Cairy sent her some roses when she sailed and was in the mob at the pier to bid her good-by.

"Perhaps I shall be over myself later on," he said, "to see if I can place the play."

"Oh, do!" Isabelle exclaimed. "And we'll buy things. I am going to ruin John."

Lane smiled placidly, as one not easily ruined. When the visitors were driven down the gangway, Isabelle called to Cairy:—

"Come on and go back in the tug with John!"

So Cairy limped back. Isabelle was nervous and tired, and now that she was actually on the steamer felt sad at seeing accustomed people and things about to slip away. She wanted to hold on to them as long as possible. Presently the hulking steamer was pulled out into the stream and headed for the sea. It was a hot June morning and through the haze the great buildings towered loftily. The long city raised a jagged sky-line of human immensity, and the harbor swarmed with craft,—car ferries, and sailing vessels dropping down stream carefully to take the sea breeze, steamers lined with black figures, screeching tugs, and occasionally a gleaming yacht. The three stood together on the deck looking at the scene.

"It always gives me the same old thrill," Cairy said. "Coming or going, it makes no difference,—it is the biggest fact in the modern world."

"I love it!" murmured Isabelle, her eyes fastened on the serried walls about the end of the island. "I shall never forget when I saw it as a child, the first time. It was mystery, like a story-book then, and it has been the same ever since."

Lane said nothing, but watched the city with smiling lips. To him the squat car ferries, the lighters, the dirty tramp steamers, the railroad yards across the river, as well as the lofty buildings of the long city—all the teeming life here at the mouth of the country—meant Traffic, the intercourse of men. And he, too, loved the great roaring city. He looked at it with a vista that reached from the Iowa town where he had first "railroaded it," up through the intervening steps at St. Louis and Torso, to his niche in the largest of these buildings,—all the busy years which he had spent dealing with men.

Isabelle touched his arm.

"I wish you were coming, too, John," she said as the breeze struck in from the open sea. "Do you remember how we talked of going over when we were in Torso?"

What a stretch of time there was between those first years of marriage and to-day! She would never have considered in the Torso days that she could sail off like this alone with a maid and leave her husband behind.

"Oh, it will be only a few weeks,—you'll enjoy yourself," he replied. He had been very good about her going over to join Vickers, made no objections to it this time. They were both growing more tolerant, as they grew older and saw more of life.

"What is in the paper?" she asked idly, as her husband rolled it up.

"There's a dirty roast on your friend, Percy Woodyard,—nothing else!"

"See, that must be the tug!" exclaimed Isabelle, pushing up her veil to kiss her husband. "Good-by—I wish you were going, too—I shall miss you so—be sure you exercise and keep thin!"...

She watched the two men climb down into the bobbing tug and take places beside the pilot room,—her tall, square-shouldered husband, and the slighter man, leaning on a cane, both looking up at her with smiles. John waved his paper at her,—the one that had the "roast" about Percy Woodyard. She had meant to read that,—she might see the Woodyards in Paris. Then the tug moved off, both men still waving to her. She hurried to the rear deck to get a last look, sentimental forlornness at leaving her husband coming over her afresh. As she gazed back at the retreating tug there was also in her heart a warm feeling for Cairy. "Poor Tom!" she murmured without knowing why.

On this great ship, among the thousand or more first-class passengers, there were a goodly number of women like her, leaving home and husband for a foreign trip. After all, as she had often said, it was a good idea for husbands and wives to have vacations from each other. There was no real reason why two people should stick together in an endless daily intimacy because they were married....

Thus the great city—the city of her ambitions—sank mistily on the horizon.



PART FOUR



CHAPTER XXXVII

Mrs. Pole's house stood on the outskirts of the old town of Bedmouth, facing the narrow road that ran eastward to the Point. In the days of Mrs. Pole's father the ships passing to and from Bedmouth on the river could be seen from the front windows. Now the wires of a trolley road disfigured the old street and cheap wooden houses cut off the view of the river. In the rear there was a small garden, sloping down to an inlet of the sea, from which could be seen Bedmouth-way the slender spires of two churches that rose among the drooping branches of the elms, and seaward the squat outline of a great summer hotel, bedecked with many flags. In the black mould of the old garden grew tall syringa bushes, lilacs, pampas grass, and a few tiger lilies, and over the crumbling brick walls hung dusty leaves of grapevines. When the gate at the bottom of the garden was open, there was a view of the inlet, bordered with marsh grass, and farther away a segment of the open sea, with the lighthouse on Goose Rock.

Here the Judge's wife had come to live when her husband died, forsaking Washington, which had grown "too busy for an old woman." ...

At the end of the garden, which was shaded by the high wall, Margaret sat, an uncut book on her knees, her eyes resting on the green marsh to be seen through the open door. Near by Ned in his little invalid chair was picking the mortar from the brick wall with a nail he had been able to reach. The two were often alone like this for hours, silent.

"Mother," the child said at last, as Margaret took up the book.

"What is it, Ned?"

"Must I sit like this always,—forever and ever?"

"I hope not, dear. You must remember Dr. Renault said it would take patience."

"But I have been patient."

"Yes, I know, dear!"

"If I didn't get any better, should I have to sit like this always?" At last the question which she feared had come, the child's first doubt. It had been uncertain, the recovery of the lost power; at times it seemed as if there were no progress. The mother answered in her slow, deep voice:—

"Yes, dear; you would have to be patient always. But we are going to hope!"

"Mother," the child persisted, "why does it have to be so?"

And the mother answered steadily:—

"I don't know, my boy. Nobody knows why."

Ned resumed his scratching at the wall, pondering this mystery of an inexplicable world. Presently there was a sound of oars beyond the wall, and the child exclaimed:—

"There's Big Bob! He said he'd take me for a row."

Falkner carried off the Little Man for his promised boat ride, leaving Margaret to cut the leaves of her book and to think. It was the week before, the end of August, that Falkner had put into Bedmouth in his small sloop. He was staying with his sister at Lancaster, only a short walk on the other side of the Point. After a few days more at the most he would have to turn back southwards, and then? ... She threw down her book and paced slowly back and forth along the garden walk. As the sun sank low, her mother-in-law appeared, a frail little lady, who looked gently into Margaret's face.

"I am afraid you feel the heat, Margaret. It has been a very hot day."

"Is it hot?" Margaret asked vaguely, shading her eyes with her hand to look out over the marsh.

There was the sound of oars and a child's laugh, loud and careless, just beyond the wall. "Look out!" Ned cried.

"There, you've wet your feet!" The two women smiled. That boyish laugh was rare these days.

When the grandmother wheeled Ned into the house for his supper, Margaret and Falkner strolled out of the garden beside the marsh to a rocky knoll that jutted into the sea. They seated themselves under a scrawny pine whose roots were bathed by the incoming tide, and watched the twilight stillness steal across the marshes and the sea. There was no air and yet the ships out by Goose Island passed across the horizon, sails full set, as though moved by an unseen hand.

They knew each other so well! And yet in silent times like these their intimacy seemed always to go deeper, to reveal without the aid of speech new levels of understanding.

"I had a letter this morning from Marvin," Falkner remarked at last.

Margaret scooped up a handful of pebbles and let them fall through her thin fingers, waiting for the expected words.

"It is settled. We sail from New York the tenth."

"The tenth?"

"Yes, ... so I must go back soon and get ready."

The decision about Panama had been in the balance when Falkner left New York, she knew. Another opportunity of work in the States had come meanwhile; the decision had not been easy to make. When Falkner had written his wife, Bessie had replied: "You must do what seems best to you, as you have always done in the past.... Of course I cannot take the children to Panama." And when Falkner had written of the other work nearer home, Bessie said: "I don't care to make another move and settle in a new place.... We seem to get on better like this. Go to Panama if you want to, and we will see when you get back." So he had debated the matter with himself all the way up the coast....

"When must you leave?"

"To-morrow," he answered slowly, and again they were silent.

It was as she wished, as she had urged. The new work would reopen the man's ambition, and that must be. Where a man's work was concerned, nothing—nothing surely of any woman—should intervene. That was her feeling. No woman's pining or longing to fetter the man: clear the decks for action!

"To-morrow!" she murmured. She was smiling bravely, a smile that belied the tenseness within. Falkner picked the long spines from a pine branch, and arranged them methodically one by one in a row. They were not all alike, differing in minute characteristics of size and length and color. Nature at her wholesale task of turning out these millions of needles varied the product infinitely. And so with human beings!

They two were at peace together, their inner hunger appeased, with a sustaining content in life neither had ever known before. When they were together in this intimate silence, their spirits were freed from all bondage, free to rise, to leap upwards out of the encircling abysm of things. And this state of perfect meeting—spiritual equilibrium—must end....

"To-morrow?" she repeated, raising her eyes and gazing far out to the sunlit sea. And her heart was saying, "Tomorrow, and to-morrow, and the days thereafter,—and all empty of this!"

"It is best so," he said. "It could not go on like this!"

"No! We are human, after all!" and smiling wanly she rose to return to the house. When they reached his boat, Falkner took her hand,—a hand with finely tapering fingers, broad in the palm and oval,—a woman's hand, firm to hold, gentle to caress. The fingers tightened about his slowly. He looked into the blue eyes; they were dry and shining. And in those shining eyes he read the same unspoken words of revolt that rose within his heart,—'Why thus too late! too late! Why has life declared itself in all its meaning—too late? Why were we caught by the mistakes of half knowledge, and then receive the revelation?' The futile questions of human hearts.

"You will come to-night—after dinner?" Margaret asked. "Bring the boat. We will go to Lawlor's Cove. I want to get away—from everything!"

