"You could never have cared for me, of course I always knew that," he remarked one day to Laura, "but I can't help wishing that you hadn't fallen in love with anybody else."

From the bright remoteness of her happiness she smiled down upon him. "But doesn't such a wish as that strike you as rather selfish?"

"I don't care—I want you back again just as you used to be—and now," he added bitterly, "you've even given up your writing."

"I shall never write again," she answered, quietly, without regret. It was a truth which she felt only intuitively at the time, for her reason as yet had hardly taken account of a fact that was perfectly evident to the subtler perceptions of her feeling. She would never write again—her art had been only the exotic flowering of a luxuriant imagination and she had lost value as a creative energy while she had gained in experience as a human soul.

"I was too young, that was the trouble," pursued Trent, "there were five years between us."

"My dear boy," she laughed merrily, "there was all eternity."

His bitterness, he felt, grew heavily upon him while he watched her. A new beauty had passed into her face; the mystery of a thousand lives was in her look, in her gestures, in her voice; and she appeared to him not as herself alone, but as the embodied essence of all former loves of which he had dreamed—of all the enchanting dead women of whom the poets wrote. Then he thought of Arnold Kemper, with his exhausted emotions, his superficial cleverness, his engrossing middle-age, and especially of his approaching baldness. Was love, after all, he questioned, only a re-quickened memory in particular brain cells as modern scientists believed? Was physical heredity, in truth, the fulfilling of the law of life? and was the soul merely a series of vibrations by which matter lived and moved?

All the way home his angry scepticism boiled over in his thoughts, and at the luncheon table, a little later, he met his mother's placid enquiries with an explosion of boyish despair.

"There's no use trying to persuade me—I can't eat," he said.

"But, my dear son, I fear you'll work yourself into an illness," returned Mrs. Trent, with her unshaken calm.

"I don't care," replied the young man desperately, "whether I die now or later, it is all the same."

"I suppose really it is," admitted his mother; but she added after a pause in which she had dipped mildly into a philosophic curiosity, "The way being in love effects one has always seemed to me the very strangest thing in life. I remember your uncle Channing lived exclusively on onions for a whole month after Mattie Godwin refused his offer. Why he selected onions I could never explain," she concluded, "unless it was that he had never been able to endure the taste of them, and he seemed bent upon making himself as miserable as it was possible to be."

While she went on placidly eating her hashed chicken, Trent tossed off a glass or two of claret, which he was perfectly aware, taken on his empty stomach, would immediately produce a racking headache. Since his passion was not sincere, it occurred to him that it might at least become dramatic; but he saw presently, with aggrieved surprise, that the impression made upon his mother by his violent behavior was far slighter than he had brought himself to expect. When next she spoke her thoughts appeared to have strayed utterly from the subject of his appetite.

"I couldn't sleep last night for thinking of that poor Christina Coles," she said, "the char-woman told me yesterday that the child had been obliged to go out and pawn some of her things in order to get the money to pay her room rent."

With a start his mind swung back from the dream life to the actual. He had not seen Christina for more than a week, and the thought of her pierced his heart with a keen reproach.

"Good God, has it come to that?" he exclaimed.

"What hurts me most is not being able to do anything to help her," resumed Mrs. Trent, "she's so proud that I don't dare even ask her to a meal for fear she'll take offence."

"But if it's so bad as that why doesn't she go home—she must have a home."

"Oh, she has—but to go back, she feels, would mean that she's given up, and the char-woman declares that she'll never give up so long as she's alive."

"Well, she's a precious little fool," observed Trent, as he drank an extra glass of claret.

But the thought of Christina was not to be so lightly put from him, and before the afternoon was over he went up to the eighth landing and knocked in vain at her door. She was still out, as the little pile of rejected manuscript lying on her threshold bore witness; and he turned away and came down again with a disappointment of which he felt himself to be half ashamed. An hour later he ran against her when he was going out into the street, and as she turned with her constrained little bow and looked at him for an instant with her sincere blue eyes, he was almost overcome by the rush of pity which the sight of her evoked. How pale and thin she had grown! how shabby her little tan coat looked in the daylight; and yet what a charming curve there was to her brown head! He realised then for the first time that brown—warm, living brown with glints of amber—was the one colour for a woman's hair.

The next morning he rushed off indignantly to upbraid Adams.

"The girl's starving, I tell you—we can't let her starve," he exclaimed in an agony of remorse.

"Oh, yes we can," returned Adams with a cheerful brutality which enraged the younger man. "Starving isn't half so bad as writing trash. But you needn't look at me like that," he added, "she doesn't come here any longer now. She told me fiction was the field she meant to dig in."

"Well, you'll kill her among you," was Trent's threatening rejoinder; and filled with a righteous fury against literature he went back again to knock at the door of Christina's empty room. Once his mother came up also, but the girl, it appeared, was always out now, while the rejected manuscript thickened each morning upon the threshold. Several times Mrs. Trent arranged a little tray of luncheon and sent it up stairs by the old negro servant, but the message brought back was always that Christina was not at home. And then gradually, as the weeks went by, the dignity and the pathos of her struggle were surrounded in Trent's mind by a romantic halo. Her beauty borrowed from his poetic fancy the peculiar touch of atmosphere it lacked, and his thoughts dwelt more and more upon her slender, girlish figure, her smooth brown hair, and the flower-like sweetness of her face.

Then just as he had grown almost hopeless of ever seeing her again, he found her one evening in the elevator as he went up to his mother's rooms. The touch of her cold little hand on his sent a sudden shock to his heart, and while he looked anxiously into her face, he saw her go deadly pale and bite her lip sharply as if to bring back her consciousness by the sting of pain.

"You are ill," he said eagerly; "don't deny it, for haven't I eyes? Yes, you must, you shall come with me in to mother."

Even then she would have turned proudly away, but with his impulsive, lover's sympathy he led her from the elevator upon the landing on which he lived. "She is waiting for you—she wants you," he urged with passion; "and can't you see—oh, Christina, I want you, too!"

But his fervour only left her the more cold and shrinking, and she shook her head with a refusal that was almost angry.

"How dare you? Why did you make me come out?" she asked. "I must go back—I am not well—oh, I must go back!"

Over the angry tones of her voice he saw her entreating eyes shining like wet flowers, and as he looked into them it came to him in a revelation of knowledge that the meaning of everything that had been was made clear at last. He knew now why he had succeeded where Christina had failed—he knew why Laura had refused his love, and why, even in his misery, her refusal had left his heart untouched. And beyond all these things, he realised that now his boyhood was over and that from the experience of this one moment he had become a man.



CHAPTER II

THE DEIFICATION OF CLAY

Not until a month after the announcement of Laura's engagement did she come face to face for the first time with the ugly skeleton which lies hidden beneath the most beautiful of dreams. The spring had passed in a troubled rapture; and it was on one of the bright, warm days in early June that she found awaiting her on the hall table when she came in from her walk a letter addressed in a strange handwriting and bearing a strange foreign postmark. Beside this was a note from Kemper explaining a broken engagement of the day before; and she read first her lover's letter, which ended, as every letter of his had ended since the beginning of their love, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

With an emotion which repetition could never deaden, she stooped to kiss the last sentence he had written, before she turned carelessly to take up the strange foreign envelope, which she had thrown, with her veil and gloves, on the chair at her side. For a moment she pondered indifferently the address; then, almost as she broke the seal, the first words she read were those which lay hidden away in the love letter within her hand, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

In her first shock, even while the blow still blinded her eyes, she turned to seek wildly for some possible solution; and it was then that she discovered that the letter, in Kemper's handwriting, was addressed evidently to some other woman, since it bore the date of a day in June just three years before she had first met him. Three years ago he had declared himself to belong, heart and soul, to this other woman; and to-day, with no remembrance in his mind, it seemed, of that former passion, he could repeat quite as ardently the old threadbare avowal. How many times, she asked herself, had he used that characteristic ending to his love letters?—and the thing appeared to her suddenly to be the veriest travesty of the perfect self-surrender of love.

She was a woman capable of keen retrospective jealousy, and as she sat there, beaten down from her winged ecstasy by the blow that had struck at her from the silence, she told herself passionately that her life was wrecked utterly and her brief happiness at an end. Then, with that relentless power of intellect, from which her emotions were never entirely separated, she began deliberately to disentangle the true facts from the temporary impulses of her jealous anger.

