"Well, I can but accept this visit as a compliment, I suppose," he observed with amiable indifference, "it means—doesn't it? that you won your fight about the opera contract?"

An expression of anger—of the uncontrolled, majestic anger of a handsome animal, awoke in her face, and she pulled off her long white glove as if seeking to free herself from some restraint of custom. Her hand, he noticed, with a keen eye for such feminine details, was large, roughly shaped and over fleshy about the wrist.

"I'd starve before I'd sing again by that old contract," she responded. "No, it's not opera—Parker refused to pay me what I asked and I held out to the end—I shall sing in concert for the first time, and I shan't be happy until I have every seat in the opera house left empty."

He laughed with an acute enjoyment of her repressed violence. "Oh, you're welcome to mine," he returned good-humouredly, "but what is the day of your great first battle?"

"Not until December. I'm going West and South before I sing in New York."

"Then you aren't here for much of a stay, after all?"

She shook her head and the orange coloured wings in her hat waved to and fro.

"Only a few days at a time. After Christmas I sail back again. In February I'm engaged for Monte Carlo."

Then her expression underwent a curious change—as if personality, colour, passion pulsed into her half averted face—and the hard professional tones in which she had spoken were softened as if by an awakening memory.

"So you still keep my portrait, I see," she observed, lifting her eyes to the picture above the mantel, "you don't hate me, then, so bitterly as I thought."

He shrugged his shoulders with the gesture he had acquired abroad.

"I did take it down, but it left a smudge on the wall, so I had to put it back again."

"Then you sometimes think of me?" she enquired, with curiosity.

"Not when I can help it," he retorted, laughing.

His ironic pleasantry stung her into an irritation which showed plainly in her face; and she appeared, for the first time, to bend her intelligence toward some definite achievement.

"And is that always easy?" she asked, in a tone of mere flippant banter.

A petty impulse of revenge lent sharpness to his voice. "Easier than you think," he responded coolly.

"Well, I suppose, I'll have to take the punishment," she answered, as lightly as before; and then turning to the mantelpiece again, she raised her glance to the portrait. "I never liked it," she commented frankly, "he's got me in an unnatural position—I never stood like that in my life—and there's an open smirk about the mouth."

He saw her face in the admirable pose which he remembered—the chin held slightly forward, the cheek rounded upward, the eyes uplifted—and for an instant he waited, half hoping that her voice of wine and honey would roll from between her lips. But she was frugal of her notes, he recalled the instant afterward.

"I've always considered it a pretty fair likeness," he remarked.

"Then you've always considered me pretty hideous," she flashed back in annoyance.

As she swung round upon the hearthrug, the white fur boa slipped from her throat, and he saw "the necklace of Venus" above the string of opals that edged her collarless lace blouse.

"On the contrary I admire you very much when you are in a good humour," he observed in his genial raillery.

"Then you thought I had a temper?"

He laughed softly, as if at a returning recollection. "A perfectly artistic one," he answered.

Her annoyance disappeared beneath his gaze, and the smile he had but half forgotten—a faint sweet ripple of expression, which seemed less the result of an inner working of intelligence than of some outward fascination in the curve of mouth and chin—hovered, while he watched her attentively, upon her bright red lips. In the making of her the soul he recognised had dissolved into the senses; and yet the accident of her one exquisite gift had conferred upon her the effect, if not the quality of genius. Because of the voice in her throat she appeared to stand apart by some divine election of nature.

"I believe I did slap your face once," she confessed, laughing, "but I begged your pardon afterward—and you must admit that you were sometimes trying."

"Perhaps—but what's the use of bringing all this up now? It's well over, isn't it?"

"Isn't it?" she repeated softly; and he had an odd impression that her voice was melting into liquid honey. The thought made him laugh aloud and at the sound she relapsed quickly into her indifferent attitude.

"Of course, it's over," she resumed promptly. "If it were not over—if I didn't feel myself entirely safe—do you think that I'd ever dare come back again?"

The absence of any hint of emotion in her words produced in him an agreeable feeling of security, and for the first time he went so close to her that he might almost have touched her hand.

"Safe?" he repeated, smiling, "then were you ever really in danger?"

Her glance puzzled him, and she followed it a moment afterward with a sentence which had the effect of increasing, rather than diminishing, the obscurity in which he floundered.

"In danger of losing my head, do you mean?" she asked, "Wasn't that question answered when I ran away?"

But the next instant she burst into a laugh of ridicule, and threw herself back into the chair upon the hearthrug, with the particular fall of drapery by which she delighted the eyes of her audience in the opera house.

"I asked your man to bring me tea, for I'm famished," she remarked; "do you think he has forgotten it?"

"He had, probably, to go out to buy the cakes," he replied, with a touch upon the bell which was immediately answered by Wilkins bearing the silver tray. As she rose to make tea, Kemper took the fur boa from her shoulders and held it for a minute to his nostrils.

"You use the same perfume, I notice," he observed.

She waited until the door had closed upon Wilkins, and then looked up, smiling, as she handed him his cup.

"There are two things one should never change," she returned, "a perfume and a lover."

With a laugh he tossed the fur upon the sofa. "By Jove, you've arrived at the conventional morality at last."

"Is it morality?" she rejoined sweetly, "I thought it was experience."

"Well, any way, you're right and I'm moral," he remarked, "the joy of living, after all, is not in having a thing, but in wanting it."

"Which proves, as I have said," she concluded, "that one love is as good as a thousand."

There was a sharp edge of ridicule to his glance; but the words he spoke were uttered from some mere impulse of audacity.

"I wonder if I taught you that?" he questioned.

Leaning slightly forward she clasped her large white hands upon her knees; and the position, while she kept it, showed plainly the rounded ample length of her figure.

"I might tell you the truth—but, after all, why should I?" she demanded.

An emotional curiosity which was almost as powerful as love flamed in his face. How much or how little did she feel? he wondered; and the vanity which was the inspiration of his largest as well as his smallest passion, dominated for the time all other impressions which she produced.

"Would it be possible for you to tell the truth if you tried?" he asked.

"I never try—all the harm on earth comes from women telling men the truth. It is the woman who tells the truth who becomes—a door mat. If I ever felt myself in danger of speaking the truth—" she hesitated for a quick breath, while her eyes drew his gaze as by a cord—"I would run away."

It was his turn to breathe quickly now. "You did run away—once."

"I ran because—" her voice was so low that he felt it like a breath upon his cheek.

"Because?" he echoed impatiently; and the vehemence in his tone wrought an immediate change in her seductive attitude. With a laugh that was almost insolent, she rose to her feet and looked indifferently down upon him.

"Oh, that's over long ago and we've both forgotten. I came to-day only to ask the honour of your presence at my first concert."

An impulse to irritate her—to provoke her into an expression of her hidden violence—succeeded quickly the curiosity she had aroused; and he felt again the fiendish delight with which, as a savage small boy, he had prodded the sleeping wild animals in their cages in the park.

"I'm not sure that I can arrange it," he responded, "I may be off on my honeymoon, you know."

"Ah, yes," she nodded while he saw a perceptible flicker of her heavy eyelids, "but when, if I'm not impertinent, does the interesting event take place? I might be able to postpone my concert," she concluded jestingly.

He shook his head. "You can't do that because I expect it to last forever."

"One usually does, I believe, but it is easy to miscalculate. Have you a photograph visible of the lady?"

He shook his head, but with the denial, his glance travelled to a picture of Laura upon his desk; and crossing the room, she took it up and returned with it to the firelight, where she dropped upon her knees in order to study it the more closely.

"Has she money?" was her first enquiry at the end of her examination.

"If she has I am not aware of it," he retorted angrily.

"Well, I wonder what you see in her," she remarked, with her attentive gaze still upon the picture, "though she looks as if she'd never let a man go if she once got hold of him."

Her vulgar insolence worked him into an uncontrollable spasm of anger; and with a smothered oath he wrenched the photograph from her and flung it into the open drawer of his desk.

"She is too sacred to me to be made the subject of your criticism," he exclaimed.

Whether she was frankly offended or unaffectedly amused he could not tell, but she burst into so musical a laugh that he found himself listening to it with positive pleasure.

"There! there! don't be foolish—I was only joking," she returned, "please don't think for one minute that it's worth my while to be jealous of you."

"I don't think so," he replied, with open annoyance, "but I wish you wouldn't come here."

She had taken up her fur and stood now wrapping it about her throat, while her eyes were fixed upon him with an expression he found it impossible to read. Was it anger, seduction, passion or disappointment? Or was it some deeper feeling than he had ever believed it possible for her face to show?

"It is the last time, I promise you," she said, "but do you know why I came this afternoon?"

"Why?—no, and I doubt if you do."

For a moment she was silent; then he watched the curious physical fascination grow in her smile.

"I came because I had a very vivid dream about you on the boat last night," she said, "I dreamed of that evening, during the first winter, in my dressing-room after the second act in 'Faust.' I thought I had forgotten it, but in my sleep it all came clearly back again—every minute and—"

"And?" the word burst from him eagerly as he leaned toward her.

"I broke a bottle of perfume, do you remember?" her soft laugh shook in her full, white throat, "your coat still smelt of it next day, you said."

Her wonderful voice, softened now to a speaking tone, seemed to endow each word, not only with melody, but with form and colour. They became living things to him while she spoke, and the night he had almost forgotten, stood out presently as in the glow of a conflagration of his memory. He smelt again the perfume which she had spilled on his coat; he saw again the fading roses, heaped on chairs and tables, that overflowed her dressing room. It was the night of her great triumph—the eyes with which she looked at him still held the intoxication of her own music—and it was to the applause of a multitude, that, alone with her behind the scenes, he had first taken her in his arms.

