guion's room.

Davenant, too, nodded, but said nothing.

"How did you find papa to-day?"

"Pretty fair, Miss Guion; only, perhaps, a little more down on his luck than usual."

"The excitement kept him up at first. Now that that's over—"

Ashley interrupted her, addressing himself to Davenant. "I understand that it's to you we owe Mr. Guion's relief from the most pressing part of his cares."

Davenant's face clouded. It was the thing he was afraid of—Ashley's intrusion into the little domain of helpfulness which for a few days he had made his own. He answered warily:

"My business with Mr. Guion, Colonel, has been private. I hope you won't mind if we leave it so."

Ashley's manner took on the diplomatic persuasiveness he used toward restive barbaric potentates.

"Not a bit, my dear fellow. Of course it's private—only not as regards Miss Guion and me. You simply must allow us to say how grateful we are for your help, even though it need be no more than temporary."

The word produced its effect. Davenant looked from Ashley to Olivia while he echoed it. "Temporary?"

Ashley nodded again. "You have no objection, I presume, to that?"

"If Mr. Guion is ever in a position to pay me back," Davenant said, slowly, in some bewilderment, "of course I'll take it."

"Quite so; and I think I may say that with a little time—let us say a year—we shall be able to meet—"

"It's a good bit of money," Davenant warned him.

"I know that; but if you'll give us a little leeway—as I know you will—"

"He means," Olivia spoke up, "that he'll sell his property—and whatever else he has—and pay you."

"I don't want that," Davenant said, hastily.

"But I do. It's a point of honor with me not to let another man shoulder—"

"And it's a point of honor with me, Rupert—"

"To stand by me," he broke in, quickly.

"I can't see it that way. What you propose is entirely against my judgment. It's fantastic; it's unreal. I want you to understand that if you attempted to carry it out I shouldn't marry you. Whatever the consequences either to you or to me—I shouldn't marry you."

"And if I didn't attempt it? Would you marry me then?"

She looked up, then down, then at Davenant, then away from him. Finally she fixed her gaze on Ashley.

"Yes," she said at last. "If you'll promise to let this wild project drop, I'll marry you whenever you like. I'll waive all the other difficulties—"

Davenant came forward, his hand outstretched. "I think I must say good-by now, Miss Guion—"

"No; wait," Ashley commanded. "This matter concerns you, by Jove!"

Olivia sprang to her feet. "No; it doesn't, Rupert," she said, hastily.

"No; it doesn't," Davenant repeated after her. "It's not my affair. I decline to be brought into it. I think I must say good-by now, Miss Guion—"

"Listen, will you!" Ashley said, impatiently. "I'm not going to say anything either of you need be afraid of. I'm only asking you to do me the justice of trying to see things from my point of view. You may think it forced or artificial or anything you please; but unfortunately, as an officer and a gentleman, I've got to take it. The position you'd put me in would be this—of playing a game—and a jolly important game at that—in which the loser loses to me on purpose."

Ashley found much satisfaction in this way of putting it. Without exposing him to the necessity of giving details, it made clear his perception of what was going on. Moreover, it secured him le beau role, which for a few minutes he feared he might have compromised. In the look he caught, as it flashed between Olivia and Davenant, he saw the signs of that appreciation he found it so hard to do without—the appreciation of Rupert Ashley as the chivalrous Christian gentleman, at once punctilious and daring, who would count all things as loss in order to achieve the highest type of manhood. If in the back of his mind he had the conviction, hardly venturing to make itself a thought, "In the long run it pays," it was but little to his discredit, since he could scarcely have descended from a line of shrewd, far-sighted Anglo-Saxon forefathers without making some such computation.

"If we're going to play a game," he continued, addressing Davenant, before the latter had time to speak, "for Heaven's sake let us play it straight—like men. Let the winner win and the loser lose—"

"I've no objection to that, Colonel, when I do play—but at present—"

"Look here," Ashley said, with a new inspiration; "I put it to you—I put it to you as a man—simply as a man—without any highfalutin principles whatever. Suppose I'd done what you've done—and given my bottom dollar—"

"But I haven't."

"Well, no matter! Suppose I had done what you've done—and you were in my place—would you, as a man—simply as a man, mind you—be willing to go off with the lady whom I had freed from great anxiety—to say the least—and be happy forever after—and so forth—with nothing but a Thank-you-sir? Come now! Would you?"

It was evident that Davenant was shy of accepting this challenge. He colored and looked uneasy—all the more so because Olivia lifted her eyes to him appealingly, as though begging him to come to her support. It was perhaps in the belief that he would do so that she said, earnestly, leaning forward a little:

"Tell him, Mr. Davenant, tell him."

"I don't see what it's got to do with me—" Davenant began to protest.

"It's got everything to do with you," Ashley broke in. "Since you've created the situation you can't shirk its responsibilities."

"Tell him, Mr. Davenant, tell him," Olivia repeated. "Would you, or would you not?"

He looked helplessly from one to the other. "Well, then—I wouldn't," he said, simply.

"There you are!" Ashley cried, triumphantly, moving away from the wall and turning toward Olivia.

She was plainly disappointed. Davenant could so easily have said, "I would." Nevertheless, she answered quietly, picking up the paper-knife that lay on the table and turning it this way and that as though studying the tints of the mother-of-pearl in the dying light:

"It doesn't matter to me, Rupert, what other people would do or would not do. If you persist in this attempt—this mad attempt—I shall not marry you."

He strode to the table, looking down at her averted face and bent head.

"Then we're at a deadlock."

She gave him a quick glance. "No; it isn't a deadlock, because—because there's still a way out."

He leaned above her, supporting himself with his hand on the table. "And it's a way I shall never take so long as you can't say—what you admitted a little while ago that you couldn't say—"

"I can't say it," she murmured, her face still further averted; "but all the same it's cruel of you to make it a condition."

He bent lower till his lips almost touched her hair. "It's cruel of you," he whispered, "to put me in the position where I must."

The room and the hall behind it were now so dim that Davenant had no difficulty in slipping between the portieres and getting away.



XVII

"He's going to squeeze me out."

This was Davenant's reflection as he walked back, along the Embankment, to Rodney Temple's house. He made it bitterly, in the light of clarified views, as to the ethics of giving and taking benefits. Up to within the last few days the subject had seemed to him a relatively simple one. If you had money, and wished to give it away, you gave it. If you needed it, and were so lucky as to have it offered you, you took it. That was all. That such natural proceedings should create complicated relations and searchings of heart never entered his mind.

He could see that they might, however, now that the knowledge was forced upon him. Enlightenment came by the easy process of putting himself in Ashley's place. "I wouldn't take my wife as a kind of free gift from another fellow—I'll be hanged if I would! I'd marry her on my own or not at all."

And unless Ashley assumed the responsibilities of his future wife's position, he couldn't marry her "on his own." That much was clear. It was also the most proper thing in the world. It was a right—a privilege. He looked upon it chiefly as a privilege. Ashley would sell his estate, and, having paid him, Davenant, the money he had advanced, would send him about his business. There would be nothing left for him but to disappear. The minute there was no need for him there would be no place for him. He had been no more than the man who holds a horse till the owner comes and rides away.

Worse than that reflection was the fear that his intervention had been uncalled for in the first place. The belief that it was imperative had been his sole excuse for forcing himself on people who fought against his aid and professed themselves able to get along without it. But the event seemed to show that if he had let things alone, Rupert Ashley would have come and taken the burden on himself. As he was apparently able to shoulder it, it would have been better to let him do it. In that case he, Peter Davenant, would not have found himself in a position from which he could not withdraw, while it was a humiliation to be dislodged from it.

But, on the other hand, he would have missed his most wonderful experience. There was that side to it, too. He would not have had these moments face to face with Olivia Guion which were to be as food for his sustenance all the rest of his life. During these days of discussion, of argument, of conflict between his will and hers, he had the entirely conscious sense that he was laying up the treasure on which his heart would live as long as it continued to beat. The fact that she found intercourse with him more or less distasteful became a secondary matter. To be in her presence was the thing essential, whatever the grounds on which he was admitted there. In this way he could store up her looks, her words, her gestures, against the time when the memory of them would be all he should have. As for her proposals of friendship made to him that day—her suggestions of visits to be paid to Ashley and herself, with introductions to a greater world—he swept them aside. He quite understood that she was offering him the two mites that make a farthing out of the penury of her resources, and, while he was touched by the attempt to pay him, he didn't want them.

He had said, and said again, that he didn't want anything at all. Neither did he. It would have been enough for him to go on as he was going now—to fetch and carry, to meet lawyers and pacify creditors, to protect her father because he was her father, and get a glimpse of her or a word from her when he came on his errands to Tory Hill. There were analogies between his devotion and the adoration of a mortal for a goddess beyond the stars. Like Hippolytus, he would have been content that his Artemis should never step down from her shrine so long as he was permitted to lay his gifts on her altar.