"I am wounded and yet why am I wounded and by what right?" she demanded, with a pathetic groping after the self-condemnation which would acquit her lover, "he has lived his life, I know—I have always known it—and his letter has only brought forcibly before me a fact which I have accepted though I have not faced it." And it occurred to her, with the bitter sweetness of a consoling lie, that he could not have been false to her three years ago, since he was not then even aware of her existence. To dwell on this thought was like yielding to the power of an insidious drug, and yet she found herself forcing it almost deliriously against her saner judgment. "How could he wrong me so long as I was a stranger to him?" she repeated over and over. "On the day that he first loved me, his old life, with its sins and its selfish pleasures, was blotted out." But her conscience, even while she reasoned, told her that love could possess no power like this—that the man who loved her to-day, was the inevitable result of the man who had loved other women yesterday, and that there was as little permanence in the prompting of mere impulse as there was stability in change itself. So the voice within her spoke through the intolerable clearness of her intellect; and in her frantic desire to drown the thing it uttered, she repeated again and again the empty words which her heart prompted. Yet she knew even though she urged the falsehood upon her thoughts, that it was less her argument that pleaded for Kemper than the memory of a look in his face at animated instants, which rose now before her and appealed disturbingly to her emotions.

Three ways of conduct were open to her, she saw plainly enough. Wisdom suggested that she should not only put the letter aside, but that she should banish the recollection of its existence from her life. But, while she admitted that this would be the most courageous treatment of the situation, she recognised perfectly that to act upon such a decision was utterly beyond her strength. Though she were to destroy the object, was the memory of it not seared indelibly into her brain? and would not this memory return to embitter long afterward her happiest moments? "When he kisses me I shall remember that he has kissed other women and I feel that I shall grow to hate him if he should ever write to me again in those lying words." But she knew intuitively that he would use the same ending in his next letter, and that she would still be powerless to hate him, if only because of his disturbing look, which came back to her whenever she attempted to judge him harshly. "I might really hate him so long as he was absent from me, and yet if he came again and looked at me in that way for a single instant, I know that, in spite of my resolution, I would throw myself into his arms." And she felt that she despised herself for a bondage against which she struggled as hopelessly as a bird caught in a fowler's net.

Of the two ways which remained to her, she chose, in the end, the course which appeared to her to be the least ungenerous. She would not read the letter—the opening and the closing sentences she had seen by accident—for, when all was said, it had not been written for her eyes; and it struck her, as she brooded over it, that there would be positive disloyalty in thus stealing in upon the secrets of Kemper's past. No, she would place it in his hands, she determined finally, still unread; and in so doing she would not only defeat the purpose of the sender, but would prove to him as well as to herself that her faith in him was as unalterable as her love. After all to trust was easier than to distrust, for the brief agony of her indecision had brought to her the knowledge that the way of suspicion is the way of death.

And so when he came a little later she gave the letter, at which she had not again looked, into his hands. "Here is something that reached me only this morning," she said. "It is not worth thinking of, and I have read only the first and the last sentence."

At her words he unfolded the paper, throwing a mere casual glance, as he did so, upon the thin foreign envelope, which appeared to convey to him no hint of its significant contents.

Then, after a hurried skimming of the first page, he turned back again and carefully studied the address in a mystification which was pierced presently by a flash of light.

"By Jove, so she's heard it!" he exclaimed; and the instant afterward he added in a kind of grudging admiration, "Well, she's a devil!"

The incident appeared suddenly to engross him in a manner that Laura had not expected, and he stooped to examine the postmark with an attention which gave her, while she watched him, a queer sense of being left out quite in the cold.

"But why, in thunder, should she care?" he demanded.

"She?" there was no trouble in her voice, only an indifferent question.

"Oh, it's Jennie Alta, of course—she's perfectly capable of such a thing." Then, reaching out, he drew Laura into his arms with a confidence which had the air, she thought, of taking the situation almost too entirely for granted—of accepting too readily her attitude as well as his possession of her. "My darling girl, what a regular brick you are!" he said.

Though she realised, as he spoke, that this was the reward of her silence and her struggle, she told herself, in the next breath that, in some way, it was all inadequate. She had expected more than a phrase, and the very fact that the note of earnestness was absent from his voice but made her desire the sound of it the more passionately. Again she felt the baffled sensation which came to her in moments of their closest intimacy. Had his soul, in truth, eluded her for the last time? And was there in the profoundest emotion always a distance which it was forever impossible to bridge? Yet the uncertainty, the very lack of a fuller understanding only added fervour to the passion that burned in her heart.

"It's all over now, so we may as well warm ourselves by the failure of her deviltry," he observed presently, as he flung the crumpled paper into the fire. "I'm downright sorry she'll never know how little harm she's done."

"It might, I suppose, have been worse," suggested Laura.

"Well, I suppose so—and you mean me to believe that you didn't even read it?" he enquired with tender gayety.

She gave him her eyes frankly as an answer to his appeal for faith. "Why should I? I love you," she replied.

For an instant—a single sufficing instant—he met her look with an earnestness that was equal to her own. The man in him, she almost cried out in her exultation, was touched at last.

"May God grant that your confidence will never fail me," he rejoined a little sadly.

"When that comes it will be time to die," was her answer.

Taking her hand in his he held it in a close pressure for several minutes. Then the earnestness she had arrested fled from her touch, and when he spoke again she could not tell whether his words were uttered sincerely or simply as the outcome of his sarcastic humour.

"If you were a flesh-and-blood woman instead of an eccentric sprite," he remarked, "I suppose you'd want me to make a clean breast of the whole affair, but I can't because, to tell the truth, I've forgotten everything about it."

"Then you didn't honestly love her, so it doesn't matter."

"Love her! Pshaw!" Though he laughed out the words there was an angry flush in his face. "Do you think I'm the kind of man to love a mere singing animal? And besides," he concluded with a brutal cynicism which repelled her sharply, "I'm of an economical turn, you know, and the love of such women comes too high. I've seen them eat up a fellow's income as if it were a box of Huyler's." The words were no sooner uttered than his mood changed quickly and he was on his feet. "But I didn't mean to give you the whole morning, sweetheart, I merely looked in to say that I wanted you to come out with me in the car this afternoon. There's a fine breeze blowing."

For a thoughtful moment she hesitated before she answered. "I told Roger Adams that I should be at home," she returned, "but I dare say he won't mind not seeing me."

"Oh, I dare say," he retorted gayly. "Well, I'll pick you up, then, on the stroke of five."

As he left the room she went over to the window, and when he came out a little later, he turned upon the sidewalk to glance up at her and wave his hand. She was happy, perfectly happy, she told herself, as she looked eagerly after the last glimpse of his figure; but even while she framed the thought into words, she was conscious that her heart throbbed high in disappointment and that her eyes were already blind with tears.

When Adams sent up his card, at twenty minutes before five o'clock, she lingered a few moments before going downstairs in her motoring coat and veil. In response to her embarrassed excuses, he made only a casual expression of regret for the visit he had missed.

"It's a fine afternoon—just right for a run," he remarked, adding after a brief hesitation. "It's the proper thing, I suppose, to offer you congratulations, but I'm a poor hand, as you know, at making pretty speeches. I wish you happiness with all my heart—that's about all there is to say—isn't it?"

"That's about all," she echoed, "and at least if I'm not happy I shall have only myself to blame."

The silence that followed seemed to them both unnatural and constrained; and he broke it at last with a remark which sounded to him, while he uttered it, almost irrelevant.

"I've never seen much of Kemper, but I always liked him."

"I know," she nodded, "you were chums at College."

"Oh, hardly that, but we knew each other pretty well. He's a lucky chap and I hope he has the sense to see it."

"There's no doubt whatever of his sense!" she laughed. Then, growing suddenly serious, she leaned toward him with her old earnest look. "No one has ever known him, I think, just as I do," she went on, "because no one understands how wonderfully good he really is. He's so good," she finished almost triumphantly, as if she had overcome by her assertion a point which he disputed, "that there are times when he makes me feel positively wicked."

Having no answer ready but a smile, he gave her this pleasantly enough, so that she might take it, if she chose, for a complete agreement. Though his heart was filled with repressed tenderness, there was nothing further now that he could say to her, for he realised as he looked into her face, that there was little room in her happiness either for his tenderness or for himself. An aversion, too, to meeting Kemper awoke in him, and so, after a few minutes of trivial conversation, he rose and held out his hand.