"It's all over, I tell you," he said angrily; "so what's the use of this?"

"It's never over!—it's never over!" she repeated in her singing voice.

She was very close to him at last; but breaking away with an effort, he crossed the room and laid his hand upon the door.

"It was over forever two years ago," he said, "and now good-bye!"

He held out his hand, but without taking it, she stood motionless while she looked at him with her unchanging smile.

"Then I'll let it be good-bye," she answered, "but not this way—not just like this—"

Her voice mocked him; and moved by an impulse which was half daring, half vanity, he closed the door again and came back to where she stood.

"So long as it's good-bye, I'll have it any way you wish," he said.



CHAPTER VIII

SHOWS THAT LOVE WITHOUT WISDOM IS FOLLY

The odd part was, he admitted next morning as he sat at breakfast, that from first to last he had not found one moment's pleasure in the society of Madame Alta. Pleasure in a suitable quantity he was inclined to regard as sufficient excuse for the most serious indiscretion; but in this case the temptation to which he had yielded appeared to him, by the light of day, to be entirely out of proportion to any actual enjoyment he had experienced. An impulse which was neither vanity nor daring, but a mixture of the two, had swept away his resolve before he was clearly aware, as he expressed it, "of the drift of the wind." He had not wanted to go with her and yet he had gone, impelled by some fury of adventure which had seemed all the time to pull against his saner inclinations.

While he ate his two eggs and his four pieces of toast, as he had done every morning for the last fifteen years, he remembered, with a mild pang of remorse, that he had not seen Laura since his return. Without doubt she had expected him last evening, had put on, probably, her most becoming gown to receive him; and the thought of her disappointment entered his heart with a very positive reproach. This reproach, short lived as it was, had the effect of enkindling his imaginary picture of her; and the eagerness with which he now looked forward to his visit completely crowded from his mind the recollection that, but for his own fault, he might have seen her with as little effort on the evening before.

As he sat there over his breakfast, with an unfolded newspaper on the table beside him, he realised, in a proper spirit of thankfulness, that he had never felt himself to be in a more thoroughly domestic mood. His face, in which the clear red from his country trip was still visible, settled immediately into its most genial lines, while he expanded his chest with a deep breath which strained the topmost button on the new English waistcoat which he wore. The sober prospect of marriage no longer annoyed him when he thought of it, and he could even look forward complacently to seeing the same woman opposite to him at breakfast for twenty years.

"By Jove, I've come to the place when to settle down and live quietly is the best thing I can do," he concluded, as he helped himself to marmalade. "I've reached the time of life when a man has to pull up and go easily or else break to pieces. It's all very well to take one's fling in youth, but middle age is the period for retrenchment."

Then, while he still congratulated himself upon the expediency of virtue, another image appeared in his reflections, and the paternal instinct, so strong in men of his kind, responded instantly to the argument which clothed his mere natural impulse. Marriage, he told himself, would mean a son of his own, and the stability which he had always missed in any relation with a woman would be secured through the responsibility which fatherhood involved. Here was the interest his life had lacked, after all—here was the explanation of that vacancy his emotions had not filled; and it appeared to him that his loves had failed in definiteness, in any vital purpose, because he had never seen himself fulfilled in the son which he now desired.

"I shouldn't wonder if this is what I've been wanting all the time," he thought; and the generous fervour, the ideal purity, he had never been able to introduce into his romances, gathered luminously about the cradle of his unborn child. It seemed to him, as he smoked his second cigar in the face of this paternal vision, that he had stumbled by accident upon the one secret of happiness which he had overlooked; and it was while the beaming effulgence of this mood still lasted, that he finished his papers, and determined to look in upon Laura on his way down town. The memory of last evening was placed at the distance of a thousand miles by his sudden change of humour, and it seemed as useless to reproach himself for an act so far beyond his present area of personality as it would have been to moralise upon an indiscretion in ancient history. A little later, as he ascended Laura's steps, he felt serenely assured that he had made the best possible disposition of his future.

To his surprise she was not in her sitting-room when he entered, and it was several minutes before she came in, very quietly and with an averted face. When he would have taken her in his arms, she drew back quickly with an indignant and wounded gesture. Her eyes were burning, but he had never heard her speak in so hard a voice.

"You were in town last night," she said, and by her look more than her words he was brought face to face with the suspicion that she was capable of a jealous outburst.

"I wanted to come, but I couldn't," he answered, with an attempt at his quizzical humour. "I rushed here as soon as I dared this morning—isn't that enough to prove something?"

Again he made a movement to take her in his arms, but her face was so unyielding that his hands, which he had outstretched, fell to his sides. From the look in her eyes he could almost believe that she had grown to hate him in the night; and at the thought his earlier impetuous emotion flamed in his heart.

"Don't lie to me," she said passionately, "there's nothing I hate so much as a lie."

"I never lied to you in my life," he answered, as he drew back with an expression of cold reproach—for it seemed to him that her attack had offered an unpardonable affront to his honour.

"When you did not come I sent a note to you—I feared something had happened—I hardly knew what—but something. The note came back. They told the messenger—" the words were wrenched out of her as by some act of bodily torture, and, at last, in spite of her struggle, she could go no further. Pausing she looked at him in silence, while her hand pressed into her bosom as if to keep down by physical force the passion which she could no longer control by a mental effort. The violence of temper which in a coarser—a more flesh-and-blood beauty—would have been repelling and almost vulgar, was in her chastened and ennobled by the ethereal quality in her outward form—and the emotion she expressed seemed to belong less to the ordinary human impulses than to some finer rage of spirit which was independent of the gesture or the utterance of flesh.

"And you suspected what?" he demanded, in a hurt and angry voice, "you were told some story by a servant—and without waiting for my explanation—without giving me a decent chance to clear myself—you were ready, on the instant, to believe me capable—of what?"

Her suspicion worked him into a furious resentment; and the consciousness that he, himself, was at fault was swallowed up by the greater wrong of her unuttered accusation. While he spoke he was honestly of the opinion that their whole future happiness was wrecked by the fact that she believed him capable of the thing which he had done.

"I would die now before I would justify myself to you," he added.

Before the unaffected resentment in his face, she was suddenly, and without knowing it, thrown into a position of defence.

"What could I believe? What else was there for me to believe?" she asked in a muffled voice. Then, as she looked up at him, it seemed to her that for the first time she saw the man as he really was in the truth of his own nature—saw his egoism, his vanity, his shallowness and saw, too, with the same mental clearness, that he had ceased to love her. But at the instant with this vision before her, she told herself that the discovery made no difference—that it no longer mattered whether he loved or hated her. Afterward, when he had gone, her perceptions would be blunted again and she would suffer, she knew; but now, while she stood there face to face with him, she could not feel that he bore any vital part in her existence.

"You must believe whatever your feeling for me dictates," he retorted. "I shall not stoop to meet a charge of which I am still ignorant—I have loved you," he added, "more than I have ever loved any man or woman in my life."

"You have never loved me—you do not love me now," she responded coolly.

She had not meant to speak the words; they held no particular meaning for her ears; and yet they had no sooner passed her lips than she had a strange impression that they remained like detached, living things in the space between them. Why she had spoken as she had done, she could not tell, nor why she had really cared so little at the instant when she had uttered her passionate reproach. Then she remembered a wooden figure she had once seen on the stage—a figure that walked and moved its arms and uttered sounds which resembled a human voice—and it seemed to her that she, herself, was this figure and that her gestures and the words she spoke were the result of the hidden automaton within her.

She saw him pass to the door, look back once, and then leave the room with his rapid step, and while her eyes followed him, she felt that the man who had just gone from her with that angry glance was a different individual from the man whom she still loved and for whom she would presently suffer an agony of longing. Then as the sound of the hall door closing sharply fell on her ears, she passed instantly from the deadening lethargy of her senses into a vivid realisation of the thing which had just happened—of the meaning of the words which she had spoken and of the look which he had thrown back at her as he went. A passion of despair rose in her throat, struggling for release until it became a physical torture, and she cried out in her loneliness that nothing mattered—neither truth nor falsehood—so long as she could be brought again face to face with his actual presence.

But—if she had only known the truth!—Kemper had never desired her so ardently as in the hour when he told himself that, by his own fault, he had lost her forever; she had never shown herself so worthy to be won as when she had looked down upon him from the remoteness of her disdain. Like many men of flexible morality, he entertained a profound respect for any rigid ethical standard; and had Laura maintained her unyielding attitude, he would probably have suffered a hopeless passion for her to the end of his embittered but still elastic experience. Though he was hardly aware of it, the only virtues he could perfectly appreciate were the ones which usually present themselves in a masculine shape—courage, honour, fair play among men and chivalry to women; and it seemed to him that Laura, in exacting his entire fidelity, was acting upon an essentially masculine prerogative. The more she demanded, the more, unconsciously to himself, he felt that he was ready to surrender—and he cursed now the intervention of Madame Alta with a vehemence he would never have felt had the course of his love flowed on smoothly in spite of his relapses.

"What a damned fool I made of myself," he confessed, as he walked rapidly away from Gramercy Park. "I got no pleasure from seeing Jennie Alta—not an atom of enjoyment even—and yet I've ruined my whole life because of her, and the chances are nine to one that if I had it to go over I'd act the same blooming idiot again. And all the time I'm more in love with Laura than I've ever been with any woman in my life. Here's the whole happiness of my future swept away at a single blow."