At least, he had felt so till to-day. He had begun the adventure in the strength of the desire born of his visit to the scene of his father's work at Hankow to do a little good. True, it was an impulse of which he was more than half ashamed. Its mere formulation in words rendered it bumptious and presumptuous. Beyond the confession made to Rodney Temple on the night of his arrival no force could have induced him to avow it. Better any imputation of craft than the suspicion of wanting to confer benefits on his fellow-men. It was a satisfaction to him to be able to say, even in his own inner consciousness, that the desperate state of Guion's affairs forced his hand and compelled him to a quixotic course which he would not otherwise have taken.

The first glimpse of Ashley brought this verbal shelter to the dust. So long as the accepted lover had been but an abstract conception Davenant had been able to think of him with toleration. But in presence of the actual man the feeling of antagonism was instinctive, animal, instantaneous. Though he pumped up his phrases of welcome to a heartiness he did not feel, he was already saying to himself that his brief day of romance was done. "He's going to squeeze me out." With this alert and capable soldier on the spot, there would be no need for a clumsy interloper any longer. They could do without him, and would be glad to see him go.

The upshot of it all was that he must retire. It was not only the part of tact, but a gentleman could do no less. Ashley had all the rights and powers. The effort to withstand him would be worse than ineffectual, it would be graceless. In Miss Guion's eyes it would be a blunder even more unpardonable than that for which her punishment had been in some ways the ruling factor in his life. He was sure she would not so punish him again, but her disdain would not be needed. Merely to be de trop in her sight, merely to be troublesome, would be a chastisement from which he should suffer all the stings of shame. If he was to go on serving her with the disinterestedness of which, to himself at any rate, he had made a boast, if he was to keep the kindly feeling she had perhaps begun to entertain for him, he must resign his provisional authority into Ashley's hands and efface himself.

To do that would be easy. He had only to advance by a few weeks his departure for Stoughton, Michigan, where he meant to return in any case. It was the familiar field of those opportunities in copper which he hoped to profit by again. Once he was on that ground, Olivia Guion and her concerns would be as much a part of a magic past as the woods and mountains of a holiday are to a man nailed down at an office desk. With a very little explanation to Ashley he could turn his back on the whole business and give himself up to his own affairs.

He made an effort to recapture his zest in the old game, but after the passionate interest he had put into the past week the fun was out of it. Stoughton, Michigan, presented itself as a ramshackled, filthy wooden town of bar-rooms, eating-rooms, pool-rooms, and unspeakable hotels. The joys and excitements he had known over such deals as the buying and selling of the Catapult, the Peppermint, and the Etna mines were as flat now as the lees of yesternight's feast. "I'm not in love with her," he kept saying, doggedly, to himself; and yet the thought of leaving Olivia Guion and her interests to this intrusive stranger, merely because he was supposed to have a prior claim, was sickening. It was more sickening still that the Englishman should not only be disposed to take up all the responsibilities Davenant would be laying down, but seemed competent to do it.

On the embankment he met Rodney Temple, taking the air after his day in the Gallery of Fine Arts. He walked slowly, with a stoop, his hands behind him. Now and then he paused to enjoy the last tints of pink and purple and dusky saffron mirrored in the reaches of the river or to watch the swing of some college crew and the swan-like movement of their long, frail shell.

"Hello! Where are you off to? Home?"

Davenant had not yet raised this question with himself, but now that it was before him he saw it was worth considering. Home, for the present, meant Drusilla and Mrs. Temple, with their intuitions and speculations, their hints and sympathies. He scarcely knew which he dreaded most, the old lady's inquisitive tenderness or Drusilla's unsparing perspicacity.

"Not home just yet, sir," he had the wit to say. "In fact, I'm walking in to Boston, and may not be home to dinner. Perhaps you'll tell Mrs. Temple so when you go in. Then I sha'n't have to 'phone her."

Temple let that pass. "Been up to look at the great man?"

Peter nodded. "Just come from there."

"And what do you make of him?"

"Oh, he's a decent sort."

"Not going to back out, eh?"

"Not at all; just the other way: he wants to step in and take everything off—off our hands."

"You don't say so. Then he's what you say—a decent sort."

"He's more than that," Davenant heard himself saying, to his own surprise. "He's a fine specimen of his type, and the type itself—"

"Is superb," the old man concluded. "That's about what I supposed he'd be. You could hardly imagine Olivia Guion picking out any other kind—especially as it's a kind that's as thick as blackberries in their army."

Davenant corroborated this by a brief account of what Ashley proposed to do. Light gleamed in the old man's eyes and a smile broke the shaggy crevice between his beard and mustache as he listened.

"Splendid! Splendid!" he commented, now at one point and now at another of the information Peter was imparting. "Sell his estate and pay up? That's downright sporting, isn't it?"

"Oh, he's sporting enough."

"And what a grand thing for you to get your money back. I thought you would some day—if Vic de Melcourt ever came to hear of what you'd done; but I didn't expect it so soon."

Davenant turned away. "I wasn't in a hurry."

"No; but he is. That's the point. That's where the beauty of it comes in for Olivia and you."

Peter looked blank. "Olivia and—me?"

"He's doing right," the old man explained, taking hold of the lapel of Davenant's coat, "or what he conceives to be right; and no one man can do that without putting us into a better position all round. Doing right," he continued, emphasizing his words by shaking the lapel and hammering on Peter's breast—"doing right is the solution of all the difficulties into which we get ourselves tied up by shilly-shallying and doing wrong. If Ashley were to hang fire you wouldn't know where the devil you were. But now that he's going straight, it leaves you free to do the same."

"It leaves me free to cut and run." He made little effort to conceal his bitterness.

"Then cut and run, if that's what you feel impelled to do. You won't run far before you see you're running to a purpose. I'll cut and run, too," he added, cheerfully. "I'll be off to see Olivia, and tell her she's made a catch."

Davenant was glad to be able to resume his tramp. "Poor old chap," he said to himself; "a lot he knows about it! It's damned easy to do right when you've got everything your own way."

Having everything his own way was the happy position in which he placed Rupert Ashley, seeing he was able to marry Olivia Guion by the simple process of selling an estate. There was no more to that in Davenant's estimation than to his own light parting with his stocks and bonds. Whatever sacrifice the act might entail would have ample compensation, since the giving up of the temporal and non-essential would secure supreme and everlasting bliss. He would gladly have spared a hand or an eye for a mere chance at the same reward.

Arrived in Boston there was nothing for him to do but to eat an expensive dinner at a restaurant and go back again. He did not return on foot. He had had enough of his own thoughts. They led him round and round in a circle without end. He was ashamed, too, to perceive that they concerned themselves chiefly, not with his love for Olivia Guion, but with his enmity to Rupert Ashley. It was the first time in his life that he was ever possessed by the fury to kill a man. He wouldn't have been satisfied to be rid of Ashley; he wanted to leap on him, to strike him, to choke him, to beat him to death. Sitting with his eyes fixed on the table-cloth, from which the waiter had removed everything but the finger-bowl and the bill, and allowing the cigar that protruded between his knuckles to burn uselessly, he had already indulged in these imaginary exercises, not a little to his relief, before he shook himself and muttered: "I'm a damned fool."

The repetition of this statement, together with the dull belief that repetition engenders, braced him at last to paying his bill and taking the tram-car to Waverton. He had formed a resolution. It was still early, scarcely later than the hour at which he usually dined. He had a long evening before him. He would put it to use by packing his belongings. Then he would disappear. He might go at once to Stoughton, or he might travel no farther than the rooms he had engaged, and which he had occupied in former years, on the less attractive slope of Beacon Hill. It would be all the same. He would be out of the circle of interests that centered round Olivia Guion, and so free to come back to his senses.

He got so much elation out of this resolve that from the electric car to Rodney Temple's house he walked with a swinging stride, whistling tunelessly beneath his breath. He tried to think he was delivered from an extraordinary obsession and restored to health and sanity. He planned to initiate Ashley as the new charge d'affaires without the necessity on his part of seeing Miss Guion again.

And yet, when he opened the door with his latch-key and saw a note lying on the table in the hail, his heart bounded as though it meant to stop beating. It was sheer premonition that made him think the letter was for him. He stooped and read the address before he had taken off his hat and while he was still tugging at his gloves:

Peter Davenant, Esq., 31 Charlesbank.

It was premonition again that told him the contents before he had read a line:

DEAR MR. DAVENANT,—If you are quite free this evening, could you look in on me again? Don't come unless you have really nothing else to do. Yours sincerely,

OLIVIA GUION.

He looked at his watch. It was only half-past eight. "I've no excuse for not going," he said to himself. He made it clear to his heart that he regretted the necessity. After the brave decisions to which he had come, decisions which he might have put into execution, it was a call backward, a retrogression. He began already to be afraid that he might not be so resolute a second time. But he had no excuse for not going. That fact took the matter out of his hands. There was nothing to do but to crumple the letter into his pocket, take down his evening overcoat from its peg, and leave the house before any one knew he had entered.