"I'm very busy just now, so I may not see you again for quite awhile," he said at parting, "but remember if ever you should want me that I am always waiting."

A little later, as he walked up the street in the June sunshine, he saw Kemper's new automobile spinning rapidly from the direction of Fifth Avenue.



CHAPTER III

THE GREATEST OF THESE

For a minute after Kemper had passed in his car, Adams turned back and stood looking down the long street filled with pleasant June sunshine. In the distance a hand-organ was grinding out a jerky sentimental air, and beside him, at the corner by which he stood, a crippled vender of fruit had halted his little cart of oranges and apples.

A year ago Adams might have told himself, in the despair of ignorance, that since Laura had given her love to Kemper she was lost to him forever. But he had learned now that this could not be true—that she was too closely knit into his destiny to separate herself entirely from it; and there came to him, while he stood there, a strange mystic assurance that she would some day feel that she had need of him again. His love had passed triumphantly through its first earthly stages, and in the large impassioned yearning with which he thought of her there was, so far as he himself was conscious, but little left of a sharper personal desire. All desire, indeed, which has its root in the physical craving for possession seemed to have gone out of him in the last few months; and since the earliest dawn of that deeper consciousness within his soul, he had almost ceased to think of himself as an isolated individual life.

To let go the personal was to fall back again on the Eternal; between the soul and God, he had learned in his deepest agony, there is room for nothing more impregnable than the illusion of self. As Roger Adams—as a mere separate existence, he was a failure. The things which he had desired in life he had not possessed; the things which he had possessed he had ceased very soon, in any vital sense, to desire. Of his life's work, so big at the beginning, he saw now that he had made but a small achievement—a volume of essays on the writings of other men and a few years editing of a magazine which had absorbed his strength without yielding him the smallest return of fame. On every side, from all avenues of hope or of mere impulse, there had crowded upon him, he admitted smiling, but disappointment and disillusion. He had played for happiness as every man plays for it from the cradle, he had staked his throw as boldly, he had made his resolves as desperately, as any of his fellows, and yet at the end of his forty years he had not a single object to put forward as his reward. Nothing remained to him! As the world counts success he could show only failure.

But the larger vision was still before him, and he knew that all these thoughts were the cheapest falsehood. In spite of appearances, in spite of the outward emptiness of his existence, he had not failed; and in the hour that he had put life aside he had for the first time in his whole experience begun really to live. In surrendering his own small individual being he knew that he had entered into the possession of a being immeasurably larger than his own.

He looked at the fruit vender smiling, and the man's answering smile came to him like the clasp of fellowship. "Did he, too, understand?" was Adams' unspoken question, "had he, also, found the key that unlocked his prison?" and there flowed into his heart something of the rapture with which Laura had cried: "I've grown to the light!" In each exclamation there was ecstasy, but in hers it was the short, troubled ecstasy of the senses, which hears its doom even in the hour of its own fulfilment; while from his finer joy there shone forth that radiant energy, in which is both warmth and light, both rest and action, which illumines not only the soul within, but transfigures and refines the mere dull ordinary facts of life.

As he stood there the car passed him again, and Laura and Kemper both turned, smiling, to look back at him. When Laura's long white veil was lost, with a last flutter, in the sunshine, he nodded to the fruit vender, and crossing to Broadway started in the direction of his home.

He had asked Trent to dine with him—the boy looked fagged he thought, and it might do him good to talk freely about his play. Then he recalled several letters that he had put aside for the sake of seeing Laura; and retracing his steps, he went back to his office and sat down before his desk. It surprised him sometimes to find how little irksome such uninteresting details had become.

They talked late over their cigars and coffee, and when at last Trent rose, with a laughing reminder of his mother, and went out into the hall to put on his overcoat, Adams passed by him, after a final handshake, and entered his darkened study at the end of the hall. He heard the door close quickly as Trent left the house, and his mind was still full of the boy's dramatic ambitions, as he paused beside his desk and bent down to raise the wick of the green lamp. He had fallen into the habit of sitting up rather late now, and there was a paper on his blotting-pad which he was preparing for the coming issue of his magazine. After glancing hastily over, he found that the last few sentences were rearranging themselves in his thoughts, and he had set himself patiently to the redraughting of the paragraph, when a slight sound at the door caused him to look up suddenly with the suspended blue pencil still, in his hand. It was too late for the maids, he knew—they had already gone to bed before Trent left—and he knew also that the person who entered at this hour must have opened the outer door by means of a latch-key. The soft, slow movement outside sent a nervous shiver through him; he was aware the next instant that he gripped the pencil more closely in his hand; and then, rising to his feet with a breathless impulse to be face to face at once with the inevitable moment, he made a single step forward, while he watched the knob turn, the door open slowly, and Connie cross the threshold and pause confusedly as if blinded by the lamplight.

The pencil dropped from his hand; he heard it fall with a thud upon the carpet; and then he heard nothing else except the beating of his own arteries in his ears. Time seemed to stop suddenly and then to whirl madly forward while he stood rooted to his square of carpet, with his useless hands hanging helplessly at his sides. It was the supreme instant his life that was before him, and yet he was as powerless to meet it as the infant in the womb to avert the hour of its birth. Dumb and petrified by very force of the will within him, he waited immovable on the spot of carpet, while his eyes saw only the visible wreck of the woman who stood upon his threshold. His dreams of her had been visions of horror, but the most pitiable of them had fallen far short of the reality as he saw it now. From her streaked blonde hair, already powdered with gray, to her exhausted bedraggled feet, which seemed hardly to support her trembling body, she stood there, terrible and full of anguish, like the most tragic ghost of his imaginary horrors. Face to face with each other they were held speechless by the knowledge that there was no word by which the past might be justified or the future made any easier for them to meet; and as in all great instants of life the thing that was said between them was uttered at last in an unbroken silence.

Then as they stood there a slight sound changed the atmosphere of the room. The shade of the lamp, which Adams had raised too high, cracked with a sharp noise and fell to the floor in broken pieces; and at the shock Connie gave a hysterical shriek and lifted to Adams the frightened glance of her ignorant blue eyes.

"I—I had nowhere to go and I am very tired," she said, in her old tone of childish irritation, "I don't think I was ever so tired in my life before."

Her voice snapped the icy constraint which held him and he knew now that he was ready to face the hour on its own terms. His will was as the strength of the strong, and he felt standing there, that he would ask no quarter of his fate. Let it be what it would, he knew that it was powerless to close on him again the door of his prison.

"Then you did right to come back; Connie," he said quietly, "you did right to come back."

His words rang out almost exultantly, but the moment afterward he was terrified by their immediate effect—for Connie—throwing herself forward upon the floor, burst wildly into one of her old spells of weeping, calling upon God, upon himself, and upon the man whom she had loved and hated. The frenzied beating of her small, helpless hands, the streaming of her tears, the quiver of her wrecked, emaciated body, the convulsed agony that looked at him from her face—these things made their appeal to that compassion by which he lived, and he found that the way which he had thought difficult had become to him as familiar as the breath he drew.

"It is all over now—there is nothing but quiet here," he said.

She lay still instantly at his words, her face half hidden in the cushions of the sofa; and turning from her he went into the dining-room and brought back a glass of wine and some bread and milk. As he fed her, she opened her lips with a little humble, tired movement which was utterly unlike the Connie whom he remembered. Was it possible that in her degradation she had learned the first rare grace of spirit which is meekness?

"Take it all, every drop," he said once, when she would have pushed the spoon away; and turning obediently, she swallowed the last drops of milk.

"It is very good," she murmured as he rose to put down the emptied bowl. The words brought a quick moisture of recollection to his eyes, and he found himself asking if the time had come at last when Connie could find pleasure in the taste of bread and milk?

After this she lay motionless on the floor until he carried her upstairs and placed her upon the bed as he had done so often on her past reckless nights. But there was no remembrance in his mind now of that former service; and as he turned on the electric light and drew the blankets over her shivering body, he was hardly surprised even by the readiness with which events, left perfectly alone, had managed to adjust themselves. Why he had acted as he had done, he could not have told; had he stopped to think of it he would probably have said that he had seen no other way. Connie as his wife, as the mother even of his dead child, had come to mean nothing to him any more; but Connie as something far deeper than this—as the object of inexhaustible compassion, as the tragedy of mortal failure—possessed now a significance which no human relation could cover by a name. Beyond the abandoned wife, he could see—not less clearly than on that night when he had waited in the snow outside the opera house—the small terrified soul caught in a web of circumstance from which there was no escape.