As she mounted the garden steps to the house, she heard the whirr of a motor in the street. It stopped in front of the house, and as Margaret waited she heard Mrs. Hillyer's thin voice: "I am so sorry! Please tell Mrs. Pole that I came over from Lancaster to get her for dinner." Presently the motor whirled away in the direction of the great hotel, a cloud of dust following in its wake. Margaret stood for a moment watching the car disappear into the distance, thankful that she had escaped Mrs. Hillyer and her new motor just now.... The sun, sinking into the Bedmouth elms across the green marshes, fell full and golden upon her face. It was still and hot and brooding, this sunset hour, like the silent reaches of her heart. But slowly a smile broke from her lips, and she raised her arms to the light. It had touched her, the Sun God! It had burned her with its heat, its life. She knew! And she was glad. Nothing could take its fire wholly from her.

"To-night!" she murmured to herself.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

She had written him in that fierce honesty which spoke in every penstroke on the paper:—

... "Yes, I love you! I am proud when I say it over to myself, when I see it written here. I want you to know just how it is with me and my husband.... So our marriage was a mistake, one of the millions women make out of the girlish guess. Ignorance, blind ignorance of self and life! And my husband knows how it is between us. He knows that when the man comes to me whom I can love, I shall love him.... The man has come.... When it is time, I shall go to him and tell him honestly what has happened. I hate the little, lying women,—those who are afraid. I am not afraid! But these last hours I will have my heart's joy to myself,—we will draw a circle about ourselves."...

"As I kiss you, I love you with that spirit you have given me," she said to Falkner. "That is right, and this is right. You have given me life, and thus I give it back to you."...

When they were alone beside the sea this last evening, Margaret said: "Dearest, you must know as I know, that nothing which we have had together is sin. I would not yield even to you where I felt the right. To my father the Bishop, this would be Sin. To that dear old lady over there in Bedmouth, who suffered all her life from a bullying husband and from a selfish son,—and who is now too broken to think for herself,—it would be Sin, anything not suffering would be Sin! But I know!" She raised her head proudly from his arms. "I know within me that this is the rightest thing in all my life. When it came, I was sure that I should take it, and that it would save me from worse than death.... It came ... and we were strong enough to take it, thank God!"

On the other side of the shingle rampart, which rose sheer behind them, the slow swells of the sea fell at distant intervals with solemn resonance, the only sound that broke the stillness of the night. This surge rising and falling on the land from out the great body of the sea was like a deep voice in the woman's soul, echoing her instinct of a reason beyond reasons that compelled.

But the man, holding her close to him, his lips upon her lips, did not heed her hot words of justification. His was the hunger which took what satisfied it without debate.

"It makes little difference, the right and the wrong, after to-night," he replied grimly, "in all the days to come.... We have lived and we have loved, that is enough."

"No, no,—we are not weak, blind fools!" she spoke on swiftly. "I will not have it so! I will not have you leave me to-night with the thought that some day you will feel that of me. You must understand—you must always remember through all the years of life—that I—the woman you love—am sinless, am pure.... I can go with your kisses upon my lips to my children, to little Ned, and hold them tight, and know that I am pure in the sight of God! ...

"I give them my life, my all,—I am giving them this, too. A woman's heart is not filled with the love of children. A woman's life is not closed at thirty-two! ... I have a soul—a life to be satisfied,—ah, dearest, a soul of my own to be filled, in order to give. Most men don't know that a woman has a life of her own—apart from her children, from her husband, from all. It's hers, hers, her very own!" she cried with a sob of joy and anguish.

In these words escaped the essence of that creed which had taken the place of the Bishop's teaching,—the creed that is breathed insensibly in the atmosphere of the age,—'I, the woman, have a soul that is mine which has its rights, and what it bids me take, that I will take and hold!'

The man listened to the solemn rhythm of the sea pounding upon the rocky coast, and it spoke to him of fatality, of the surge of life striking blindly, carrying in its mighty grip the little human atoms. It had borne him up to the stars, and in a few hours it would roll him back, down into the gulf, from which no effort of his will could take him. With this hunger, which was his human birthright, he must labor on, unappeased. It was given him merely to know what would recreate living for him, what would make of the days joy instead of pain, and it was not to be his, except for this moment of time.

"I think," he said, "there is enough to suffer and endure. We will not quibble about the law. In the face of the gulf, why argue?" and he took her once more in his arms, where she rested content....

Lawlor's Point was a little neck of shingle, curving inwards from the open sea, making a small harbor. On the landward side the still, salty marsh was fringed by evergreens that rose dark in the night. Once it had been a farm, its few acres swept by the full Atlantic winds, its shore pounded by the rock drift of the coast. Within the shingle the waves had washed a sandy beach.... Margaret knew the place years before, and they had found it to-night in the dark. The abandoned farm-house, windowless, loomed above them, desolate, forlorn, emitting an odor of the past from its damp rooms. About the old walnut tree where they had been sitting there grew in the long grass fleur-de-lys and myrtle.

"Let us go nearer to the water!" Margaret exclaimed. "I want to hear its voice close to my ears. This place is musty with dead lives. Dead lives!" She laughed softly. "I was like them once, only I walked and spoke, instead of lying still in a grave. And then you found me, dearest, and touched me. I shall never be dead like that again."

And when they had picked their way over the rough shingle to the water, she said in another passionate outburst, as if nature dammed for a long time were pouring itself forth in torrent:—

"Pain! Don't say the word. Do you think that we can count the pain—ever? Now that we have lived? What is Pain against Being!"

"A man's thought, that!" he reflected, surprised by the piercing insight, the triumphant answer of the spirit to the backward dragging surge of circumstance. "A woman suffers—always more than a man."

Margaret, flinging up her head to the dark heaven, the deep guttural note of the sea in her ears, chanted low, "Some pain is tonic.... Though to-night we are together, one and undivided—for the last time, the last time," she whispered, "yet I cannot feel the pain."

The man rebelled:—

"The last time? ... But we are not ready, Margaret,—not yet!"

"We should never be ready!"

"We have had so little."

"Yes! So little—oh, so little of all the splendid chance of living."

The same thought lay between them. They had come but to the edge of experience, and beyond lay the vision of recreated life. Like souls that touched the confines of a new existence and turned back, so must they turn back to earth. So little! A few hours of meeting, a few spoken words, a few caresses, a few moments like this of mute understanding, out of all conscious time, and then nothing,—the blank!

There was something cowardly, thus to turn back at the edge of experience, incomplete and wistfully desirous. Yet the man would not ask her to venture on. What the woman would gladly give, he would not take as sacrifice. She understood.

"Would it be easier?" she asked slowly, "if for a time we had all?"

"Yes!"

"If for a little while we left the world behind us and went away—to know—all?"

"We should be happier then, always.... But I cannot ask it."

"It would be better so," she whispered dreamily. "I will go!"

Her hands clasped about him and her lips trembled.

"We will take our life!" She smiled as the vision of joy—food for a lifetime—filled her heart. "For a few hours I will be yours, all yours."

Thus, there beside the grumbling sea, these two—full man and woman, having weighed the issues of this life, the complex threads of soul and body, obligation and right, willed that they would take to themselves out of all eternity a few days, a few nights, a few mornings and a few evenings, —entire hours to be theirs, from which must be born courage for the future.

* * * * *

Old Mrs. Pole looked up at the sound of Margaret's step. The younger woman's face was pale, but still radiant with a complete joy. She patted the old lady's cheek and glanced down at the magazine in her lap. Between these two there was a depth of unspoken sympathy.

"Found a good story, mother dear?" Margaret asked.

The old woman's lips trembled. Many times that evening she had resolved to speak to Margaret of something her heart ached over. For she had seen far these last days with those old eyes that had seen so much. She could divine the dead waste in her daughter-in-law's heart, having lived with father and son, and out of the wisdom of suffering years endured she wished to speak to-night. But the deeper wisdom of age restrained her.

"Yes, my dear,—a very good story."

Each ache must find its own healing.



CHAPTER XXXIX

The long train pulled slowly into the station of the little seaport town. It was late, as always at this turning-point of the season, when the summer population was changing its roost from sea to mountain or from the north to the south shore. Falkner, glancing anxiously along the line of cars for a certain figure, said again to himself, 'If she shouldn't come—at the last moment!' and ashamed of his doubt, replied, 'She will, if humanly possible.' ... At last his eye caught sight of Margaret as she stepped from the last car. She had seen him at the instant, and she smiled rapidly above the crowd, one of her fleeting smiles, like a ray of April sun. Another smile, he took her bag from the porter's hand, and their meeting was over. It was not until they were seated at a table in a sheltered corner of the station restaurant that he spoke:—

"The Swallow is waiting at the wharf. But we had best get something hot to eat here. We shall have a long sail."

He took charge, at once, and while he ordered the luncheon, she looked at the travellers swarming to their food. Once during the long ride she had thought, "If we were seen by some one!" and her face had burned at the miserable fear. Now looking at the passing faces, she had a fierce wish that she might be seen by all the world! To speak out, to act unashamed,—but not yet,—no; the time was not ripe. As her look returned to Falkner, who was dressed in yachting flannels with a white sweater she smiled again:—

"I am so hungry!"

"I am afraid it will be bad. However—"

"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters—to-day!"

Neither of them, she reflected, cared for the detail of life, for luxury, mere comfort. They had shed superfluity, unlike those around them, who lived for it.

"Is it all right?" he asked as the waitress slung the dishes on the table.

"Everything!" and she added: "I can telephone Ned? I promised to speak to him every day."

"Of course!"

"Now let us forget.... What a lot of people there are in the world running about!"

"We'll say good-by to them all very soon," he replied.

Their spirits rose as they ate. It was festive and joyous, even this dirty country station. The September sun was shining brightly through the window, and a faint breeze came straying in, smelling of the salt water. She had given no thought to what they would do, to where they would go. She did not ask. It was good to trust all to him, just to step forth from the old maze into this dreamed existence, which somehow had been made true, where there was no need to take thought. She pushed away her ice untouched and began slowly to draw on her gloves.

"All the way here from Bedmouth I had a queer feeling that I was making a journey that I had made before, though I was never here in my life. And now it seems as if we had sat by this window some other day,—it is all so expected!" she mused. And she thought how that morning when she got up, she had gone to her little girl, the baby Lilla, and kissed her. With her arms about the child she had felt again that her act was right and that some day when the little one was a woman she would know and understand.