And the domestic dream which Madame Alta had destroyed was mapped out for him by his imagination, until she seemed, not only to have prevented his marriage, but, by some singular eccentricity of feeling, to have murdered the son who had played so large a part in his confident expectations.

"But why should this have happened to me when I'm no worse than other men?" he questioned, "when I'm even better than a hundred whom I know? I've never willingly harmed any human being in my life—I've never cheated, I've never lied to get myself out of a tight place, I've never breathed a word against the reputation of any woman." He thought of Brady, who, although he was a cad and had ruined Connie Adams, was now reconciled with his wife and received everywhere he went; of Perry Bridewell whose numerous affairs had never interfered with either his domestic existence or his appetite. Beside either of these men he felt himself to glow inwardly with virtue, yet he saw that his greater decency had not in the least prevented his receiving the larger punishment; and it seemed to him that he must be pursued by some malign destiny because, though he was so much better than Brady or Perry Bridewell, he should have been overtaken by a retribution which they had so easily escaped. An unreasonable anger against Laura pervaded his thoughts, but this very anger lent fervour to the admiration he now felt for her. He knew she loved him and if—as in the case of no other woman he had ever known—her love could be dominated and subdued by her recognition of what was due her honour, his feeling rather than his thought, assured him that he would be reduced to a moral submission approaching the abject. Though he hoped passionately that she would yield, he realised in his heart that he would adore her if she remained implacable. Love is not always pleased with reverence, but reverence, he saw dimly through some pathetic instinct for virtue, is the strongest possible hold that love can claim. He, himself, would always live in the external world of the senses, yet deep within him, half smothered by the clouds of his egoism, there was still a blind recognition of that other world beyond sense which he had shut out. To this other world, for the time at least, Laura, with all the enchantment of the distance, appeared to belong.

The morning, with its unusual burden of introspection, was, perhaps, the most miserable he had ever spent, and after he had lunched at his club—when to his surprise he found that his appetite was entirely undisturbed by his mental processes—he returned to his rooms before starting dejectedly for a long run in his automobile. But a letter from Laura was the first object he noticed upon his desk, and his afternoon plans were swept from his mind with the beginning of her heart-broken entreaty for reconciliation. While he read it there was recognition in his thoughts for no feeling except his rapture in her recovery, and he took up his pen with a hand which trembled in the shock of his reaction from despair to happiness. Then, while he still hesitated, in a mixture of self-reproach and tenderness, there was a knock at his door, it opened and shut quickly, with an abruptness which even in inanimate things speak of excitement, and Laura, herself, breathing rapidly and very pale, came hurriedly across the room.

"I could not stay away—you did not answer my note—it would have killed me," she began brokenly; and as he stretched out his arms she threw herself into them with a burst of tears.

"Oh, you angel!" he exclaimed, in a tenderness which was almost an ecstasy of feeling; and then, moved by a passion of sympathy, he called her by every endearing name his mind could catch at or his voice utter. The depth of his nature responded in all its volume, as she lay there weeping for joy, in his arms, and in her coming to him as she had done he beheld then only an exquisite proof of her nobility of soul, of the unworldly innocence for which he loved her. In that embrace, for that one supreme instant, their spirits touched more nearly than they had ever done in the past or would ever do again in the future—for even while he held her the tide of being receded from its violence and they drew apart.

"If you had only waited I should have come to you at once," he said, looking at her in a rapture which, though he himself was ignorant of it, struggled against a disappointment because she had shown herself to be closer to his own level than he had believed.

Drawing slightly away Laura stood shaking the tear drops from her lashes, while she regarded him with her radiant smile. The misty brightness of her eyes showed to him in an almost unreal loveliness.

"I didn't care—nothing mattered to me," she answered, "it made no difference what the world said—nor whether I lived or died."

Though the flattery of her coming moved him strongly, he found himself wishing while she spoke that she had not proved herself to be so ardently regardless of conventions—that she had appeared, for once, less natural and more worldly-wise.

"Well, I'll take you home now," he said, smiling; then as he saw her gaze, passing curiously about the room, rest enquiringly upon the portrait of Madame Alta, he broke into a laugh which sounded, for all its pleasantness, a little strained.

"That goes out of the way as soon as I can get something to cover the spot," he remarked, adding gayly, "Symonds says he will finish his portrait of me next week, and I'll hang it there until you claim it."

Her face had clouded, and without looking at him she moved toward the door. "Are you really glad that I came?" she asked abruptly, turning upon the threshold.

"Glad! My darling girl, I'm simply overjoyed. You gave me the most miserable morning of my life."

It was the truth—he knew it for the truth while he uttered it, but, in his heart of hearts, he felt without confessing it to himself, that his love had dropped back from that divine height beyond which mere human impulse becomes ideal passion.



CHAPTER IX

OF THE FEAR IN LOVE

When Laura reached the sidewalk she was seized by one of those reactions of feeling which are possible only in periods of unnatural and overstrained excitement.

"I would rather you didn't come with me now," she said, "I've promised Gerty to go to her this afternoon, and I'd honestly rather go alone."

"But I've seen nothing of you at all," he urged, "put Gerty aside—she won't mind. If she does, tell her I made you do it."

She shook her head, shrinking slightly away from him in the street. "It isn't that, but I want to be alone—to think. Come this evening and I'll be quite myself again. Only just now I—I can't talk."

In the end he had yielded, overborne by so unusual a spirit of opposition; and with a reproachful good-bye he had returned to his rooms, while she went slowly up the street in the pale autumn sunshine.

The impulse in which she had gone to him had utterly died down; and she asked herself, with a curiosity that was almost indifferent, why, since the reconciliation she had longed for was now complete, she should feel only melancholy where she had expected to find happiness? Kemper had never been more impassioned, had never shown himself to be more thoroughly the lover—yet in some way she admitted, it had all been different from the deeper reunion she had hoped for; there had come to her even while she lay in his arms that strange, though familiar sense of unreality in her own emotion; and beneath the touch of his hands she had felt herself to be separated from him by the space of a whole inner world. Though she appeared to have got everything, she realised, with a pang of resentment directed against herself, that she had wanted a great deal more than he had had the power to bestow. Could it be that the thing she had missed was that finer sympathy of spirit without which all human passion is but the withered husk where the flower has never bloomed?

"Is it true that I must be forever content with the mere gesture of love?" she thought. "Is it true that I shall never reach his soul, which is surely there if I could but find it? Has it eluded me, after all, only because I did not know the way?"

This longing for the immortal soul of love seized her like an unquenchable thirst, until it seemed to her that all outward forms of expression—all embraces all words—were but dead earthly things until the breath of the spirit had entered in to raise them from mere trivial accidents into eternal symbols.

Then suddenly she understood, for the first time, that she had humiliated herself by going to his rooms, and she felt her cheek burn in remembering a step which she had taken, under the stress of feeling, without an instant's hesitation. It seemed to her now, when she looked back upon it, that it would have been better to have lost him forever than to have lowered her pride in the way that she had done—but before seeing him her pride had been nothing to her, and she realised that if she felt his affection slipping from her again she would be driven to the same or even to greater lengths of self-abasement.

"But I did wrong—I have lowered myself forever in his eyes," she thought, "he can never feel the same respect for me again, and because I have lost his respect I have lost also my power to keep him constant to me in his heart."

With the confession, she was aware that a spiritual battle took place within her, and she thought of her soul, not as one but as multiple—as consisting of hosts of good and evil angels who warred against one another without ceasing. And she felt assured that presently the good or the evil host would be vanquished and that henceforth she would belong to the victorious side forever—not for this life only, but for a thousand lives and an eternal evolution along the course which she herself had chosen. A passage she had once read in an old book occurred to her, and she recalled that the writer had spoken of God as "the place of the soul." If this were so, had she not filled that place which is God with a confusion in which there was only terror and disorder.

"Why has it all happened as it has?" she demanded almost in despair. "Why did I love him in the beginning? Why did I humiliate myself in his eyes to-day?" But her motives, which appeared only as impulses, were still shrouded in the obscurity of her ignorance; and the one thing that remained clear to her was that she had struggled breathlessly for the happiness she had not possessed. Was it this desire for happiness, she asked, which had returned to her now in the form of an avenging fury?

At the corner of Fifth Avenue, while she stopped upon the sidewalk to wait for the stage, she was joined by Mr. Wilberforce, who told her that he had just come from her house.

"I was particularly sorry to miss you," he added, "because I brought a book of poems I wanted to talk over with you—the work of a young Irishman with a touch of genius."

"Yes, yes," she responded vaguely, without knowing what she said. Literature appeared to her suddenly as the most uninteresting pursuit upon the earth, and she longed to escape from the presence of Mr. Wilberforce, because she knew that he would weary her by ceaseless allusions to books which she no longer read.

"I'm on my way to Gerty's—she made me promise to come this afternoon," she explained hurriedly, recalling with surprise that she had once found pleasure in the companionship of this ineffectual old man, with his placid face and his interminable discussions of books. Feeling that her impatience might provoke her presently into an act of rudeness which she would afterward regret, she held out her hand while she signalled with the other to the approaching stage.