The night was mild. It was so soft and scented that it might have been in June. From the stars and the street-lamps and the line of electrics along the water's edge there was just light enough to show the surface of the river, dim and metallic, and the wisps of vapor hovering above the marshes. In the east, toward Cambridge and beyond Boston, the sky was bright with the simulation of the dawn that precedes the moonrise.

His heart was curiously heavy. If he walked rapidly it was none the less reluctantly. For the first time since he had taken part and lot in the matter in hand he had no confidence in himself. He had ceased to be able to say, "I'm not in love with her," while he had no other strengthening formula to put in its place.

Algonquin Avenue, which older residents still called Rodney Lane, was as still and deserted as a country road. The entry gate to Tory Hill clicked behind him with curious, lonely loudness. The gravel crunched in the same way beneath his tread. Looking up at the house, he saw neither light nor sign of living. There was something stricken and sinister about the place.

He was half-way toward the front door when a white figure came forward beneath the Corinthian portico. If it had not been so white he couldn't have seen it.

"I'm here, Mr. Davenant."

The voice, too, sounded lonely, like a voice in a vast, empty house. He crossed the lawn to the portico. Olivia had already reseated herself in the wicker chair from which she had risen at his approach.

"Aren't you afraid of taking cold?" She had not offered him her hand; both hands were hidden in the folds of her voluminous wrap. He said the simplest thing he could think of.

"No. I'm wearing a very warm fur-lined cloak. It's very long, too. I couldn't stay indoors. The house seemed so—so dead."

"Is there nobody with you?"

"Colonel Ashley went back to town before dinner. Papa wasn't quite so well. He's trying to sleep. Will you sit down on the step, or go in and bring out a chair? But perhaps you'll find it chilly. If so, we'll go in."

She half rose, but he checked her. "Not at all. I like it here. It's one of our wonderful, old-fashioned Octobers, isn't it? Besides, I've got an overcoat."

He threw the coat over his shoulders, seating himself on the floor, with his feet on the steps below him and his back to one of the fluted Corinthian pilasters. The shadow was so deep on this side of the house—the side remote from the approaching moonrise—that they could see each other but dimly. Of the two she was the more visible, not only because she was in white, but because of the light coming through the open sitting-room behind her from the hail in the middle of the house. In this faint glimmer he could see the pose of her figure in the deep wicker arm-chair and the set of her neat head with its heavy coil of hair.

"I asked you to come," she said, simply, "because I feel so helpless."

"That's a very good reason," he responded, guardedly. "I'm glad you thought of me, rather than of any one else."

He was pleased to note that even to his own ears his accent was polite, but no more. At the same minute he found the useful formula he had been in search of—"I mustn't let her know I'm in love with her."

"There's no one else for me to think of," she explained, in self-excuse. "If there were, I shouldn't bother you."

"That's not so kind," he said, keeping to the tone of conventional gallantry.

"I don't mean that I haven't plenty of friends. I know lots of people—naturally; but I don't know them in a way to appeal to them like this."

"Then so much the better for me."

"That's not a reason for my imposing on your kindness; and yet I'm afraid I must go on doing it. I feel like a person in such desperate straits for ready money that he's reckless of the rate of interest. Not that it's a question of money now—exactly."

"It doesn't matter what it's a case of. I'm at your service, Miss Guion—"

"I know. That's why I asked you to come. I want you to keep Colonel Ashley from doing what he proposed this afternoon."

She spoke more abruptly, more nervously, than was her habit.

"I would if I could; but I don't know that I've any way of dissuading him."

"You needn't dissuade him. You've simply to refuse to take his money."

"It's not quite so easy as that, because there's no direct business between him and me. If Mr. Guion wanted to pay me what I've lent him, I couldn't decline to accept it. Do you see?"

In the dim light he noticed her head nodding slowly. "Oh, so that's the way it is? It would have to be done through papa?"

"It would have to be done through him. And if he preferred to use Colonel Ashley's money rather than mine, I should have nothing at all to say."

"I see; I see," she commented, thoughtfully. "And I don't know how papa would feel about it, or how far I could count on him."

For a few minutes Davenant said nothing. When he spoke it was with some amazement at his own temerity. "I thought you didn't want my help, if you could possibly get any other?"

The words took her by surprise. He could see her draw her cloak more tightly about her, her hands still within its folds.

"I felt that way at first. I don't now. Perhaps I understand you a little better. But, in any case, I couldn't take his."

He pushed the liberty a little further. "But if you're going to marry him—"

"That's just it. I wonder if you've the faintest idea of what it means to a woman to marry a man by making herself a burden to him in advance—and such a burden!"

"It wouldn't be a burden to any one who—who—"

"I know what you're going to say. Love does make a difference. Of course. But it acts one way on the man and another way on the woman. In proportion as it urges him to make the sacrifice, it impels her to prevent it."

He grew still bolder. The cover of the night and the intimacy of the situation made him venturesome. "Then why don't you break off your engagement?"

It was a long while before she answered. "He won't let me," she said then. "And, besides," she added, after slight hesitation, "it's difficult not to be true to a man who's showing himself so noble."

"Is that your only reason?"

She raised her head slightly and turned toward him. He expected something cutting, but she only said: "What makes you ask that?"

He was a little frightened. He backed down, and yet not altogether. "Oh, nothing. I only—wondered."

"If you think I don't care for him—"

"Oh no. Not that—not that at all."

"Well, if you were to think it, it would probably be because I've been through so much—I'm going through so much—that that sort of thing has become secondary."

"I didn't know that—that sort of thing—was ever secondary."

"Because you've never had the experience. If you had—"

The freedom of speech she seemed to be according him led him on to say:

"I've had experience enough—as you may know—to be sure it wouldn't be secondary with me."

She seemed willing to discuss the point. "When I say secondary I mean that I'm in a position in which I find it isn't the most important thing in the world to me to marry the man I—I care for."

"Then, what is the most important thing?"

She stirred impatiently. "Oh, it's no use going into that; I suppose it would be—to be free—not to owe you anything—or anybody anything—to be out of this big, useless house—away from these unpaid servants—and—and free! I'm not a dependent person. I dare say you've noticed that. I shouldn't mind having no money. I know a way by which I could support myself—and papa. I've thought that out. I shouldn't mind being alone in the world, either—if I could only burst the coil that's been wound about me."

"But since you can't," he said, rather cruelly, "wouldn't the next best thing be—to marry the man you care for?"

Her response was to say, irrelevantly, somewhat quaveringly, in a voice as near to tears as he could fancy her coming: "I wish I hadn't fallen out with Aunt Vic."

"Why? Would she help you?"

"She's very good and kind—in her way."

"Why don't you write to her?"

"Writing wouldn't be any good now. It's too late."

Another long silence fell between them. The darkened windows of the house on the other side of the lawn began to reflect a pallid gleam as the moon rose. Shadows of trees and of clumps of shrubbery became faintly visible on the grass. The great rounded elm in the foreground detached itself against the shimmering, illuminated sky like an open fan. Davenant found something ecstatic in the half-light, the peace, and the extraordinary privilege of being alone with her. It would be one more memory to treasure up. Silence, too, was a form of communion more satisfactory to him than speech. It was so full of unutterable things that he wondered at her allowing it to last.

Nevertheless, it was he who broke it. The evening grew chilly at last. Somewhere in the town a clock struck ten. He felt it would be indiscreet to stay longer.

"I'll make a try for it, Miss Guion," he said, when he had got on his feet to go away. "Since you want me to see Colonel Ashley, I will."

"They always say that one man has such influence on another," she said, rising, too—"and you see things so clearly and have such a lot of common sense.... I'll walk down to the gate with you.... I'm tired with sitting still."

He offered his hand to help her in descending the portico steps. Though there was no need for her to take it, she did so. The white cloak, loosely gathered in one hand in front, trailed behind her. He thought her very spirit-like and ethereal.

At the foot of the steps his heart gave a great bound; he went hot and cold. It seemed to him—he was sure—he could have sworn—that her hand rested in his a perceptible instant longer than there was any need for.

A moment later he was scoffing at the miracle. It was a mistake on his part, or an accident on hers. It was the mocking of his own desire, the illusion of his feverish, overstrained senses. It was a restorative to say to himself: "Don't be a damned fool."

And yet they walked to the gate almost in silence. It was a silence without embarrassment, like that which had preceded it. It had some of the qualities of the silence which goes with long-established companionships. He spoke but once, to remind her, protectingly, that the grass was damp, and to draw her—almost tactually—to the graveled path.

They came to the gate, but he did not immediately say good night.

"I wish you could throw the burden of the whole thing on me, Miss Guion," he ventured, wistfully, "and just take it easy."

She looked away from him, over the sprinkling of lights that showed the town. "If I could do it with any one, it would be with you—now."

