From the quiet corner where Vickers looked on at the household these autumn days, he watched especially his brother-in-law. Lane could be at the Farm only for occasional days, and while there spent his time out of doors. He took small part in all the talk, but it amused him as might the vivacity of children. He left this personal side of life to Isabelle, content to be a passive spectator of the little game she was playing; while, as Vickers judged from what Gossom and other men said, Lane himself had a more absorbing, more exacting game in the city, which he was playing with eminent success. "He's getting close to the king row," Isabelle remarked to Vickers. "He was offered the presidency of some road of other out West. But we couldn't go out there again to live!"

Of all the men and women who came and went at the Farm, Cairy was on the most familiar footing. "He likes to work here," Isabelle explained with pride, "and he amuses John more than most of them. Besides he's very useful about the place!" Surely Cairy was pleasantly installed, as Conny would have said. He was delightful with the governess, who admired his light conversation, and he selected the pony for Molly, and taught her how to fall off gracefully. At domestic moments, which were rare, he effaced himself. He had a curious position in the household that puzzled Vickers. He was accepted,—the wheels ran around him. Isabelle treated him with a jesting, frank intimacy, very much as she treated her brother. And Lane, Vickers decided, had distinctly more use for the limping Southerner than he had for most of the people at the house, including his brother-in-law. Cairy was so completely out of Lane's world of men that there were no standards of comparison for him.

"Tommy distracts John," Isabelle explained to Vickers. "If he only could play golf, I suspect John would steal him from me."

As the weeks passed, however, Cairy was drawn to the city for longer intervals. The new play had not been a "Broadway success," in fact had been taken off after a short run, and Cairy's money affairs were again becoming precarious, much to Isabella's frank concern. "It's the wretched condition of the theatre in our country," she complained; "to think that a few miserable newspaper writers can ruin the chances of a dramatist's being heard! The managers become panicky, if it doesn't go at once in New York.... There is a chance that they will put it on again somewhere West. But Tom hasn't much hope."

"It was a poor play," Fosdick asserted flatly. "And if you hadn't heard it line by line from Tommy, you'd know it."

"No," Isabelle protested; "it's lots cleverer than most things."

"I do not know how it may be with the theatre," Gossom put in at this point, "but more literature is produced in America to-day than at any other time in the world's history!"

"Oh!"

"I don't mean mere rhetoric, college writing," Gossom went on dogmatically; "but literature, things with blood to them in the language people use. Why, in the story contest for the People's there were at least fourteen masterpieces submitted, and not one of them had any reference to Europe, or showed the least trace of what college professors call style!" He turned triumphantly to Vickers, to whom he had previously expressed his conviction that America was the future home of all the arts. This was an idea in his patriotic creed.

"Fourteen masterpieces,—really!" drawled Fosdick; "and how much a masterpiece, please? I must send you mine."

They had heard a good deal this week about the famous story contest for the People's. Gossom, ignoring the gibe, continued:—

"We publish every month real literature, the kind that comes from the heart, the stuff of real human lives. I am tired of this silly whine about the lack of opportunities for genius in our country."

"It's hard on Tommy, all the same," Isabelle concluded irrelevantly.

* * * * *

When Isabelle moved to New York for the winter, Vickers took Delia Conry West, and on his return after a few days in the city went up to the Farm, where Miss Betterton and Marian were still staying. He felt relieved to get back once more in the country that was now beginning its quiet preparation for winter. New York had overwhelmed him. And he could not but see that in the city he was something of a problem to his beautiful sister. She would not hear of his going to a hotel, and yet he was in the way. Vickers was not one to make an impression. And one must make an impression of some sort in Isabelle's world. "He's quaint, your brother," one of her friends said. "But he's locked up and the key is lost. Most people won't take the time to hunt for keys or even open doors."

If he had been more the artist, had some reclame from his music or his father's money, he would have fitted in. But a subdued little man with a sandy beard, sunken eyes, and careless clothes,—no, he was queer, but not "interesting"! And Isabelle, in spite of her strong sisterly loyalty, was relieved when she saw him off at the station.

"It's nice to think of you, Vickie, snugged away in the country, going around in your velveteens with a pipe in your mouth. Keep an eye on Molly and don't flirt with Miss Betterton. I shall run up often, and you must come down for the opera when you want to hear some music."

So Vickers betook himself to his seclusion. And when he did run down for the opera, he found himself jostled in a worse jam of Isabelle's occupations than before. Although she had just recovered from her yearly attack of grippe, and felt perpetually tired and exhausted, she kept up with her engagement list, besides going once a week to her boys' club, where Cairy helped her. Seeing her tired, restless face, Vickers asked her why she did it all.

"I should die if I sat back!" she answered irritably. "But I'll go up to the Farm with you for a day or two.... There's the masseuse—you'll find some cigarettes in the drawer—don't forget we dine early."...

When they reached the Farm the next afternoon, little Marian met them in the hall, dressed like a white doll. "How do you do, Mamma?" she said very prettily. "I am so glad to see you." And she held up her face to be kissed. The little girl had thought all day of her mother's coming, but she had not dared to ask the governess to meet her at the station; for "Mamma has not arranged it so." Isabelle looked at her daughter critically, and said in French to the English governess, "Too pale, my darling,—does she take her ride each day?"

Everything about the child's life was perfectly arranged, all thought out, from her baths and her frocks and her meals to the books she read and the friends she should have. But to Vickers, who stood near, it seemed a strange meeting between mother and child.

That evening as Isabelle lay with a new novel before the blazing fire, too listless to read, Vickers remarked:—"A month of this would make you over, sis!"

"A month! I couldn't stand it a week, even with you, Bud!"

"You can't stand the other."

"Come! The rest cure idea is exploded. The thing to do nowadays is to vary your pursuits, employ different sets of nerve centres!" Isabelle quoted the famous Potts with a mocking smile. "You should see how I vary my activities,—I use a different group of cells every half hour. You don't know how well I look after the family, too. I don't neglect my job. Aren't you comfortable here? Mary cooks very well, I think."

"Oh, Mary is all right.... You may shift the batteries, Belle, but you are burning up the wires, all the same."

"Let 'em burn, then,—I've got to live! ... You see, Vickie, I am not the little girl you remember. I've grown up! When I was down after Marian came, I did such a lot of thinking.... I was simple when I married, Vick. I thought John and I would spoon out the days,—at least read together and be great chums. But it didn't turn out that way; you can't live that sort of life these days, and it would be stupid. Each one has to develop his talent, you see, and then combine the gifts. John thinks and breathes the railroad. And when he's off duty, he wants to exercise or go to the theatre and see some fool show. That's natural, too,—he works hard. But I can't do his things,—so I do my things. He doesn't care.... To tell the truth, Vick, I suspect John wouldn't miss me before the month's bills were due, if I should elope to-night!"

"I am not so sure, Belle."

"Of course—don't I know? That must be the case with most marriages, and it's a good thing, perhaps."

Vickers suggested softly, "The Colonel's way was good, too."

"Women didn't expect much those days. They do now. Even the architects recognize the change in our habits."

"I don't believe the architects have made any changes for Alice."

"Oh, Alice!" Isabelle pished. "She is just a mother."

"And the millions of others, men and women?"

"They copy those on top as fast as they can; the simple life is either compulsory or an affectation.... I don't care for the unexpressive millions!"

(A Cairy phrase—Vickers recognized the mint.)

Isabelle rose, and drawing aside the curtains, looked out at the snowy gardens.

"See how stunning the poplars are against the white background! Do you remember, Vick, when we ran away from school and came up here together and spent two nights while they were telegraphing all over for us? What a different world! ... Well, good night, Buddie,—I must sleep up."

Yes, thought Vickers, as he lighted another cigarette, what a different world! That summed up the months since he had taken the steamer at Cherbourg. And what different people! Had he stood still while Isabelle and her friends had expanded, thrown off limitations? For her and the many others like her the intoxicating feast of life seemed to have been spread lavishly. With full purses and never sated appetites they rushed to the tables,—all running, out of breath, scenting opportunities, avid to know, to feel, to experience! "We are passing through another renaissance," as Gossom had pompously phrased it. But with what a difference!

To-night as Vickers looked across the still white fields from his bedroom window, he was less concerned with the national aspect of the case than with what this renaissance meant to his sister. Even with the aid of the great Potts she could never keep the nerve-racking pace that she had set herself. And yet in actual expenditure of force, either mental or physical, what Isabelle did or any of her acquaintance did was not enough to tire healthy, full-grown women. There was maladjustment somewhere. What ailed this race that was so rapidly becoming neurasthenic as it flowered?

