The article-writer neglected to reply at all, moving after her with his queer, startled look....

So these two passed from the Heth drawing-room to the Heth library, to talk about business: the new Heth Works, in fine. They came into a room which was intimately and poignantly associated with Hugo Canning. Memories of the departed greeted Cally upon the threshold, and thereafter; only they were not poignant now. Hugo's face kept rising mistily beside the so different visage of the man he had instinctively disliked, his ancient hoodoo....

This was to be a meeting like none other Cally had ever had with the stranger in her house, a happy meeting, troubled by no shadow. They sat down across the great table from each other, in good business style, as she considered; and then she began to talk eagerly, recounting to him without any embarrassment, though of course with some judicious expurgation, what had been going on in her mind, and out of it, during the last five days; beginning with the afternoon she had seen him at the Cooneys', and culminating with the long talk she had had with her father at, and after, luncheon to-day.

And he, the only confidant she had ever had, sitting with his patched elbow on her father's table, and his chin in his cupped hand, attended every word with his singular quality of interest. He was unique among all the people she had known, in that the things he seemed to care most about were never things for himself at all....

"So that's how it stands now," said Cally, presently. "My father was naturally surprised at first, as I've never shown any interest in his work before, and of course he said he wouldn't do it,—wouldn't take my money, I mean, though it's really his all the time. But at last I did get him to talking about it seriously, and then he grew more and more interested.... Oh, I know he's going to do it! I know it!—That's all settled! And I do think he'll let me have a hand in really planning it—that is, if I can show him that I—I know anything about it.... Well, of course I don't, you see—nothing, nothing!—and that's where my problem begins. I've got to learn everything, from the very start, and do it quickly.... Do you think I possibly can?—"

"Books!" he cried, throwing out both hands. "What're they for but to teach us everything, right away?..."

In fact, her problem there was really no problem at all, it seemed. Pond himself had at hand a fine little general library on all these subjects; there was the State Library; there were the bookstores of the world: all waiting for her, all packed with meaty information. Perhaps, just as a starter, she would let him make out a sort of preliminary check-list to-night, out of catalogues, out of some bully advertisements in the backs of Pond's works....

"Oh, you are nice!" exclaimed Cally. "You can't guess what it means to be encouraged!... I do so want to go into it seriously."

He talked further, indicating the procedure: first her own idea of what she wanted; then an architect to sketch some plans; then a builder to figure after the architect. The thing began to shape up, rapidly, definitely. She found him an inspiriting soul....

"I ought to say," she explained, quite excited, "that I mentioned fifty thousand dollars only because that was the sum I happened to have, in a lump. But we're going to make it good, no matter what it costs. I have a little more money of my own," said she, "about eight thousand dollars, and of course I'll put that in, too. And I know my father will feel the same way."

But no, V.V.'s belief was that the sum she mentioned would be far more than necessary. She could get a rough sort of estimate at once, if desired, given the dimensions of the lot and a general idea of the style of building she wanted. His friend, Jem Noonan, he who was just now starting out as a contractor, would be only too delighted to do some figuring on it.

"Of course the best way of all to gather ideas at the start," said he, staring through her, "is to go to the Works—go often.... There's no other such way of seeing what the actual needs are."

"Yes ... Yes, of course that's true," said Cally.

But what she felt like saying was that she didn't want to go to the Works at all, unless he could go with her.

"I want to get your ideas now, please," she added—"everything you can think of. You can't have any notion how ignorant I am.... But—oh, there's one thing I wanted to speak to you about first. I suppose—even at the best—it would be some time before the new building could begin?"

Oh, a few months, no doubt, before all plans would be ready, and her father's arrangements made to move.

"Do you think the floors in this old building are very strong? The man who was with me the day I went there didn't seem to think so—and I didn't either! And some very heavy-looking new machines were being put in the bunching-room, and I believe some more are going to be put in to-morrow."

"Oh!... You mean you think they might overload the floor?"

"Don't you?"

"Well—it's possible," admitted Mr. V.V., slowly, and one could see that he didn't altogether like the idea of anybody's criticizing Mr. Heth's conduct of his business. "But—ah—really I don't—"

"Couldn't we fix it, in some simple way—brace up the floor somehow?"

"Oh, yes. You'd have no trouble in fixing it.... Far as that goes."

"Don't you think you could manage to say we once?"

"Oh!" said Mr. V.V., pleased. "I could that!... I didn't know, you see, how far you cared to let me in."

Cally smiled at him over the library table.

"Hasn't it occurred to you that you are in it, that you've been right in the middle of it all along?"

He gave her one of his original looks, and said: "Well, I can't say it had.... But it's where I'd rather be than anywhere else in the world."