There was an inflection on the now which again gave him strange and sudden thrills, as though some extraordinary chemical agent had been infused into his blood. All kinds of capitulations were implied in it—changes of heart and mind and attitude—changes that had come about imperceptibly, and for reasons which he, and perhaps she, could not have followed. He felt the upleaping of great joy. It was joy so intense that it made him tactful, temperate. It also made him want to rush away and be alone.

"I'll make that do for the present," he said, smiling down at her through the darkness. "Thank you for letting me come. Good night."

"Good night."

There was again that barely noticeable lingering of her hand in his. The repetition rather disappointed him. "It's just her way of shaking hands," was the explanation he gave of it.

When he had passed out of the gate he pretended to take his way down Algonquin Avenue, but he only crossed the Street to the shelter of a friendly elm. There he could watch her tall, white figure as it went slowly up the driveway. Except for a dim light in the fan-shaped window over the front door the house was dark. The white figure moved with an air of dragging itself along.

"It isn't the most important thing in the world for her," he whispered to himself, "to marry—the man she cares for."

There was a renewal of his blind fury against Ashley, while at the same time he found himself groaning, inwardly: "I wish to God the man she cares for wasn't such a—such a—trump!"



XVIII

When the colonel of the Sussex Rangers woke on the following morning the Umfraville element in him, fatigued doubtless with the demands of the previous day, still slept on. That strain in him which had made his maternal ancestors gentlemen-adventurers in Tudor times, and cavaliers in the days of Charles the First, and Jacobites with James the Second, and roysterers with George the Fourth—loyal, swashbuckling, and impractical, daring, dashing, lovable, absurd, bound to come to grief one day or another, as they had come—that strain lying dormant, Ashley was free to wake in the spirit of the manufacturer of brushes. In other words he woke in alarm. It was very real alarm. It was alarm not unlike that of the gambler who realizes in the cold stare of morning that for a night's excitement he has thrown away a fortune.

The feeling was so dreadful that, as he lay for a few minutes with his eyes closed, he could say without exaggeration that he had never felt anything so sickening in his life. It was worse than the blue funk that attended the reveille for his first battle—worse than the bluer remorse that had come with the dawn after some of his more youthful sprees. The only parallel to it he could find was in the desolation of poor creatures he had seen, chiefly in India, reduced suddenly by fire, flood, or earthquake to the skin they stood in and a lodging on the ground. His swaggering promises of yesterday had brought him as near as possible to that.

Fortunately, when he had sprung out of bed the feeling became less poignant. By the time he had had his bath and his breakfast it had got itself within the limits of what could be expressed in the statement: "I've been a jolly ass."

Though there was no denying this fact, he could nevertheless use the reproach in its precise signification. He was not a jolly ass because he had remained true to Olivia Guion, but because of the extravagant methods of his faithfulness. No one but an Umfraville, he declared, would have hesitated to accept the status quo. Considering that in spite of everything he was still eager to give Olivia the shelter of his name and the advantages of his position, his insistence on doing more fell short of the grotesque.

Nevertheless he had insisted on it, and it was too late to shrink from making good his offer. No doubt, if he did so shrink, Olivia would commend him; but it would be a commendation not inconsistent with a fall in her esteem. His nerves still tingled with the joy of hearing her say, as she had said yesterday: "You're the noblest man in the world; I never dreamed there could be any one like you." She was so sparing with her words that these meant more from her than from another. If she used them, it was because she thought he was the noblest man in the world and because he did surpass her dreams. This was setting up the standard in a way that permitted no falling short of it. He must be Rupert Ashley at his best even if the world went to pieces while he made the attempt. Moreover, if he failed, there was always Peter Davenant ready to loom up above him. "I must keep higher than him," he said to himself, "whatever it costs me." So, little by little, the Umfraville in him also woke, with its daredevil chivalry. It might be said to have urged him on, while the Ashley prudence held him back, when from his room in the hotel he communicated by telephone with Olivia, begging her to arrange an interview between Guion and himself about eleven o'clock.

* * * * *

On taking the message to her father Olivia found him awake, but still in bed. Since his downfall had become generally known, she had noticed a reluctance on his part to get up. It was true he was not well; but his shrinking from activity was beyond what his degree of illness warranted. It was a day or two before she learned to view this seeming indolence as nothing but the desire to creep, for as many hours as possible out of the twenty-four, into the only refuge left to him. In his bed he was comparatively safe, not from the law, which he no longer had to fear, but from intrusion and inspection, and, above all, from sympathy.

It was between nine and ten o'clock. The blinds were up, the windows open, and the sunshine was streaming in. A tray with his scarcely tasted breakfast on it stood beside the bed. Guion lay on his back, his head sunk deep into the pillows. Though his face was turned from the door and his eyes closed, Olivia knew he was not sleeping. After performing small tasks in the room, carrying the breakfast tray into the hall, and lowering the blinds, she sat down at the bedside.

"Papa, darling."

As he turned his head slowly she thought his eyes had the look of mortal ennui that Rembrandt depicts in those of Lazarus rising from the tomb and coming back to life.

She delivered her message, to which he replied, "He can come."

"I think I ought to tell you," she continued, "what he's coming for."

She gave him the gist of her conversation with Ashley on the previous day and the one great decision to which they had led him up. It would have gratified Ashley, could he have overheard, to note the skill with which she conveyed precisely that quality of noble precipitancy in his words and resolutions which he himself feared they had lacked. If a slight suspicion could have risen in his mind, it would have been that of a certain haste on her part to forestall any possible questioning of his eagerness such as he had occasion to observe in himself. That might have wounded him.

"So he wants to go ahead," Guion said, when she had finished.

"Apparently."

"Can't he do that and still leave things as they are?"

"He seems to think he can't."

"I don't see why. If I have to owe the money to any one, I'd rather owe it to Davenant."

"So should I."

"Do you really want to marry him?"

The question startled her. "Marry him? Who?"

There was a look almost of humor in Guion's forlorn eyes. "Well, I didn't mean Davenant. I didn't suppose there was any—"

"Papa, darling," she hastened to say, "as things are at present I'd rather not marry any one at all. There's so much for me to do in getting life on another footing for us both that marriage seems to belong to another kind of world."

He raised himself on his elbow, turning toward her. "Then why don't you tell him so?"

"I have; but he won't take that as a reason. And, besides, I've said I would marry him if he'd give up this wild project—"

"But you're in love with him, aren't you? You may as well tell me," he continued, as she colored. "I must have some data to go on."

"I—I was in love with him," she faltered. "I suppose I am still. But while everything is as it is, I—I—can't tell; I—I don't know. I'm—I'm feeling so many other things that I don't know whether I feel—feel love—or not. I dare say I do. But it's like asking a man if he's fond of playing a certain game when he thinks he's going to die."

He slipped down into bed again, pulling the coverlet about his chin and turning his face away. As he said nothing more, she rose to go. "About eleven, then, papa dear."

She could hear a muffled assent as she left the room. She was afraid he was crying.

Nevertheless, when she had gone Guion rang for Reynolds and made his usual careful toilet with uncommon elaboration. By the time his guest arrived he was brushed and curled and stretched on the couch. If he had in the back of his mind a hope of impressing Ashley and showing him that if he, Guion, had fallen, it was from a height, he couldn't help it. To be impressive was the habit of his life—a habit it was too late now to overcome. Had he taken the Strange Ride with Morrowby Jukes, he would have been impressive among the living dead. Curiously enough, too, now that that possibility was past, he wondered if he didn't regret it. He confessed as much to Ashley.

"I know what you've come for," he said, when Ashley, who had declined a cigar, seated himself beside the couch.

"That means, I suppose, that Olivia has got ahead of me."

"She told me what you've proposed. It's very fine—very sporting."

"I haven't proposed it because it's either sporting or fine. It seems to me the only thing to do."

"Y-es; I can understand that you should feel so about it. I should myself if I were in your place and had a right to be generous. The trouble is—that it wouldn't work."

Ashley would have given much not to feel this sudden exhilaration of relief. It was so glowing that, in spite of his repugnance, he could have leaned forward and wrung Guion's hand. He contrived, however, to throw a tone of objection into his voice as he said: "Wouldn't work? Why not?"

Guion raised himself on his elbow. "It's no use going over the arguments as to the effect on your position. You've considered all that, no doubt, and feel that you can meet it. Whether you could or not when it came to the point is another question. But no matter. There are one or two things you haven't considered. I hate to put them before you, because—well, because you're a fine fellow—and it's too bad that you should be in this fix. It's part of my—my—my chastisement—to have put you there; but it'll be something to me—some alleviation; if you can understand—to help to get you out."

Ashley was dumb. He was also uncomfortable. He hated this sort of thing.

Guion continued. "Suppose I were to let you go ahead on this—let you raise the money—and take it from you—and pay Davenant—and all that—then you might marry my daughter, and get life on some sort of tolerable working basis. I dare say." He pulled himself forward on the couch. Ashley noticed the blazing of his eyes and hectic color in his cheeks. "You might even be happy, in a way," he went on, "if you didn't have—me."