"Come to-morrow when I shall be at home," she said; and though she remembered that she would probably spend the next afternoon with Kemper, this suggestion of an untruth seemed at the time to make no difference. A moment later as she seated herself in the stage, she drew a long breath as if she had escaped from an oppressive atmosphere; and the rumbling of the vehicle was a relief to her because it silenced for awhile the noise of the opposing hosts of angels that warred unceasingly within her soul.

When she reached Gerty's house in Sixty-ninth Street, she found not only her friend, whom she wished to see, but Perry Bridewell, whom she had tried particularly to avoid. At first she felt almost angry with Gerty for not receiving her alone; but Gerty, suspecting as much from her chilled look, burst out at once into a comic protest:

"I tried my best to get rid of Perry," she said, "perhaps you may make the attempt with better success."

"I've caught a beastly cold," responded Perry, from the cushioned chair on the hearthrug, where he sat prodding the wood fire with a small brass poker, "it's stuck in my chest, and the doctor tells me if I don't look out I'll be in for bronchitis or pneumonia or something or other of the kind."

That he was genuinely frightened showed clearly by the unusual pallor on his handsome face; and with an appearance of giving emphasis to the danger in which he stood, he held out to Laura, as he spoke, a glass bottle filled with large brown lozenges.

"He remembers his last illness," observed Gerty seriously, "which was an attack of croup at the age of two—and he's afraid they will bandage his chest as they did then."

As he fell back languidly in his easy chair, resting his profile against the pale green cushions, Laura noticed, for the first time, a striking resemblance to Kemper in the full, almost brutal curve of his jaw and chin. Ridiculous as her annoyance was, she felt that it mounted through her veins and showed in her reddening face.

"Since you are ill I'll not take Gerty away from you to-day," she said, rising hastily.

"Oh, don't think of going on my account," replied Perry, with a pale reflection of his amiable smile, "a little cheerful company is the very thing I need." Then, as a servant entered with a cup of tea and a plate of toast, he sat up, with his invalid air, to receive the tray upon his knees. "I manage to take a little nourishment every hour or two," he explained, as he crumbled his toast into bits.

"I've racked my brain to amuse him," remarked Gerty, while she watched him gravely, "but he can't get his mind off that possible attack of pneumonia, and he's even made me look up the death rate from it in the bulletin of the Board of Health. Do you think Arnold would come if I telephoned him? or shall I send instead for Roger Adams? I have even thought of writing invitations to his entire club list."

"Oh, I'll send Arnold myself," rejoined Laura, "he got back just last night, you know."

"I saw him coming up at five o'clock when I went to the doctor's," returned Gerty; and this innocent chance remark plunged Laura immediately into a melancholy which not only arrested the words upon her lips, but seemed to deaden her whole body even to her hands which held her muff. An intolerable suspicion seized her that they were aware of the return of Madame Alta, that they blamed Arnold for something of which they did not speak, that they pitied her because she was deluded into an acceptance of the situation. Though her judgment told her that this suspicion was a mere wild fancy, still she could not succeed in driving it from her thoughts, and the more she struggled against it, the stronger was the hold it gained upon her imagination if not upon her reason. In the effort to banish this persistent torment, she began to talk fast and recklessly of other things, until the animation with which she spoke rekindled the old brilliant fervour in her face.

She was still talking with her restless gayety, when Adams came in to ask after Perry, but with his presence a stillness which was almost one of peace, came over her. At the end of a few minutes she rose to leave, and a little later as he walked with her along Sixty-ninth Street in the direction of the Park, she had, for the first time in her life, a vague intuition that the secret of happiness, after all, might lie for her, not in the gratification but in the relinquishment of desire.

"I saw Kemper a while ago," he remarked, as they crossed Fifth Avenue to the opposite sidewalk which ran along the wall under the bared November trees. "He seemed very much interested in some mining scheme which Barclay has gone in for. I never saw him more enthusiastic."

"Was he?" she asked indifferently; and she felt almost a resentment against Kemper because he could pass so easily from the reconciliation with her to the subject of mining. Since the evening before, when she had received the news of his absence with Madame Alta, her attitude to her lover had, unconsciously to herself, undergone a change; and her critical faculty, so long dominated by her feeling, appeared now to have usurped the place which was formerly held by her ideal image of him. But this awakening of her intellect had no power whatever over her love, which remained unaltered, and the one result of her clearer mental vision was to destroy her happiness, while it did not lessen the strength of her emotion.

She glanced up at Adams as he walked beside her in the pale sunshine, and the smile with which he responded to her look, awoke in her the impulse to confess to him the burden which oppressed her thoughts. Realising that it would be impossible to confide these things to any human being, she changed the subject by asking him a trivial question about Trent's play.

"There's no doubt of his success, I think," he answered, "but just now his mind is absorbed with other things. He's as deep in his love as he ever was in his ambition."

"So he has found her?" enquired Laura, with but little animation. She was glad that Trent was happy at last, but she could not force herself to feel an interest in this love affair which was so unlike her own.

"Well, he didn't have to look far," rejoined Adams, laughing, "he discovered her, I believe, in the same apartment house. Some of us," he concluded a little sadly, "go a good deal farther with considerably less success."

"It does puzzle one," said Laura, thinking of Kemper, "that some people should find what they want lying on their very doorstep, while others must go on looking for it their whole lives through."

He smiled at her with a tenderness which seemed, somehow, a part of his strength. "But yours was the easier fate," he said.

"Is it the easier? I hardly know," she answered, and the note of pain in her voice entered his heart. "I sometimes think that the best of life is to go on wanting till one dies."

"Not the best—not the best," he responded, with a touch of his whimsical humour. "I have had my share of wanting and I speak of what I know. It all comes right in the end, I suppose, but it's a pretty tough experience while it lasts, and, after all, we live in the minute not in eternity."

Her gaze had dropped away from him, but at his words she lifted her eyes again to meet his look.

"I wonder what it was you wanted so," she said—for he impressed her suddenly as possessing a force of will which it would be not only ineffectual, but even foolish to resist. The aggressive bulk of Perry Bridewell, the impetuous egoism of Kemper showed, not as strength, but as violence compared to the power which controlled the man at her side. Where had he found this power? she wondered, and by what miracle had he been able to make it his own?

"If I told you, I dare say it wouldn't enlighten you much," he answered. "Isn't it enough to confess that I've done my share of crying for the moon?"

"And if it had dropped into your hands, you would have found, probably, that it was made only of green cheese," she replied.

For an instant he looked at her with a glance in which his humour seemed to cover a memory which she could not grasp.

"Oh, well, I'd have risked it!" he retorted almost gayly.



CHAPTER X

THE END OF THE PATH

Having decided that Laura was to be married on the nineteenth of December, Mrs. Payne had gathered not only the invitations, but the entire trousseau into the house three weeks before the date upon which she had fixed. Laura, who had at first entered enthusiastically into the question of clothes, had shown during the last fortnight an indifference which was almost an open avoidance of the subject; and the lively old lady was forced to conduct an unsupported campaign against dressmakers and milliners.

"It's fortunate, to put it mildly, my dear, that you have me to attend to such matters," she remarked one day, "or you would most likely have started on your wedding journey a dowd—and there can be no happy marriage," she concluded with caustic philosophy, "which is not founded upon a carefully selected trousseau."

"If his love for me depends on clothes, I don't want it," replied Laura in an indignant voice.

Mrs. Payne shook her false gray curls, until the little wire hairpins which held them in place slipped out and dropped into her lap.

"It might very well depend upon something more difficult to procure," she retorted with reason. Then in a last effort to arouse Laura into the pride of possession, she brought out her multitude of boxes and unfolded her treasures of old lace.

At the time Laura looked on with listless inattention, but two days later she returned in a change of mood which put to blush the worldly materialism of Mrs. Payne.

"Aunt Rosa, you're right," she said, "I haven't paid half enough attention to my clothes. I believe, after all, that clothes are among the most important things in life."

"I regard it as a merciful providence that you have come to your senses in time," observed the old lady, with a sincerity which survived even the extravagance into which her niece immediately plunged—for, after looking carelessly over the contents of the large white boxes, Laura turned away as if disappointed, and demanded in her next breath a sable coat.

"Arnold admired a woman in a sable coat yesterday," she said, with a gravity which impressed Mrs. Payne as almost solemn.

But her reaction into the vanities of the world was as short lived as her former disdain of them; and by the time the sable coat arrived she had almost begun to regret that she had ever asked for it. Since the selection of it she had heard Kemper quite as carelessly express approval of an ermine wrap, and her heart had suddenly sickened over the fruitlessness of her ambition. She was still trying on the coat under Mrs. Payne's eyes, when Gerty, coming in, as she announced, to deliver a message, paused in the centre of the room as if petrified into an attitude of admiration.

"My dear, you're so gorgeous that you look like nothing short of a tragic actress. Well, you ought to be a happy woman."

"If clothes can make me happy, I suppose I shall be," rejoined Laura. "Aunt Rosa has spared neither her own strength nor Uncle Horace's money."

"That's because I love you better than my ease and Horace loves you better than his foundling hospital," replied Mrs. Payne.

Standing before the long mirror, Laura looked with a frown at the sable coat, which gave her, as Gerty had said, the air of a tragic actress. Her dark hair, with its soft waves about the forehead, her brilliant eyes, and the delicate poetic charm of her figure, borrowed from the costly furs a distinction which Gerty felt to be less that of style than of personality.

"He will like me in this," she thought; and then remembering the ermine wrap, which was becoming also, she wondered if another woman would buy it, if Kemper would see it at the opera, and if he would, perhaps, admire it again as he had done that day.