One thing was plain,—that so far as emotional satisfaction went Isabelle's marriage was null, merely a convention like furniture. And John, as Vickers recognized in spite of his brother-in-law's indifference to him, was a good husband. Fortunately Isabelle, in spite of all her talk, was not the kind to fill an empty heart with another love.... A suspicion of that had crossed his mental vision, but had faded almost at once.... Isabelle was another sort!



CHAPTER XLVII

Isabelle had agreed to stay out the week with Vickers, and in spite of her restlessness, her desire to be doing something new, the old self in her—the frank, girlish, affectionate self—revived, as it always did when she was alone with her brother. He said:—

"I am coming to agree with Potts, Isabelle; you need to elope."

As she looked up, startled, he added, "With me! I'll take you to South America and bring you back a new woman."

"South America,—no thanks, brother."

"Then stay here."...

That evening Isabelle was called to the telephone, and when she came back her face was solemn.

"Percy Woodyard died last night,—pneumonia after grippe. Too bad! I haven't seen him this winter; he has been very delicate.... I must go in for the funeral."

"I thought you and Cornelia were intimate," Vickers remarked; "but I haven't heard you mention her name since I've been home."

"We were, at first; but I haven't seen much of her the last two years.... Too bad—poor Percy! Conny has killed him."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, she's worked him to death,—made him do this and that. Tom says—" Isabelle hesitated.

"What does Tom say?"

"Oh, there was a lot of talk about something he did,—went off to Europe two years ago, and let some politicians make money—I don't know just what. But he's not been the same since,—he had to drop out of politics."

This and something more Isabelle had learned from Cairy, who had heard the gossip among men. Woodyard was too unimportant a man to occupy the public eye, even when it was a question of a "gigantic steal," for more than a few brief hours. By the time the Woodyards had returned from that journey to Europe, so hastily undertaken, the public had forgotten about the Northern Mill Company's franchise. But the men who follow things and remember, knew; and Percy Woodyard, when he sailed up the bay on his return in October, realized that politically he was buried,—that is, in the manner of politics he cared about. And he could never explain, not to his most intimate friend, how he had happened to desert his post, to betray the trust of men who trusted him. It was small satisfaction to believe that it would all have happened just as it had, even if he had been there to block the path of the determined majority.

When, towards the end of their stay abroad, a letter had come from the Senator in regard to "that post in the diplomatic service," Percy had flatly refused to consider it.

"But why, Percy?" his wife had asked gently,—she was very sweet with him since their departure from New York. "We can afford it,—you know my property is paying very well."

In the look that Percy gave her, Conny saw that her husband had plumbed her farther than she had ever dreamed him capable of doing, and she trembled.

"I am going back to New York to practise my profession," Percy said shortly. "And we shall live henceforth on my earnings, solely."

So he had gone back to his office and taken up his practice. He was a delicate man, and the past year had strained him. His practice was not large or especially profitable. The franchise scandal stood in his way, and though he succeeded in securing some of the corporation practice that he had once scorned, his earnings were never sufficient to support the establishment Conny had created. In fact that able mistress of domestic finance increased the establishment by buying a place at Lancaster for their country home. She was weaving a new web for her life and Percy's, the political one having failed, and no doubt she would have succeeded this time in making the strands hold, had it not been for Percy's delicate health. He faded out, the inner fire having been quenched....

At the funeral Isabelle was surprised to see Cairy. Without knowing anything exactly about it, she had inferred that in some way Conny had treated Tom "badly," and she had not seen him the last times she had been at the Woodyards'. But that had not been lately. Somehow they had drifted apart these last two years,—their paths had diverged in the great social whirlpool ever more and more, though they still retained certain common friends, like the Silvers, who exchanged the current small gossip of each other's doings. Isabelle was thinking of this and many other things about Percy and Conny as she waited in the still drawing-room for the funeral service to begin. She had admired Conny extravagantly at first, and now though she tried to think of her in her widowhood sympathetically, she found it impossible to pity her; while of poor Percy, who it seemed "had been too much under his wife's thumb," she thought affectionately.... The hall and the two rooms on this floor where the people had gathered were exquisitely prepared. Isabelle could see Conny's masterly hand in it all....

When the service was over, Isabelle waited to speak with Conny, who had asked her to stay. She saw Cairy go out behind the Senator, who looked properly grave and concerned, his black frock-coat setting off the thick white hair on the back of his head.

* * * * *

The two men walked down the street together, and the Senator, who had met Cairy at the Woodyards' a number of times and remembered him as an inmate of the house, fell to talking about the dead man.

"Poor chap!" he said meditatively; "he had fine talents."

"Yes," assented Cairy. "It was a shame!" His tone left it doubtful just what was a shame, but the Senator, assuming that it was Percy's untimely death, continued:—

"And yet Woodyard seemed to lack something to give practical effectiveness to his abilities. He did not have the power to 'seize that tide which leads men on to victory,'—to size up the situation comprehensively, you know." (The Senator was fond of quoting inaccurately and then paraphrasing from his own accumulated wisdom.)

"I doubt very much," he went on expansively, "if he would have counted for as much as he did—as he promised at one time to count at any rate—if it had not been for his wife. Mrs. Woodyard is a very remarkable woman!"

"Yes, she is a strong personality,—she was the stronger of the two undoubtedly."

"She has one of the ablest business heads that I know of," the Senator said emphatically, nodding his own head. "She should have been a man."

"One would miss a good deal—if she were a man," suggested Cairy.

"Her beauty,—yes, very striking. But she has the brain of a man."

"She is the sort that must make destiny," agreed Cairy, feeling a literary satisfaction in the phrase and also pride that he could so generously play chorus to the Senator's praise. "I fancy she will marry again!"

He wondered at the moment whether the Senator might not venture now to break his long widowerhood. The great man, stopping on the step of his club, remarked in a curious voice:—

"I suppose so,—she is young and beautiful, and would naturally not consider her life ended. And yet—she is not exactly the sort of woman a man marries—unless he is very young!"

With a nod and a little smile the Senator went briskly up the steps of his club.



CHAPTER XLVIII

The time, almost the very minute, when Isabelle realized the peculiar feeling she had come to have for Cairy, was strangely clear to her. It was shortly after Percy Woodyard's funeral. She had been to Lakewood with her mother, and having left her comfortably settled in her favorite hotel, had taken the train for New York. Tom was to go to the theatre with her that evening, and had suggested that they dine at a little down-town restaurant he used to frequent when he was Gossom's slave. He was to meet her at the ferry.

She had been thinking of Percy Woodyard, of Fosdick's epithet for Conny,—the Vampire. And there flashed across her the thought, 'She will try to get Tom back!' (Cairy had told her that he had gone to the funeral because Conny had written him a little note.) 'And she is so bad for him, so bad for any man!' Then looking out on the brown March landscape, she felt a pleasant glow of expectation, of something desirable in immediate prospect, which she did not at once attribute to anything more definite than the fact she was partly rested, after her two days at Lakewood. But when in the stream of outgoing passengers that filled the echoing terminal she caught sight of Tom's face, looking expectantly over the heads of the crowd, a vivid ray of joy darted through her.

'He's here!' she thought. 'He has come across the ferry to meet me!'

She smiled and waved the bunch of violets she was wearing—those he had sent down to Lakewood for her—above the intervening heads.

"I thought I would snatch a few more minutes," he explained, as they walked slowly through the long hall to the ferry.

The bleak March day had suddenly turned into something warm and gay for her; the dreary terminal was a spot to linger in.

"That was very nice of you," she replied gently, "and so are these!"

She held up his flowers, and in the look they exchanged they went far in that progress of emotional friendship, the steps of which Cairy knew so well.... The city was already lighted, tier on tier of twinkling dots in the great hives across the river, and as they sat out on the upper deck of the ferry for the sake of fresh air, Isabelle thought she had never seen the city so marvellous. There was an enchantment in the moving lights on the river, the millions of fixed lights in the long city. The scent of sea water reached them, strong and vital, with its ever witching associations of far-off lands. Isabelle turned and met Cairy's eyes looking intently at her.

"You seem so joyous to-night!" he said almost reproachfully.

She smiled at him softly.

"But I am! Very happy!—it is good to be here."

That was it,—the nearest description of her feeling,—it was all so good. She was so much alive! And as she settled back against the hard seat, she thought pleasantly of the hours to come, the dinner, the play, and then Tom would take her home and they would talk it over.... She had asked John to go with her. But he had declined on the ground that "he could not stand Ibsen," and "he didn't like that little Russian actress." Really, he was getting very lazy, Isabelle had thought. He would probably smoke too many cigars, yawn over a book, and go to bed at ten. That was what he usually did unless he went out to a public dinner, or brought home work from the office, or had late business meetings. Nothing for his wife, she had complained once....