"Didn't have—you? I don't understand—"

"And you'd have me. You couldn't get out of it. I'm done for—I'm no good to any one any more—but I'm not going to die. That's my point. That's my punishment, too. Can't you imagine what it means to a man like me—who used to think well of himself—who's been well thought of—can't you imagine what it is to have to inspire every one who belongs to him with loathing? That's what I've got to do for the rest of my life—and I'm going to live."

"Oh, I say!"

"You mayn't believe it, Ashley, but I'd rather have been—shut up—put away—where people couldn't see me—where I didn't have to see them. You know Olivia and I were facing that. I expect she's told you. And 'pon my soul there are many ways in which it would have been easier than—than this. But that's not what I'm coming to. The great fact is that after you'd counted your cost and done your utmost you still have me—like a dead rat strung round your neck—"

"Oh, I say, by Jove!"

"Olivia, poor child, has to bear it. She can, too. That's a remarkable thing about us New England people—our grit in the face of disgrace. I fancy there are many of our women who'd be as plucky as she—and I know one man. I don't know any others."

Ashley felt sick. He had never in his life felt such repulsion as toward what seemed to him this facile, theatrical remorse. If Guion was really contrite, if he really wanted to relieve the world of his presence, he could blow his brains out. Ashley had known, or known of, so many who had resorted to this ready remedy for a desperate plight that it seemed simple. His thoughts were too complex, however, for immediate expression, and, before he could decide what to respond, Guion said:

"Why don't you give him a chance?"

Ashley was startled. "Chance? What chance? Who?"

"Davenant."

Ashley grasped the back of his chair as though about to spring up. "What's he want a chance for? Chance for what?"

"I might have said: 'Why don't you give her a chance?' She's half in love with him—as it is."

"That's a lie. That's an infernal lie."

Ashley was on his feet. He pushed the chair from him, though he still grasped it. He seemed to need it for support. Guion showed no resentment, continuing to speak with feverish quiet.

"I think you'll find that the whole thing is predestined, Ashley. Davenant's coming to my aid is what you might call a miracle. I don't like to use the expression—it sounds idiotic—and canting—and all that—but, as a matter of fact, he came—as an answer to prayer."

Ashley gave a snort of impatience. Guion warmed to his subject, dragging himself farther up on the couch and throwing the coverlet from his knees.

"Yes, of course; you'd feel that way about it—naturally. So should I if anybody else were to tell me. But this is how it happened. One night, not long ago, while you were on the water, I was so hard hit that I—well, I actually—prayed. I don't know that I ever did before—that is, not really—pray. But I did then; and I didn't beat about the bush, either. I didn't stop at half measures; I asked for a miracle right out and out—and I got it. The next morning Davenant came with his offer of the money. You may make what you like out of that; but I make—"

"I make this, by Jove; that you and he entered into a bargain that he should supply the cash, and you should—"

"Wrong!" With his arm stretched to its full length he pointed his forefinger up into Ashley's face. "Wrong!" he cried, again. "I asked him if she had anything to do with it, and he said she hadn't."

"Pff! Would you expect him to acknowledge it? He might deny it till he damned his soul with lies; but that wouldn't keep you and him from—"

"Before God, Ashley, I never thought of it till later. I know it looks that way—the way you put it—but I never thought of it till later. I dragged it out of him that he'd once been in love with her and had asked her to marry him. That was a regular knock-down surprise to me. I'd had no idea of anything of the kind. But he said he wasn't in love with her any longer. I dare say he thinks he isn't; but—"

"Suppose he is; that needn't affect her—except as an impertinence. A woman can defend herself against that sort of thing, by Jove!"

"It needn't affect her—only—only as a matter of fact—it does. It appeals to her imagination. The big scale of the thing would impress almost any woman. Look here, Ashley," he cried, with a touch of hysteria; "it'll be better for us all in the long run if you'll give him a chance. It'll be better for you than for any one else. You'll be well out of it—any impartial person would tell you that. You must see it yourself. You do see it yourself. We're not your sort—"

But Ashley could stand it no longer. With a smothered, inarticulate oath, he turned abruptly, and marched out of the room.



XIX

Fortunately there was no one in the upper hall, nor on the stairs, nor in the lower hall, nor in the oval room into which Ashley stumbled his way. The house was all sunshine and silence. He dropped into the nearest arm-chair. "It's a lie," he kept repeating to himself. "It's a lie. It's a damned, infernal lie. It's a put-up job between them—between the old scoundrel and that—that oaf."

The reflection brought him comfort. By degrees it brought him a great deal of comfort. That was the explanation, of course! There was no need of his being panic-stricken. To frighten him off was part of their plan. Had he not challenged her two or three times to say she didn't care for him? If she had any doubt on the subject he had given her ample opportunity to declare it. But she had not done so. On the contrary, she had made him both positive and negative statements of her love. What more could he ask?

He breathed again. The longer he thought of it the better his situation seemed to grow. He had done all that an honorable man could think of. He had been chivalrous to a quixotic degree. If they had not accepted his generous proposals, then so much the worse for them. They—Guion and Davenant—were pursuing obstructionist tactics, so as to put him in a place where he could do nothing but retreat. Very well; he would show them! There were points beyond which even chivalry could not go; and if they found themselves tangled in their own barbed wire they themselves would be to blame.

So, as the minute of foolish, jealous terror passed away, he began to enjoy the mellow peace of the old house. It was the first thing he had enjoyed since landing in America. His pleasure was largely in the anticipation of soon leaving that country with all the honors and Olivia Guion besides.

It was a gratification to the Ashley spirit, too, to note how promptly the right thing had paid. It was really something to take to heart. The moral to be drawn from his experiences at the heights of Dargal had been illustrated over and over again in his career; and this was once more. If he had funked the sacrifice it would have been on his conscience all the rest of his life. As it was, he had made it, or practically made it, and so could take his reward without scruple.

He put this plainly before Olivia when at last she appeared. She came slowly through the hail from the direction of the dining-room, a blank-book and a pencil in her hand.

"I'm making an inventory," she explained. "You know that everything will have to be sold?"

He ignored this to hurry to his account of the interview with Guion. It had been brief, he said, and in a certain sense unsatisfactory. He laid stress on his regret that her father should have seen fit to decline his offer—that's what it amounted to—but he pointed out to her that that bounder Davenant, who had doubtless counseled this refusal, would now be the victim of his own wiles. He had overreached himself. He had taken one of those desperate risks to which the American speculative spirit is so often tempted—and he had pushed it too far. He would lose everything now, and serve him right!

"I've made my offer," he went on, in an injured tone, "and they've thrown it out. I really can't do more, now, can I?"

"You know already how I feel about that."

They were still standing. He had been too eager to begin his report to offer her a chair or to take one himself.

"They can't expect me to repeat it, now, can they?" he hurried on. "There are limits, by Jove! I can't go begging to them—"

"I don't think they expect it."

"And yet, if I don't, you know—he's dished. He loses his money—and everything else."

In putting a slight emphasis on the concluding words he watched her closely. She betrayed herself to the extent of throwing back her head with a little tilt to the chin.

"I don't believe he'd consider that being dished. He's the sort of man who loses only when he—flings away."

"He's the sort of man who's a beastly cad."

He regretted these words as soon as they were uttered, but she had stung him to the quick. Her next words did so again.

"Then, if so, I hope you won't find it necessary to repeat the information. I mistook him for something very high—very high and noble; and, if you don't mind, I'd rather go on doing it."

She swept him with a look such as he knew she must be capable of giving, though he had never before seen it. The next second she had slipped between the portieres into the hail. He heard her pause there.

It was inevitable that Guion's words should return to him: "Half in love with him—as it is."

"That's rot," he assured himself. He had only to call up the image of Davenant's hulking figure and heavy ways to see what rot it was. He himself was not vain of his appearance; he had too much to his credit to be obliged to descend to that; but he knew he was a distinguished man, and that he looked it. The woman who could choose between him and Davenant would practically have no choice at all. That seemed to him conclusive.

Nevertheless, it was with a view to settling this question beyond resurrection that he followed her into the hall. He found her standing with the note-book still in her hand.

He came softly behind her and looked over her shoulder, his face close to hers. She could feel his breath on her cheek, but she tried to write.

"I'm sorry I said what I did," he whispered.

She stayed her pencil long enough to say: "I hope you're still sorrier for having thought it."

"I'm sorry you know I think it. Since it affects you so deeply—"

"It affects me deeply to see you can be unjust."

"I'm more than unjust. I'm—well you can fancy what I am, when I say that I know some one who thinks you're more than half in love with this fellow—as it is."

"Is that papa?"

"I don't see that it matters who it is. The only thing of importance is whether you are or not."

"If you mean that as a question, I shall have to let you answer it yourself."

"Would you tell me if—if you were?"

"What would be the use of telling you a thing that would make you unhappy and that I couldn't help?"