Standing at daybreak in the centre of his study floor, he remembered the last humble look with which she had closed her eyes; and he saw in it a gratitude that was like the first faint dawning of the daybreak. For the first time in his life he had watched in Connie's eyes the struggle for consciousness which was as the struggle of an animal in whom a soul had come painfully to birth; and the memory of it sent a strange, an almost divine happiness to his heart. Was it possible that the will of God had moved here while he slept? Was it possible, he asked himself in an ecstasy of wonder, that in spite of all sin, all failure, all degradation, all despair, he had really won Connie's soul?



CHAPTER IV

ADAMS WATCHES IN THE NIGHT AND SEES THE DAWN

For a week after her home-coming Connie lay ill and almost unconscious in her chamber. Since her first wild outburst on the night of her return she had allowed no hint of remorse or gratitude to break through the obstinate silence upon her lips; and the impression she gave Adams, on his occasional visits to her room, was of a soul and body too exhausted for even the slightest emotional activity. She had made of her life what her desire prompted; and she seemed to suggest now, lying there wrecked and silent, that the end of all self-gratification is in utter weariness of spirit.

Then gradually, as the long June days went by, life appeared feebly to renew itself and move within her. At first it was only a look, raised to Adams, when he bent over her, with something of the pathetic, expectant wonder of a sick child; then a helpless expressive gesture, and at last he found in her eye a clearer and fuller recognition of her surroundings and of himself. The gratitude he had seen on that terrible night surprised him again one day as he spoke to her; and after this he began to watch for its reappearance with an eagerness which he himself found it difficult to understand. Of all virtues gratitude was most lacking in the woman who had been his wife; and this slow, silent growth of it, showed to him as no less a miracle than the coming of the spring or the resurrection of the dead earth beneath the rain. There were moments even, when he felt that he must move softly, lest he disturb the working of those spiritual forces which make for righteousness by strange and wonderful ways. Strange and wonderful, indeed, he had found, beyond all miracles were the means by which the soul might be brought back to the knowledge of its immortal destiny. Was it not under the eyes of a harlot that he, himself, had seen the mystery which is God's goodness? and so might he not find that Connie had learned, in the depths of her self-abasement, that the light which surrounds the pleasures of the senses is full of enchantment only for the distant, deluded vision?

But there were other hours when he asked himself if he were strong enough for the thing which he had before him—strong enough, not for the swift, exalted moment of the sacrifice, but for the daily fret and torment of a perfectly unpoetic self-denial. Would the light go out again and the exaltation fail him before many days? Then he remembered the pathos of her struggling smile, the timid groping of her hands, the deprecating gratitude he found in her look; and it seemed to him when all other resources were exhausted—when his energy, his duty, his religion flagged—that his compassion would still remain in his heart to render possible all that was impossible to his will alone. Compassion! this, he came to find in the end, was the true and the necessary key to any serious understanding of life.

He was still putting these questions to himself, when, coming in one afternoon from his office, he found Connie, wearing a loose fitting wrapper of some pale coloured muslin, awaiting him in an easy chair beside her window. It was the first time that she had left her bed; and when he offered a few cheerful congratulations upon her recovered strength, she looked up at him with a face which still showed signs of the hideous ravages of the last few months. In her hollowed cheeks, in her quivering unsteady lips, and in the dull grayness of her hair, from which the golden dye had faded, he could find now no faint traces of that delicate beauty he had loved. At less than thirty years she looked the embodiment of uncontrolled and reckless middle-age.

"It isn't that I'm really better—not really," she said, in answer to his look almost more than to his words, "but the doctor told me that I must get up and dress to-day. He wants me to go to the hospital this afternoon."

Her voice was so composed—so unlike the usual nervous quiver of her speech—that at first he could only repeat her words in the vague blankness of his surprise.

"To the hospital? Then you are ill?"

"I asked him not to tell you," she replied, with a tremor of the lips which had almost the effect of a smile, "he didn't understand—he couldn't, so I wanted you to hear it first from me. I'll never be any better—I'll never get really well again—without such an operation—and he thinks, he says, that it must be at once—without delay."

As she spoke she stretched out her hand for a glass of water that stood at her side, and in the movement her wedding ring slipped from her thin finger and rolled to a little distance upon the floor. Picking it up he handed it back to her, but she placed it indifferently upon the table. Her attitude, with its dull quiet of sensation, impressed him at the instant almost more than the greater importance of what she told him. Was it this acceptance of the thing, he wondered, which appeared to rob it of all terror in her mind? and was the dumb resignation in her face and voice, merely an expression of the physical listlessness of despair? There was about her now that peculiar dignity which belongs less to the human creature than to the gravity of the moment in which he stands; and he remembered vividly that he had never watched any soul in the supreme crisis of its experience without the stirring in himself of a strange sentiment of reverence. Even the most abandoned was covered in that exalted hour by some last rag of honour.

"Then you have suffered great pain?" he asked, because no other words came to him that he could utter.

"Weeks ago—yes—but not now. It does not hurt me now."

"And you thought, yourself, that it was so serious as this?"

She shook her head. "Oh, no, I never thought of it. When it came I drove it off with brandy."

The absence in her of any appeal for pity moved him far more than the loudest outcry could have done.

"Poor girl!" he said, and stopped in terror, lest he had obtruded the personal element into a situation which seemed so devoid of feeling.

"It was a pity," she returned to his surprise very quietly; and without looking at him, she spoke presently in a voice which struck him as having a strange quality of hollowness, "it was a pity; but it can't be helped. You might try and try because you're made that way, but it wouldn't, in the end, do the very least bit of good. If I live till to-morrow and get well and come out of the hospital, it will all be over just exactly what it was before. Not at first, perhaps—oh, I know, not at first!—but afterward, when things bored me, the taste would come back again."

"Hush!" he said quickly, with a forward movement, "hush! you shall not think such things!"

"The taste would come back again!" she repeated, with a kind of savage sternness. "I am not strong and the doctor told me long ago that there was no cure."

"Then he lied—there is always a cure."

"There is not—there is not," she insisted harshly, dwelling upon the words because in them she found a keen agony which relieved her lethargy of bitterness, "I am different now for a while, but it would not last. I am very tired, but after I have rested—"

"What would not last?" he broke in, as she hesitated over her unfinished sentence.

For a long pause she waited, searching in vain, he saw, for some phrase which might describe the thing she had not as yet thought out clearly in her own dazed mind. Then, at last, she spoke almost in a whisper, "the freedom."

The word gave him a sudden shock of gladness. "Then you are free to-day—you feel it now?"

She raised her hand, pushing back her faded hair, as if she would look more closely at an object which rose but dimly before her eyes.

"I want you to know all—everything," she went on slowly, "I want you to understand how low I sank—to what fearful places I came in the end. At first it was merely discontent, and I felt that it was only happiness I wanted. I loved him—for a time, I think, I really loved him—you know whom I mean—but at last, when I began to weary him, when he knew what I took, he cursed me and left me alone in the street one night. Then a devil was let loose within me—I wanted hell, and I went further—further."

Her voice was still lifeless, but while she spoke he felt his teeth bite into his lips with a force which stung him to the consciousness of what she said. There awoke in him a triumph, almost a glory in the rage he felt, and he knew now why men had always believed in a hell—why they had even come at last to hope for it.

"I never meant to come back," she began again, after a pause in which the tumult of his feeling seemed to fill the air with violence, "but I had reached the end of wretchedness, I was tired and hungry, and nothing that happened really mattered. If you had told me to go away I don't think that I should have cared. I meant, in that case, to sell my coat for a bottle of brandy, and to put an end to it all while I had the courage of drink."

Her bent disordered head trembled slightly, but she appeared to him to have passed in her misery beyond the bounds where any human sympathy could be of use. She was no longer his wife, nor he her husband; she was no longer even a fellow mortal between whom and himself there might be some common ground of understanding. Absolutely alone and unapproachable, he knew that she had reached the ultimate desolation of her soul.

"It was because you did not send me away that I have told you," she said quietly. "It is because, too, I want you to know that I—understand."

To the end her thoughts were but poor faltering, half-developed things; yet he knew what she meant to say, though she, herself, had divined it only through some pathetic, dumb instinct.

"I think I know what you mean," he said presently, when it appeared to him that her confession was over; but after he had spoken she took up her sentence with the dead calm in which she had come to rest.