Her lips trembled, and then a slow smile suffused her face, bringing color, and leaning forward she murmured:—

"I am so happy!" Their eyes met, and for the moment they were lost in wonder, unconscious of the noisy room....

With a familiarity of old knowledge, Falkner descended the winding streets to the water front. In this lower part of the town the dingy old houses had an air of ancient grandeur, and tall elms drooped dust-laden branches over the street.

"Dear old place!" he exclaimed, memories reviving of his boyhood cruises. "It was in ninety-one when I was here last. I never expected to put in here again."

The streets were empty, a noon stillness brooding in them. Margaret slipped her hand into his, the joy, the freedom, the sense of the open road sweeping over her afresh. The world was already fading behind them.... They came out upon the wharves, and threaded their way among the sagging gray buildings that smelt of salt fish, until the harbor water lapped at the piles beneath their feet.

"There's the Swallow!" Falkner cried, pointing into the stream.

They were soon aboard, and Margaret curled herself in the cockpit on a rug, while Falkner ran up the sails. Little waves were dancing across the harbor. Taking the tiller, he crouched beside her and whispered:—

"Now we are off—to the islands of the blest!"

It was all so in her dream, even to the white sail slowly filling before the breeze. They glided past hulking schooners lying idle with grimy sails all set, and from their decks above black-faced men looked down curiously at the white figure in the cockpit of the little sloop. Behind the schooners the wharves and the red brick warehouses, the elms and the white houses on the hill, the tall spires—all drew backwards into the westering sun. A low gray lighthouse came into sight; the Swallow dipped and rose; and the breeze freshened as they entered the lower bay. A great ship was slowly rounding the point, bound outward, too, laboring into the deep—for what? For some noisy port beneath the horizon. But for her the port of starlight and a man's arm,—the world was wonderful, this day! Falkner raised his hand and pointed far away to the eastward where a shadow lay like a finger on the sea,

"Our harbor is over there!"

Away to the east, to the broad open ocean, it was fitting they should speed,—they who had shaken themselves loose from the land....

She held the tiller when he rummaged below for a chart, and while she was there alone, a pot-bellied pleasure steamer, swarming with people, rolled past, shaking the Swallow with its wake. The people on the decks spied the sail-boat, raised glasses, looked down, and had their say. 'A bit of the chattering world that is left,' thought Margaret, 'like all the rest.' And something joyful within cried: 'Not to-day! To-day I defy you. To-day I have escaped—I am a rebel. You can do nothing with me. Oh, to-day I am happy, happy, happy,—can you say that?' Falkner came up from the cabin with his chart, and shading his eyes, swept the sea for the landmarks of their course. And the Swallow sped on out of the noisy to-day through a path of gold and blue to the radiant to-morrow.

"See!" Falkner pointed back to the old seaport grown dim in the distance behind them. The sun was falling behind the steeples, and only the black smoke from engine and chimney marked the edge of the shore. Far away to the north opened a long reach of blue water and at the head of the bay green fields descending gently to the sea. The Swallow was a lonely dot in the open waters, dipping, rising, the sun on its white sail,—fleeing always. Falkner sat beside her, circling her shoulders with his arm, talking of the sea and the boat as if they had sailed for many days like this together and were familiar with all. His arm as it touched her said, 'I love you!' And his eyes resting on her face said, 'But we are happy, together, you and I,—so strangely happy!'

What was left there behind—the city and the vessels, the land itself—was all the mirage of life, had never been lived by them. And this—the swaying, sweeping boat, a dot upon the ocean and they together, heart by heart, going outward to the sea and night—was all that was real. Could it be possible that they two would ever land again on that far shore of circumstance, hemmed in by petty and sorrowful thoughts?

Yet across the dream came the thought of the Little Man, waiting behind there, and the woman knew that on the morrow after the morrow she should wake. For life is stronger than a single soul! ...

To the west and north there were islands, long stretches of sea opening between their green shores, far up into the coast land. The wind freshened and died, until at last in the twilight with scarcely a ripple the Swallow floated into a sheltered cove on the outermost of all the islands. A forest of stiff little spruces covered the sea point, and behind this was a smooth green field, and above on the crest of the island a small white farm-house.

"A man named Viney used to live there," Falkner said, breaking a long silence. "Either he or some one else will take us in." Margaret helped him anchor, furl the sails, and then they went ashore, pulling the tender far up on the shingle beech beside the lobster-pots. They crossed the field—it was nearly dark and the Swallow was a speck on the dark water beneath—and knocked at the white farm-house.

"It is like what you knew must be so when you were a child," whispered Margaret.

"But suppose they turn us away?"

"Why, we'll go back to the Swallow or sleep under the firs! But they won't. There is a charm in all our doings this day, dearest."

The Vineys welcomed them, and gave them supper. Then Mr. Viney, divining that with these two wanderers a love matter was concerned, remarked suggestively:—

"Maybe you'd like to go over to my son's place to sleep. My son's folks built a camp over there on the Pint. It's a sightly spot, and they've gone back to the city. Here, Joe, you show 'em the path!"

So in the starlight they threaded the spruce forest down by the sea, and found the "camp," a wooden box, with a broad veranda hanging over the eastern cliff.

"Yes!" exclaimed Margaret, taking now her woman's place of command; "this is the very spot. We'll sleep here on the veranda. You can bring out the bedding. If we had ordered it all, we could not have discovered the perfect thing, like this!"

The gray pathway of the ocean lay at their feet, and from the headlands up and down the coast, from distant islands, the lights began to call and answer each other. A cloud of smoke far eastward hung over a seagoing steamer. And throughout the little island, over the floor of the ocean, in the wood about them, there was perfect stillness, a cessation of all movement.

"Peace! Such large and splendid peace!" Margaret murmured, as they stood gazing at the beauty of the coming night. Peace without and answering peace within. Surely they had come to the heart of solitude, removed from the tumultuous earth.

"Come!" he whispered at her ear, and she slowly turned her face to him.

"Now, I know!" she said triumphantly. "This has been sent to answer me,—all the glory and the wonder and the peace of life, my dearest! I know it all. We have lived all our years with this vision in our hearts, and it has been given to us to have it at last."

And as they lay down beside each other she murmured:—

"Peace that is above joy,—see the stars!"

And there beneath the tranquil stars in the calm night came the ecstasy of union, transcending Fate and Sorrow....

Thus at the extreme verge of human experience these two realized that inner state of harmony, that equilibrium of spirit, towards which conscious beings strive blindly, and which sanctioning what man forbids gives reason to life. The spirit within them declared that it was best so to gain the heights, whether in the final sum of life it should lie as Sin or Glory, For this night, for these immediate hours, as man and woman they would rise to wider kingdoms of themselves than ever otherwise might be reached.

Thus far to them had come revelation.

* * * * *

In the morning Margaret would play housewife. Sending Falkner to the Vineys' for the things needed, she cooked the meal while he swam out to the Swallow and made ready for the day's sail. Whimsically she insisted on doing all without his help, and when he was ready, she served him before she would eat herself,—"Just as Mrs. Viney would her man."

Did she wish to show him that she was equal to the common surface of living,—a comrade to do her part? Or, rather, was the act symbolical,—woman serving joyfully where she yields real mastery? The woman, so often capricious and disdainful, was submissive, as if she would say: "This man is my mate. I am forever his. It is my best joy to be through him myself."

And after the meal she insisted on completing the task by washing the dishes, putting all to rights in the camp; then mended a rent in his coat which he had got from a stumble in the dark the night before. He laughed, but her eyes shone.

"Let me do as long as I can! ... There—wouldn't you and I shed things! That's the way to live,—to shed things." As they passed the Vineys' house on their way to the boat, Margaret observed:—

"That would do very well for us, don't you think? You could go lobstering, and I would have a garden. Can you milk a cow?" She was picturing the mould for their lives.

And all that day as they sailed among the islands, up thoroughfares, across the reaches of the sea, they played a little game of selecting the right cottage from the little white farm-houses dotted along the shores, and said, "We'd take this or that, and we'd do thus and so with it—and live this way!" Then they would laugh, and grow pensive, as if the land with its smoke wreaths had suddenly drifted past their eyes, reminding them of the future. 'You are bound with invisible cords,' a voice said. 'You have escaped in fancy, but to-morrow you will find the world wagging its old way.' But the woman knew that no matter what came, the morrow and all the morrows could never be again as her days once had been. For the subtle virtue of a great fulfilment is its power to alter the inner aspect of all things thereafter. Nothing could ever be the same to either of them. The stuff of their inner lives had been changed....

They sailed the day long in the full sun, which beat down with a memory of summer that already had departed. At noon they landed on a rocky islet, a mere clump of firs water bound, and after eating their luncheon they lay under the fragrant trees and talked long hours.

"If this hadn't been," Falkner said with deep gratitude, "we should not have known each other."

She smiled back triumphantly. That was the truth she had divined the night he was to have left her.

"No," she assented, "we should have been almost strangers and been dissatisfied always."

"And now nothing can come between us, not time nor circumstance, nor pain. Nothing! It is sealed for all time—our union."

"Our life together, which has been and will be forever."

None of the surface ways of life, no exchange of words, no companionship, could have created anything to resemble this inner union which had come about. The woman giving herself with full knowledge, the man possessing with full insight,—this experience had made a spirit common to both, in which both might live apart from each other, so long as they could see with the spirit,—an existence new, deep, inner.

So they talked of the life to be with perfect willingness, as two might who were to part soon for a long journey, which both would share intimately and real loneliness never seize them.

"And beyond this luminous moment," suggested the man,—his the speculative imagination,—"there must lie other levels of intimacy, of comradeship. If we could go on into the years like this, why, the world would ever be new,—we should go deeper into the mysteries every day, discovering ourselves, creating ourselves!"