This wonderful feeling of light-hearted content continued as they walked through dingy streets to the old brick building that housed the restaurant, half cafe, half saloon, where the Irish wife of the Italian proprietor cooked extraordinary Italian dishes, according to Cairy. He was pensive. He had been generally subdued this winter on account of the failure of his play. And, after all, the London opening had not come about. It was distinctly "his off year"—and he found it hard to work. "Nothing so takes the ideas out of you as failure," he had said, "and nothing makes you feel that you can do things like success."

Isabelle wanted to help him; she was afraid that he was being troubled again by lack of money. Art and letters were badly paid, and Tom, she was forced to admit, was not provident.

"But you are happy to-night," she had said coaxingly on the ferry. "We are going to be very gay, and forget things!" That was what Tom did for her,—made her forget things, and return to the mood of youth where all seemed shining and gay. She did that for him, too,—amused and distracted him, with her little impetuosities and girlish frankness. "You are such a good fellow—you put heart into a man," he had said.

She was happy that she could affect him, could really influence a man whose talent she admired, whom she believed in.

"I can't do anything to John except make him yawn!" she had replied.

So to-night she devoted her happy mood to brushing away care from Cairy's mind, and by the time they were seated at the little table with its coarse, wine-stained napkin, he was laughing at her, teasing her about growing stout, of which she pretended to be greatly afraid.

"Oh, dear!" she sighed. "I stand after meals and roll and roll, and Mrs. Peet pounds me until I am black and blue, but it's no use. I am gaining! Tommy, you'll have to find some younger woman to say your pretty things to. I am growing frightfully homely! ... That's one comfort with John,—he'll never know it."

As the meal passed their mood became serious once more and tender, as it had been when they met. Cairy, lighting cigarette after cigarette, talked on, about himself. He was very despondent. He had made a hard fight for recognition; he thought he had won. And then had come discouragement after discouragement. It looked as if he should be obliged to accept an offer from a new magazine that was advertising its way into notice and do some articles for them. No, he would not go back to be Gossom's private mouthpiece at any price!

He did not whine,—Cairy never did that exactly; but he presented himself for sympathy. The odds had been against him from the start. And Isabelle was touched by this very need for sunshine in the emotional temperament of the man. Conny had appraised the possibilities of his talent intelligently, believed that if properly exploited he should "arrive." But Isabelle was moved by the possibilities of his failure,—a much more dangerous state of mind....

It was long past the time for the theatre, but Cairy made no move. It was pleasantly quiet in the little room. The few diners had left long ago, and the debilitated old waiter had retreated to the bar. Cairy had said, "If it were not for you, for what you give me—" And she had thought, 'Yes, what I might give him, what he needs! And we are so happy together here.'...

Another hour passed. The waiter had returned and clattered dishes suggestively and departed again. Cairy had not finished saying all he wanted to say.... There were long pauses between his words, of which even the least carried feeling. Isabelle, her pretty mutinous face touched with tenderness, listened, one hand resting on the table. Cairy covered the hand with his, and at the touch of his warm fingers Isabelle flushed. Was it the mood of this day, or something deeper in her nature that thrilled at this touch as she had never thrilled before in her life? It held her there listening to his words, her breath coming tightly. She wanted to run away, and she did not move.... The love that he was telling her she seemed to have heard whispering in her heart long before....

The way to Isabelle's heart was through pity, the desire to give, as with many women. Cairy felt it instinctively, and followed the path. Few men can blaze their way to glory, but all can offer the opportunity to a woman of splendid sacrifice in love!

"You know I care!" she had murmured. "But, oh, Tom—" That "but" and the sigh covered much,—John, the little girl, the world as it is. If she could only give John what she felt she could give this man, with his pleading eyes that said, 'With you I should be happy, I should conquer!'

"I know—I ask for nothing!"

(Nothing! Oh, damnable lover's lie! Do the Cairys ever content themselves with nothings?)

"I will do as you say—in all things. We will forget this talk, or I will not go back to the Farm; but I am glad we understand!"

"No, no," she said quickly. "You must come to the Farm! It must be just as it has been." She knew as she said the words that it could never be "as it had been." She liked to close her eyes now to the dark future; but after to-day, after this new sense of tenderness and love, the old complexion of life must be different.

Cairy still held her hand. As she looked up with misty eyes, very happy and very miserable, a little figure came into the empty room followed by the waiter, and glanced aimlessly about for a table.

"Vick!" Isabelle cried in astonishment. "Where did you come from?"

Vickers had a music score under his arm, and he tapped it as he stood above them at the end of their table.

"I've been trying over some things with Lester at his rooms, and came in for a bite. I thought you were going to the theatre, Belle?"

"We are!" Cairy exclaimed, looking at his watch. "We'll about get the last act!"

Vickers fingered his roll and did not look at Isabelle. Suddenly she cried:—

"Take me home, Vick! ... Good-night, Tom!"

She hurried nervously from the place. Vickers hailed a cab, and as they rode up town neither spoke at first. Then Vickers put his hand on hers and held it very tightly. She knew that he had seen—her tear-stained eyes and Cairy's intent face,—that he had seen and understood.

"Vick," she moaned, "why is it all such a muddle? Life—what you mean to do, and what you can do! John doesn't care, doesn't understand.... I'm such a fool, Vick!" She leaned her head on his shoulder and sobbed. He caressed her hand gently, saying nothing.

He was sure now that he was called somewhere on this earth.



CHAPTER XLIX

When Lane went West early in May for his annual inspection trip, Isabelle moved to the Farm for the season. She was wan and listless. She had talked of going abroad with Vickers, but had suddenly given up the plan. A box of books arrived with her, and she announced to Vickers that she meant to read Italian with him; she must do something to kill the time. But the first evening when she opened a volume of French plays, she dropped it; books could not hold her attention any more. All the little details about her house annoyed her,—nothing went smoothly. The governess must be changed. Her French was horrible. Marian followed her mother about with great eyes, fearful of annoying her, yet fascinated. Isabelle exclaimed in sudden irritation:

"Haven't you anything to do, Molly!" And to Vickers she complained: "Children nowadays seem perfectly helpless. Unless they are provided with amusement every minute, they dawdle about, waiting for you to do something for them. Miss Betterton should make Molly more independent."

And the next day in a fit of compunction she arranged to have a children's party, sending the motor for some ten-mile-away neighbors.

In her mood she found even Vickers unsatisfactory: "Now you have me here, cooped up, you don't say a word to me. You are as bad as John. That portentous silence is a husband's privilege, Vick.... You and I used to jaser all the time. Other men don't find me dull, anyway. They tell me things!"

She pouted like a child. Vickers recalled that when she had said something like this one day at breakfast with John and Cairy present, Lane had lifted his head from his plate and remarked with a quiet man's irony: "The other men are specials,—they go on for an occasion. The husband's is a steady job."

Cairy had laughed immoderately. Isabelle had laughed with him,—"Yes, I suppose you are all alike; you would slump every morning at breakfast."

This spring Isabelle had grown tired, even of people. "Conny wants to come next month, and I suppose I must have her. I wanted Margaret, but she has got to take the little boy up to some place in the country and can't come.... There's a woman, now," she mused to Vickers, her mind departing on a train of association with Margaret Pole. "I wonder how she possibly stands life with that husband of hers. He's getting worse all the time. Drinks now! Margaret asked me if John could give him something in the railroad, and John sent him out to a place in the country where he would be out of harm.... There's marriage for you! Margaret is the most intelligent woman I know, and full of life if she had only half a chance to express herself. But everything is ruined by that mistake she made years ago. If I were she—" Isabelle waved a rebellious hand expressively. "I thought at one time that she was in love with Rob Falkner,—she saw a lot of him. But he has gone off to Panama. Margaret won't say a word about him; perhaps she is in love with him still,—who knows!"

One day she looked up from a book at Vickers, who was at the piano, and observed casually:—

"Tom is coming up to spend June when he gets back from the South." She waited for an expected remark, and then added, "If you dislike him as much as you used to, you had better take that time for Fosdick."

"Do you want me to go?"

"No,—only I thought it might be more comfortable for you—"

"Cairy doesn't make me uncomfortable."

"Oh—well, you needn't worry about me, brother dear!" She blushed and came across the room to kiss him. "I am well harnessed; I shan't break the traces—yet."...

It was a summerish day, and at luncheon Isabelle seemed less moody than she had been since her arrival. "Let's take one of our old long rides,—just ride anywhere, as we used to," she suggested.

They talked of many things that afternoon, slipping back into the past and rising again to the present. Vickers, happy in her quieter, gentler mood, talked of himself, the impressions he had received these months in his own land.