"If he does I shall regret these though they were so much more costly," she concluded, "and my whole pleasure in them may be destroyed by a chance remark which he will let fall." She understood, all at once, the relentless tyranny which clothes might acquire—the jealousy, the extravagance, the feverish emulation, and the dislike which one woman might feel for another who wore a better gown. "Yet if I give my whole life to it there will always be someone who is richer, who is better dressed and more beautiful than I," she thought. "Though my individuality wins to-day, to-morrow I shall meet a woman beside whom I shall be utterly extinguished. And there is no escape from this; it is inevitable and must happen." A shiver of disgust went through her, and it seemed to her that she saw her life as plainly as if the glass before her revealed her whole future and not merely her figure in the sable coat. She shrank from her destiny, and yet she knew that in spite of herself, she must still follow it; she longed for her old freedom of spirit, and instead she struggled helplessly in the net which her own temperament cast about her. "Is it possible that I can ever enter into this warfare which I have always despised?" she asked, "into this conflict of self against self, of vanity against vanity? Shall I, like Gerty, grow to fear and to hate other women in my foolish effort to keep alive a passion which I know to be worthless? Shall I even come in the end to feel terror and suspicion in my love for Gerty?" But this last thought was so terrible to her that she lacked the courage with which to face it, and so she put it now resolutely aside as she had learned to put aside at will all the disturbing questions which her conscience asked.

"I know that you are over head and ears in it all," Gerty was saying, "and I shouldn't have dropped in if I hadn't just been called to the telephone by Arnold. He was, of course, rushing off to a meeting about those everlasting mines—Perry's in it, too, and it's really helped his mind to get the better of his lungs at last."

"But I thought Arnold was coming this afternoon," returned Laura, a little hurt.

With a laughing glance at Mrs. Payne, who sat counting silk stockings by the window, Gerty buried her face in her muff while she shook with unaffected merriment.

"Oh, my dear, what a wife you'll make if you haven't learned to mask your feelings!" she exclaimed, "but as for Arnold, he wants me to bring you to his rooms for tea. The Symonds portrait has come and he'd like us to see it before it's hung. He'll hurry back, he says, the minute that abominable meeting is over-though between you and me he is almost as much interested in those mines as he is in his marriage."

The disappointment in Laura's face was succeeded by an expression of impatient eagerness, and a little later as she drove with Gerty through the streets she was able to convince herself that the uncertainty of the last fortnight had yielded finally to the perfect security for which she longed Sitting there in Gerty's carriage, she felt with a compassionate heart-throb, that out of her own fulness she could look down and pity the emptiness of her friend's life; and this thought filled her bosom with a sympathy which overflowed in the smile she turned upon the brilliant woman at her side.

"I find myself continually rejoicing because you are to take a house up town," remarked Gerty, as she pressed Laura's hand under the fur robe. "When you come back we'll see each other every day, and when you land, I'll be there to welcome you with the house full of flowers and the dinner ordered."

"There's no use trying to realise it all, I can't," responded Laura; and the interest with which she entered immediately into a discussion of furnishing and housekeeping banished from her mind all recollection of the despondency, the tormenting doubts, of the last few weeks. Yes, all would go well—all must go well in spite of everything she had imagined. Once married she would see this foolish foreboding dissolve in air, and with the wedding ceremony she would enter into that cloudless happiness which she had expected so confidently to find in the Adirondacks. This new hope possessed her instantly to the exclusion of all other ideas, and she clung to it as passionately as she had clung to every illusion of the kind which had presented itself to her imagination.

When they reached his rooms, Kemper had not returned, and while Gerty amused herself by examining every photograph upon his desk and mantel, Laura drew a chair before the portrait, which was a bold, half-length study painted with a daring breadth of handling. The artist was a new French painter, who had leaped into prominence because of a certain extravagance of style which he affected; and his work had taken Kemper's fancy as everything took it either in art or in life which deviated in any marked eccentricity from the ordinary level of culture or of experience.

"There's something queer about it—I don't like it," said Laura, with her first glance. "Why, it makes him look almost brutal—there's a quality in it I'll never grow accustomed to."

Then, as she looked a moment longer at the picture, she saw that the quality in Kemper which the painter had caught and arrested with an excellent technique upon the canvas, was the resemblance to Perry Bridewell which had offended her when she noticed it the other day. It was there, evidently—this foreign painter had seized upon it as the most subtle characteristic of Kemper's face—and in dwelling upon it in the portrait as he had done, she realised that he had attempted to produce, not so much the likeness of the man, as a startling, almost sinister study of a personality. What he had shown her was the temperament, not the face of her lover—not her lover, indeed, she told herself the next instant, but Madame Alta's.

"I can't get used to it—I'll never like it," she repeated, and rising from her chair, as if the view of the portrait annoyed her, she went over to the centre table to glance idly over the current fiction with which Kemper occupied his leisure hours. Her eyes were still wandering aimlessly over the titles of the books, when her attention was diverted by the sound of Wilkins' voice, lowered discreetly to an apologetic whisper; and immediately afterward she heard the softened soprano of a woman, who insisted, apparently, upon leaving the elevator and crossing the hall outside. The conversation with Wilkins had reached Gerty's ears at the same instant, and she, too, sat now with her enquiring gaze bent on the door, which opened presently to admit the ample person of Madame Alta. At sight of them she showed no tremor of surprise, but stood poised there, in an impressive stage entrance, upon the threshold, presiding, as it were, over the situation with all the brilliant publicity which her exquisite gift conferred. Her art had not only placed her below the level of her sex's morality, it had lifted her above any embarrassment of accident, and as she hesitated for a single smiling minute in the doorway, she appeared more at home in her surroundings than either of the two women who stood, in silence, awaiting her advance. With her ermine, her ostrich feathers, her smile, and her scented powder, she impressed Laura less as extinguishing her by the splendour of a presence than as smothering her in the softness of an effect. For it was at Laura that, after the first gently enquiring glance, she levelled her words as well as her caressing look.

"It was such a happy chance to meet you that I couldn't let it slip," she said, as she bore down upon her with a large, soft hand outstretched, "Mr. Kemper has been so good a friend to me that I am overjoyed to have the opportunity of telling you how much I think of him. He has been really the greatest help about some speculations, too—don't you think he has quite a genius for that kind of thing?"

For a moment Laura looked at her in a surprise caused less by the other's entrance than by her own inward composure. For weeks she had told herself that she hated Madame Alta in her heart, yet, brought face to face with her, feeling the soft pressure of her hand, she realised that she had hated merely a creature of straw and not this woman whose humanity was, after all, of the same flesh and blood and spirit as her own. By the wonder of her intuition she had recognised in her first glance the thing which Kemper, for all his worldly knowledge, had missed in his more intimate association, and this was that the soul of the woman before her had not perished, but was still tossed wildly in the fires of art, of greed, of sensuality. Between her lover and the prima donna she knew that for this one instant at least, she was strong enough to stand absolutely detached and incapable of judgment. And in a sudden light, as from a lamp that was turned inward, she saw that if she could but maintain this attitude of pity, she would place her happiness beyond any harm from the attacks of Madame Alta or of her kind. She saw this, yet she felt that the vision was almost useless, for even while she stood there the light went out and she knew that it would not shine for her again.

"I know but little of that side of him," she answered, smiling. "It is pleasant to hear that he has a gift I did not suspect."

"Oh, I dare say he has others," retorted Madame Alta, "but I came about these very speculations to-day," she added, "and since he isn't at home—if you'll let me—I'll leave a note on his desk. I start for Chicago to-night for a month of continuous hard work. Until you know what it is to race about the country for your life," she wound up merrily, "never stop to waste your pity on a day labourer."

With a smiling apology to Gerty, she crossed to Kemper's desk, where she wrote a short note which she proceeded coolly to place in an envelope and seal. As she moistened the flap of the envelope with her lips, she turned to glance at Laura over her ermine stole.

"I hope you'll remember to tell him that my visit was by no means thrown away, since I saw you," she remarked, with her exaggerated sweetness.

"Why not wait and tell him yourself?" suggested Laura, so composedly that she wondered why her heart was beating quickly, "he'll probably be back in a few minutes for tea, and in that case it wouldn't be necessary for me to deliver so flattering a message."

"Oh, but I want you to—I particularly want you to," insisted the other, creating, as she rose, a lovely commotion by the flutter of her lace veil and her ostrich feathers. "I send him my liveliest congratulations, and the part he'll like best is that I am able to send them by you."

The door closed softly after her, and Gerty, going to the window, threw it open with a bang which served as an outlet to the emotion she lacked either the courage or the opportunity to put into words.

"I don't like her perfume," she observed, with an affected contortion of her nostrils, "there's something to be said for the odour of sanctity, after all."

"Why, I thought it delicious," returned Laura, as if astonished. "It even occurred to me to ask her where she got it."

"Well, I'm thankful you didn't," exclaimed Gerty; and she concluded dismally after a moment, "What hurts me most is to think I've wasted bouquets on her over the footlights, for a more perfectly odious person—"

"I found her wonderfully handsome," remarked Laura, in a voice which had a curious quality of remoteness, as if she spoke from some dream-like state of mental abstraction. "Wonderfully handsome," she insisted, indignant at the scornful denial in Gerty's look.

"Well, it's the kind of handsomeness that makes me want to scratch her in the face," rejoined Gerty, with the unshakable courage of her impressions.