The warm sunlight, the islands mirrored in the waveless sea, the aromatic breath of the spruce and fir, the salty scent of the tidal shore—this physical world in which they lay—and that other more remote physical world of men and cities—all, all was but the pictured drama of man's inner life. As he lived, each day dying and recreated, with an atmosphere of the soul as subtly shifting as the atmosphere of the earth, so this wonderful panorama of his faded, dissolved, was made anew. For out of the panorama of sense man builds his tabernacle, and calls it life, but within the veil there lies hidden beneath a power, that can unlock other worlds,—strange, beautiful worlds, like the mazes of the firmament through which the earth pursues its way. And the tide ebbing past this islet to the sea, flowing fast outward into the deep, carried them in its silent depths out into the new, the mysterious places of the spirit.

The sun sank, covering the islands and the sea with a rare amethystine glow deepening to a band of purple, like some old dyed cloth, then fading to pale green at the rim of the earth. There ensued a hush, a pause in life, that filled the air. 'We are fading, we are withdrawing,' whispered the elements. 'Our hour is past, the riotous hour, the springtime flood, the passionate will. And in our place the night will come and bring you peace.' The sadness of change, the sense of something passing, of moments slipping away to eternity! ...

"Tell me," she said as they drifted back with the tide, "what is it?"

"Only," he answered, "the thought of waste,—that it should have come late, too late!"

Proudly denying the flaw in the perfect image, she protested:—

"Not late,—the exact hour. Don't you see that it could never have been until now? Neither of us was ready to understand until we had lived all the mistakes, suffered all. That is the law of the soul,—its great moments can neither be hastened nor delayed. All is appointed."

Her gentle voice touched his heart like a soothing hand,—'Accept—rejoice—be strong—it must be so! And it is good!'

"Dearest, we should have passed each other in the dark, without knowing, earlier. You could not have seen me, the thing you love in me, nor I you, until we were stricken with the hunger.... It takes time to know this babbling life, to know what is real and what is counterfeit. Before or after, who knows how it might have been? This was the time for us to meet!"

In these paths her eyes were bright to see the way, her feet accustomed. So it was true. By what they had suffered, apart, by what they had tested and rejected, they had fitted themselves to come together, for this point of time, this flame of fulfilment. Mystery of waste to be accepted. No wistfulness for loss! Brave smiles for that which had been given. And resolved hearts for that to come....

Slowly, with the mood of the day in her lingering feet, Margaret crossed the field towards the Vineys' cottage, while Falkner stayed to make the Swallow ready for its homeward journey in the morning. Joe Viney rowed out to the boat with him. Nodding towards the slight figure on the path above, the fisherman observed simply:—

"She ain't strong, your wife?"

With that illumined face! He had thought her this day pure force. Later as he followed her slow steps to the camp, he said over the old man's words, "She ain't strong." She lived behind her eyes in the land of will and spirit. And the man's arms ached to take her frail body to him, and keep her safe in some island of rest.



CHAPTER XL

After supper Margaret sat and talked with Mrs. Viney. The fisherman's wife was a woman of fifty, with a dragging voice, a faint curiosity in her manner. Her iron-gray hair smoothed flat was tied in a little knot behind. Her husband, a good ten years older, had the vitality of a young man compared with his wife. He was grizzled and squat, with thick red face and powerful shoulders. His eyes twinkled sharply under their fleshy lids; but he exhibited no outward curiosity over the two strangers who had dropped down on his island.

"That woman!" Margaret exclaimed disgustedly to Falkner as they went back to the camp.

"Our excellent hostess? What is the matter with her?"

"She's a whiner!" Margaret replied hotly. "The woman is always the whiner,—it makes me despise my sex. What do you suppose she wants? She has a sister in Lawrence, Mass., and Lawrence, Mass., is her Paris! She wants her husband to give up this, all the life he's known since he was a boy, and go to live in Lawrence, Mass., so that she can walk on brick sidewalks and look into shop windows. There's an ideal for you, my dear!"

Falkner laughed at her outburst. After all an ambition for Lawrence, Mass., was not criminal.

"Oh, women! ... She wanted me to know that she had seen life,—knew a lady who had rings like mine,—the social instinct in women,—phew! And he smoked his pipe like an honest man and said not a word. He'll never die in Lawrence, Mass."

"But it must be lonely for the poor thing here winters; their children have all gone to the city."

"There are ten families at the other end of the island, if she must have some one to clack with."

"Perhaps she doesn't find the island society congenial," Falkner suggested slyly. He had heard Margaret inveigh against certain less restricted societies.

"But the old man said, 'Winters are best of all—when it's fierce outside, and there's nothing but yourself to amuse yourself with!' That's the man. And he said: 'I like the blows, too. I've been on the sea all my life, and I don't know nothing about it to speak on.' He has a sense of what it means,—all this greatness about him."

"But her element, you forget, is Lawrence, Mass."

"The man has the imagination, if he is a man! If he is a man! Woman just tails on,—as I cling to you, dearest!"

"And sometimes I think you would want to take the lead,—to have your own little way."

"Yes, I like my way, too! But the women who think they can strike out alone—live their own lives, as they say—are foolish. The wise women work through men,—accomplish themselves in those they love. Isn't that bigger than doing all the work yourself?"

"Women create the necessity for man's work."

"You know I don't mean that! ... What is bliss is to make the way clear for the one you loved.... I could do that! I'd set my little brain working to smooth away the immediate difficulties, those that hinder, the little things that stick in the way. I'd clean the armor for my lord and bring him nourishing food."

"And point out the particular castle you would like him to capture for your dwelling?"

"Never! If the man were worth serving, he would mark his own game."...

They had walked to the eastern point of the island, where nothing was to be seen but the wide sea. The wind had utterly fallen, leaving the surface of the water mottled with currents from beneath. Far away on the horizon some ships seemed to be sailing—they had wind out there—and their sails still shone in the twilight. About the cliff at their feet the tide ran in black circles. It was still, and the earth was warm and fragrant from the hot day. Margaret rested her head upon his arm and closed her eyes.

"It has been too much for you," he said, concerned.

"No," she murmured, "I am not tired. This is content, at the day's end. It is marvellous,"—she opened her eyes again upon him with a smile of wonder. "I haven't had a moment of fatigue, and I have done so much since yesterday,—more than I have done for years. I wonder what it is gives us women strength or weakness."

"Joy gives strength!"

"Peace gives strength. Sometimes I think that all the weakness in life—women's weakness—is merely wrong adjustment. It is never work that kills—it isn't just living, no matter how hard it is. But it is trying to live when you are dead.... Dearest, if we stayed here, I should be always strong! I know it. All the weariness and the pain and the languor would go; I should be what I was meant to be, what every human being is meant to be,—strong to bear."

"It is a bitter thought."

"I suppose that is why men and women struggle so blindly to set themselves right, why they run away and commit all sorts of follies. They feel within them the capacity for health, for happiness, if they can only get right somehow. And when they find the way—"

She made a little gesture with her hand that swept the troubles from the road.

"If they can be sure, it is almost a duty—to put themselves right, isn't it?"

Here they had come to the temptation which in all their intimate moments they had avoided.... 'Others have remade the pattern of their lives,—why not we?' The woman answered the thought in the man's mind.

"I should never take it, even knowing that it is my one chance for health and all that I desire, not while my father lives, not while my mother-in-law lives; it would add another sorrow to their graves. Nor while my husband has a right to his children. We are all bound in criss-cross in life. Nor would you, dearest, have me; you would hate me,—it would turn our glory to gall!"

It was not her habit to put her hands before her eyes. She was clear with herself, and without the sentimental fog. For the Bishop's creed she cared nothing. For her mother-in-law's prejudices she cared as little. The punishment of Society she would have met with gleeful contempt. People could not take from her what she valued, for she had stripped so much that there was little left in her heart to be deprived of. As for her husband, he did not exist for her; towards him she was spiritually blind. Her children were so much a part of her that she never thought of them as away from her. Where she went, they would be, as a matter of course.

They had never laid all this on the table before them, so to speak, but both had realized it from the beginning. They had walked beside the social precipice serene, but aware of the depths—and the heights.

"I hate to be limited by the opinions, the prejudices, of other people, of any one," the man protested. "There seems a cowardice in silently acquiescing in social laws that I don't respect, because the majority so wills it."

"Not because it is the will of the majority—not that; but because others near you will be made wretched. That is the only morality I have!"

The law of pity in the place of the law of God! A fragile leash for passion and egotism. They both shuddered.

The dusk gathered all about them. Her head still rested on his breast, and her hand stole to his face. She whispered, "So we pay the forfeit—for our blindness!"

"And if I stay—"

"Don't say it! Don't say that! Do you think that I could be here this moment in your arms if that were possible?"

Her voice trembled with scorn, disgust of the adulterous world.

"Hiding and corner lies for us? No, no, my lover,—not for you! Not even for me. That is the one price too great to pay for happiness. It would kill it all. Kill it! Surely. I should become in your eyes—like one of—them. It would be—oh, you understand!" She buried her head in his coat.

Again she had saved them, kept the balance of their ideal. She would have love, not hidden lust. What she had done this once could never be done again without defilement. She had come to him as to a man condemned to die, to leave the earth forever, and the one most precious thing he wanted and the one most precious thing that she had to give,—that she had given freely—to the man condemned to death.

"We have come all the hard way up the heights to infinite joy, to Peace! Shall we throw ourselves down into the gulf?"...

* * * * *

In the night Falkner woke with a start, putting out his hand to fend off a catastrophe. She was not there by his side! For one moment fear filled his mind, and then as he sprang up he saw her in the faint moonlight, leaning against the post of the veranda, looking out into the night. At his movement she turned.

"The night was too beautiful to sleep through, dearest! I have so much to think about."

She came back to his side and knelt above him, drawing her cloak around her. "See! we are all alone here under the stars." The fog had stolen in from the sea, risen as high as the trees, and lay close over land and ocean. The heavens were cloudless, and the little moon was low. "Those tranquil stars up there! They give us our benediction for the time to come.... We have had our supreme joy—our desire of desires—and now Peace shall enter our hearts and remain there. That is what the night says.... It can never be as it was before for you or me. We shall carry away something from our feast to feed on all our lives. We shall have enough to give others. Love makes you rich—so rich! We must give it away, all our lives. We shall, dearest, never fear."