"What strikes me most," he said, "at least with the people that I see about you, Belle, is the sharp line between work and play. I see you women all at play, and I see the men only when they are wearily watching you play or playing with you. One hears so much about business in America. But with you people it is as much suppressed as if your husbands and brothers went off to some other star every day to do their work and came back at night by air ship to see their families."

"Business is dull," Isabelle explained,—"most men's business. They want to forget it themselves when they leave the office."

"But it is so much a part of life," Vickers protested, thinking of the hours and days Lane spent absorbed in affairs that Isabelle hadn't the curiosity to inquire about.

"Too much over here."

"And not enough."...

On their way home in the cool of the evening, over a hilly road through the leafing woods, their horses walked close together, and Isabelle, putting an arm affectionately on her brother's shoulder, mused:—

"One feels so differently different days. Tell me, Vick, what makes the atmosphere,—the color of life in one's mind? Look over there, along the river. See all the gray mist and up above on the mountain the purple—and to-morrow it will be gone! Changing, always changing! It's just so inside you; the color is changing all the time.... There is the old village. It doesn't seem to me any longer the place you and I lived in as boy and girl, the place I was married from."

"It is we who have changed, not Grafton."

"Of course; it's what we have lived through, felt,—and we can't get back! We can't get back,—that's the sad thing."

"Perhaps it isn't best to get back altogether."

Isabelle gave him a curious glance, and then in a hard tone remarked, "Sometimes I think, Vick, that in spite of your experience you are the same soft, sentimental youth you were before it happened."

"Not quite."

"Did you ever regret it, Vick?"

"Yes," he said bravely, "many times; but I am not so sure now that one can really regret anything that is done out of one's full impulse."

"Well,—that was different," Isabelle remarked vaguely. "Did you ever consider, Vick, that marriage is an awful problem for a woman,—any woman who has individuality, who thinks? ... A man takes it easily. If it doesn't fit, why he hangs it up in the closet, so to speak, and takes it out just as little as he has to. But a woman,—she must wear it pretty much all of the time—or give it up altogether. It's unfair to the woman. If she wants to be loved, and there are precious few women who don't want a man to love them, don't want that first of all, and her husband hasn't time to bother with love,—what does she get out of marriage? I know what you are going to say! John loves me, when he thinks about it, and I have my child, and I am happily placed, in very comfortable circumstances, and—"

"I wasn't going to say that," Vickers interrupted.

"But," continued Isabelle, with rising intensity, "you know that has nothing to do with happiness.... One might as well be married to a hitching-post as to John. Women simply don't count in his life. Sometimes I wish they did—that he would make me jealous! Give him the railroad and golf and a man to talk to, and he is perfectly happy.... Where do I come in?"

"Where do you put yourself in?"

"As housekeeper," she laughed, the mood breaking. "The Johnstons are coming next week, all eight—or is it nine?—of them. I must go over and see that the place is opened.... They live like tramps, with one servant, but they seem very happy. He is awfully good, but dull,—John is a social lion compared to Steve Johnston. John says he's very clever in his line. And as for Alice, she always was big, but she's become enormous. I don't suppose she ever thinks of anything so frivolous as a waist-line."

"I thought she had a beautiful face."

"Vick, I don't believe that you know whether a woman has a figure! You might write a Symphonie Colossale with Alice and her brood as the theme."

"She is Woman," suggested Vickers.

"Woman!" Isabelle scoffed. "Why is child-bearing considered the corner-stone of womanhood? Having young? Cows do that. Women are good for other things,—inspiration, love, perhaps!" She curved her pretty lips at her brother mockingly....

There were two telegrams at the house. Isabelle, opening the first, read aloud, "Reach Grafton three thirty, Tuesday. John," and dropped it on the table. The other she did not read aloud, but telephoned an answer to the telegraph office. Later she remarked casually, "Tom finds he can get back earlier; he'll be here by the end of the week."



CHAPTER L

"There's Steve," Isabelle said to Vickers, "coming across the meadow with his boys. He is an old dear, so nice and fatherly!"

The heavy man was plodding slowly along the path, the four boys frisking around him in the tall June grass like puppies.

"He has come to see John about some business. Let us take the boys and have a swim in the pool!"

Isabelle was gay and happy this morning with one of those rapid changes in mood over night that had become habitual with her. When they returned from their romp in the pool, the boys having departed to the stable in search of further amusement, Lane and Johnston were still talking while they slowly paced the brick terrace.

"Still at it!" exclaimed Isabelle. "Goodness! what can it be to make John talk as fast as that! Why, he hasn't said half as many words to me since he's been back. Just look at 'em, Vick!"

* * * * *

Outside on the terrace Steve Johnston was saying, stuttering in his endeavor to get hastily all the words he needed to express his feelings:—

"It's no use, Jack! I tell you I am sick of the whole business. I know it's big pay,—more than I ever expected to earn in my life. But Alice and I have been poor before, and I guess we can be poor again if it comes to that."

"A man with your obligations has no right to give up such an opportunity."

"Alice is with me; we have talked the thing all through.... No, I may be a jackass, but I can't see it any different. I don't like the business of loading the dice,—that is all. I have stood behind the counter, so to speak, and seen the dice loaded, fifteen years. But I wasn't responsible myself. Now in this new place you offer me I should be IT,—the man who loads.... I have been watching this thing for fifteen years. When I was a rate clerk on the Canada Southern, I could guess how it was,—the little fellows paid the rate as published and the big fellows didn't. Then when I went into the A. and P. I came a step nearer, could watch how it was done—didn't have to guess. Then I went with the Texas and Northern as assistant to the traffic manager, and I loaded the dice—under orders. Now—"

"Now," interrupted Lane, "you'll take your orders from my office."

"I know it,—that's part of the trouble, Jack!" the heavy man blurted out. "You want a safe man out there, you say. I know what that means! I don't want to talk good to you, Jack. But you see things differently from me."...

"All this newspaper gossip and scandal has got on your nerves," Lane said irritably.

"No, it hasn't. And it isn't any fear of being pulled up before the Commission. That doesn't mean anything to me.... No, I have seen it coming ever since I was a clerk at sixty a month. And somehow I felt if it ever got near enough me so that I should have to fix the game—for that's all it amounts to, Jack, and you know it—why, I should have to get out. At last it's got up to me, and so I am getting out!"

The stolid man puffed with the exertion of expressing himself so fully, inadequate as his confused sentences were to describe all that fermenting mass of observation, impression, revulsion, disgust that his experience in the rate-making side of his employment had stored up within him the last fifteen years. Out of it had come a result—a resolve. And it was this that Lane was combating heatedly. It was not merely that he liked Johnston personally and did not want him "to make a fool of himself," as he had expressed it, not altogether because he had made up his mind that the heavy man's qualities were exactly what he needed for this position he had offered him; rather, because the unexpected opposition, Johnston's scruples, irritated him personally. It was a part of the sentimental newspaper clamor, half ignorance, half envy, that he despised. When he had used the words, "womanish hysteria," descriptive of the agitation against the railroads, Steve had protested in the only humorous remark he was ever known to make:—

"Do I look hysterical, Jack?"

So the two men talked on. What they said would not have been wholly understood by Isabelle, and would not have interested her. And yet it contained more elements of pathos, of modern tragedy, than all the novels she read and the plays she went to see. The homely, heavy man—"He looks just like a bag of meal with a yellow pumpkin on top," Isabelle had said—replied to a thrust by Lane:—

"Yes, maybe I shall fail in the lumber business. It's pretty late to swap horses at forty-three. But Alice and I have talked it over, and we had rather run that risk than the other—"

"You mean?"

"That I should do what Satters of the L. P. has just testified he's been doing—under orders—to make traffic."

It was a shrewd blow. Satters was a clear case where the powerful L. P. road had been caught breaking the rate law by an ingenious device that aroused admiration in the railroad world. He had been fined a few thousand dollars, which was a cheap forfeit. This reference to Satters closed the discussion.

"I hope you will find the lumber business all you want it to suit your conscience, Steve. Come in and have some lunch!"

The heavy man refused,—he was in no mood for one of Isabelle's luncheons, and he had but one more day of vacation. Gathering up his brood, he retraced his way across the meadow, the four small boys following in his track.

"Well!" exclaimed Isabelle to her husband. "What was your business all about? Luncheon has been waiting half an hour. It was as good as a play watching you two out there. Steve looked really awake."

"He was awake all right," Lane replied.

"Tell us all about it—there, Vick, see if he doesn't put me off with 'Just business, my dear'!"

"It was just business. Steve has declined a good position I made for him, at nearly twice the salary he has ever earned."

"And all those boys to put through college!"

"What was it?" Vickers asked.

Something made Lane unusually communicative,—his irritation with Steve or his wife's taunt.