"Am I to understand, then, that you are half in love with him?"

She continued the effort to write.

"I think I've a right to press that question," he resumed. "Am I, or am I not, to understand—"

She turned slowly. Her face was flushed, her eyes were misty.

"You may understand this," she said, keeping her voice as much under control as possible, "you may understand this, that I don't know whom I'm in love with, or whether or not I'm in love with any one. That's the best I can say. I'm sorry, Rupert—but I don't think it's altogether my fault. Papa's troubles seem to have transported me into a world where they neither marry nor are given in marriage—where the whole subject is alien to—"

"But you said," he protested, bitterly, "no longer ago than yesterday that you—loved me."

"And I suppose I do. I did in Southsea. I did—right up to the minute when I learned what papa—and I—had been doing all these years—and that if the law had been put in force—You see, that's made me feel as if I were benumbed—as if I were frozen—or dead. You mustn't blame me too much—"

"My darling, I'm not blaming you. I'm not such a duffer but that I can understand how you feel. It'll be all right. You'll come round. This is like an illness, by Jove!—that's what it's like. But you'll get better, dear. After we're married—if you'll only marry me—"

"I said I'd do that, Rupert—I said it yesterday—if you'd give up—what I understand you have given up—"

He was on his guard against admitting this. "I haven't given it up. They've made it impossible for me to do it; that's all. It's their action, not mine."

"It comes to the same thing. I'm ready to keep my promise."

"You don't say it with much enthusiasm."

"Perhaps I say it with something better. I think I do. At the same time I wish—"

"You wish what?"

"I wish I had attached another condition to it."

"It mayn't be too late for that even now. Let's have it."

"If I had thought of it," she said, with a faint, uncertain smile, "I should have exacted a promise that you and he should be—friends."

He spoke sharply. "Who? Me? That's a good 'un, by Jove! You may as well understand me, dear, once and for all. I don't make friends of cow-punchers of that sort."

"I do," she said, coldly, turning again to her note-book.

* * * * *

It was not strange that Ashley should pass the remainder of the day in a state of irritation against what he called "this American way of doing things." Neither was it strange that when, after dinner in the evening, Davenant kept close to him as they were leaving Rodney Temple's house, the act should have struck the Englishman as a bit of odious presumption. Having tried vainly to shake his companion off, he was obliged to submit to walking along the Embankment with him, side by side.

He had not found the dinner an entertaining event. Drusilla talked a great deal, but was uneasy and distraite. Rodney Temple seemed to him "a queer old cove," while Mrs. Temple made no impression on him at all. Olivia had urged her inability to leave her father as an excuse for not coming. Davenant said little beyond giving the information that he was taking leave of his host and hostess to sleep that night in his old quarters in Boston and proceed next day to Stoughton, Michigan. This fact gave him a pretext for saying good night when Ashley did and leaving the house in his company.

"We're going the same way, aren't we?" he asked, as soon as they were outside.

"No," Ashley said, promptly; "you're taking the tram, and I shall walk."

"I should like to walk, too, Colonel, if you don't mind."

Since silence raised the most telling objection, Ashley made no reply. Taking out his cigarette-case, he lit a cigarette, without offering one to his companion. The discourtesy was significant, but Davenant ignored it, commenting on the extraordinary mildness of the October night and giving items of information as to the normal behavior of American autumn weather. As Ashley expressed no appreciation of these data, the subject was dropped. There was a long silence before Davenant nerved himself to begin on the topic he had sought this opportunity to broach.

"You said yesterday, Colonel, that you'd like to pay me back the money I've advanced to Mr. Guion. I'd just as soon you wouldn't, you know."

Ashley deigned no answer. The tramp went on in silence broken only by distant voices or a snatch of song from a students' club-house near the river. Somewhere in the direction of Brookline a locomotive kept up a puffing like the beating of a pulse.

"I don't need that money," Davenant began again. "There's more where it came from. I shall be out after it—from to-morrow on."

Ashley's silence was less from rudeness than from self-restraint. All his nerves were taut with the need to visit his troubles on some one's head. A soldiering life had not accustomed him to indefinite repression of his irritable impulses, and now after two or three days of it he was at the limit of his powers. It was partly because he knew his patience to be nearly at an end that he wanted to be alone. It was also because he was afraid of the blind fury with which Davenant's mere presence inspired him. While he expressed this fury to himself in epithets of scorn, he was aware, too, that there were shades of animosity in it for which he had no ready supply of terms. Such exclamatory fragments as forced themselves up through the troubled incoherence of his thoughts were of the nature of "damned American," "vulgar Yankee," "insolent bounder," rendering but inadequately the sentiments of a certain kind of Englishman toward his fancied typical American, a crafty Colossus who accomplishes everything by money and brutal strength. Had there been nothing whatever to create a special antagonism between them, Ashley's feeling toward Davenant would still have been that of a civilized Jack-the-Giant-Killer toward a stupendous, uncouth foe. It would have had elements in it of fear, jealousy, even of admiration, making at its best for suspicion and neutrality, and at its worst for.... But Davenant spoke again.

"I'd a great deal rather, Colonel, that—"

The very sound of his voice, with its harsh consonants and its absurd repetitions of the military title, grated insufferably on Ashley's ear. He was beyond himself although he seemed cool.

"My good fellow, I don't care a hang what you'd a great deal rather."

Ashley lit a fresh cigarette with the end of the old one, throwing the stump into the river almost across Davenant's face, as the latter walked the nearer to the railing.

The American turned slightly and looked down. The action, taken in conjunction with his height and size and his refusal to be moved, intensified Ashley's rage, which began now to round on himself. Even the monotonous tramp-tramp of their footsteps, as the Embankment became more deserted, got on his nerves. It was long before Davenant made a new attempt to fulfil his mission.

"In saying what I said just now," he began, in what he tried to make a reasonable tone, "I've no ax to grind for myself. If Miss Guion—"

"We'll leave that name out," Ashley cried, sharply. "Only a damned cad would introduce it."

Though the movement with which Davenant swung his left arm through the darkness and with the back of his left hand struck Ashley on the mouth was so sudden as to surprise no one more than himself, it came with all the cumulative effect of twenty-four hours' brooding. The same might be said of the spring with which Ashley bounded on his adversary. It had the agility and strength of a leopard's. Before Davenant had time to realize what he had done he found himself staggering—hurled against the iron railing, which threatened to give way beneath his weight. He had not taken breath when he was flung again. In the dim light of the electrics he could see the glare in Ashley's eyes and hear him panting. Davenant, too, panted, but his wrath that had flared up like a rocket had already come down like a stick.

"Look here," he stammered; "we—we—c-can't do this sort of thing."

Ashley fell back. He, too, seemed to realize quickly the folly of the situation. When he spoke it was less in anger than in protest.

"By God, you struck me!"

"I didn't know it, Colonel. If I did, we're quits on it—because—because you insulted me. Perhaps you didn't know that. I'm willing to think you didn't—if you'll only believe that the whole thing has been a mistake—a damned, idiotic, tom-fool mistake."

The words had their effect. Ashley fell back still farther. There was a sinking of his head and a shrinking of his figure that told of reaction from the moment of physical excess.

A roadside bench was visible beneath an arc-lamp but a few yards away. "Come and sit down," Davenant said, hoarsely. He found it difficult to speak.

Ashley stumbled along. He sat down heavily, like a man spent with fatigue or drink. With his elbows on his knees, he hid his face in his hands, while his body rocked.

Davenant turned away, walking down the Embankment. He walked on for fifty or sixty yards. He himself felt a curious sense of being battered and used up. His heart pounded and the perspiration stood on his brow. Putting his hand to his collar, he found his evening cravat awry and his waistcoat pulled out of shape.

He grasped the rail, as if for support, looking off with unseeing eyes into the night. Lights along the river-side were reflected in the water; here and there a bridge made a long low arch of lamps; more lights sprinkled the suburban hills, making a fringe to the pall of stars. They grew pale, even while he looked at them, as before a brighter radiance, and he knew that behind him the moon was coming up. He thought of the moonrise of the previous evening, when Olivia Guion had walked with him to the gate and let her hand rest in his. He recalled her words, as he had recalled them a hundred times that day, "The man I care for." He went back over each phase of their conversation, as though it was something he was trying to learn by heart. He remembered her longing for her aunt de Melcourt.

All at once he struck the railing with the energy of a man who has a new inspiration. "By George!" he said, half aloud, "that's an idea—that's certainly an idea! I wonder if.... The Indiana sailed last week ... it ought to be the turn of the Louisiana the day after to-morrow. By George, I believe I could make it if ..."

He hurried back to the bench where Ashley was still sitting. The latter was upright now, his arm stretched along the back. He had lit a cigarette.

Davenant approached to within a few feet. "Look here, Colonel," he said, gently, "we've got to forget this evening."

It was a minute or two before Ashley said: "What's the good of forgetting one thing when there are so many others to remember?"