For the soul has its own sensualities,—its self-delight in pain, in humiliation,—its mood of generosity, too. The penetrating warmth of a great passion irradiates life about it.

"My children, my children," she murmured, "I love them more—I can do for them more. And for dear Mother Pole—and even for him. I shall be gentler—I shall understand.... Love was set before me. I have taken it, and it has made me strong. I will be glad and love the world, all of it, for your sake, because you have blessed me.... Ours is not the fire that turns inward and feeds upon itself!"

"Oh, Margaret, Margaret!—"

"Listen," she murmured, clasping his neck, "you are the Man! You must spread the flame where I cannot. I kiss you. I have eaten of life with you. Together we have understood. Forget me, cease to love me; but always you must be stronger, greater, nobler because you have held me in your arms and loved me. If you cannot carry us upwards, it has been base,—the mere hunger of animals,—my lover! You have made of my weakness strength, and I have given you peace! Pour it out for me in deeds that I may know I have loved a Man, that my hero lives!"

Like a cry of the spirit it rang out into the night between the mist-hidden earth and the silent stars. In the stillness there had come a revelation of life,—the eternal battle of man between the spirit and the flesh, between the seen and the unseen, the struggle infinite and always. Where life is, that must be. And the vision of man's little, misshapen existence,—the incomplete and infinitesimal unit he is,—and also the significance of him,—this material atom, the symbol, the weapon of the spirit, shone forth before them. This the woman had felt in giving herself to him, that the spirit within was freed by the touch of flesh....

Already in the calm night desire and passion seemed to fade from them. Here had ended their passion, and now must begin the accomplishment. When the revelation comes, and the spirit thus speaks through the flesh, it is peace with human beings....

They lay there awake but silent into the gray hours of dawn, and when the mist had spread upwards to the sky, shutting out the stars, they slept.



CHAPTER XLI

At breakfast Joe Viney said:—

"I was lobsterin' this morning."

"It must have been the thud of your oars that we heard when we woke."

"Mos' likely,—I was down there at the end of the island, hauling in the pots. It's goin' to be a greasy day. But there's wind comin'."

They could hear the long call of a steamer's whistle and the wail of the fog-horn beyond the next island. The little white house was swathed in the sea mist.

"Better take the steamer at the Neck, if you're going to the city," Mrs. Viney suggested. "It'll be cold and damp sailing this morning."

"Never!" Margaret protested.

Mrs. Viney looked at Margaret pityingly. That a woman from the city should care to come to this forlorn, lonesome spot, "when the summer folks had gone," and sleep out of doors on fir boughs, and go off in a messy sail-boat in a fog, when there was a clean, fast steamer that would take her in an hour to the city—it was a mystery. As she packed some pieces of soggy bread, a little meat, and still soggier cake into a box for their luncheon she shook her head, protesting:—

"You'll spoil that hat o' yourn. It wasn't meant for sailin'."

"No, it wasn't; that's true!" She took off the flower-bedecked hat with its filmy veiling. "Would you like it? I shall find a cap in the boat."

'Clearly,' thought Mrs. Viney, 'the woman is crazy;' but she accepted the hat. Afterwards she said to her husband:—

"I can't make them two out. She ain't young, and she ain't exactly old, and she ain't pretty,—well, she's got the best of the bargain, a little wisp like her." For, womanlike, she admired Falkner in his sweater and flannels, strong and male, with a dark coat of tan on his face.

Viney accompanied them to the boat, waddling across the field, his hands in the armholes of his vest. He said little, but as he shoved them off in their tender, he observed:—

"It's the sort of day you could get lost in mighty easy."

"Oh," Falkner called back cheerily, "I guess I know my way."

"Well, I guess you do!"

* * * * *

As Viney had said, the wind came through the fog, driving the boat in unseen fashion, while the sail hung almost limp. There was a little eddy of oily water at the stern; they were slipping, sliding through the fog-bank, back to the earth.

"Back to life," Falkner hummed, "back; back, to the land, to the world!"

The fog clung in Margaret's hair, and dimmed her eyes. She bared her arms to feel the cool touch of it on her skin. Clean things, like the sun yesterday, the resinous firs, the salty fog,—clean elemental things,—how she loved them!

"And suppose," Falkner suggested, "I should lose my way in this nest of reefs and islands and we got shipwrecked or carried out to sea?"

"I should hear Ned calling through the fog." A simple answer, but withal enough. Their hour, which they had set themselves, was past. And lying here in the impalpable mist, slipping towards the hidden port, she was filled with ineffable content....

"You are still radiant!" Falkner said wonderingly.

"It can't fade—never wholly! I cherish it." She drew her arms close about her. "Sacred things never utterly die!"

They had found it, they had lived it, they knew—what the unspiritual and carnal millions that clutter God's earth may never know—ecstasy, the secret behind the stars, beyond the verge of the sea, in the great lunar spaces of spirit.

* * * * *

On they glided through the thoroughfares, around island points, across reaches of the sea, sweeping onward now with an audible gurgle in their wake, the sails bellying forward; veering this way, falling off there, as the impassive man touched the tiller, obeying an instinct, seeing into the dark beyond. Now a bit of cliff loomed in the fog, again a shingled roof or a cluster of firs, and the whistling buoy at the harbor's mouth began to bellow sadly,—reminders all of the shell of that world towards which they sailed. And at last the harbor, with its echoing bells and fog-whistles, the protesting shrieks of its man-machines; suddenly the colossal hull of a schooner at anchor. Then the ghostly outlines of the huddled shipping, the city roofs, the steeples, the shriek of engines in the freight yards—they touched the earth! It had ended. The noise of living reverberated in their ears.

Margaret rose with a sigh, and looked back through the closing curtain of fog to an island headland misty and vague.

"My heaven—oh, my heaven! our haven, my master!"

Like two newly wakened beings, stunned by the light and sound around them, they stumbled over the wharf. A large sailing vessel was loading there for its voyage,—a Portuguese ship bound for Demerara, so the black sailor said whom Falkner questioned. With a last look at its tall masts they took their way into the city and so to the station.

Here was the same crowd coming from the trains,—the little human motes pushing hither and thither, hurrying from train to train, dashing, dawdling, loitering. Were they the same motes as two days before? Were they always the same,—marionettes wound to perform the clamorous motions of life? Or were they men and women like themselves, with their own great secrets in their hearts? Above all, the secret that transforms! Had these others, too, gone into the great high places?

They walked to the bridge while they waited for the Bedmouth train. Far down the harbor rose the tall masts of the Portuguese ship.

"Bound for Demerara," murmured Falkner, with a smile; "we might be sailing for the Windward Islands?"

"No," Margaret smiled back; "we love too much for that,—you and I."



CHAPTER XLII

Within the old parlor of the Bedmouth house Mrs. Pole was waiting for a step. It came at last.

"The children?" Margaret demanded, kissing the old lady.

"Perfectly well."

"I must go up to them," and she started for the door.

"Wait!" Mrs. Pole said, looking up sadly into the younger woman's pale face, which still held the glow.

"Yes, mother?" The voice rang with a note of vitality, of life, as if to chant, 'I have come back to you from a long way off!' Mrs. Pole said slowly:—

"Lawrence is upstairs. He came on from New York yesterday."

"Oh!"

At the head of the stairs she met her husband, who had heard her voice below.

"You have been away!" he said sharply, an unwonted touch of authority in his voice.

It was in her heart to say: 'Yes, in heaven! Can't you see it in my face?' She replied gently:—

"Yes, I have been—away!"

"Where?"

She looked at him out of her deep eyes, and said slowly:—

"Do you wish me to tell you?"

And after a moment, as if her husband was not there and she were looking through him at something beyond, she went on into the children's room. Pole, steadying himself by the hand-rail, descended the stairs.

He no longer existed, even as a convention, for his wife.



PART FIVE



CHAPTER XLIII

Isabelle had not succeeded in bringing Vickers home with her that first time she had gone abroad. They had had a very pleasant month in the Dolomites, and he had taken her to Paris to join the Woodyards, with whom she returned. Whenever she had spoken to Vickers of coming home he had smiled and made a little joke. Once he said, "Not yet,—I cannot go yet, Belle," and she understood that it was "that beast of a woman," as she called Mrs. Conry, who kept him. She wanted to say to him, "Well, Vick, if you won't leave her, why don't you marry her then!" But gentle as her brother was to her, she did not like to touch on that topic.

She had meant to go over the next spring, but the new house was under way then. A year later a letter from Fosdick, who was returning from Russia by the way of Venice, made her start for Europe at once.

... "Madam," Fosdick wrote, "having sucked our Vickers dry, has left him at last, I am happy to say. Gone off with a fresh orange. Vick doesn't realize his luck,—he's plain dazed. Before the other orange becomes dry, it is our simple duty—yours and mine—to remove the stranded hero out of reach. I think you can do it now.... I forgot to say that the Conry left with him a pledge of her return in the shape of a lump of a girl, her daughter by Conry. Vick seems idiotically tied to this little Conry.... Oh, it is a shame, a shame!"

Isabelle cabled Fosdick to bring Vickers with him to Paris and started with her mother. "No sermons, you know, mother," she warned Mrs. Price. "It's something you and I don't understand."

When Vickers came to their hotel in Paris, it seemed to Isabelle that the last two years had worked more damage than the previous six. There was a dazed and submissive air about her brother that brought the tears to her eyes. In the languid, colorless face before her, she could scarcely find a trace of the pale, tense boy, who had roused her in the middle of the night the day before he left St. Louis....

"Why don't you come to this hotel?" Mrs. Price had demanded.

Vickers had made an excuse, and when his mother had left the room, he said to Isabelle, "You will have to explain to mother that I am not alone."