"Did you ever hear of the Interstate Commerce Commission?" he asked his brother-in-law, in a slightly ironical tone. And he began to state the situation, and stated it remarkably well from his point of view, explaining the spirit of interference that had been growing throughout the country with railroad management, corporation management in general,—its disastrous effect if persisted in, and also "emotionalism" in the press. He talked very ably, and held his wife's attention. Isabelle said:—

"But it was rather fine of Steve, if he felt that way!"

"He's kept his mouth shut fifteen years."

"He's slow, is Steve, but when he sees—he acts!"

Vickers said nothing, but a warm sense of comfort spread through his heart, as he thought, 'Splendid!—she did that for him, Alice.'

"I hope he won't come to grief in the lumber business," Lane concluded. "Steve is not fitted for general business. And he can't have much capital. Only their savings."

Then he yawned and went to the library for a cigar, dismissing Steve and his scruples and the railroad business altogether from his mind, in the manner of a well-trained man of affairs, who has learned that it is a useless waste of energy to speculate on what has been done and to wonder why men should feel and act as they do feel and act.

And Isabelle, with a "It will come hard on Alice!"—went off to cut some flowers for the vases, still light-hearted, humming a gay little French song that Tom had taught her.

* * * * *

If it were hard for Alice Johnston, the large woman did not betray it when Vickers saw her a few days later. With the help of her oldest boy she was unharnessing the horse from the Concord buggy.

"You see," she explained, as Vickers tried to put the head halter on the horse, "we are economizing on Joe, who used to do the chores when he did not forget them, which was every other day!"

When Vickers referred to Steve's new business, she said cheerfully:—

"I think there is a good chance of success. The men Steve is going in with have bought a large tract of land in the southern part of Missouri. They have experience in the lumber business, and Steve is to look after the city end,—he's well known in St. Louis."

"I do so hope it will go right," Vickers remarked, wishing that in some way he could help in this brave venture.

"Yes!" Alice smiled. "It had to be, this risk,—you know there come times when there is only one thing to do. If Steve hadn't taken the step, left the railroad, I think that neither of us would have been happy afterwards. But these are anxious days for us. We have put all the money in our stocking into it,—seven thousand dollars; all we have in the world but this old farm, which the Colonel gave me. I wanted to mortgage the farm, but Steve wouldn't let me. So all our eggs are in one basket. Not so many eggs, but we can't spare one!"

She laughed serenely, with a broad sense of humor over the family venture, yet with a full realization of its risk. Vickers marvelled at her strong faith in Steve, in the future, in life. As he had said to Isabelle, this was Woman, one who had learned the deeper lessons of life from her children, from her birth-pangs.

She took him into the vegetable garden which she and the children had planted. "We are truck-farmers," she explained. "I have the potatoes, little Steve the corn, Ezra the peas, and so on to Tot, who looks after the carrots and beets because they are close to the ground and don't need much attention. The family is cultivating on shares."

They walked through the rows of green vegetables that were growing lustily in the June weather, and then turned back to the house. Alice stopped to fasten up a riotous branch of woodbine that had poked its way through a screen.

"If the worst comes to the worst, I shall turn farmer in earnest and raise vegetables for my wealthy neighbors. And there is the orchard! We have been poor so much of the time that we know what it means.... I have no doubt it will come out all right,—and we don't worry, Steve and I. We aren't ambitious enough to worry."

It was a pleasant place, the Price farm, tucked away in a fold of gentle hills, at the end of a grassy lane. The bees hummed in the apple trees, and the June breeze swayed through the house, where all the windows and doors were open. Vickers, looking at the calm, healthy woman sitting beside him on the porch, did not pity the Johnstons, nor fear for them. Alice, surely, was the kind that no great misfortune could live with long.

"I am really a farmer,—it's all the blood in my veins," Alice remarked. "And when I get back here summers, the soil seems to speak to me. I've known horses and cows and pigs and crops and seasons for centuries. It's only skin deep, the city coating, and is easily scraped off.... Your father, Vickers, was a wise man. He gave me the exact thing that was best for me when he died,—this old farm of my people. Just as he had given me the best thing in my life,—my education. If he had done more, I should be less able to get along now."

They had dinner, a noisy meal at which the children served in turns, Alice sitting like a queen bee at the head of the table, governing the brood. Vickers liked these midday meals with the chattering, chirping youngsters.

"And how has it been with the music?" Alice asked. "Have you been able to work? You spent most of the winter up here, didn't you?"

"I have done some things," Vickers said; "not much. I am not at home yet, and what seems familiar is this, the past. But I shall get broken in, no doubt. And," he added thoughtfully, "I have come to see that this is the place for me—for the present."

"I am glad," she said softly.



CHAPTER LI

As Vickers crossed the village on his way back from the Johnstons', Lane emerged from the telegraph office and joined him. On the rare occasions when they were thrown together alone like this, John Lane's taciturnity reached to positive dumbness. Vickers supposed that his brother-in-law disliked him, possibly despised him. It was, however, a case of absolute non-understanding. It must remain forever a problem to the man with a firm grasp on concrete fact how any one could do what Vickers had done, except through "woman-weakness," for which Lane had no tolerance. Moreover, the quiet little man, with his dull eyes, who moved about as if his faculties had been forgotten in the morning when he got up, who could sit for hours dawdling at the piano striking chords, or staring at the keys, seemed merely queer to the man of action. "I wish he would do something," Isabelle had said of Vickers, using his own words of her, and her husband had replied, "Do? ... What could he do!"

"I've just been to see Alice," Vickers remarked timidly. "She takes Steve's change of business very calmly."

"She doesn't know," Lane answered curtly. "And I am afraid he doesn't either."

He let the topic drop, and they walked on in silence, turning off at the stile into an old by-path that led up to the new house through a small grove of beeches, which Isabelle had saved at her brother's plea from the destructive hand of the landscape artist. Vickers was thinking about Lane. He understood his brother-in-law as little as the latter comprehended him. He had often wondered these past months: 'Doesn't he see what is happening to Isabelle? Doesn't he care! It isn't surely helpless yet,—they aren't so wholly incompatible, and Isabelle is frank, is honest!' But if Lane saw the state of affairs in his house, he never showed that he perceived it. His manner with his wife was placid,—although, as Isabelle often said, he was very little with her. But that state of separation in which the two lived seemed less due to incompatibility than to the accident of the way they lived. Lane was a very busy man with much on his mind; he had no time for emotional tribulations.

Since his return from the West—these five days which he had allowed himself as vacation—he had been irritable at times, easily disturbed, as he had been with Steve Johnston, but never short with his wife. Vickers supposed that some business affair was weighing on him, and as was his habit he locked it up tight within....

And Lane would never have told what it was that gnawed at him, last of all to Vickers. It was pride that made him seem not to see, not to know the change that had come into his house. And something more, which might be found only in this kind of American gentleman,—a deep well of loyalty to his wife, a feeling of: 'What she wishes, no matter what it may be to me!' 'I shall trust her to the last, and if she fails me, I will still trust her to be true to herself.' A chivalry this, unsuspected by Vickers! Something of that old admiration for his wife which made him feel that he should provide her with the opportunities she craved, that somehow she had stooped in marrying him, still survived in spite of his successful career. And love? To define the sort of sentiment Lane at forty-two had for his wife, modified by his activities, by his lack of children, by her evident lack of passion for him, would not be an easy matter. But that he loved her more deeply than mere pride, than habit would account for, was sure. In that afterglow between men and women which comes when the storms of life have been lived through, Lane might be found a sufficient lover....

As they entered the narrow path that led through the beechwood, Lane stepped aside to allow Vickers to precede him. The afternoon sun falling on the glossy new leaves made a pleasant light. They had come to a point in the path where the western wing of the house was visible through the trees when suddenly Vickers stopped, hesitated, as if he would turn back, and said aloud hastily: "I always like this side of the house best,—don't you? It is quieter, less open than the south facade, more intime—" He talked on aimlessly, blocking the path, staring at the house, gesticulating. When he moved, he glanced at Lane's face....

Just below in a hollow where a stone bench had been placed, Isabelle was sitting with Cairy, his arm about her, her eyes looking up at him, something gay and happy in the face like that little French song she was singing these days, as if a voice had stilled the restless craving in her, had touched to life that dead pulse, which had refused to beat for her husband.... This was what Vickers had seen, and it was on his lips to say, "When did Cairy come? Isabelle did not tell me." But instead he had faltered out nonsense, while the two, hearing his voice, betook themselves to the upper terrace. Had her husband seen them? Vickers wondered. Something in the man's perfect control, his manner of listening to Vickers's phrases, made him feel that he had seen—all. But Lane in his ordinary monosyllabic manner pointed to a nest of ground sparrows beside the path. "Guess we had better move this establishment to a safer place," he remarked, as he carefully put the nest into the thicket.