"You can make nice speeches, at any rate.... Do you know you're the strangest man, I believe, that ever lived?"

"No, that's news. Am I?... Well, in what way am I so strange?"

"Oh, it's a long, long story. But I'm going to tell it all to you some day.... Do go on and help me about the floors. Papa won't. He didn't seem to like my speaking about them at all. He says they'd hold hundreds more machines if he only had the room—"

"Well, he knows.... He's—he's had the strain figured out. Of course."

So had Time, the master-humorist, reversed positions between Heths and Vivians. The old Arraigner, for his part, seemed to feel now that, to all intents and purposes, papa had put up the building six years ago....

But Cally explained how floors and machines had got upon her nerves. This was, she said, our first point to settle. And thereupon the young man at once addressed himself to the question of remedies; sketching with his finger on the table-top, till she got note-paper and pencils from mamma's desk in the corner, switched light into a reading-lamp, and came and sat down beside him. On the paper V.V. obligingly produced an outline of the three floors of the present factory, accurately locating stairway and elevator shaft; even the point where the cloak-room was to be knocked out to give the space needed for the new machines....

"How in the world do you know so much about the Works?"

"Oh—well, you see, the shipping clerk there is quite a friend of mine," said V.V. "A very nice fellow, sort of a Lithuanian, named Dolak. Don't be offended, but I—I've been down there once or twice at night."

However, he seemed stumped as to the best method of support, admitting that it was not so simple as it seemed. And presently, when he had tried and condemned columns from floor to floor, the girl said, hesitatingly:

"Dr. Vivian, do you think props—outside—would do any good?"

He turned his intent gaze upon her; he was frowning absorbedly and looking rather doubtful about it all.

"I mean iron braces running from the ground on each side of the building," said Cally—"and holding up girders, or whatever you call them, under the bunching-room floor?"

He gazed a moment, and then exclaimed:

"Oh—good! Oh, that's good!... That would do it—do it perfectly!..."

He proceeded with eagerness to sketch in her square-arch braces under his bunching-room floor, and he said again: "Perfect solution!... Why, you ought to have been a builder!"

"Oh, I—just happened to see a picture of something like that in the encyclopaedia this afternoon."

Her tone was depreciatory, not suggesting that she had looked some time before she happened to see that picture. But within she was feeling the strangest, the most exhilarating thrills.... Oh, the clearness of being a fellow-worker; of praise that had nothing to do with a candidacy for matrimony!...

"But the difficulty," she said, "is to persuade papa to let me do it. Of course, I've no right to expect him to take me seriously.... I know you could persuade him."

That, spoken impulsively, she hurriedly covered up in conversation; begging him to go on at once and give her his ideas of what the new building should be like. She had gathered by now, that, whatever he considered wonderful in all this, it was not the fact that he, she, and her father should be, so to say, planning it shoulder to shoulder. But this fine unconsciousness of his she herself could not match; not at least till she had had more time to smooth things over with her father....

However, talk of mere temporary repairs in condemned old buildings was quickly swallowed in plannings for the splendid new. Here the man from the outskirts indubitably shone; he bristled with illuminating ideas. He, it seemed, was for a four-story building, brick, with concrete floors. Much he had to say on the subject of fire-escapes and patent-doors, lunch-rooms and rest-rooms with lockers, enclosed stairways and elevator shafts; shower-baths, too, if one simply must have the best and never mind the expense. And then his pencil began unconsciously to work as he went along; and presently there emerged upon a fresh sheet of mamma's best note-paper the first visible presentment of the Works that would be. There it actually was, for you to gaze at, dream over; the perfect apology: the front and side elevation of a fine, dignified, businesslike building, plain yet undeniably handsome, very substantial and roomy, very full of airy windows. Not like a marble palace, after all; but a child could see that nobody was ever crowded in there, nobody ever the least faint. Nothing homicidal here, Mr. V.V., look where you will....

"You can draw, too!"

"Straight lines," said V.V., modestly. But he regarded his handiwork with passionate approbation, and finished it off gallantly with a flag flying from the roof and two stately motor-trucks (so he said) wheeling by the door.

"Oh, how beautiful!" cried Cally Heth.

And it was all so curiously exciting to her, so intensely interesting. No prospect in her life, it seemed, had ever stirred her like this strange one; a new cigar-factory, born of her purse and heart....

Once, about at this point, the young man threw out with mysterious delight:

"I'll like to see old Sam O'Neill's face, when he hears about this."