Isabelle gasped, and Vickers hastened to say, "You see Delia is with me."

"Dick wrote me that she left her child!"

"Yes.... I am really very fond of the poor little thing."

"The beast!" Isabelle muttered.

Vickers shuddered, and Isabelle resolved that no matter what happened she would not allow herself to refer again to either mother or child. Later she walked back with him to his rooms and saw the girl. Delia Conry was a heavily built and homely girl of thirteen, with light gray eyes. All but the eyes were like her father, the builder. There was no hint of the mother's soft, seductive physique.

"Delia," Vickers said gently, "come and speak to my sister, Mrs. Lane."

As the child awkwardly held out a hand, Isabelle felt the tears come into her eyes. Here was her old Vickers,—the gentle, idealistic soul she had loved, the only being it seemed to her then that she had ever really loved.

"Delia and I have been tramping the Louvre," Vickers remarked. "That's the way we are learning history."

Isabelle glanced about the forlorn little sitting-room of the third-class hotel.

"Why did you come here?"

"It does well enough, and it's near the Louvre and places.... It is very reasonable."

Then Isabelle remembered what Fosdick had said about Vickers's gift of half his fortune to Mrs. Conry. "You see the idiot hadn't sense enough to run off with a man who had money. Some damn fool, artist! That's why you must pack Vick away as soon as you can get him to go."

With this in her mind she exclaimed impulsively:—

"You are coming back with us, Vick!"

"To live in America?" he queried with bitter humor. "So you came out as a rescue party!"

"You must get back into life," Isabelle urged vaguely.

"What life? You don't mean the hardware business?"

"Don't be silly! ... You can't go on living over here alone by yourself with that child."

"Why not?"

"Oh, because—you must do something, Vick! I want you to be famous."

"That doesn't seem quite possible, now," he replied gently.

"You'll come and live with me—oh, I need you, Vick!"

She threw her arms about him and hugged him tightly to her as she had as a girl. The intensity of her feeling moved him strangely, and her words also. What was it she meant by "needing him"?

"You must—that's the thing!"

Holding her head away she searched his face critically, and her heart was wrung again by the sense of waste in it all. "Poor brother," she murmured, tightening her clasp.

"I'm not going over as a helpless dependent!" he protested, and suddenly without warning he shot out his question,—"And what have you made out of it? How have the years been?"

"Oh, we jog on, John and I,—just the usual thing, you know,—no heights and no depths!"

An expression of futility came momentarily into her eyes. It wasn't what she had pictured to herself, her marriage and life. Somehow she had never quite caught hold of life. But that was a common fate. Why, after all, should she commiserate her brother, take the 'poor Vick' tone that everybody did about him? Had she attained to a much more satisfactory level than he, or had the others who 'poor Vickered' him? There was something in both their natures, perhaps, at jar with life, incapable of effectiveness.

Vickers finally consented to return to America with his mother and sister "for a visit." Delia, he said, ought to see her father, who was a broken man, living in some small place in the West. (Isabelle suspected that Vickers had sent him also money.) Conry had written him lately, asking for news of his daughter.

"Does Vick intend to tote that lump of a girl around with him for the next twenty years?" Mrs. Price demanded of Isabelle, when she heard that Delia was to be of their party.

"I suppose so, unless she totes herself off!"

"The woman dumped her child on him! Well, well, the Colonel had something of the fool in him where women were concerned,—only I looked after that!"

"Mother," Isabelle retorted mischievously, "I am afraid you'll never be able to keep down the fool in us; Vick is pretty nearly all fool, the dear!"

Her brother's return being settled, Isabelle plunged into her shopping, buying many things for both the houses, as well as her dresses. There were friends flitting back and forth, snatches of sight-seeing, and theatres. By the time they took the steamer Isabelle confessed she was a "wreck." Yet she talked of taking an apartment in Paris the next spring and sending her child to a convent, as Mrs. Rogers had done. "It would be nice to have my own corner over here to run to," she explained. "Only Potts wants me to bury myself at Schwalbach."

Cairy joined them at Plymouth. He had been in London making arrangements for the production of a play there, and had hopes of enlarging his sphere.

"Coming home?" he asked Vickers. "That's good!"

"Thank you," Vickers replied dryly.

Cairy had already the atmosphere of success about him. He still limped in a distinguished manner, and his clothes marked him even in the company of well-dressed American men. He had grown stouter,—was worried by the fear of flesh, as he confided to Vickers,—and generally took himself with serious consideration. It was a far call from the days when he had been Gossom's ready pen. He now spoke of his "work" importantly, and was kind to Vickers, who "had made such a mess of things," "with all that money, too." With his large egotism, his uniform success where women were concerned, Vickers's career seemed peculiarly stupid. "No woman," he said to Isabelle, "should be able to break a man." And he thought thankfully of the square blow between the eyes that Conny had dealt him.

In the large gay party of returning Americans that surrounded Isabelle and Cairy on the ship Vickers was like a queer little ghost. He occupied himself with his small charge, reading and walking with her most of the days. Isabelle was conscious of the odd figure Vickers made, in his ill-fitting Italian clothes, with an old Tyrolean cloak of faded green hanging about him, his pale face half hidden by a scrubby beard, his unseeing eyes, wandering over the great steamer, a little girl's hand in his, or reading in a corner of the deserted dining hall.

Vickers was not so dull of eye, however, that he did not observe Isabelle and Cairy, sitting side by side on the deck, talking and reading. They tried to "bring him in," but they had a little language of jokes and references personal to themselves. If Vickers wondered what his sister, as he knew her, found so engrossing in the Southerner, he was answered by a remark Isabelle made:—

"Tom is so charming! ... There are few men in America who understand how to talk to a woman, you know."

When Vickers had left his native land, the art of talking to a woman as distinguished from a man had not been developed....

Lane met the party at Quarantine. That was his domestic office,—"meeting" and "seeing off." As he stood on the deck of the bobbing tug waving to his wife, he was a symbol of the American husband, Cairy jokingly pointed out. "There's John holding out the welcoming arms to roving wife." And there were hundreds of them, roving wives, on the deck, very smartly dressed for their return to domesticity, with laden trunks coming up out of the holds, and long customs bills to pay, the expectant husbands waiting at the pier with the necessary money. And there were others with their husbands beside them on the decks, having carried them through Europe, bill-payers and arrangers extraordinary for their majesties, the American wives. Cairy was writing a farce about it with the title, "Coming Home."

Vickers, who scarcely remembered his brother-in-law, looked curiously at the self-possessed, rather heavy man on the tug. He was an effective person, "one who had done something," the kind his countrymen much admired. "Had a pleasant voyage, I suppose, and all well?" Then he had turned to Vickers, and with slight hesitation, as if not sure of his ground, observed, "You will find considerable changes, I suppose."

"I suppose so," Vickers assented, feeling that conversation between them would be limited. In the confusion at the pier while the numerous trunks were being disgorged, Vickers stood apart with Delia Conry and had an opportunity to observe the quiet, efficient manner in which John Lane arranged everything. He had greeted Isabelle and his mother impartially, with a family kiss for both. Vickers caught his brother-in-law's eye on him several times as they were waiting, and once Lane made as if to speak and was silent. Vickers was sensitively aware that this man of affairs could not pretend to understand him,—could at the best merely conceal under general tolerance and family good feeling his real contempt for one who had so completely "made a mess of things." He had foreseen the brother-in-law, and that had been one reason why he had hesitated to return, even for a visit. Lane soon made another effort, saying: "You will find it rather warm in the city. We have had a good deal of hot weather this summer."

"Yes," Vickers replied; "I remember New York in September. But I am used to long summers."

As the stranger's eyes roved over the noisy pier, Lane looked at the little girl, who was rendered dumb by the confusion and clung to Vickers's hand, and then he eyed his brother-in-law again, as if he were recollecting the old Colonel and thinking of the irony in the fact that his only surviving son should be this queer, half-foreign chap.

A large motor waited outside the pier to take the party to the hotel.

"Aren't you coming, Tom?" Isabella asked, as Cairy made for a cab with his luggage.

"I will meet you at the station to-morrow," Cairy called back. "Business!"

"Well,—how is everything?" she asked her husband. "Glad to see me back?"

"Of course."

They darted swiftly up town to an immense hotel, where Lane had engaged rooms for the party. Having seen them into the elevator, he returned by the motor to his office.



CHAPTER XLIV

The old Farm at Grafton had been marvellously transformed. Vickers Price, standing on the terrace the evening of his arrival, looked wistfully for landmarks, for something to recall the place he had loved as a boy, which had gathered charm in his imaginative memory these years of his exile. The Georgian facade of the new house faced the broad meadow through which the wedding party had wandered back to the Farm the day of Isabelle's marriage. Below the brick terrace, elaborate gardens, suggesting remotely Italy, had been laid out on the slope of the New England hill. The thin poplars, struggling to maintain themselves in the bitter blasts of an American winter, gave an unreal air to the place as much as anything. The village of Grafton, which had once been visible as a homely white-dotted road beyond the meadow, had been "planted out." There was a formal garden now where the old barn stood, from which the Colonel's pointers had once yapped their greetings on the arrival of strangers. The new brick stables and the garage were in the woods across the road, connected with the house by telephone.

On their arrival by the late train they had had supper quite informally. It had been served by two men, however, and there was a housekeeper to relieve the mistress of the care of the increased establishment. What had bewildered Vickers on his return to America after an absence of ten years, from the moment he had taken ship until the Lanes' new French motor had whisked him up to the Farm—Isabelle still clung to the old name—was the lavish luxury, the increased pace of living, on this side of the ocean. The years he had spent in Italy had been the richest period of our industrial renaissance. In the rising tide of wealth the signs of the old order—the simplicity of the Colonel's day—had been swept away.

As Vickers stood rather apart from the others, who were strolling about the terrace, and looked at Dog Mountain, the only perfectly familiar feature in the scene, Isabella tucked her arm under his and led him towards the gardens:—

"Vick, I want you to see what I have done. Don't you think it's much better? I am not altogether satisfied." She glanced back at the long facade: "I think I should have done better with Herring rather than Osgood. But when we started to alter the old place, I didn't mean to do so much to it."