When they reached the hall, Isabelle, followed by Cairy, entered from the opposite door. "Hello, Tom; when did you get in?" Lane asked in his ordinary equable voice. "I sent your message, Isabelle." And he went to dress for dinner.

* * * * *

The dinner that night of the three men and the woman was tense and still at first. All the radiance had faded from Isabelle's face, leaving it white, and she moved as if she were numb. Vickers, watching her face, was sad at heart, miserable as he had been since he had seen her and Cairy together. Already it had gone so far! ... Cairy was talkative, as always, telling stories of his trip to the South. At some light jeer over the California railroad situation, Lane suddenly spoke:—

"That is only one side, Tom. There is another."

Ordinarily he would have laughed at Cairy's flippant handling of the topics of the day. But to-night he was ready to challenge.

"The public doesn't want to hear the other side, it seems," Cairy retorted quickly.

Lane looked at him slowly as he might at a mosquito that he purposed to crush. "I think that some of the public wants to hear all sides," he replied quietly. "Let us see what the facts are."...

To-night he did not intend to be silenced by trivialities. Cairy had given him an opening on his own ground,—the vast field of fact. And he talked astonishingly well, with a grip not merely of the much-discussed railroad situation, but of business in general, economic conditions in America and abroad,—the trend of development. He talked in a large and leisurely way all through the courses, and when Cairy would interpose some objection, his judicious consideration eddied about it with a deferential sweep, then tossed it high on the shore of his buttressed conclusions. Vickers listened in astonishment to the argument, while Isabelle, her hands clasped tight before her, did not eat, but shifted her eyes from her husband's face to Cairy's and back again as the talk flowed.

... "And granted," Lane said by way of conclusion, having thoroughly riddled Cairy's contentions, "that in some cases there has been trickery and fraud, is that any reason why we should indict the corporate management of all great properties? Even if all the law-breaking of which our roads are accused could be proved to be true, nevertheless any philosophic investigator would conclude that the good they have done—the efficient service for civilization—far outbalances the wrong—"

"Useful thieves and parasites!" Cairy interposed.

"Yes,—if you like to put it in those words," Lane resumed quietly. "The law of payment for service in this world of ours is not a simple one. For large services and great sacrifices, the rewards must be large. For large risks and daring efforts, the pay must be alluring. Every excellence of a high degree costs,—every advance is made at the sacrifice of a lower order of good."

"Isn't that a pleasant defence for crime?" Isabelle asked.

Lane looked at his wife for a long moment of complete silence.

"Haven't you observed that people break laws, and seem to feel that they are justified in doing so by the force of higher laws?"

Isabelle's eyes fell. He had seen, Vickers knew,—not only this afternoon, but all along! ... Presently they rose from the table, and as they passed out of the room Isabelle's scarf fell from her neck. Lane and Cairy stooped to pick it up. Cairy had his hands on it first, but in some way it was the husband who took possession of it and handed it to the wife. Her hand trembled as she took it from him, and she hurried to her room.

"If you are interested in this matter of the Pacific roads, Tom," Lane continued, handing Cairy the cigarette box, "I will have my secretary look up the data and send it out here.... You will be with us some time, I suppose?"

Cairy mumbled his thanks.

After this scene Vickers felt nothing but admiration for his brother-in-law. The man knew the risks. He cared,—yes, he cared! Vickers was very sure of that. At dinner it had been a sort of modern duel, as if, with perfect courtesy and openness, Lane had taken the opportunity to try conclusions with the rival his wife had chosen to give him,—to tease him with his rapier, to turn his mind to her gaze.... And yet, even he must know how useless victory was to him, victory of this nature. Isabella did not love Cairy because of his intellectual grasp, though in the matters she cared for he seemed brilliant.

'It's to be a fight between them,' thought Vickers. 'He is giving the other one every chance. Oh, it is magnificent, this way of winning one's wife. But the danger in it!' And Vickers knew now that Lane scorned to hold a woman, even his wife, in any other way. His wife should not be bound to him by oath, nor by custom, nor even by their child. Nor would he plead for himself in this contest. Against the other man, he would play merely himself,—the decent years of their common life, their home, her own heart. And he was losing,—Vickers felt sure of that.



CHAPTER LII

Did he know that he had virtually lost when at the end of his brief vacation he went back to the city, leaving his rival alone in the field? During those tense days Vickers's admiration for the man grew. He was good tempered and considerate, even of Cairy. Lane had always been a pleasant host, and now instead of avoiding Cairy he seemed to seek his society, made an effort to talk to him about his work, and advised him shrewdly in a certain transaction with a theatrical manager.

"If she should go away with Cairy," Vickers said to himself, "he will look out for them always!"

Husband and wife, so Vickers judged, did not talk together during all this time. Perhaps they did not dare to meet the issue openly. At any rate when Isabelle proposed driving John to the station the last night, he said kindly, "It's raining, my dear,—I think you had better not." So he kissed her in the hall before the others, made some commonplace suggestion about the place, and with his bag in hand left, nodding to them all as he got into the carriage. Isabelle, who had appeared dazed these days, as if, her heart and mind occupied in desperate inner struggle, her body lived mechanically, left the two men to themselves and went to her room. And shortly afterwards Cairy, who had become subdued, thoughtful, pleaded work and went upstairs.

* * * * *

When Vickers rose early the next morning, the country was swathed in a thin white mist. The elevation on which the house stood just pierced the fog, and, here and there below, the head of a tall pine emerged. Vickers had slept badly with a suffocating sense of impending danger. When he stepped out of the drawing-room on the terrace, the coolness of the damp fog and the stillness of the June morning not yet broken by bird notes soothed his troubled mind. All this silent beauty, serenely ordered nature—and tumultuous man! Out of the earthy elements of which man was compounded, he had sucked passions which drove him hither and yon.... As he walked towards the west garden, the window above the terrace opened, and Isabelle, dressed in her morning clothes, looked down on her brother.

"I heard your step, Vick," she said in a whisper. Her face in the gray light was colorless, and her eyes were dull, veiled. "Wait for me, Bud!"

In a few moments she appeared, covered with a gray cloak, a soft saffron-colored veil drawn about her head. Slipping one hand under his arm,—her little fingers tightening on his flesh,—she led the way through the garden to the beech copse, which was filled with mist, then down to the stone bench, where she and Cairy had sat that other afternoon.

"How still it is!" she murmured, shivering slightly. She looked back to the copse, vague in the mist, and said: "Do you remember the tent we had here in the summers? We slept in it one night.... It was then I used to say that I was going to marry you, brother, and live with you for always because nobody else could be half so nice.... I wish I had! Oh, how I wish I had! We should have been happy, you and I. And it would have been better for both of us."

She smiled at him wanly. He understood the reference she made to his misadventure, but said nothing. Suddenly she leaned her head on his shoulder.

"Vick, dear, do you think that any one could care enough to forgive everything? Do you love me enough, so you would love me, no matter what I did? ... That's real love, the only kind, that loves because it must and forgives because it loves! Could you, Vick? Could you?"

Vickers smoothed back her rumpled hair and drew the veil over it.

"You know that nothing would make any difference to me."

"Ah, you don't know! But perhaps you could—" Then raising her head she spoke with a harder voice. "But that's weak. One must expect to pay for what one does,—pay everything. Oh, my God!"

The fog had retreated slowly from their level. They stood on the edge looking into its depth. Suddenly Vickers exclaimed with energy:—

"You must end this, Isabelle! It will kill you."

"I wish it might!"

"End it!" and he added slowly, "Send him away—or let me take you away!"

"I—I—can't,—Vick!" she cried. "It has got beyond me.... It is not just for myself—just me. It's for him, too. He needs me. I could do so much for him! And here I can do nothing."

"And John?"

"Oh, John! He doesn't care, really—"

"Don't say that!"

"If he did—"

"Isabelle, he saw you and Tom, here, the afternoon Tom came!"

She flushed and drew herself away from her brother's arms.

"I know it—it was the first time that—that anything happened! ... If he cared, why didn't he say something then, do something, strike me—"

"That is not right, Belle; you know he is not that kind of animal."

"If a man cares for a woman, he hasn't such godlike control! ... No, John wants to preserve appearances, to have things around him smooth,—he's too cold to care!"

"That's ungenerous."

"Haven't I lived with him years enough to know what is in his heart? He hates scandal. That's his nature,—he doesn't want unpleasant words, a fuss. There won't be any, either.... But I'm not the calculating kind, Vick. If I do it, I do it for the whole world to know and to see. I'm not Conny,—no sneaking compromises; I'll do it as you did it,—for the whole world to see and know."

"But you'll not do it!"