"There's no use saying that I'm sorry and yet—I am sorry."

Her look of weariness was so great that with the words she seemed to lose instantly her remaining strength; and he gathered in her silence, an impression that she was reaching blindly out to him for help.

"Promise me that you will stay with me as long as they will let you?" she implored, with a quick return to her convulsion of childish terror.

He promised readily; but when the time came for her to go, she had entirely recovered her aspect of listless fortitude, and during the short drive to the hospital, she talked, without stopping, of perfectly indifferent subjects—of the dust in the street, the deserted look of the closed houses, and of the wedding present she wished to buy for a maid who was to be married in the coming week.

"Let it be something really thee," she asked, and this single request marked for him, as she uttered it, a change in Connie greater than any he had seen before.

At the hospital he expected a relapse into her hysterical dread, but, to his surprise, she watched the surgical preparations with a calmness in which there was a kind of passive curiosity. While the nurse laid out her nightdress on the small white iron bed, and braided her hair in two long, slender braids, she assisted with a patient attention to such details which seemed hardly to account for the terrible event for which they prepared. Her hair, he noticed, was combed straight back from her forehead in the fashion in which she might have worn it as a little girl; and this simple change gave her an expression which was almost one of injured innocence. Age and experience were suddenly wiped out of her face, not by any act of mental illumination, but merely by the ruffles of her white nightdress and the simple childish fashion in which they had combed her hair.

When they came to take her upstairs to the operating room upon the roof, he would have gone also, but after reaching the top landing, she turned to him upon the threshold and told him that she would rather he came no farther.

"I can bear everything better alone now," she said; and so when they carried her inside he turned away and entered the little waiting room at the other end of the hall. The place stifled him with the odours of chloroform and ether, and going to the window, he threw open the blinds and leaned out into the street. With the first breath of air in his face, he realised that it was he, and not Connie, who had turned coward at the end; and he wondered if it were merely waning vitality which had assumed in her an appearance of such natural dignity. She had lived her life in terror of imaginary horrors and now in presence of the actual suffering she could show herself to be absolutely unafraid. Not she but he, himself, now shivered at the thought of her unconscious body in the surgeon's hands, and he felt that it would be a positive relief to change places with her at the instant—to confront in her stead either the returning pangs of consciousness or the greater mystery of her unawakening.

In the small, newly painted room, which smelt of chloroform and varnish, he sat staring through the half open door to the hall where a surgeon, wearing a shirt with roiled-up sleeves, had just hurried by. A nurse passed carrying a basin from which a light steam rose; then a young doctor with a brown leather bag, and presently a second surgeon, who walked rapidly, and turned up his cuffs over his fat arms, just before he reached the threshold.

Connie was no longer his wife, Adams had told himself; and yet this fact seemed not in the least to lessen the importance of the news which he awaited. For the first time he understood clearly how trivial are any mere social relations between man and woman.

Then, while he watched the hand of the clock on the mantel drag slowly around the great staring face, he compelled his thoughts gradually to detach themselves from her helpless body, as it lay outstretched on the table across the hall, and to regather about the girlish figure he had first seen under cherry coloured ribbons. The old vibrant emotion was but ashes; try as he would he could bring back but a pale memory of that golden moment; and this emptiness where there had once been life, lessened forever in his mind the value of all purely human passion. But his personal attitude to her was lost suddenly in his wider regret that such tragedies were possible—that the girl with the delicate babyish face could have become a creature to whom vice was a desired familiar thing.

"Did the outcome lie in my hands? and might I have prevented it?" he demanded. "If I had stood in the way of her impulse, would it have turned aside from me at the last?" And the salvation of the world appeared to him to depend upon just this courageous coming between evil and the desire which it invited—for had not the soul of the weak, been delivered, in spite of all moral subterfuge, into the power of the strong?

Then his vision broadened, and he looked from Connie's life to the lives of men and women who were more fortunate than she; but all human existence, everywhere one and the same, showed to him as the ceaseless struggle after the illusion of a happiness which had no part in any possession nor in any object. He thought of Laura, with the radiance of her illusion still upon her; of Gerty, groping after the torn and soiled shreds of hers; of Kemper, stripped of his and yet making the pretence that it had not left him naked; of Perry Bridewell, dragging his through the defiling mire that led to emptiness; and then of all the miserable multitude of those that live for pleasure. And he saw them, one and all, bound to the wheel which turned even as he looked.

The door across the hall opened and they brought Connie out, breathing quietly and still unconscious. He followed the stretcher downstairs; but after they had placed her upon the bed, he came back again and sat down, as before, in the little stuffy room. Presently he would go home, he thought, but as the night wore on, he became too exhausted for further effort, and closing his eyes at last, he fell heavily asleep.

When he awoke the day was already breaking, and the electric light burned dimly in the general wash of grayness. About him the atmosphere had a strangely sketchy effect, as if it had been laid on crudely with a few strokes from a paint brush.

The window was still open, and going over to it he leaned out and stood for several minutes, too tired to make the necessary effort to collect his thoughts, while he looked across the sleeping city to the pale amber dawn which was beginning to streak the sky with colour. The silence was very great; in the faint light the ordinary objects upon which he gazed—the familiar look of the houses and the streets—appeared to him less the forms of a material substance than the result of some shadowy projection of mind. All the earth and sky showed suddenly as belonging to this same transient manifestation of thought; and gradually, as he stood there, his perceptions were reinforced by a sense which is not that of the eye nor of the ear. He neither saw nor heard, yet he felt that the spirit had moved toward him on the face of the dawn; and the "I" was not more evident to his illumined consciousness than was the "Thou." He beheld God, with the vision which is beyond vision; the light of his eyes, the breath of his body were less plain to him than was the mystery of his soul. And the universal life, he saw—spirit and matter, fibre and impulse, vibration of atom and quiver of aspiration—was but an agonised working out into this consciousness of God. With the revelation his own life was changed as by a miracle of nature; right became no longer difficult, but easy; and not the day only, but his whole existence and the end to which it moved were made as clear to him as the light before his eyes.

Again he thought of Laura, still under the troubled radiance of her illusion, and his heart dissolved in sympathy, not for her only, but for all mankind—for Kemper, whom she loved, for Gerty, for Connie, for Perry Bridewell. "They seek for happiness, but it is mine," he thought; "and because they seek it first, it will keep away from them forever. It is not to be found in pleasure, nor in the desire of any object, nor in the fulfilment of any love—for I, who have none of these things, am happier than they."

He turned away from the window toward the door, and it was at this instant that one of the nurses ran up to him.

"We thought you had gone home," she said, "so we have rung you up by telephone for an hour—" She stopped and paused hesitating for an instant; then meeting the quiet question in his look, she added simply, "Your wife died, still unconscious, an hour ago."



CHAPTER V

TREATS OF THE POVERTY OF RICHES

On the morning of Connie's death, Gerty, dropping in shortly before luncheon, brought the news to Laura.

"Do you know for once in my life my social instinct has failed me," she confessed in her first breath, "I am perfectly at a loss as to how the situation should be met. Ought one to ignore her death or ought one not to?"

"Do you mean," asked Laura, "that you can't decide whether to write to him or not?"

"Of course that's a part of it, but, the main thing is to know in one's own mind whether one ought to regard it as an affliction or a blessing. It really isn't just to Providence to be so undecided about the character of its actions—particularly when in this case it appears to have arranged things so beautifully to suit everybody who is concerned."

"It was, to say the least, considerate," remarked Laura, with the cynical flavour she adopted occasionally from Kemper or from Gerty, "and it is certainly a merciful solution of the problem, but does it ever occur to you," she added more earnestly, "to wonder what would have happened if she hadn't died?"

"Oh, she simply had to die," said Gerty, "there was nothing else that she could do in decency—not that she would have been greatly influenced by such a necessity," she commented blandly.

"I'd like all the same to know how he would have met the difficulty, for that he would have met it, I am perfectly assured."

"Well, I, for one, can afford to leave my curiosity unsatisfied," responded Gerty; then she added in a voice that was almost serious. "Do you know there's really something strangely loveable about the man. I sometimes think," she concluded with her fantastic humour, "that I might have married him myself with very little effort on either side."

"And lived happily forever after on the International Review?"