In the midst of the animated talk came Annie, the parlormaid—and Cally started at the sound of the approaching feet, and hated herself for it—to say that Dr. Vivian was wanted at the telephone. The doctor seemed annoyed by the summons, though not surprised; he had had to take the liberty, he explained as he rose, of leaving word at his office where he could be found, in case of necessity—words of this sort being left, as we know, with his paid assistant, Mrs. Garland, the world's biggest office-boy.

So V. Vivian was led away by Annie to the downstairs telephone in the butler's pantry; whence he was back in a moment, looking relieved, and assuring Miss Heth that it was nothing in the least urgent or important. There was no hurry at all, it seemed. But Cally felt that the business talk was drawing to a close, with a good deal still left unsaid....

Returning with eager interest to his drawing, Mr. V.V. fell to planting shade-trees of the best quality all down the Seventeenth Street side of the new building. So engaged, he observed suddenly:

"Don't worry any more about those floors, please—will you? That's all going to work out very nicely.... I'll get a figure from Jem Noonan right away on that plan of yours. And I'll see that it's a low figure, too,—it's got to be low!... Good heavens!" said V.V., eyeing his drawing with a queer little introspective smile. "We can't be expected to spend anything much on a building that's going to come down in a couple of months, you know."

She looked, smiling a little, too, at his unconscious face, fine, to thinness, which had once made Mr. Pond think of a bishop who never grew up. And her look became suddenly full of tenderness....

"I don't worry," said Cally, "now that I've got you to help me."

The man from the Dabney House spoke again:

"I was just thinking, out there at the telephone, that if there's no further business before the house, you might feel like beginning that long story you—you spoke of just now."

That took her by surprise. She seemed to be less and less at her ease. But now surely had come her moment to take her courage in her hands, and render him his due.

"I believe I ought to," said she, lightly—"a chapter or two, at least. For I don't think you'll ever work it out for yourself.... And I'm glad you're that way."

He made no reply, going on carefully with his arbor-day practice.

"When you said just now that this was wonderful," said Cally, beginning to lose the light touch already—"you meant that it was a wonderful happening, didn't you? Your idea seems to be that all this just happened."

But no, Mr. V.V. denied that vigorously, and stated his logical theory: that her father had chanced to postpone his intentions, merely through the well-known fact that men get accustomed to conditions that they constantly see; but that she, going there with fresh eyes....

"I might have gone there a hundred times, but I'd never have thought of it as having anything to do with me—don't you know it?—if it hadn't been for you."

He looked at her briefly; and she saw that his look was as bewildered as a battle-ground.

"Oh!... Do you mean that you are doing it because of—to—to avoid the—that is, on account of the articles?"

"Oh, not the articles!—no! That's just what I don't mean. I've never thought of the articles! I don't think of you that way at all...."

She stopped precipitately, somehow divining that she was mysteriously wounding him. And then suddenly she understood that that was the way he thought of himself, exactly; that he, who unconsciously moved mountains by his gentleness, somehow saw himself only in the light of his "terrible" (but still unpublished) articles. It was as if he reckoned himself as either an article-writer, or nothing....

"Though it's true," said Cally, gently, with hardly any pause at all, "that through most of the time I've known you I've thought of you ... as a hard man ... terribly uncompromising."

His, it was clear, was not a tongue that spoke easily about himself. He finished putting a flower-box into the window of the new Works, before he said:

"I hope we needn't trouble now about anything at all that's past."

"That's what I hope, too ... more than you could. And besides—I've always liked you best when you were gentle. And ... it's because of what you've taught me—at those times—that I'm doing this to-day."

Again he turned his singularly lucid gaze full upon her; and now his look was absolutely startled. Color was coming into his face. His short, crisp hair, which had been parted so neatly an hour ago, stood rumpled all over his head, not mitigating the general queerness of his appearance. And yet his mouth wore a smile, humorous and disparaging.

"May I ask what you consider that I've taught you?"

"Everything I know," said Cally, lacing a pencil between her fingers.

"Why!... When we've never even had a real talk about it before!... I told you once that you were more generous than—"

"No, I'm never generous enough. That's my trouble, among others.... But if you think that it's a nice and happy thing for us to be putting up this building, I want you please always to remember ... that you've done it all yourself."

There was a tense silence, out of which his voice spoke, no longer with any trace of humor.

"Don't be polite.... I couldn't quite stand it. Do you mean that?"

"It's all a failure if you won't believe that I do."

"Then I do believe it."

This time the silence ran somewhat longer, and again it was V.V.'s voice, greatly stirred, that broke it.

"I don't understand, but I do believe it.... And it makes me pretty proud. By George, pretty proud!... Why—I've talked a lot—but it's the first thing I've ever accomplished! The first thing...."