"You think I haven't the courage? You don't know me, Vick. I am not a girl any longer. I am thirty-two, and I know life now, my life at any rate.... It was all wrong between John and me from the beginning,—yes, from the beginning!"

"What makes you say that! You don't really believe it in your heart. You loved John when you married him. You were happy with him afterwards."

"I don't believe that any girl, no matter what experience she has had, can really love a man before she is married to him. I was sentimental, romantic, and I thought my liking for a man was love. I wanted to love,—all girls do. But I didn't know enough to love. It is all blind, blind! I might have had that feeling about other men, the feeling I had for John before.... Then comes marriage, and it's luck, all luck, whether love comes, whether it is right—the thing for you—the only one. Sometimes it is,—often enough for those who don't ask much, perhaps. But it was wrong for John and me. I knew it from the first days,—those when we tried to think we were happiest. I have never confessed this to a human being,—never to John. But it was so, Vick! I didn't know then what was the matter—why it was wrong. But a woman suspects then.... Those first days I was wretched,—I wanted to cry out to him: 'Can't you see it is wrong? You and I must part; our way is not the same!' But he seemed content. And there was father and mother and everything to hold us to the mistake. And of course I felt that it might come in time, that somehow it was my fault. I even thought that love as I wanted it was impossible, could never exist for a woman.... So the child came, and I went through the motions. And the gap grew between us each year as I came to be a woman. I saw the gap, but I thought it was always so, almost always, between husbands and wives, and I went on going through the motions.... That was why I was ill,—yes, the real reason, because we were not fitted to be married. Because I tried to do something against nature,—tried to live married to a man who wasn't really my husband!"

Her voice sank exhausted. Never before even to herself had she said it all,—summed up that within her which must justify her revolt. Vickers felt the hot truth to her of her words; but granted the truth, was it enough?

Before he could speak she went on wearily, as if compelled:—

"But it might have gone on so until the end, until I died. Perhaps I could have got used to it, living like that, and fussed around like other women over amusements and charities and houses,—all the sawdust stuffing of life—and become a useless old woman, and not cared, not known."

She drew a deep breath.

"But you see—I know now—what the other is! I have known since"—her voice sank to a whisper—"that afternoon when I kissed him for the first time." She shuddered. "I am not a stick, Vick! I—am a woman! ... No, don't say it!" She clasped his arm tightly. "You don't like Tom. You can't understand. He may not be what I feel he is—he may be less of a man for men than John. But I think it makes little difference to a woman so long as she loves—what the man is to others. To her he is all men!"

With this cry her voice softened, and now she spoke calmly. "And you see I can give him something! I can give HIM love and joy. And more—I could make it possible for him to do what he wants to do with his life. I would go with him to some beautiful spot, where he could be all that he has it in him to be, and I could watch and love. Oh, we should be enough, he and I!"

"Dear, that you can never tell! ... It was not enough for us—for her. You can't tell when you are like this, ready to give all, whether it's what the other most needs or really wants."

In spite of Isabelle's doubting smile, Vickers hurried on,—willing now to show his scar.

"I have never told you how it was over there all these years. I could not speak of it.... I thought we should be enough, as you say. We had our love and our music.... But we weren't enough, almost from the start. She was unhappy. She really wanted those things we had given up, which she might have had if it had been otherwise—I mean if she had been my wife. I was too much of a fool to see that at once. I didn't want divorce and marriage—there were difficulties in the way, too. We had thrown over the world, defied it. I didn't care to sneak back into the fold.... Our love turned bad. All the sentiment and lofty feeling somehow went out of it. We became two animals, tied together first by our passion, and afterwards by—the situation. I can't tell you all. It was killing.... It did kill the best in me."

"It was her fault. The woman makes the kind of love always."

"No, she might have been different, another way! But I tell you the facts. She became dissatisfied, restless. She was unfaithful to me. I knew it, and I shielded her—because in part I had made her what she was. But it was awful. And at the end she went away with that other man. He will leave her. Then she'll take another.... Love turns sour, I tell you—love taken that way. Life becomes just curdled milk. And it eats you like poison. Look at me,—the marrow of a man is all gone!"

"Dear Vick, it was all her fault. Any decent woman would have made you happy,—you would have worked, written great music,—lived a large life."

His story did not touch her except with pity for him. To her thinking each case was distinct, and her lips curved unconsciously into a smile, as if she were picturing how different it would be with them....

The fog had broken, and was rising from the meadows below, revealing the trees and the sun. The birds had begun to sing in the beeches. It was fresh and cool and moist before the warmth of the coming day. Isabelle drew deep breaths and loosened her scarf.

Vickers sat silent, miserable. As he had said to Alice, the wreck of his life, where he had got knowledge so dearly, availed nothing when most he would have it count for another.

"No, Vick! Whatever happens it will be our own fate, nobody's else—and I want it!"

There was cool deliberation in her tone as if the resolve had been made already.

"Not John's fate, too?"

"He's not the kind to let a thing like this upset him long. While the railroad runs and the housekeeper stays—"

"And Molly's fate?"

"Of course I have thought about Marian. There are ways. It is often done. She would be with me until she went to school, which won't be long, now."

"But just think what it would mean to her if her mother left her father."

"Oh, not so much, perhaps! I have been a good mother.... And why should I kill the twenty, thirty, maybe forty years left of my life for a child's sentiment for her mother? Very likely by the time she grows up, people will think differently about marriage."

She talked rapidly, as if eager to round all the corners.

"She may even decide to do the same thing some day."

"And you would want her to?"

"Yes! Rather than have the kind of marriage I have had."

"Isabelle!"

"You are an old sentimental dreamer, Vick. You don't understand modern life. And you don't know women—they're lots more like men, too, than you think. They write such fool things about women. There are so many silly ideas about them that they don't dare to be themselves half the time, except a few like Margaret. She is honest with herself. Of course she loves Rob Falkner. He's in Panama now, but when he gets back I have no doubt Margaret will go and live with him. And she's got three children!"

"Isabelle, you aren't Margaret Pole or Cornelia Woodyard or any other woman but yourself. There are some things you can't do. I know you. There's the same twist in us both. You simply can't do this! You think you can, and you talk like this to me to make yourself think that you can.... But when it comes to the point, when you pack your bag, you know you will just unpack it again—and darn the stockings!"

"No, no!" Isabelle laughed in spite of herself; "I can't—I won't.... Why do I sniffle so like this? It's your fault, Vick; you always stir the pathetic note in me, you old fraud!"

She was crying now in long sobs, the tears falling to his hand.

"I know you because we are built the same foolish, idiotic way. There are many women who can play that game, who can live one way for ten or a dozen years, and then leave all that they have been—without ever looking back. But you are not one of them. I am afraid you and I are sentimentalists. It's a bad thing to be, Belle, but we can't help ourselves. We want the freedom of our feelings, but we want to keep a halo about them. You talked of cutting down these beeches. But you would never let one be touched, not one."

"I'll have 'em all cut down to-morrow," Isabelle murmured through her tears.

"Then you'll cry over them! No, Belle, it's no use going dead against your nature—the way you were made to run. You may like to soar, but you were meant to walk."

"You think there is nothing to me,—that I haven't a soul!"

"I know the soul."

Isabella flung her arms about her brother and clung there, breathing hard. The long night had worn her out with its incessant alternation of doubt and resolve, endlessly weaving through her brain.

"Better to suffer on in this cloudy world than to make others suffer," he murmured.

"Don't talk! I am so tired—so tired."....

From the hillside below came a whistled note, then the bar of a song, like a bird call. Some workman on the place going to his work, Vickers thought. It was repeated, and suddenly Isabelle took her arms from his neck,—her eyes clear and a look of determination on her lips.

"No, Vick; you don't convince me.... You did the other thing when it came to you. Perhaps we are alike. Well, then, I shall do it! I shall dare to live!"....

And with that last defiance,-the curt expression of the floating beliefs which she had acquired,—she turned towards the house.

"Come, it is breakfast time."

She waited for him to rise and join her. For several silent moments they lingered to look at Dog Mountain across the river, as if they were looking at it for the last time, at something they had both so much loved.

"You are dear, brother," she murmured, taking his hand. "But don't lecture me. You see I am a woman now!"

And looking into her grave, tear-stained face, Vickers saw that he had lost. She had made her resolution; she would "dare to live," and that life would be with Cairy! His heart was sad. Though he had tried to free himself of his old dislike of Cairy and see him through Isabelle's eyes, it was useless. He read Tom Cairy's excitable, inflammable, lightly poised nature, with the artist glamour in him that attracted women. He would be all flame—for a time,—then dead until his flame was lighted before another shrine. And Isabelle, proud, exacting, who had always been served,—no, it was hopeless! Inevitable tragedy, to be waited for like the expected motions of nature!