Turning away from her friend, Laura went over to the desk as if drawn in spite of her resolution, by the large sealed envelope lying on the white blotter. The handwriting of the address, with its bold, free flourish at the end, appeared to fascinate her eyes, for after looking at it attentively a moment, she took it up and brought it over to the hearth where Gerty stood.

"Yes, she is wonderfully handsome," she repeated; and her tone was so indifferent that it came with a shock of surprise to Gerty, when she bent over and laid the letter upon the burning logs. Dropping on her knees, she watched the paper catch fire, redden in the flame, turn to ashes, and at last dissolve in smoke. Then she leaned forward and pushed the logs together, as if she wished to destroy some last vestige of the words which were still visible to her eyes.

"Laura!" called Gerty sharply. She had made a step forward, but as Laura rose from her knees and faced her, she fell back into her former attitude.

"If you want to tell him," said Laura coldly, "you may do it when he comes. I shan't mind it in the least."

"Tell him!" cried Gerty, and her voice shook with a tremor she could not control, "but, oh! Laura, what made you do it?"

She knew that she wanted to go away by herself and weep; but she could not tell at the moment whether it was for Laura or for her own disappointment that she was more concerned. Her whole outlook on life was altered by the thing which Laura had done; she felt that she no longer believed in anybody and that it was impossible for her to go on living as she had lived until to-day.

"I don't know," replied Laura, with a curiosity so vague that it sounded almost impersonal, "I don't know why I did it." As she uttered the words the question seemed to absorb her thoughts; then, before Gerty caught the sound of Kemper's approaching footsteps, she knew that he must be coming by the abruptness of the change with which Laura spoke.

"I wonder why it is that men never appreciate the necessity for tea!" she exclaimed, and laughing she went quickly toward the door. "I don't believe you'd have cared if you'd found us starving on your threshold," she wound up with reproachful gayety.

"Oh, I hoped you'd ordered it," said Kemper, "upon my word I'm sorry—I fear you must have had a stupid wait."

He entered with his breathless, though smiling, apology, touched the bell for Wilkins as he crossed the room, and offered his hand first to Gerty and then to Laura with an equally enthusiastic pressure. The clear red was still in his face, and his eyes beamed with animation as he stood warming himself before the fire.

"Have you been here long?" he asked, looking at his watch with a slight frown. "By Jove, I'm a good half hour after time. What did you do with yourselves while you cursed me?"

"First we looked at the portrait—which I hate—then we read the names of all your silly books," responded Laura, with a dissimulation so natural that Gerty was divided between regret for her sincerity and admiration for her acting.

"Well, it doesn't do to quarrel not only with our bread and meat, but with our automobiles, too," protested Kemper lightly, "It's a good thing I've gone in for, and it all came of my riding up in the train with Barclay to the Adirondacks—otherwise he'd have been too sharp to have put me on to the tip." Then his rapid glance travelled to the portrait leaning against a chair, and he put a question with the same eager interest he had shown in the subject of mining. "So you've had time to come to judgment on the French fellow. What do you think of him?"

"It's not you—I won't believe it," replied Laura merrily, "if he's right, then I've been deluded into marrying the wrong man."

"Oh, he goes in for style, of course," remarked Kemper, closing one eye as he fell back and examined the picture, "most of the French people do, you know."

The radiance which belonged to an inner illumination rather than to any outward flush of colour, had suffused Laura's face, until she seemed to glow with an animation which revealed itself not only in her look and voice, but in her whole delicate figure, so fragile, yet so full of energy. There was something unnatural, almost feverish in the brightness of her eyes and in the rapid gestures of her small expressive hands. To Gerty she appeared to resemble a beautiful wild bird, helplessly beating its wings in the fowler's net.

"But isn't their style mostly affectation as their strength is only coarseness?" she asked eagerly, wondering as she spoke, what her words meant and why she should have chosen these out of the whole English language. "Isn't it truth, after all," she added, with the same excited emphasis, "that we need in life?" It occurred to her suddenly that she was repeating words which someone else had said before her, and she tried to remember what the occasion was and who had uttered them.

Then as she looked at Kemper, she found herself wondering if they would be obliged, in order to make life bearable, to lie to each other every day they lived? The letter which she had destroyed was her half of this lie, she saw, and it seemed to her that Kemper's share was in his old love for Jennie Alta. But, to her surprise, when she thought of this it aroused no torment, hardly any disturbance in her heart, for Kemper and his love for her appeared to her now in an entirely new and different aspect, and she realised that because of the lie between them, even the emotion he aroused in her had turned worthless in her eyes.



PART IV

RECONCILIATION



CHAPTER I

THE SECRET CHAMBERS

Waking in the night, with a start, Laura asked herself why she had burned the letter. As she lay there in the darkness it seemed to her that the sudden light shone in her thoughts again, and she saw everything made clear to her as she had seen it while she held Jennie Alta's hand. In that instant she had looked beyond the small personal emotions to the woman's soul with its burden of greed and sensuality, and because she had been able to do this, she had felt herself to be composed and released from hatred. To discern the soul was to feel not only tolerance, but pity for the flesh, and it appeared to her now that in that one moment she had ceased to be herself alone, and had shared in the divine wisdom which the sudden light had revealed to her in her breast. Yet the instant afterward her personality had triumphed and she had burned the letter!

The illumination within her faded now, and as she lay there with wide open eyes, she saw only the surrounding darkness. Her own motives were still vague to her; when she tried to remember the prompting of her thoughts she could recall only a physical pain which had entered her bosom while she looked at the large white envelope upon the blotter. "Before this I had never lied in my life," she said, "I had never been capable of the slightest dishonest act, I had even taken a pride in my truth like the pride some women take in beauty—and yet I did this thing without effort and I do not know now why I did, nor what I thought of at the time, nor whether I regretted it the moment afterward."

With a resolution which had seldom failed her, she attempted to banish the recollection from her mind; and turning her face from the pale darkness of the window, she closed her eyes again and lay breathing quietly. "Why should I worry—it will all come right—everything will come right if I have patience," she thought, trying to persuade herself to sleep.

But she had no sooner shut her eyes than she began to live over again the afternoon in Kemper's room; and her heart beat so high that she heard the muffled sound under the coverlet "Why did Gerty look at me so?" she asked. "Did she really look at me as if she were afraid, or was it only my imagination?" From Gerty her excited thoughts flew back to Kemper and it seemed to her that she had read scorn and suspicion in the beaming glance he had thrown upon her—in the breathless apology of his entrance. "Had he met her downstairs? Did he know all the time? and was he only waiting for Gerty's absence to accuse me face to face of my dishonesty? But it was a very little thing," she argued aloud, as if justifying herself to a presence beside her bed, "it was such a little thing that it had almost escaped my memory." Then, as she uttered the words, she realised that the justification she attempted was for her own soul rather than for her lover; and she saw that whether Kemper suspected or not made no vital difference to her so long as the dishonesty was there. "The unspoken lie is still between us and his knowledge of it can neither take it away nor undo the fact that it has been. And if I burned the letter might I not be guilty of even greater things under the same impulse? Since I trust neither him nor myself what is there but misery in any future that we may share? Shall I give him up even now? Can I give him up?" But as she demanded this of herself there returned to her the look in his eyes at certain animated instants, and she felt that the charm of his look, which meant nothing, was stronger to hold her than a multitude of reasons. "If I could forget this look in his face, I might forget him," she thought, "but though I struggle to forget it I cannot any more than I can forget the letter lying on his desk."

Again she closed her eyes in a fresh effort to shut out consciousness; but when she determined to sleep the darkness seemed to grow suddenly alive about her, and starting up in a spasm of terror, she lighted the candle on the table beside her bed.

"In the morning I shall tell him," she exclaimed aloud, "I shall tell him everything and if he looks at me with anger I shall go away and not see him any more." At the time it appeared to her very easy, and she felt that it made no difference to her however things might happen on the morrow. "It will be as it will be, and I cannot alter it, for in any event I shall be miserable whether I marry him or give him up." Then she remembered that though she had pardoned Kemper greater sins than this, by the courage of his attitude he had always succeeded in placing her hopelessly in the wrong. "Even after his meeting with Madame Alta it was he who forgave me," she thought with the strange mental clearness, which destroyed her happiness without lessening her emotion, "and through his whole life, however deeply he may wrong me, I know that I shall always be the one to justify myself and seek forgiveness. Is it, after all, only necessary to have the courage of one's acts that one may do anything and not be punished?"

The light of the candle flickering on the mirror gave back her own face to her as if reflected in the dim surface of a pool. She watched the shadows from a vase, of autumn leaves come and go across it, until it seemed to her that the rippling reflection resembled a drowned face that was still her own; and shrinking back in horror, she sat holding the candle in her hand, so that the light would shine on the walls and floor.

"Yes, that is settled—I shall tell him to-morrow," she said, as if surrendering her future into the power of chance or God or whatever stood outside herself, "it will happen as it must, I cannot change it." For a moment there was some comfort in the fatalism of this thought, and after blowing out the candle, she turned her face to the wall and fell at last into a troubled sleep. But her sleep even was filled with perplexing questions, which she continued to ask herself with the same piercing mental clearness that tormented her when she was awake; and she passed presently into a vivid dream, in which she rescued the letter with burned hands, from the fire, and carried it to Kemper, who laughed and kissed her burns and threw the letter back into the flames. "It has never really happened—you have imagined it all," he said, "you've dreamed Jennie Alta and now you're dreaming me and yourself also. Look up, for you are just beginning to awake." And when she looked up at his words, his face changed suddenly and she saw that it was Roger Adams who held her hands.