Isabelle knew more now than when Osgood had been engaged, two years before, and Herring's reputation had meanwhile quite overshadowed the older architect's.

"I told Isabelle at the start," said Cairy, who joined them, "she had better pull the old place down, and have a fresh deal. You had to come to it practically in the end?" He turned to Isabelle teasingly.

"Yes," she admitted half regretfully; "that's the way I always do a thing,—walk backwards into it, as John says. But if we had built from the ground up, it wouldn't have been this place, I suppose.... And I don't see why we did it,—Grafton is so far from anything."

"It's neither Tuxedo nor Lenox," Cairy suggested.

"Just plain Connecticut. Well, you see the Colonel left the place to me,—that was the reason."

And also the fact that he had left her only a small portion of his fortune besides. It was an ironical rebuke for his act that much of the small fortune he had given her had gone to transform his beloved Farm into something he would never have recognized. Vickers thought sadly, "If the old Colonel's ghost should haunt this terrace, he couldn't find his way about!"

"But it's snug and amusing,—the Farm? Isn't it?" Cairy demanded of Vickers in a consoling manner.

"I shouldn't call it snug," Vickers replied, unconsciously edging away from the Southerner, "nor wholly amusing!"

"You don't like my efforts!" Isabelle exclaimed wearily. She herself, as she had said, was not satisfied; but money as well as strength and her husband's dislike of "more building" had held her hand.

"We all change," Vickers replied humorously. "I can't blame the old place for looking different. I have changed somewhat myself, and you, Cairy,"—he glanced at the figure by his sister's side, which had sleek marks of prosperity as well as the Farm,—"too. All changed but you, Isabelle!"

"But I have changed a lot!" she protested. "I have grown better looking, Vickie, and my mind has developed, hasn't it, Tom? One's family never sees any change but the wrinkles!"...

Vickers, turning back to the terrace where Fosdick and Gossom were smoking, had a depressed feeling that of all the changes his was the greatest.

"I must look in on my little girl," he explained to Isabelle, as he left her and Cairy.

Isabelle watched him mount the steps. His small figure had grown heavy from his inactive life abroad. The thick hair had almost gone from the top of his head, and the neat pointed beard had become bushy. In his negligent clothes he looked quite slouchy, she had felt that evening, as if he had long ceased to have any interest in his person. "It's all that beast of a woman," she said resentfully to Cairy, remembering the slender, quite elegant brother of the old days. "And to think of his saddling himself with her brat and lugging her around with him! I couldn't make him drop her in New York with her governess. But it's impossible!"

"The lady left him her husband's child, as a souvenir, didn't she?"

"I can't think of it!" Isabelle exclaimed, shrugging her shoulders. "To go off with that other man—after all he had given up for her! The beast!"

"Perhaps that was the best she could do for him under the circumstances," Cairy remarked philosophically. "But the child must be a bore." He laughed at the comical situation.

"Just like Vick!"

It was also like Vickers to give Mrs. Conry a large share of his small fortune when she had seen fit to leave him, as Fosdick had told her....

After visiting his small charge, who was lonely this first night in the strange house, Vickers had gone to his room and sat down by the window. Below him on the terrace Fosdick and Gossom were discussing Socialism, the Russian revolution, and the War of Classes. New topics, or rather new forms of old themes, they seemed to Vickers. Fosdick, from his rolling around the earth, had become an expert on the social revolution; he could tell the approximate dates when it "would be pulled off" in all the great countries. He had bought a farm somewhere in Vermont, and had sat down to wait for the social revolution; meantime he was raising apples, and at intervals descended upon the houses of his friends to inveigh against predatory wealth or visited the city for the sake of more robust amusement. Gossom, whose former radicalism was slowly modifying into an "intelligent conservatism," was mildly opposing Fosdick's views. "We have gone too far in this campaign of vilification of wealth,—Americans are sound at the core,—what they want is conservative individualism, a sense of the law," etc. Vickers smiled to himself, and looking out over the old meadow forgot all about the talkers.

From the meadow came the sweet scent of the September crop of hay. There was the river at the end of the vista, disappearing into a piece of woodland. The place was sown with memories, and Vickers's eyes were moist as he leaned there, looking forth into the night. It was but a shallow New England brook, this river, meandering through cranberry bogs, with alders and bilberry bushes on either side. He remembered the cranberry picking at this season, and later when the meadow had been flooded, the skating over the bushes that were frozen in the ice, and the snaky forms of the cranberry plants visible at the bottom. All these years he had thought of this little meadow as he had conceived it when a child,—a mighty river flowing on mysteriously through the dark valley,—on, around the woods that made out like a bold headland, then on and on to the remote sea. It was dim and wild, this meadow of his childhood, and the brook was like that river on which was borne to Camelot the silent bark with the fair Elaine. His older brother had taken him down that same brook in a canoe,—a quite wonderful journey. They had started early, just as the August moon was setting; and as they passed the headland of woods—pines and maples fearful in their dark recesses—an early thrush had broken the silence of the glimmering dawn with its sweet call. And another had answered from the depth of the wood, and then another, while the little canoe had slipped noiselessly past into strange lands,—a country altogether new and mysterious.... To-night that old boyhood thrill came over him, as when kneeling in the canoe with suspended paddle, in the half light of dawn, he had heard the thrushes calling from the woods. Then it had seemed that life was like this adventurous journey through the gray meadows, past the silent woods, on into the river below, and the great sea, far, far away! A wonderful journey of enlarging mystery from experience to experience into some great ocean of understanding....

Vickers sat down at the piano by the window, and forgetting all that had taken the place of his dream,—the searing flame of his manhood,—struck the gentle chords of that boyhood journey, something of the river and the meadow and the woods and the gray dawn, which had often sounded in his ears far away in Venice.

Isabelle and Cairy, coming up the terrace steps, heard the notes and stopped to listen.

"Charming!" Cairy murmured. "His own?"

"How I wish he would try to do something, and get his work played by our orchestras! He could if he would only interest himself enough. But the ambition seems gone out of him. He merely smiles when I talk about it."

"He'll come back to it," Cairy grinned. "It's in the air here to put your talent in the front window."

Vickers played on softly, dreaming of the boy's river of life, at home once more in the old Farm.

* * * * *

Early the next morning as Vickers stole softly through the corridor, on his way for a stroll, a door opened and Isabelle looked out.

"You'll find coffee downstairs, Vick. I remembered your dawn-wandering habit and asked Mrs. Stevens to have it ready for you. I'll join you in a few moments."

Before he had finished his coffee, Isabelle appeared and sleepily poured out a cup for herself. The servant was making ready a tray at the sideboard.

"Tom is one of your sleepless kind, too," she explained. "He does his writing before the house is awake, so as not to be disturbed, or he says he does. I believe he just turns over and takes another nap!"

"Cairy seems at home here," Vickers observed, sipping his coffee.

"Of course, Tommy is one of the family," Isabelle replied lightly. "He is much more domesticated than John, though, since his great success last winter, he hasn't been up very much."

"Has he made a great success?" Vickers inquired. "What at?"

"Haven't you heard of his play! It ran all the winter, and this new one they say will also make a great hit."

Vickers, who remembered Cairy in college as one always endeavoring after things out of his reach, looked mildly surprised.

"I hadn't heard that he was a dramatist," he said.

"I wish you would do something!" Isabelle remarked, feeling that Cairy's success might point for Vickers his own defeat, and stir him into healthy action.

"What? Write a play?"

"No—you old dear!" She caressed his hand. "I think it would be good for you to feel you were doing something in the world, instead of running about with that absurd child." She wanted to say much more about Delia Conry, but bided a more fitting time.

"I haven't run much so far," was all that Vickers replied. "You shouldn't have bothered to come down," he added when the coffee was finished. "I just wanted to poke around the old place as I used to."

"I know—and I wanted to be with you, of course, this first time. Don't you remember how we got our own breakfasts when we went shooting in the autumn?"

Her brother nodded.

"Those were good times, Vick! ... They were the best for both of us," she added less buoyantly. She pushed away her cup, put her arm about his shoulders, and kissed him.

"You shouldn't say that, Belle!"

"Vickie, it's so nice to hug you and have you all to myself before the others are up. I've missed some one to go batting with me, to hug and bully and chatter with. Now you've come I shall be a girl all over again."

And Isabelle was her old self for the first time since Vickers had joined her in Paris a month before,—no longer preoccupied, striving after some satisfaction that never perfectly arrived. Here the past was upon them both,—in spite of Osgood's transformations,—a past when they had been close, in the precious intimacy of brother and sister. Outside in the new, very new Dutch garden, Isabelle resumed her anxieties of the day.

"The gardener ought not to have put those bulbs there,—he knows nothing really! I shall have to find another man.... I hope the chauffeur John engaged will get along with the houseman. The last one fought.... Oh, did I tell you that Potts is coming out Saturday,—the great Dr. Potts? He wants to look me over,—get me ready for the winter campaign.... There's Tom, writing at the desk by his window. Hello, Tommy!" Isabelle waved a hand gayly at the balcony above them. Vickers smiled at the disconnected remarks, so like Isabelle. Her conversation was a loose bundle of impressions, reflections, wishes, and feelings, especially her feelings about other people. And Isabelle had a taste for lame cats, as her mother said,—at least those cats that obviously felt their lameness.

"You don't like Tom," she rambled on. "Why not? Poor Tommy! he's so sweet and clever. Why don't you like Tom, Vickers? You must like him—because he'll be here a lot, and I am awfully fond of him."

"Why 'poor Tom'?" Vickers asked laconically.

"He's had such a hard time, a struggle to get on,—his people were poor, very nice though,—the best Virginia, you know.... He's ambitious, and he isn't strong. If this play shouldn't go—he's counting on it so much!"