And beneath this misery for Isabelle was the bitterest of human feelings,—personal defeat, personal inadequacy. 'If I had been another!' "Don't lecture me!" she had said almost coldly. The spiritual power of guidance had gone from him, because of what he had done. Inwardly he felt that it had gone. That was part of the "marrow of the man" that had been burned out. The soul of him was impotent; he was a shell, something dead, that could not kindle another to life.

'I could have saved her,' he thought. 'Once I could have saved her. She has found me lacking now, when she needs me most!'

The whistle sounded nearer.

"Will you do one thing for me, Isabelle?"

"All—but one thing!"

"Let me know first."

"You will know."

Cairy was coming down the terrace, cigarette in hand. His auburn hair shone in the sunlight. After his sleep, his bath, his cup of early coffee, he was bright with physical content, and he felt the beauty of the misty morning in every sense. Seeing the brother and sister coming from the beeches together, he scrutinized them quickly; like the perfect egotist, he was swiftly measuring what this particular conjunction of personalities might mean to him. Then he limped towards them, his face in smiles, and bowing in mock veneration, he lay at Isabelle's feet a rose still dewy with mist.

Vickers turned on his heel, his face twitching. But Isabelle with parted lips and gleaming eyes looked at the man, her whole soul glad, as a woman looks who is blind to all but one thought,—'I love him.'

"The breath of the morn," Cairy said, lifting the rose. "The morn of morns,—this is to be a great day, my lady! I read it in your eyes."



CHAPTER LIII

It was still sultry at four o'clock in the afternoon, and the two men walked slowly in the direction of the river. Cairy, who had been summoned by telegram to the city, would have preferred to be driven to the junction by Isabelle, but when Vickers had suggested that he knew a short cut by a shady path along the river, he had felt obliged to accept the implied invitation. He was debating why Price had suddenly evinced this desire to be with him, for he felt sure that Vickers disliked him. But Isabelle had shown plainly that she would like him to accept her brother's offer,—she was too tired to go out again, she said, and the only horse that could be used was a burden to drive. So he set forth on the two-mile walk this oppressive afternoon, not in the best mood, determined to let Vickers do the talking.

They plodded across the meadow in silence, Cairy thinking of the interview in the city, his spirits rising as they always soared at the slightest hint of an "opening." "I'll make her take the play," he said to himself; "she isn't much good as an actress, but I must get the thing on. I'll need the money." He hoped to finish his business with this minor star, who had expressed a desire to see him, and return to Grafton by the morning express. Isabelle would be disappointed if he should not be back for luncheon.

Vickers's head was bent to the path. He had seized this chance of being alone with Cairy, and now that they were beyond the danger of interruption his blood beat uncomfortably in his head and he could not speak—for fear of uttering the wrong word.... When they reached the river, the two men paused involuntarily in the shade and looked back up the slope to the Farm, lying in the warm haze on the brow of the hill. As they stood there, the shutter of an upper chamber was drawn in, and Cairy smiled to himself.

"The house looks well from here," he remarked. "It's a pleasant spot."

"It is a dear old place!" Vickers answered, forgetting for the moment the changes that Isabelle had wrought at the Farm. "It's grown into our lives,—Isabelle's and mine. We used to come here as boy and girl in vacations.... It was a day something like this when my sister was married. I remember seeing her as she came out of the house and crossed the meadow on my father's arm. We watched her from the green in front of the chapel.... She was very beautiful—and happy!"

"I can well imagine it," Cairy replied dryly, surprised at Vickers's sudden loquacity on family matters. "But I suppose we ought to be moving on, hadn't we, to get that express? You see I am a poor walker at the best."

Vickers struck off by the river path, leading the way. Suddenly he stopped, and with flushed face said:—

"Tom, I wish you wouldn't come back to-morrow!"

"And why the devil—"

"I know it isn't my house, it isn't my wife, it isn't my affair. But, Tom, my sister and I have been closer than most,—even husband and wife. I love her,—well, that's neither here nor there!"

"What are you driving at, may I ask?" Cairy demanded coldly.

"What I am going to say isn't usual—it isn't conventional. But I don't know any conventional manner of doing what I want to do. I think we have to drop all that sometimes, and speak out like plain human beings. That's the way I am going to speak to you,—as man to man.... I don't want to beat about the bush, Tom. I think it would be better if you did not come back to-morrow,—never came back to the Farm!"

He had not said it as he meant to phrase it. He was aware that he had lost ground by blurting it out like this. Cairy waited until he had lighted a cigarette before he replied, with a laugh:—

"It is a little—brusque, your idea. May I ask why I am not to come back?"

"You know well enough! ... I had hoped we could keep—other names out of this."

"We can't."

"My sister is very unhappy—"

"You think I make your sister unhappy?"

"Yes."

"I prefer to let her be the judge of that," Cairy retorted, walking ahead stiffly and exaggerating his limp.

"You know she cannot be a judge of what is best—just now."

"I think she can judge of herself better than any—outsider!"

Vickers flushed, controlled himself, and said almost humbly:—

"I know you care for her, Tom. We both do. So I thought we might discuss it amicably."

"This doesn't seem to me a discussable matter."

"But anything that concerns one I love as I do Isabelle must be discussable in some way."

"Your sister told me about her talk with you this morning.... You did your best then, it seems. If you couldn't succeed in changing her mind,—what do you expect from me?"

"That you will be generous! ... There are some things that Isabelle can't see straight just now. She doesn't know herself, altogether."

"I should think that her husband—"

"Can't you feel his position? His lips are closed by his pride, by his love!"

"I should say, Vickers," Cairy remarked with a sneer, "that you had better follow Lane's sensible course. This is a matter for the two most concerned and for them alone to discuss.... With your experience you must understand that ours is the situation which a mature man and a mature woman must settle for themselves. Nothing that an outsider says can count."

And turning around to face Vickers, he added slowly, "Isabelle and I will do what seems best to us, just as under similar circumstances you did what you thought was best for you without consulting anybody, as I remember."

Vickers quivered as his eye met Cairy's glance, but he accepted the sneer quietly.

"The circumstances were not the same. And I may have learned that it is a serious matter to do what you wish to do,—to take another man's wife, no matter what the circumstances are."

"Oh, that's a mere phrase. There's usually not much taking! When a woman is unhappy in her marriage, when she can be happy with another man, when no one can be really hurt—"

"Somebody always is hurt."

"The only thing I am greatly interested in is Isabelle's happiness, her life. She has been stifled all these years of marriage, intellectually, emotionally stifled. She has begun to live lately—we have both begun to live. Do you think we shall give that up? Do you think any of your little preachments can alter the life currents of two strong people who love and find their fulfilment in each other? You know men and women very little if you think so! We are living to-day at the threshold of a new social epoch,—an honester one than the world has seen yet, thank God! Men and women are daring to throw off the bonds of convention, to think for themselves, and determine what is best for them, for their highest good, undisturbed by the bogies so long held up. I will take my life, I will live, I will not be suffocated by a false respect for my neighbor's opinion."

Cairy paused in the full career of his phrases. He was gesticulating with his hands, almost forgetful of Vickers, launched as it were on a dramatic monologue. He was accustomed thus to dramatize an emotional state, as those of his temperament are wont to do, living in a world of their own feelings imaginatively projected. While Vickers listened to Cairy's torrent of words, he had but one thought: 'It's no use. He can't be reached that way—any way!'

A stone wall stopped their progress. As Cairy slowly dragged himself over the wall, Vickers saw the outline of the pistol in the revolver pocket, and remembered the afternoon when Cairy had shown them the weapon and displayed his excellent marksmanship. And now, as then, the feeling of contempt that the peaceable Anglo-Saxon has for the man who always goes armed in a peaceable land came over him.

Cairy resumed his monologue on the other side of the wall.

"It is the silliest piece of barbaric tradition for a civilized man to think that because a woman has once seen fit to give herself to him, she is his possession for all time. Because she has gone through some form, some ceremony, repeated a horrible oath that she doesn't understand, to say that she belongs to that man, is his, like his horse or his house,—phew! That's mere animalism. Human souls belong to themselves! Most of all the soul of a delicately sensitive woman like Isabelle! She gives, and she can take away. It's her duty to take herself back when she realizes that it no longer means anything to her, that her life is degraded by—"

"Rot!" Vickers exclaimed impatiently. He had scarcely heard what Cairy had been saying. His sickening sense of failure, of impotency, when he wished most for strength, had been succeeded by rage against the man, not because of his fluent argument, but because of himself; not against his theory of license, but against him. He saw Isabelle's life broken on the point of this glib egotism. "We needn't discuss your theories. The one fact is that my sister's life shall not be ruined by you!"