From this dream she awoke with a more distinct memory of Adams than she had had for many days; and she felt again the impulse to unburden her heart to him, which she had resisted on the afternoon they walked together down Fifth Avenue. The dawn had begun to break, and while she waited impatiently for the growing light, she resolved with one of those promptings of wisdom, in which ordinary reason appeared to have no part, that when the morning came she would go to Adams' office before seeing Kemper. Then she remembered the distance which had sprung between them in the last few months, and it seemed to her to have grown still more impassable since the evening before. But because the visit offered an excuse to postpone her confession to Kemper until the afternoon, she caught at it with an eagerness, which hurried her into her hat and coat as soon as her pretence of breakfasting with Angela was at an end.

The morning was bright and clear, and as she walked through the early sunshine in the street, she remembered the day, so long ago now, when she had met Adams going to his office at this hour, and she recalled, with a smile, that she had pitied him then because of the worn places on his overcoat. She no longer pitied him now—Gerty, herself, Perry Bridewell, even Kemper, she felt, might be deserving of compassion, but not Adams. Yes, she, herself, in spite of her boasted strength had come at last to feel the need of being loved for the very weakness she had once despised. But she knew that, though Adams might understand and forgive this weakness, in Kemper it would provoke only the scorn which she had begun to fear and dread. Yet her intellect rather than her heart told her that Adams was a stronger man than Kemper and that his wider sympathies proved only that he was, also, the larger of the two. Was the difference between them merely one of goodness, after all, her intellect, not her heart, demanded, and was it true that the perfect love could not enter except where this goodness had been to blaze the way before it in the soul?

As she walked through the streets fanciful comparisons between the two men thronged in her brain, but when presently she reached Adams' office, and stood beside his desk, with her hand in his hearty grasp, she realised all at once that the visit was useless, and that there was nothing she could say to him which would not sound hysterical and absurd.

"So, thank heaven, there's something I can do for you!" he exclaimed, with his cordial smile. "Wait till I get into my overcoat and then we'll see about it."

"No—no," she protested in a terror, which she could not explain even to herself, "don't come out with me—there's nothing you can do. I came because I couldn't help myself," she added, smiling; "and I'll go for no better reason, in a little while."

"Well, I'm ready whenever you say so. If it's to overturn Brooklyn Bridge, I'll set about it for the asking."

"It isn't anything so serious—there's nothing really I want done," she answered gayly, though the pain in her eyes stabbed him to the heart, "all I wanted was to make sure of you—to make sure, I mean, that you are really here."

"Oh, I'm here all right!" he replied, with energy. She looked at him steadily for a moment with her excited eyes which had grown darkly brilliant.

"Do you know what I sometimes think?" she said, breaking into a pathetic little laugh, "it is that I remind myself of one of those angels who, after falling out of heaven, could neither get back again nor reconcile themselves to the things of earth."

Her hand lay on his desk, and while she spoke he bent forward and touched it an instant with his own. Light as the gesture was, it possessed a peculiar power of sympathy; and she was conscious as he looked at her that there was no further need for her to speak, because he understood, not only all that she had meant to put into words, but everything that was hidden in her heart as well.

"I can't preach to you, Laura," he said, "but—but—oh, I can't express even what is in my mind," he added. "I wish I could!"

"It wouldn't help me," she replied, "because although I am not reconciled with the things of earth I want to be—oh, how I want to be!"

"But you can't be—not you," he said. "You're of that particular fibre which grows stronger through pain, I think—and, in the end, how much easier it is to be made all spirit or all clay—it's the combination, not the pure quantity that hurts."

"I wonder if you ever know what it is?" she rejoined. "Does the earth ever pull you back when you want to climb?"

His smile faded, and he looked at her again with the sympathy which accepted, without explanation, not only her outward aspect, but the soul within. "There's not much in my life that counts for a great deal, Laura," he said, "but you come in for considerably the larger share of it. At this moment I am ready to do either of two things, as you may wish—I am ready to stand aside and let your future settle itself as it probably will, or I am ready, at your word, to hear everything and to judge for you as I would judge for myself. No—no, don't answer me now," he added, "carry it away with you, and remember or forget it, as you choose."

Though there were tears in her eyes as she looked at him, she turned away, after an instant, with a flippant laugh.

"Why, it all sounds as if I were really unhappy!" she exclaimed, "but you won't believe that, will you?"

"I'll gladly believe otherwise when you prove it."

"But haven't I proved it? Don't I prove it every day I live?"

"You prove to me at this minute that you are particularly wretched," he returned.

"I am not—I am not," she retorted angrily, while a frown drew her dark brows together. "You have no right to think such things of me—they are not true."

"I have a right to think anything that occurs to me," he corrected quietly, "though I am willing to beg your pardon for putting it into words. Well, since you assure me that you are entirely happy, I can only say that I am overjoyed to hear it."

"I am happy," she insisted passionately; and a little later when she was alone in the street, she told herself that a lie had become more familiar to her than the truth. The conversation with Adams appeared a mistake when she looked back upon it—for instead of lessening it seemed only to increase the weight of her troubles—so she determined presently to think no more either of Adams or of the reasons which had prompted her impulsive visit to him. To forget oneself! Yes, Gerty was right in the end, and the object of all society, all occupations, all amusements, showed to her now as so many unsuccessful attempts to escape the haunting particular curse of personality. Gerty escaped it by her frivolous pursuits and her interminable flirtations, which meant nothing; Kemper escaped it by living purely in the objective world of sense; Adams escaped it—The name checked her abruptly, and she stopped in her thoughts as if a light had flashed suddenly before her eyes. Here, at last, was the explanation of happiness, she felt, and yet she felt also, that it presented itself to her mind in an enigma which she could not solve—for Adams, she recognised, had mastered, not escaped, his personality. The poison of bitterness was gone, but the effectiveness of power was still as great; and his temperament, in passing through the fiery waters of experience, was mellowed into a charm which seemed less a fortunate grace of aspect than the result of a peculiar quality of vision. Was it his own life that had opened his eyes until he could look into the secret chambers in the lives of others?

In Gramercy Park she found Mrs. Payne waiting for her with the carriage, and she accepted almost eagerly the old lady's invitation to spend the morning in a search for hats. At the moment it seemed to her that hats offered as promising an aid to forgetfulness as any other, and she threw herself immediately into the pursuit of them with an excitement which enabled her, for the time, at least, to extinguish the fierce hunger of her soul in supplying the more visible exactions of her body.

At luncheon Gerty appeared, wearing a startling French gown, which, she said, had just arrived that morning. After the first casual greeting they fell into an animated discussion of the choice of veils, during which Gerty declared that Laura had never selected the particular spots which would be most becoming to her features. "You get them too large and too far apart," she insisted, picking up a black net veil from a pile on Laura's table, "even I with my silly nose can't stand this kind."

Laura's eyes were fixed upon her with their singular intensity of look, but in spite of the absorption of her gaze, she had not heard a single word that Gerty uttered.

"Yes, yes, you're right," she said; but instead of thinking of the veils, she was wondering all the time if Gerty had really forgotten her jealousy of Madame Alta and the letter she had burned.

"I shall tell him this afternoon and that will make everything easy," she thought; and when, after a little frivolous conversation Gerty had remembered an engagement and driven hurriedly away, the situation appeared to Laura to have become perfectly smooth again. At the announcement of Kemper's name, she crossed the room to meet him with this impulse still struggling for expression. "I shall tell him now, and then everything will be made easy," she repeated.

But when she opened her lips to speak, she found that the confession would not come into words, and what she really said was:

"It has been a century since yesterday, for I've done nothing but shop."

Laughing he caught her hands, and she saw with her first glance, that he was in one of his ironic moods.

"I thought I'd netted a wren," he answered, "but it seems I've caught a bird of Paradise."

"Then it was your ignorance of natural history, and not I, that deceived you," she retorted gayly, "because I didn't spread my wings for you, did you imagine that they were not brilliant?"

There was a note almost of relief in her voice as she spoke—for she knew now that, so long as he refused to be serious, she could not tell him until to-morrow.



CHAPTER II

IN WHICH LAURA ENTERS THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION

Two weeks later Laura was still able to assure herself that it was this lack of "seriousness" in Kemper's manner which had kept her from alluding to the burned letter. Since the morning on which she had seen Adams, she felt that she had merely skimmed experience without actually touching it; and three days from the date of her marriage she was as far from any deeper understanding of the situation as she had been in the beginning of her love. In the end it was so much easier to ignore her difficulties than to face them; and it seemed to her now that she was forced almost in spite of herself into Gerty's frivolous attitude toward life. To evade the real—to crowd one's existence with little lies until there was no space left through which the larger truth might enter—this was the only solution which she had found ready for her immediate need.

Adams she had not met again; once he had called, but impelled by a shrinking which was almost one of fear, she had turned back on the threshold and refused to see him. Even Gerty she had tried to avoid since the afternoon in Kemper's rooms, but Gerty, who was in her gayest mood, drove down every day "to overturn," as she carelessly remarked, "the newest presents."

"I'm heartily glad you're going to Europe," she said, "and I hope by the time you come back you'll have lost that nervous look in your face. It never used to be there and I don't like it."

At her words Laura threw an alarmed glance at the mirror; then she turned her head with a laugh in which there was a note of bitterness.