"Oh, I don't know but what it would be quite as easy as to live on clothes. I don't believe poverty, after all, is a bit worse than boredom. What one wants is to be interested, and if one isn't, life is pretty much the same in a surface car or in an automobile. I don't believe I should have minded surface cars the least bit," she finished pensively.

"Wait till you've tried them—I have."

"What really matters is the one great thing," pursued Gerty with a positive philosophy, "and money has about as much relation to happiness as the frame has to the finished picture—all it does is to show it off to the world. Now I like being shown off, I admit—but I'd like it all the better if there were a little more of the stuff upon the canvas."

"If you were only as happy as I am!" said Laura softly.

For a moment Gerty looked at her with a sweetness in which there was an almost maternal understanding. "I wish I were, darling," was what she answered.

Her hard, bright eyes grew suddenly wistful, and she looked at Laura as if she would pierce through the enveloping flesh to the soul within. Of all the people she had ever known Laura was the only one, she had sometimes declared, who had never lied to her. The world had lied to her, Kemper had lied to her, Perry had lied to her more than all; and she had come at last to feel, almost without explaining it to herself, that the truth was in Laura as in some obscure, mystic sense the sacrament was in the bread and wine upon the altar. Though she herself was quite content to slip away from her ideals, she felt that to believe in somebody was as necessary to her life as the bread she ate. It made no difference that she should number among the profane multitude who found their way back to the fleshpots, but her heart demanded that her friend should remain constant to the prophetic vision and the promised land. Laura was not only the woman whom she loved, she had become to her at last almost a vicarious worship. What she couldn't believe Laura believed in her stead; where she was powerless even to be good, Laura became not only good but noble. And through all her friendship, from that first day at school to the present moment, she remembered now that no hint of jealousy had ever looked at her from Laura's eyes. "A thrush could hardly borrow the plumage of a paroquet," Trent had said; and the brilliant loveliness which had disturbed the peace of other women she had known, had produced in Laura only an increasing delight, a more fervent rapture. As she looked on the delicate, poetic face of the woman before her, she found herself asking, almost in terror, if it were possible that her friend was not only reconciled but positively enamoured of the world? Had Laura, also, entered into a rivalry which would be as relentless and more futile than her own? Would she, too, waste her life in an effort to give substance to a shadow and to render permanent the most impermanent of earthly things? But the question came and went so abruptly that the minute afterward she had entirely forgotten the passage of it through her mind.

"What a bore of a summer I shall have," she observed lightly, with one of those swift changes of subject so characteristic of her restless temperament. "The doctor has ordered me back to camp in the Adirondacks, and unless Arnold and yourself take pity on me heaven knows whether I'll be any better than a fungus by the autumn."

She was arranging her veil before the mirror as she spoke, and she paused now to survey with a dissatisfied frown one of the large black spots which had settled across her nose. "I told Camille I couldn't stand dots like these," she remarked with an equally irrelevant flash of irritation.

"Of course I'll come for July if you ask me," replied Laura, ignoring the question of the veil for the sake of the more important issue, "I can't answer for Arnold, but I think it's rather what he's looking forward to."

"Oh, he told me yesterday that he'd come if I could persuade you. He didn't have the good manners to leave me in doubt as to what the attraction for him would be."

Laura's happy laugh rewarded her. "This will be the first summer he's spent in America for ten years," she replied, "so I hope he'll find me worth the sacrifice of Europe."

"Then he's really given up his trip abroad for you?"

"There's hardly need to ask that—but don't you think it a quite sufficient reason?"

"Oh, I guess so," returned Gerty carelessly. "Once I'd have been quite positive about it, but that was in the days when I was a fool. Now I'm not honestly sure that you're doing wisely to let him stay. A man is perfectly capable of making a sacrifice for a woman in the heat of emotion, but there are nine chances to one that he never forgives her for it afterward. Take my advice, my dear, and simply make him go—shove the boat off yourself if there's no other way. He'll probably love you ten times more while he's missing you than he will be able to do through a long hot summer at your side."

"Gerty, Gerty, how little you know love!" said Laura.

"My dear, I never pretended to. I've given my undivided time and attention to men."

"Well, he doesn't want in the least to go—he'll tell you so himself when you see him—but I do wish that your views of life weren't quite so awful."

Gerty was still critically regarding her appearance in the mirror, and before answering she ran her hand lightly over the exquisite curve of her hip in her velvet gown.

"I'm sorry they strike you that way," she responded amiably, "because they are probably what your own will be five years from now. Then I may positively count on you both for July?" she asked without the slightest change in her flippant tone, "and I'll try to decoy Billy Lancaster for August. He's still young enough to find the virgin forest congenial company."

"But I thought Perry hated him!" exclaimed Laura, in surprise.

"He does—perfectly—but I can't see that you've made an argument out of that. Billy's really very handsome—I wish you knew him—he's one of the few men of my acquaintance who has any hair left on the top of his head."

Her flippancy, her shallowness left Laura for a minute in doubt as to how she should accept her words. Then rising from her chair, she laid her restraining hands on Gerty's shoulders.

"My darling, do be careful," she entreated.

The shoulders beneath her hands rose in an indifferent shrug. "Oh, I've been careful," laughed Gerty, "but it isn't any fun. Perry isn't careful and he gets a great deal more out of life than I do."

"A great deal more of what?" demanded Laura.

For an instant Gerty thought attentively, while the mocking gayety changed to a serious hardness upon her face.

"More forgetfulness," she answered presently. "That's what we all want isn't it? Call it by what name you will—religion, dissipation, morphia—what we are all trying to do is to intoxicate ourselves into forgetting that life is life."

"But it isn't what I want," insisted Laura, "I want to feel everything and to know that I feel it."

"Well, you're different," rejoined Gerty. "What I'm after is to be happy, and I care very little what form it takes or what kind of happiness mine may be. I've ceased to be particular about the details even—if Billy Lancaster is my happiness I'll devour him and never waste an idle moment in regret. Why should I?—Perry doesn't."

"So there's an end to Perry?"

"An end! Oh, you delicious child, there's only a beginning. Perry's cult is the inaccessible—present him with all the virtues and he will run away; ignore him utterly and he'll make your life insupportable by his presence. For the last twenty-four hours I assure you he's stuck to me—like a briar."

"Then it's all for Perry—I mean this Billy?" asked Laura.

Gerty shook her head while her brows grew slowly together in an expression of angry bitterness.

"It was in the beginning," she responded, "but I'm not sure that it is now—not entirely at any rate. The boy's worship is incense to my nostrils, I suppose. Yes, I've always been a monument of indifference to men, but I confess to an increasing enthusiasm for Billy's looks."

"An enthusiasm which Perry doesn't share?"

The laughter in Gerty's voice was a little sad. "I declare it really hurts me that I've ceased to notice. The poor silly man offered to give up his golf to go motoring with me yesterday afternoon, and I went and was absolutely bored to death. I couldn't help thinking how much more interesting Billy is."

Her veil was at last adjusted to her satisfaction; and with a last brilliant glance, which swept her entire figure, she turned from the mirror and paused to draw on her gloves while she bent over and kissed Laura upon the cheek.

"Goodbye, dear, if Billy turns out to be any real comfort, I'll share him with you."

"Oh, I have a Billy of my own!" retorted Laura; and though her words were mirthful there was a seriousness in her look which lasted long after the door had closed upon her friend. She was thinking of Adams, wondering if she should write to him, and how she should word her note; and whether any expression of sympathy would not sound both trivial and absurd? Then it seemed to her that there was nothing that she could say because she realised that she stood now at an impassable distance from him. The connection of thought even which had existed between them was snapped at the instant; and she felt that she was no longer interested in the things which had once absorbed them. The friendship was still there, she supposed, but the spirit of each, the thoughts, the very language, had become strangely different, and she told herself that she could no longer speak to him since she had lost the power to speak in any words he might understand.

"How can I pretend to value what no longer even interests me?" she thought, "and if I attempt to explain—if I tell him that my whole nature has changed because I have chosen one thing from out the many—what possible good, after all, could come of putting this into words? Suppose I say to him quite frankly: 'I am content to let everything else go since I have found happiness?' And yet is it true that I have found it? and how do I know that this is really happiness, after all?"

It seemed to her, as she asked the question, that her whole life dissolved itself into the answer; and she became conscious again of the two natures which dwelt within her—of the nature which lived and of the nature which kept apart and questioned. She remembered the night after her first meeting with Kemper and the conviction she had felt then that her destiny lay mapped out for her in the hand of God. Her soul on that night had seemed, in the words of the quaint old metaphor, a vase which she held up for God to fill. The light had run over then, but now, she realised with a pang, it had ceased to shine through her body, and her vase was empty. Even love had not filled it for her as her dream had done.