"Perhaps we can forget them, too—one by one. I guess you haven't understood me. I dare say I haven't understood you, either, though I think I could if you'd give me a chance. But all I want to say is this, that I'm—off—"

Ashley turned quickly. "Off? Where?"

"Where we're not likely to meet—for some little time—again."

"Oh, but I say! You can't—"

"Can't what, Colonel?"

"Can't drop—drop out of the running—damn it all, man! you can't—you can't—let it be a walk-over for me—after all that's—"

"That's where you've made your mistake, Colonel, I guess. You thought there was—was a—a race, so to speak—and that I was in it. Well, I wasn't?"

"But what the deuce—?"

"I not only wasn't in it—but there was no race. There never was. It was a walk-over for—for some one—from the start. Now I guess I'll say good night."

He turned away abruptly, but, having taken a few steps, came back again.

"Look here! Let's have a cigarette."

Ashley fumbled for his case, opened it, and held it up. "I say, take two or three."

As Ashley lifted the one he was smoking to serve as a light Davenant noticed that the hand trembled, and steadied it in the grasp of his own.

"Thanks; and good night again," he said, briefly, as he strode finally away into the darkness.



XX

It was not till the motor had actually got out of Havre and was well along the dusty white road to the chateau that Davenant began to have misgivings. Up to that point the landmarks—and and the sea-marks—had been familiar. On board the Louisiana, in London, in Paris, even in Havre, he had felt himself on his accustomed beat. On steamers or trains and in hotels he had that kind of confidence in himself which, failing him somewhat whenever he entered the precincts of domestic life, was sure to desert him altogether now, as he approached the strange and imposing.

"Madame est a la campagne."

A black-eyed old woman had told him so on the previous day. For the instant he was relieved, since it put off the moment of confronting the great lady a little longer.

He had, in fact, rung the bell at the frowning portal in the rue de l'Universite with some trepidation. Suggestions of grandeur and mystery beyond anything he was prepared to meet lay within these seemingly fortified walls. At the same time it gave glory to the glamour in which the image of Olivia Guion always appeared to him to think she had passed and repassed these solemn gates at will, and that the stately Louis Quinze hotel, of which the concierge allowed him a glimpse across the courtyard, had, on and off, been her home for years. It was one more detail that removed her beyond his sphere and made her inaccessible to his yearnings.

From the obliging post-office clerk at the bank on which he drew—a gentleman posted in the movements of all distinguished Americans on the continent of Europe—he learned that "la campagne" for the Marquise de Melcourt meant the chateau of Melcourt-le-Danois in the neighborhood of Harfleur. He was informed, moreover, that by taking the two-o'clock train to Havre he could sleep that night at the Hotel Frascati, and motor out to Melcourt easily within an hour in the morning. It began then to occur to him that what had presented itself at first as a prosaic journey from Boston to Paris and back was becoming an adventure, with a background of castles and noble dames.

Nevertheless, he took heart for the run to Havre, and except for feeling at twilight the wistfulness that comes out of the Norman landscape—the melancholy of things forgotten but not gone, dead but still brooding wraith-like over the valley of the Seine, haunting the hoary churches, and the turreted chateaux, and the windings of the river, and the long lines of poplar, and the villages and forests and orchards and corn-fields—except for this, his spirits were good. If now and then he was appalled at what he, a shy fellow with no antecedents to recommend him and no persuasive powers, had undertaken, he thought of Olivia Guion. The thing he was attempting became trivial when compared with the possible benefits to her.

That reflections too, enabled him to come victoriously out of three long hours of inward wrestling—three long hours spent on the jetty which thrust itself into the sea just outside his hotel at Havre. He supposed he had already fought the battle with himself and won it. Its renewal on the part of powers within his soul took him by surprise.

He had strolled out after dinner to the Chaussee des Etats-Unis to while away the time before going to bed. Ships and sailors, with the lights and sights and sounds of a busy port, had for him the fascination they exert over most men who lead rather sedentary lives. At that time in the evening the Chaussee des Etats-Unis was naturally gay with the landsman's welcome to the sailor on shore. The cafes were crowded both inside and out. Singing came from one and the twang of an instrument from another, all along the quay. Soldiers mingled fraternally with sailors, and pretty young women, mostly bareheaded and neatly dressed in black, mingled with both. It was what a fastidious observer of life might call "low," but Davenant's judgments had no severity of that kind. He looked at the merry groups, composed for the most part of chance acquaintances, here to-day and gone to-morrow, swift and light of love, with a curious craving for fellowship. From the gatherings of friends he felt himself invariably the one shut out.

It was this sense of exclusion that finally sent him away from the cheerful quay to wander down the jetty which marks the line where the Harbor of Grace, with its intricate series of basins and docks, becomes the sea. It was a mild night, though the waves beat noisily enough against the bastions of the pier. At intervals he was swept by a scud of spray. All sorts of acrid odors were in the wind—smells of tar and salt and hemp and smoke and oil—the perfumes of sea-hazard and romance.

Pulling his cap over his brows and the collar of his ulster about his ears, he sat down on the stone coping. His shoulders were hunched; his hands hung between his knees. He did not care to smoke. For a few minutes he was sufficiently occupied in tracing the lines and the groupings of lights. He had been in Havre more than once before, and knew the quai de Londres from the quai de New York, and both from the quai du Chili. Across the mouth of the Seine he could distinguish the misty radiance which must be Trouville from that which must be Honfleur. Directly under his eyes in the Avant Port the dim hulls of steamers and war-ships, fishing-boats and tugs, lay like monsters asleep.

There was no reason why all this should make him feel outside [Transcriber's Note: Original reads 'outide'] the warm glow and life of things; but it did. It did worse in that it inspired a longing for what he knew positively to be unattainable. It stirred a new impulse to fight for what he had definitely given up. It raised again questions he thought he had answered and revived hopes he had never had to quench, since from the beginning they were vain.

Were they vain? In taking this form the query became more insidious—more difficult to debate and settle once for all. To every argument there was a perpetually recurring, "Yes, but—" with the memory of the instants when her hand rested in his longer than there was any need for, of certain looks and lights in her eyes, of certain tones and half-tones in her voice. Other men would have made these things a beginning, whereas he had taken them as the end. He had taken them as the end by a foregone conclusion. They had meant so much to him that he couldn't conceive of asking more, when perhaps they were nothing but the first fruits.

The wind increased in violence; the spray was salt on his mustache, and clung to the nap of his clothing. The radiance that marked Trouville and Honfleur grew dim almost to extinction. Along the quay the cafes began to diminish the number of their lights. The cheerful groups broke up, strolling home to the mansard or to the fo'castle, with bursts of drunken or drowsy song. Davenant continued to sit crouched, huddled, bowed. He ceased to argue, or to follow the conflict between self-interest and duty, or to put up a fight of any kind. He was content to sit still and suffer. In its own way suffering was a relief. It was the first time he had given it a chance since he had brought himself to facing squarely the fact of his useless, pointless love. He had always dodged it by finding something to be done, or choked it down by sheer force of will. Now he let it rush in on him, all through him, all over him, flooding his mind and spirit, making his heart swell and his blood surge and his nerves ache and his limbs throb and quiver. If he could have formed a thought it would have been that of the Hebrew Psalmist when he felt himself poured out like water. He had neither shame for his manhood nor alarm for his pride till he heard himself panting, panting raucously, with a sound that was neither a moan nor a sob, but which racked him convulsively, while there was a hot smarting in his eyes.

But in the end he found relief and worked his way out to a sort of victory. That is to say, he came back to see, as he had seen all along, that there was one clear duty to be done. If he loved Olivia Guion with a love that was worthy to win, it must also be with a love that could lose courageously. This was no new discovery. It was only a fact which loneliness and the craving to be something to her, as she was everything to him, had caused him for the moment to lose sight of. But he came back to it with conviction. It was conviction that gave him confidence, that calmed him, enabling him, as a clock somewhere struck eleven, to get up, shake the sea-spray from his person, and return to his hotel.

It was while he was going to bed that Rodney Temple's words came back to him, as they did from time to time: "Some call it God."

"I wonder if it is—God," he questioned.

* * * * *

But the misgiving that beset him, as he motored out of Havre in the morning, was of another kind. It was that which attaches to the unlikely and the queer. Once having plunged into a country road, away from railways and hotels, he felt himself starting on a wild-goose chase. His assurance waned in proportion as conditions grew stranger. In vain an obliging chauffeur, accustomed to enlighten tourists as to the merits of this highway, pointed out the fact that the dusty road along which they sped had once—and not so many years ago—been the border of the bed of the Seine, that the white cliffs towering above them on the left, and edged along the top with verdure, marked the natural brink of the river, and that the church so admirably placed on a hillside was the shrine of a martyred maiden saint, whose body had come ashore here at Graville, having been flung into the water at Harfleur. Davenant was deaf to these interesting bits of information. He was blind, too. He was blind to the noble sweep of the Seine between soft green hills. He was blind to the craft on its bosom—steamers laden with the produce of orchard and the farm for England; Norwegian brigantines, weird as The Flying Dutchman in their black and white paint, carrying ice or lumber to Rouen; fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages, clambering over cliffs to a casino, a plage, and a Hotel des Bains, or nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was blind to the charms of Harfleur, famous and somnolent, on the banks of a still more somnolent stream. He resumed the working of his faculties only when the chauffeur turned and said:

"Voila, monsieur—voila le chateau de madame la marquise."