"It came there in my effort to make conversation," she answered. "I've been engaged to Arnold eight months and we've talked out every subject that we have in common. Do you know what it is to be in love with a man and yet to rack your brain for something to say to him?" she finished merrily.

"That's because you ought to have married Roger Adams, as I was the only one to suggest," retorted Gerty, "then you'd have had conversation enough to flow on, without a pause, till Judgment Day. It's a very good thing, too," she added seriously, "because the real bug-a-boo of marriage is boredom, you know."

"But how can two people bore each other when they are in love?" demanded Laura, almost indignant.

The possibility appeared to her at the moment as little short of ridiculous, yet she knew, in her heart of hearts, that she faced, not without approaching dread, the thought of those two months in Europe; and she admitted now for the first time that beyond the absorption of their love, she and Kemper had hardly an interest which they shared. Even the eyes with which they looked on Europe would be divided by the space of that whole inner world which stretched between them. Yet because of the supremacy of this one sentiment she had striven to crush out her brain in order that she might have the larger heart with which to nourish the emotion which held them together. In the pauses of this sentiment she realised that their thoughts sprang as far asunder as the poles, and as she looked from Gerty to the wedding presents scattered in satin boxes on chairs and tables, the fact that the step she took was irrevocable, that in three days she would be Kemper's wife, that there was no possible escape from it now, produced a sudden sickening terror in her heart. Then with a desperate clutch at her old fatalistic comfort, she told herself that it would all come right if she were only patient—that with her marriage everything would be settled and become entirely simple.

Gerty was unpacking a case from a silversmith's when Kemper came in; and he gave a low whistle of dismay as he glanced about the room strewn with boxes.

"By Jove, I believe they think we're going to set up a business!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, you can't imagine how all this comes in for entertaining," replied Gerty, shaking out her skirt as she rose from her knees.

Laura's eyes were on Kemper's face, and she saw that it wore a look of annoyance beneath the conventional smile with which he responded to Gerty's words. Something had evidently happened to displease him, and she waited a little anxiously half hoping for, half dreading her friend's departure.

"I trust you'll go through the ceremony more gracefully than Perry did," Gerty was saying with a teasing merriment, while she broke a white rosebud from the vase of flowers and fastened it in his coat. "I declare he quite spoiled the whole effect, he looked so frightened. I never realised how little sense of humour Perry has until I saw him at the altar."

"Well, it isn't exactly a joke, you know," retorted Kemper.

For the first time, as Laura watched him, she remembered that he had been through it all before without her; and the thought entered her heart like a dagger, that even now there was another woman alive somewhere in the world who had been his wife—who had been almost as much loved, almost as close to him as she herself was to-day. The thought sickened her, and she felt again her blind terror of a step so irrevocable.

Gerty had gone at last; and Kemper, after walking twice up and down the room, stopped to examine a silver coffee service with an attention which was so evidently assumed that Laura was convinced he might as well have fixed his gaze upon the fireplace. His thoughts were busily occupied in quite an opposite direction from his eyes, for turning presently, he laid down the sugar bowl he had picked up, and went rapidly to the mantel piece, where he took down a photograph of Roger Adams.

"You don't see much of Adams now?" he remarked enquiringly.

"Not much," she went over to the mantel and glanced carelessly at the picture in his hand. "I never shall again."

"How's that? and why?"

"Oh, I don't know—one never sees much of one's friends after marriage, somehow. To supply the world to me," she added gayly, "is a part of the responsibility of your position."

Though his gaze was fixed intently upon her face, she saw clearly that he had hardly taken in her words, for while she spoke his hands wandered to the inside pocket of his coat, as if he wished to make sure of a letter he had placed there.

"By the way, Laura, a queer thing happened to-day," he said, frowning.

She looked up a little startled.

"A queer thing?"

"I had a letter from Madame Alta asking why I hadn't sold some stock I'd been holding for her? She lost a good deal by my not selling and she was in a devilish temper about it."

Laura had not lowered her eyes, and as he finished she smiled into his face.

"And you did not sell?" she asked.

"I never got the letter—but the odd part is she says she came to see me about it the day you were there with Gerty—that she saw you and that she left the letter with you to deliver—"

He broke off and stood waiting with a half angry, half baffled look; and then as she was still silent he picked up a red leather box from the table, laid it down again and came nearer to where she stood.

"Is it all a lie, Laura?" he demanded.

The justification which she had attempted alone in the night came back to her while she stood there with her hands, which felt like dead things, hanging limp at her sides. "It was so very little that it escaped my memory," was what she had said to herself in the darkness; but now, face to face with him in the light of day, she could not bring her mind to think these words nor her lips to utter them.

"No, it isn't a lie—it is true," she answered.

"It is true?" he repeated in an astonishment which gave place to anger as he went on. "Do you mean you really met her in my rooms?"

"I met her there—I met her there!" she rejoined in a bitter triumph of truth which seemed, somehow, a relief to her.

"And you did not tell me?"

She shook her head. "I'd never have told you."

"But the letter? What became of the letter?"

She had drawn a step away from him, not in any fresh spirit of evasion, but that she might gain a better view of the look with which he confronted her. Her eyes had not wavered from his since the first question he had asked, but her hands were nervously knotting and unknotting a silver cord which she had picked up from a jeweller's box upon the table at her side.

"Why didn't I get the letter, Laura?" he asked again.

"Because I burned it," she answered slowly, "I burned it in the fire in your room just before you came in—I burned it," she repeated for the third time, raising her voice to clearer distinctness.

A dark flush rose to his face and the sombre colour gave him an almost brutal look.

"In God's name why did you do it?" he asked; and she saw the contempt in his eyes as she had seen it before in her imagination. "I am to presume, I suppose, that you were prompted by jealousy?" he added. "An amiable beginning for a marriage."

"I don't know why I did it," she replied, in a voice which was so constrained as to sound unfeeling. "I didn't know at the time and I don't know now. Yes, I suppose jealousy is as good a reason as any other."

"And is this what I am to expect in the future?" he enquired, with an irony which he might as well have flung at a figure of wood. "Good God!" he exclaimed as his righteous resentment swept from his mind all recollection of his own relapses. "Are you willing to marry a man whom you can't trust out of your sight?"

The force with which he uttered the words drove them so deeply into his consciousness that he was convinced by his own violence of the justice in the stand he took. "Have you absolutely no faith in me?" he demanded.

For a moment the question occupied her thoughts.

"No, I don't think I have any now," she answered, "I've tried to make myself believe I had—I've told a lie to my conscience about it every day I lived—but I don't think I've ever really had faith in you since that night—"

"And yet you are willing to marry me?" he asked, and the scorn in his voice stung her like a physical blow. He looked at her with an angry glance, and while his eyes rested upon her, she understood that he had never really seen her in his life—that he had never penetrated beyond the outward aspect, the trick of gesture.

"No!—No!" she cried out suddenly, as if she had awakened in terror from her sleep. At the instant she saw herself through his eyes, humiliated, beaten down, unwomanly, and she was possessed by a horror of her own individuality which she felt in some way to be a part of her horror of the man who had revealed it to her.

In his perplexity he had fallen back a step and stood now pulling nervously at his moustache with a gesture which recalled his resemblance to Perry Bridewell. This gesture, more than any words he spoke, shocked her into an acuteness of perception which was almost unnatural in its vividness. It was as if her soul, so long drugged to insensibility, had started up in the last battle for liberation.

"No—no—it is impossible!" she repeated.

"Aren't you rather late in coming to this decision?" he enquired with a short laugh.

But his irony was wasted upon her, for she saw only the look in his eyes, which revealed her deception to her in a blaze of scorn—and she felt that she hated him and herself with an almost equal hatred.

"I am sorry, but—but I can't," she stammered. Feeling her words to be ineffectual she cast about wildly for some reason, some explanation however trivial—and in the effort she found her eyes wandering aimlessly about the room, taking in the scattered wedding presents, his dejected yet angry look, and the fading white rosebud Gerty had pinned jauntily in his coat. Then at last she realised that there was nothing further that she could say, so she stood helplessly knotting the silver cord while she watched the furious perplexity in which he tugged at his moustache.

"I can't for the life of me see why you should be so damned jealous, Laura," he burst out presently, thrust back from the surface conventions into a brute impulse of rage.

"I told you I didn't know," she answered irritably, "I told you that—"

"Of course, I'm willing to let it go this time," he went on, with what she felt to be a complacent return to his lordly attitude, "there's no use making a fuss, so we may as well forget it—but, for heaven's sake, don't give me a jealous wife. There's nothing under heaven more likely to drive a man insane."

Some elusive grace in her attitude—a suggestion of a wild thing poised for flight—arrested him suddenly as he looked at her; and she saw his face change instantly while the fire of passion leaped to his eyes.

"Be a darling and we'll forget it all!" he exclaimed.

He made a step forward, but shrinking back until she appeared almost to crouch against the wall, she put out her hands as if warding off his approach.

"Don't touch me!" she said; and though she spoke in a whisper, her words seemed to shriek back at her from the air. The thought that she was fighting for the freedom of her soul rushed through her brain, and at the instant, had he laid his hand upon her, she knew that she would have thrown herself from the window.

"I don't want to touch you," he returned, cooling immediately, "but can't you come to your senses and be reasonable?"

"If you don't mind I wish you'd go," she said, looking at him with a smile which was like the smile of a statue.

"If I go now will you promise to get sensible again?" he asked, with annoyance, for it occurred to him that since he had made up his mind to be magnanimous, she had repulsed his generosity in a most ungrateful fashion.