Again she asked if it were happiness, and still she could find no answer. The quickened vibration of the pulses, the concentration of thought upon a single presence, the restless imagination which leaped from the disappointment of to-day to the possible fulfilment of to-morrow—these things were bound up in her every instant, and yet could she, even in her own thoughts, call these things happiness? She told off her minutes by her heartbeats; but there were brief suspensions of feeling when she turned to ask herself if in all its height and force and vividness there was still no perceptible division between agony and joy.

For at times the way grew dark to her and she felt that she stumbled blindly in a strange place. From the heights of the ideal she had come down to the ordinary level of the actual; and she was as ignorant of the forces among which she moved as a bird in the air is ignorant of a cage. Gerty alone, she knew, was familiar with it all—had travelled step by step over the road before her—yet, she realised that she found no help in Gerty, nor in any other human being—for was it not ordained in the beginning that every man must come at last into the knowledge of the spirit only through the confirming agony of flesh?

"No, I am not happy now because he is not utterly and entirely mine," she thought, "there are only a few hours of the day when he is with me—all the rest of the twenty-four he leads a life of which I know nothing, which I cannot even follow in my thoughts. Whom does he see in those hours? and of what does he think when I am not with him? Next week in the Adirondacks we shall be together without interruption, and then I shall discern his real and hidden self—then I shall understand him as fully as I wish to be understood." And that coming month appeared to her suddenly as luminous with happiness. Here, now, she was dissatisfied and incapable of rest, but just six days ahead of her she saw the beginning of unspeakable joy. An impatient eagerness ran through her like a flame and she began immediately the preparations for her visit.



CHAPTER VI

THE FEET OF THE GOD

When Kemper, in an emotional moment, had declared that he would give up his trip to Europe, he had expected that Laura would see in the sacrifice a convincing proof of the stability of his affection; but, to his surprise, she had accepted the suggestion as a shade too much in the natural order of events. Europe, empty of his presence, would have been in her eyes a desert; and that any grouping of mountains or arrangement of buildings could offer the slightest temptation beside the promised month in the Adirondacks appeared to her as entirely beyond the question. If the truth were told he did immeasurably prefer the prospect of a summer spent by her side, but he felt at the same time—though he hardly admitted this even to himself—that in remaining in America he was giving up a good deal of his ordinary physical enjoyments. It was not that he wanted in the very least to go; he felt merely that he ought to have been seriously commended because he stayed away. Since he had never relinquished so much as a day's pleasure for any woman in the past, he was almost overcome by appreciation of his present generosity.

For a time the very virtue in his decision produced in him the agreeable humour which succeeds any particular admiration for one's own conduct. Of all states of mind the complacent suavity resulting from self-esteem is, perhaps, the most pleasantly apparent in one's attitude to others; and no sooner had Kemper assured himself that he had made an unusual sacrifice for Laura than he was rewarded by the overwhelming conviction that she was more than worth it all. In some way peculiar to the emotions her value increased in direct relation to the amount of pleasure he told himself he had given up for her sake.

When at last he had freed himself from a few financial worries he had lingered to attend to, and was hurrying toward her in the night express which left New York, he assured himself that now for the first time he was comfortably settled in a state which might be reasonably expected to endure. The careless first impulse of his affection would wane, he knew—it were as useless to regret the inevitable passing of the spring—but beyond this was it not possible that Laura might hold his interest by qualities more permanent than any transient exaltation of the emotions? He thought of the soul in her face rather than of the mere changing accident of form—of the smile which moved like an edge of light across her eyes and lips—and this rare spiritual quality in her appearance appealed to him at the instant as vividly as it had done on the first day he saw her. This charm of strangeness had worn with him as nothing in the domain of the sensations had worn in his life before. In the smoking car, when he entered it a little later, he found a man named Barclay, whom he saw sometimes at his club; and they sat talking together until long after midnight. Barclay was a keen, aggressively energetic person, who lived in a continual rush of affairs, which had not kept him from a decided over-development about the waist. He was married to an invalid wife, who, as he now told Kemper, was threatened with consumption and condemned to spend the whole year in the Adirondacks. Kemper had seen her once, and though she was neither pretty nor intelligent, he remembered her with respect as the owner of a property of forty millions. The knowledge of this fact covered her with a certain distinction in his mind, and because of it he condoned almost unconsciously the absence in her of any more personal attraction than that of wealth. The marriage, so far as he could judge, had been, from Barclay's point of view, entirely satisfactory—domestic affairs occupied no place whatever in the man's existence, which was devoted exclusively to speculation in stocks; and he had solved the eternal problem of philosophy by reducing life, not to a formula, but to a figure. Of scandal there had never blown the faintest breath about him; he paid apparently as little attention to other women as to his wife; and money, Kemper decided now, not without an irrational envy, appeared to satisfy as well as absorb his every instant.

"Yes, it's a great thing to get back to the woods now and then," Barclay was saying, "I usually manage to run up for Sunday—and then I find time to look over all the news of the week."

By "news," Kemper was aware he meant only the changes in the stock market; but his recognition that the man had not so much as a casual interest above the accumulation of wealth, did not detract in the least from the admiration with which Barclay inspired him. This was a life that counted! he thought with generous enthusiasm; and success incarnate, he felt, was riding beside him in the train.

Barclay had drawn a paper from his pocket, and was following the list of figures with the point of his toothpick. Though there was but one subject upon which he possessed even the rudiments of knowledge, the fact that he could speak with authority in a single department of life had conferred upon him a certain dignity of manner; and so Kemper, as he fell into conversation with him, found himself wishing that he might arrange to be thrown with him during the month of his vacation. Money, though he himself was ignorant of it, possessed almost as vital an attraction for him as he found in love.

But the next morning, when he descended from the train and saw Laura awaiting him against a green background of forest, all recollection of Barclay and his financial genius, was swept from his thoughts. As he looked at her small distinguished figure, and met her charming eyes, radiant with love, he told himself that he had, indeed, got to the good place in his life at last. The pressure of her hand, the surrender in her look, the tremor of her voice, appealed to his inflammable senses with a freshness which he found as delicious as the dawn in which they stood.

"To think that I'm only beginning to live when I've past forty years!" he exclaimed, as they rolled in the little cart over the forest road.

Laura held the reins, and while she drove he flung his arm about her with a boyish laugh.

"But this is heavenly—how did you manage it?" he asked.

"Oh, I came alone in the cart because I wanted these first minutes all to ourselves," she answered, "I didn't want even Gerty to see how happy we could be." And it seemed to her as she spoke that all that she had demanded of happiness was fulfilled at last.

A week later she could still tell herself that the dream was true. Kemper had thrown himself into his love making with all the zest, as he said, of his college days; and there was in his complete absorption in it something of the exclusive attention he devoted to a game of billiards. It was a law of his nature that he should live each minute to its utmost and let it go; and this romance of the forest was less an idyl to him than a delicious experience which one must enjoy to the fullest and have over. There were moments even when Laura saw his temperamental impatience awake in his face, as if his thoughts were beginning already to plunge from the fruition of to-day after the capricious possibility which lies in to-morrow. In the midst of the forest, under the gold and green of the leaves, she realised at times that his moods were more in harmony with the city streets and the rush of his accustomed eager life.

And yet to Kemper the month was full of an enchantment which belonged half to his actual existence and half to some fairy stories he remembered from his childhood. It was more beautiful than the reality, but still it was not real; and this very beauty in it reminded him at times of the vanishing loveliness which results from a mere chance effect—of the sunlight on the green leaves or the flutter of Laura's blue gown against the balsam. In the very intensity of his enjoyment there was at certain instants almost a terrified presentiment; and following this there were periods of flagging impulse when he asked himself indifferently if a life of the emotions brought as its Nemesis an essential incapacity for love? If Laura had only kept up the pursuit a little longer, he complained once in a despondent mood, if she had only fluttered her tinted veil as skilfully as a woman of the world might have done. "Yet was it not for this unworldliness—for this lack of artifice in her—that I first loved her?" he demanded, indignant with her, with nature, with himself. She had surrendered her soul, he realised, with the frankness of inexperience; the excitement of the chase was now over forever, and he saw stretching ahead of him only the radiant monotony of love. Was the satiety with which, in these listless instants, he looked forward to it merely, he questioned bitterly, the inevitable end to which his life had reached?