If it was possible for Davenant's heart to leap and sink in the same instant, it did it then. It leaped at the sight of this white and rose castle, with its towers and donjon and keep; it sank at the thought that he, poor old unpretentious Peter Davenant, with no social or personal passports of any kind, must force his way over drawbridge and beneath portcullis—or whatever else might be the method of entering a feudal pile—into the presence of the chatelaine whose abode here must be that of some legendary princess, and bend her to his will. Stray memories came to him of Siegfrieds and Prince Charmings, with a natural gift for this sort of thing, but only to make his own appearance in the role the more absurd.

Melcourt-le-Danois had that characteristic which goes with all fine and fitting architecture of springing naturally out of the soil. It seemed as if it must always have been there. It was as difficult to imagine the plateau on which it stood without it as to see Mont Saint Michel merely as a rocky islet. The plateau crowned a white bluff running out like the prow of a Viking ship into a bend of the Seine, commanding the river in both directions. It was clear at a glance that when Roger the Dane laid here the first stone of his pirates' stronghold, to protect his port of Harfleur, the salt water must have dashed right up against the chalky cliff; but the centuries during which the silt of the Vosges had been carried down the river and piled up against the rocks at its mouth, had driven the castle inland for an eighth of a mile. Melcourt-le-Danois which had once looked down into the very waves now dominated in the first place a strip of gardens, and orchards of small fruit, through which the, road from Harfleur to the village of Melcourt, half a mile farther up the Seine, ran like a bit of white braid.

Viewed from the summit of the cliff on which Davenant's motor had stopped, the chateau was composed of two ancient towers guarding the long, and relatively low, relatively modern, brick mansion of the epoch of Louis Treize. The brick, once red, had toned down now to a soft old rose; the towers, once white, were splashed above the line to which the ivy climbed with rose and orange. Over the tip of the bluff and down its side of southern exposure, toward the village of Melcourt, ran a park of oak and chestnut, in all the October hues of yellow and olive-brown.

But ten minutes later, when the motor had made a detour round cliffs and little inlets and arrived at the main entrance to the chateau, Davenant found the aspect of things less intimidating. Through a high wrought-iron grille, surmounted by the head of an armorial beast, he had the view of a Lenotre garden, all scrolls and arabesques. The towers, which at a distance had seemed part of a continuous whole, now detached themselves. The actual residence was no more imposing than any good-sized house in America. Davenant understood the chauffeur to say that "Madame la marquise l'avait modernise jusqu'au bout des ongles."

Having summoned up courage to ring the bell, he found it answered by a middle-aged woman with a face worn by time and weather to the polished grooves and creases to which water wears a rock.

"On ne visite pas le chateau."

She made the statement with the stony, impersonal air of one who has to say the same thing a good many times a year. Davenant pressed close to the grille, murmuring something of which she caught the word "Madame."

"Madame la marquise n'est pas visible."

The quick Norman eye had, however, noticed the movement of Davenant's hand, detecting there something more than a card. In speaking she edged nearer the grille. Thrusting his fingers between the curves of the iron arabesques, he said, in his best French: "Prenez."

Measuring time by the pounding of his heart rather than the ticking of his watch, it seemed to him he had a long time to wait before the woman reappeared, handing him back his card through the openwork of the grille, saying briefly: "Madame la marquise ne recoit pas." Perhaps it was the crestfallen look in the blond giant's face that tempted her to add: "Je le regrette, monsieur."

In the compassionate tone he read a hint that all was not lost. Scribbling under his name the words: "Boston, Mass. Very urgent," he once more passed the card through the grille, accompanied by the manual act that had won the woman's sympathy in the first place.

"Allez, please," he said, earnestly, "and—vite."

He found his penciled words effective, for presently the woman came back. "Venez, monsieur," she said, as she unlocked the grille with a large key carried beneath her apron. Her stony official manner had returned.

As he drew near the house a young man sketching or writing under a yew-tree looked up curiously. A few steps farther on a pretty girl, in a Leghorn hat, clipping roses into a basket, glanced at him with shy, startled eyes. In the hall, where he was left standing, a young officer in sky-blue tunic and red breeches, who had been strumming at a piano in an adjoining room, strolled to the door and stared at him. A thin, black-eyed, sharp-visaged, middle-aged lady, dressed in black and wearing a knitted shawl—perhaps the mother of the three young people he had just seen—came half-way down the strip of red carpet on the stairs, inspected him, and went up again. It was all more disconcerting than he had expected.

The great hall, of which the chief beauty was in the magnificent sweep of the monumental stairway, with its elaborate wrought-iron balustrade, struck him as a forbidding entry to a home. A man-servant came at last to deliver him from the soft, wondering eyes of the young officer, and lead him into a room which he had already recognized as a library through the half-open door.

Here he had just time to get a blurred impression of portraits, busts, Bull surfaces, and rich or ancient bindings—with views through the long windows of the traffic on the Seine—when a little old lady appeared in a doorway at the farther end of the room. He knew she was a little old lady from all sorts of indefinable evidence, in spite of her own efforts to be young. He knew it in spite of fluffy golden hair and a filmy, youthful morning robe that displayed the daintiness of her figure as well as the expensiveness of her taste.

She tripped rapidly down the long room, with quick little steps and a quick little swinging of the arms that made the loose gossamer sleeves blow outward from the wrists. He recognized her instantly as the Marquise de Melcourt from her resemblance, in all those outlines which poudre de riz and cherry paste could not destroy, to the Guion type. The face would have still possessed the Guion beauty, had she given it a chance. Looking at it as she came nearer, Davenant was reminded of things he had read of those Mongolian tribes who are said to put on masks to hide their fear and go resolutely forth to battle. Having always considered this a lofty form of courage, he was inconsistent in finding its reflection here—the fear of time beneath these painted cheeks and fluffy locks, and the fight against it carried on by the Marquise's whole brave bearing—rather pitifully comic.

Madame herself had no such feeling. She wore her mask with absolute nonchalance, beginning to speak while still some yards away.

"Eh, bien, monsieur?"

Davenant doubled himself up into a deep bow, but before he had time to stammer out some apologetic self-introduction, she continued:

"You've come from Davis and Stern, I suppose, on business. I always tell them not to send me people, but to cable. Why didn't they cable? They know I don't like Americans coming here. I'm pestered to death with them—that is, I used to be—and I should be still, if I didn't put 'em down."

The voice was high and chattering, with a tendency to crack. It had the American quality with a French intonation. In speaking, the Marquise made little nervous dashes, now to the right, now to the left, as though endeavoring to get by some one who blocked her way.

"I haven't come on business, my—my lady."

He used this term of respect partly from a frightened desire to propitiate a great personage and partly because he couldn't think of any other.

"Then what have you come on? If it's to see the chateau you may as well go away. It's never shown. Those are positive orders. I make no exceptions. They must have told you so at the gate. But you Americans will dare anything. Mon Dieu, quel tas de barbares!"

The gesture of her hands in uttering the exclamation was altogether French, but she betrayed her oneness with the people she reviled by saying: "Quel tah de bah-bah!"

"I haven't come to see the chateau either, my lady—"

"You can call me madame," she interrupted, not without a kindlier inflection on the hint.

He began again. "I haven't come to see the chateau, either—madame. I've come to see you."

She made one of her little plunges. "Oh, indeed! Have you? I thought you'd learned better than that—over there. You used to come in ship-loads, but—"

He began to feel more sure of himself. "When I say I came to see you, madame, I mean, I came to—to tell you something."

"Then, so long as it's not on business, I don't want to hear it. I suppose you're one of Walter Davenant's boys? I don't consider him any relation to me at all. It's too distant. If I acknowledged all the cousins forced on me from over there I might as well include Abraham and Adam. Are you the first or the second wife's son?"

He explained his connection with the Davenant name. "But that isn't what I came to talk about, madame—not about myself. I wanted to tell you of—of your nephew—Mr. Henry Guion."

She turned with a movement like that of a fleeing nymph, her hand stretched behind her. "Don't. I don't want to hear about him. Nor about my niece. They're strangers to me. I don't know them."

"You'd like to know them now, madame—because they're in great trouble."

She took refuge behind a big English arm-chair, leaning on the back.

"I dare say. It's what they were likely to come to. I told my niece so, the last time she allowed me the privilege of her conversation. But I told her, too, that in the day of her calamity she wasn't to look to me."