Vickers smilingly drew her hand beneath his arm and led her out through the garden into the meadow. "The same old Belle after all," he murmured. "I don't see that Brother Cairy is badly off,—he has a good deal of petting, I fancy. I have heard all about that Virginia childhood and the rest of it.... Do you remember, Belle, when we used to go over to the Ed Prices' and were scared when we saw a tramp in the bushes on the hill? And how we ran through the willows as if the devil was after us?—Who have the Ed Prices' farm now?"

"Don't you know that father gave it to Alice Johnston? Wasn't it nice of him! Her husband is in the road, in St. Louis, doing very well, John says. Alice is over there now,—she brings the children on for the summer.... I don't see much of her—she is so enveloped in children!"

"What's become of the brother,—the one I licked and threw into Beaty's pond?"

"The world seems to have licked him, too," Isabelle replied, laughing at the old memory. "The last time Alice spoke of him she said he was on some newspaper in Spokane, had been in the Klondike, I believe.... There's Mr. Gossom and Tom! We must go back for breakfast."

"Thanks! I have had mine. I think I'll walk over to the Price place and see Alice. Don't look for me before noon."

"But there are people coming for luncheon," Isabelle protested.

Vickers waved his hand to her and called back, "I think you'll get on very well without me!"

Isabelle was already answering Cairy's shout from the terrace. As Vickers took his way through the meadow, he thought how sweet she was, the real Isabelle, when one got to her as he had this morning. But she had never once mentioned John; her husband seemed to be very little in her mind.



CHAPTER XLV

Vickers strode off through the meadow that morning in the hope of finding familiar things, and indulging in old memories. The country roads had been widened and improved, and many of the farm-houses had given way to more or less pretentious "places." Motors whirled past him. The hill that he remembered as a veritable mountain was a mere rise in the straightened road over which a fast car plunged at full speed, covering him with dust and leaving behind a sickening odor. He struck off into a wood-lot; here and in the pastures and meadows he found himself again. It was nearly noon before he came up the lane that led to the Ed Price farm.

This was off the beat of the motors, away from the new "estates," at the end of a grassy road bordered by gray birches. The ample old house he remembered very well with its square central chimney and stretch of outbuildings that joined the yellow barn. At his knock a broad-shouldered, smiling woman came to the door, and after a moment's hesitation exclaimed:—

"Why, Vick,—can it be you?"

"Yes, Cousin Alice."

She led him to the orchard in the rear, where with the aid of two little boys she was preparing vegetables for dinner. Tying on a large apron, she said:—

"You see we all have to take a hand. Won't you have a bib and dip in, too? ... Children, this is your uncle—cousin. Which is it, Vickers?"

It was pleasant in the long grass under the apple tree, looking across the orchard of gnarled and stubby trees to the lane. Mrs. Johnston worked and talked, while the little boys with furtive glances pecked at the peas like two birds.

"I heard you were coming—I did not know just when. It is good to see you back, Vick!"

There was a comfortable largeness in the atmosphere of this woman, which suited the homely background of the square farm-house and the peaceful orchard. And there was a pleasant warmth in her tone.

"How do you find it?" she asked; "or perhaps you haven't had time yet to know."

"It hardly seems like being home," Vickers admitted, "everything is so changed—everything but this!" he added gratefully, thinking of Alice as well as the farm.

"Yes,—the country has changed, so many rich people have bought places. And your old home—" She hesitated to complete her sentence.

"I can't find my way around there." Vickers laughed. "What would the Colonel say!"

Alice looked as if she preferred not to think what the Colonel might say of his daughter's alterations.

"I suppose Isabelle had to have more room,—she has so many people with her. And you will find that life has changed over here in ten years."

"Nothing but change!"

"Except among the poor! ... No, Tot, you can't eat the pods. There, boys, take sister and run out to the barn to help Charlie wash the buggy.... How does Isabelle seem to you?"

"I scarcely know—I haven't made up my mind. How does she seem to you?"

"She does too much,—she's not strong enough," Alice replied evasively.

"No, she doesn't seem strong; but she can't keep still!"

"She gets so little comfort out of anything,—that is the worst of it. Sometimes I wish John weren't so strong,—that he would have an illness, so that Isabelle would have something definite to do."

"She would have a trained nurse!" Vickers suggested with a laugh.

"She is such a dear,—I wish she were happier!"

"Perhaps that isn't in the blood."

"But I never saw a happier creature than she was the day she was married! And John is a fine fellow, and she has everything a woman could want."

"A woman wants a good many things these days."...

They chatted on about Isabelle and her love of people, and then about St. Louis and the old days at Grafton. For the first time since he had landed, it seemed to Vickers, he was permitted to ignore his failure,—he was at home. When he rose to go, Alice protested:—

"But you aren't going back,—it is just our dinner-time, and we haven't said half what we have to say!"

So he dined with the brood of children in the large front room, and afterwards Alice walked down the lane with him.

"I hope you are going to stay here?" she asked warmly.

"Oh, I don't know! America doesn't seem to need me," he replied, endeavoring to joke; "not that I know any place which does. I am waiting to be called."

In spite of the joking manner there was sadness in the voice. Alice was silent for a time and then replied earnestly:—

"Perhaps you are called here—for the present."

"You mean over there?" he asked quickly, nodding in the direction of Grafton.

"Yes!"

"Why do you think so?"

"You know Isabelle really cares for you as she doesn't for any one else in the world!"

"Yes,—we have always been close."

"But she cares for what you think—"

Vickers made a gesture, as if it were impossible that any one could do that.

"Yes," Alice continued gently; "a woman never gets wholly away from the influence of one she has admired as Isabelle admired you."

"But one's experience," he mused, "no matter how costly it has been, never seems to be of any use to any one else."

"Can you tell—until the end? ... What we don't see in life is so much more than what we see!"

Vickers looked at her gratefully. He would like to feel that he was needed somewhere in this hurried world. Presently there was a childish uproar behind them, and Alice turned back.

"My brood is getting tempestuous; I must say good-by!"

She held Vickers's hand in her warm, firm grasp.

"I hope we shall see you often.... I think that you are called here!"

Vickers returned to the Farm, thinking of Alice Johnston. She had given him of her peace, of her confidence, her large way of taking the issues of life. 'And I used to say that she was a commonplace dumpy country girl!' he mused. He pondered what she had spoken,—the suggestion, vague but comforting, of purpose, of a place for him in the world to fill. Just what was she thinking of? "We'll see," he murmured, as he mounted the steps of the terrace. As Alice had said, the unseen in life was so much more than the seen.

* * * * *

In the formal garden the pretty little English governess was conducting the social game for the two girls. Marian Lane, having shown Delia her pony and her rabbits without eliciting much enthusiasm, now sat and stared at her with politely suppressed scorn for the dull red frock that Vickers had designed for his charge.

"Have you been to dancing school?" she demanded.

"What is that?" Delia asked.

She was dully uncomfortable in the company of this very dainty little creature, who was always dressed in delicate, light fabrics, and seemed to have many possessions. And Miss Betterton had a well-bred manner of putting the stranger outside the little social game. So when Delia spied Vickers, she cried, "There's father!" and ran towards him.

"Uncle Vickers is not Mabel's father," Marian asserted to Miss Betterton.

"Hush, dearie!" the well-bred Miss Betterton replied; "we mustn't talk about that."

When Isabelle and Cairy came up to the house from their afternoon ride, they found Vickers playing croquet with Miss Betterton and the two little girls, who in his society were approaching something like informality in their manner of addressing each other.

"He looks quite domestic," Cairy jeered.

"Hello, Vick! Come over and see the horses," Isabelle called.

At the stable Marian's new pony that Cairy had selected was exhibited. Lane drove up with a friend he had brought from the city for the week end, and the party played with the pony and laughed at his tricks, which Cairy showed off.

"He looks like a cross between an Angora cat and a Newfoundland dog," Cairy remarked, leaning down to feel of his legs. As he stooped the ivory handle of a small revolver pushed out of the hip pocket of his riding breeches.

"What's that, Uncle Tom?" Marian asked, pointing to the pistol.

Cairy drew out the pistol and held it up, with a slight flourish,—"A family weapon!"

Holding the pony with one hand and pointing the revolver at a blossom on a magnolia tree a few paces away, he fired and the white petals came fluttering down. A second report and another blossom fell. The pony jumped and snorted, but it did not disturb Cairy's aim. A third blossom fell, and then he quickly shot the descending bud which had been cut by the previous shot.

"Steady hand!" Lane commented.

"It's an old habit of mine to carry it and practise when I have a chance," Cairy remarked, breaking the revolver. After extracting the shells, he handed the pistol to Isabelle.

"Made in Paris," she read from the chased plate.

"Yes; it's a pretty toy, don't you think?"

"It's a curious shell," Lane remarked, picking up one of the empty shells from the ground.

"Yes, I have to have them specially made," replied Cairy. The toy was handed around and much admired.

"But, Uncle Tom," Marian asked, "why do you carry a pistol?"

"In the South gentlemen always carry pistols."

"Is it very dangerous in the South?" the little girl inquired. Then the older people laughed, and Cairy looked rather foolish.



CHAPTER XLVI

Isabelle's house appeared to Vickers more like a comfortable country club or a small country inn than the home of a private family. There were people coming and going all the time. Isabelle seemed at a loss without a peopled background. "And they are all interesting," she said to her brother, with a touch of pride. "It's the only place Dickie will stay in for any time,—he says I have the best collection of fakes he knows. But he likes to chatter with them." So far as Vickers could discover there was no special principle of selection in the conglomerate, except the vague test of being "interesting." Besides Gossom and Cairy and the Silvers and others of their kind there were Lane's business friends, officers of the railroad, and men that Lane brought out to golf with or ride with. "We don't go in for society," Isabelle explained, affecting a stronger indifference than she really felt for "merely smart people." She wished her brother to know that she had profited by her two years of New York life to gather about her intellectual people, and there was much clever talk at the Farm, to which Vickers paid an amused and bewildered attention.