Lying in a hammock on the broad piazza of Gerty's camp, he asked himself the question while he watched Laura, who stood at a little distance examining some decorations for the hall.

"Oh, I'd choose the green tapestry by all means," he heard her say; and he told himself as he listened to the ordinary words that if she had been a perfect stranger to him he would have known her voice for the voice of a woman who was in love. Was she really lacking, he asked himself in amusement, in the quality which he called for want of a better phrase—"the finesse of sentiment?" or was the angelic candour of her emotion only the outward expression of that largeness of nature which inspired him at times with a respect akin to awe? The absence of any coquetry in her attitude impressed him as the final proof of her inherent nobility; and yet there were instants when he admitted almost in spite of himself, that he would have relished the display of a little amorous evasion. Laura, he believed, was perfectly capable of a great emotion, but the great emotion, after all, he concluded humorously, was less conducive to his immediate enjoyment than was the small flirtation.

The two women were still discussing the bit of tapestry; and while he watched them, a ray of sunlight, piercing the bough of a maple beside the porch, felt with a charming brightness upon Gerty's hair Each brilliant red strand he noticed, appeared to leap instantly into life and colour.

It was pure effect, a mere creation of changing light and shade and yet, as he looked, he was aware of a sudden tremor in his blood. The time had been when Gerty had rather liked him, he remembered—or was it, after all, merely that he had exaggerated the subtle suggestion in her look? Something had passed between them—just what it was, he could hardly recall with distinctness—a mere fervent glance, perhaps a half spoken phrase, or at most a cousinly kiss which had contained the passion of a lover. The incident had passed, and though he told himself now that it had vanished entirely from his memory, he felt that it had left behind a vague longing that it might some day occur again.

"I can't for the life of me remember what it was, nor how it happened," he thought. "It was out of the question, of course, that I should fall in love with Perry's wife—and yet, by Jove, I'd like to know what she felt about it all. I'm glad," he added earnestly after a moment, "that Laura doesn't happen to be the flirtatious kind." Nevertheless he continued to wonder, as he looked at the sunlight on Gerty's hair, if there could have been, after all, a grain of truth in those hints she had so carelessly let fall.

* * * * *

Early in August Laura was summoned home by the illness of Angela; and Kemper, after a few days spent with her in the city, started upon a yachting cruise which occupied him for two weeks. On the day of his return, when as yet he had not seen Laura he accidentally ran across Adams shortly before the luncheon hour.

"Look here, old chap, let's lunch together at the club," he suggested, adding with a laugh, "if I let you go now, heaven knows when I'll be so fortunate as to knock up against you any more."

Adams readily agreed; and a little later, as they sat opposite each other at table, he showed, as usual, a sincere enough enjoyment of his companion's society. Though he had never taken Kemper as he said, "quite seriously," there were few men whom he found it pleasanter to meet at dinner.

"I wish you came more in my way," he observed, while Kemper gave the order, with the absorbed attention he devoted to such details, "I don't believe I've laid eyes on you but once in the last six months."

"Oh, you've something better to think of," returned Kemper carelessly. "Do you know," he pursued after a moment's thought, "I'm sometimes tempted to wish that I could change place with you and get beaten into shape for some serious work. It's the only thing in life that counts, when you come to think of it," he concluded with an irritation directed less against himself than against his fate.

"Well, I can't say I'd object to standing in your shoes for a while," rejoined Adams, "I've a taste for the particular brand of cigar you smoke."

"Oh, they're good enough—in fact everything is good enough—it comes too easily, that's the trouble. I've never found anything yet that was seriously worth trying for."

Adams regarded him for a moment with a smile, to which his whimsical humour lent a peculiar attraction.

"I, on the other hand, have tried pretty hard for some things I didn't get," he answered, "the difference between us, I guess, is that I had a tough time in my youth and you didn't. A man's middle age is usually a reaction from his youth."

"I've never had a tough time anywhere," replied Kemper, almost in disgust, "it's' been too soft—that's the deuced part of it. And yet I've got the stuff in me for a good fight if the opportunity would only come my way."

The expression of satiety—of moral weariness—was etched indelibly beneath the brightness of his smile; and yet, Adams, looking at him, remembered, a little bitterly, that this man had won from him the woman whom he loved. To Kemper belonged both her body and her spirit; the touch of her hand no less than the charm of her intellect! At the thought his old human longing for her awoke and stirred restlessly again in his heart.

"Yes, the only thing is to have one particular interest," resumed Kemper, "to occupy oneself with something that is eternally worth while. Now, look at Barclay—I went up in the train with him to the Adirondacks, and, upon my word, I never envied a man more in my whole life. You know Barclay, don't you?"

Adams nodded. "I'd find a little of his financial ability rather useful myself," he observed. Then he broke into a boyish laugh at a recollection the name aroused, "the last time I had a talk with him was at the beginning of our war with Spain, and he told me he was interested in news from the front because he happened to own some Spanish bonds."

Kemper joined in the laugh. "Oh, he's narrow, of course," he replied, "but all the same I'd like the chance to get in his place. By Jove, I don't believe he's ever bored a minute of the day!" And it seemed to him, as he thought of Barclay, that his own life held nothing for him but boredom from this time on.



CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH KEMPER IS PUZZLED

Late in October Kemper went South for a couple of weeks shooting; and It was not until the first day of November that he parted from his companions of the trip and returned to New York. He had enjoyed every minute of his absence—until the last few days when the strangeness appeared, somehow, to have worn from his out-door life—and as he drove now, on the bright autumn afternoon, from the station to his rooms, he was agreeably aware that he had never felt physically or mentally in better shape. After a fortnight spent away from civilisation, he found a refreshing excitement in watching the crowd in Fifth Avenue, the passing carriages, and particularly the well-dressed figures of the women in their winter furs. Taken all in all life was a pretty interesting business, he admitted; and he remembered with eagerness that he would see Laura again before the day was over. Though he had barely thought of her once during the past two weeks, this very forgetfulness served to surround her with the charm of novelty in his awakened memory.

A woman in a sable coat rolled past him in an automobile; and his eyes followed her with an admiration which seemed strangely mixed with a vague longing in his blood—a longing which was in some way produced by the animated street, the changing November brightness and the crispness of frost which was in the air. Then he caught sight of a milliner's pretty assistant carrying a hat box along the sidewalk, and his gaze hung with pleasure upon her trim and graceful figure in a cheap cloth coat bordered with imitation ermine. A feeling of benevolence, of universal good will pervaded his heart; his chest expanded in a sigh of thankfulness, and it seemed to him that he asked nothing better than to be alive. He was in the mood when a man is grateful to God, charitable to himself and generous to his creditors.

The cab stopped before his door, and while he paid the man, he gave careful directions to Wilkins about the removal of his shooting traps. Then he entered the apartment house, and passing the elevator with his rapid step, went gayly humming up the staircase.

On the third landing he paused a moment to catch his breath, and as he laid his hand, the instant afterward, on the door of his sitting-room, he became aware of a faint, familiar, and yet almost forgotten perfume, which entered his nostrils from the apartment before which he stood. The perfume, distant as it was, revived in him instantly, with that curious association between odours and visual memory, a recollection which might otherwise have slumbered for years in his brain—and though he had not thought of Jennie Alta once during the summer and autumn months, there rose immediately before him now the memory of her dressing table with the silver box in which she kept some rare highly scented powder. Every incident of his acquaintance with her thronged in a disordered series through his brain; and it was with an odd presentiment of what awaited him, that he entered his sitting room and found her occupying a chair before his fireside. When she sprang up and faced him in her coarsened beauty, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should accept the fact of her presence with merely an ironic protest.

"So you've turned up again," he remarked, as he held out his hand with a smile, "I was led to believe that the last parting would be final."

"Oh, it was," she answered lightly, "but there's an end even to finality, you know."

The flute-like soprano of her voice fell pleasantly upon his ears, and as he looked into her face he told himself that it was marvellous how well she had managed to preserve an effect of youthfulness. Under the flaring wings in her hat her eyes were still clear and large and heavy lidded, her thin red lips still held the shape of their sensual curve. A white fur boa was thrown carelessly about her neck, and he remembered that underneath it, encircling her short throat there was the soft crease of flesh which the ancient poets had named "the necklace of Venus."