His voice showed that his mind had swept away from her, over spaces; and Cally raised her eyes and looked at him. He sat gazing wide-eyed into the dull-green glow of her lamp, on his face a curious and moving look; a look humbled yet exalted, gloriously wondering, and to her the wistfullest thing she had ever seen in her life. He, who had given away his patrimony, who was giving away his life every day with a will, thought that this was the first thing....

All that was sweetest in the girl, all that was maternal and understanding, rose fiercely within her, stormed her with a desire to mother this man, to protect him from his own royal yet somehow infinitely sad self-denials. For this moment she felt far stronger than he. His hand, with the pencil in it, lay on the table close by her, and Cally closed her slim fingers over it with a firm clasp.

"Ah, don't say that, Mr. V.V.—don't look that way. It hurts me, in my heart.... Can't I make you believe that you've accomplished more than anybody else in the world?..."

He did not move at the shock of her touch, at the sound of his little name upon these unaccustomed lips. She was aware only of a subtle contraction, a sort of tightening going on somewhere within him. So Cally finished her small speech with her hand over his. But at just that point, a stir seemed to shake through the man; he was seen to be turning his head; and in the same breath, her moment of high strength broke abruptly. The veins fluttered queerly in the forward hand; she felt a quick flush rising somewhere within, spreading and tingling upward into her face. So Cally rose hurriedly, her hand withdrawn, and moved away. But she did her best, for her pride's sake, to envelop her movement with a matter-of-fact air; and when she had got about four steps away from him, she remarked, quite distinctly:

"Don't get up.... I ... want to get something."

And she did, in fact, go on to mamma's desk and attentively select three more sheets of note-paper, which would no doubt come in handy for something or other some day.

And out of the stillness behind her came Mr. V.V.'s voice, just a little husky now:

"No one ever did anything so sweet to me before."

But that only made things worse, turning a white light, as it were, on thoughts she had had before now of the loneliness of his life. So she, finding herself not strong enough to be a comforter after all, said in a resolute kind of way:

"I never like to hear my friends depreciated. So please don't do it any more.... What was the name of that book about factories—the one you said that Mr. Pond had?"

Silence behind her, and then: "'The New Factory Idea,' by T.B. Halton."

She noted this information carefully on one of her sheets of paper, thus proving that she was right to go and get them, all the time.

"I thought," said she, "I might see if Saltman had it. Then I could begin to cram to-night."

But no, he said that Saltman hadn't it, but would order it, of course. And then the scraping of a chair-leg advised all listeners that Mr. V.V. was violating that injunction laid upon him as to not getting up....

He advanced round the table-end, his hand raised in his nervous and characteristic gesture. So anyone who wished could see that deficiency at his elbow, about which he himself seemed so splendidly indifferent. He was as tall as Hugo; but Hugo, with his lordly good looks and beautiful clothes, was certainly a much more eye-catching figure. And yet, as she straightened now and looked, the knowledge shot suddenly through Cally that this doctor in his patches somehow looked, that he had always looked, rather the finer gentleman of the two....

"Johnson's the publisher," said V.V., coming to a halt in front of her. And then, taking the sheets of note-paper unconsciously from her unresisting hands, he added, looking down:

"But—how'd you mean just now ... that I—I've accomplished so—so much?"

By now Cally could smile, in quite a natural-seeming way; and this she did, full under the prophetic gaze, revealing shining white teeth and glimpses of a rose-lined mouth. And if "he was a Hun, she had always been the loveliest of them, God wot....

"I'm beginning to believe," said she, "that you're not such a very strange man, after...."

So she ended; her gaze shifting, the smile dying on her lip. For the door of the library had opened authoritatively, and that difficulty which had embarrassed her all through the afternoon suddenly confronted her upon the threshold.

Mr. Heth, of the Works, en route to his study, was briefly surprised by the little tableau he had stumbled upon. But seeing young men about the house at all hours wan no nine days' wonder for him; and he came on in with quite his usual air.

"Ah, Cally! Didn't know anybody was in here," said papa; and he glanced from her, with amiable expectancy, toward the stranger. "What's this confabulation about?"

Cally felt herself turning white. She steadied herself with one hand on the writing-leaf of the desk.

"We were talking about the new Works," said she.... "Papa—I want to introduce a good friend of mine—Dr. Vivian."

"Oh, Mr. Heth!... I'm so glad to know you, sir."

Thus the fearless young voice at her side. But Cally was gazing, transfixed, at her father, on whose face the friendly greeting air was giving place to astonished displeasure, not untouched with indignation. He had stopped short in the middle of the floor, and the hand he had been automatically putting out fell dead at his side.

"Oh!—Ah!—Dr. Vivian!" said Mr. Heth, with the stiffest inclination. And then, his look going from one to the other of the two young people, he added, as if involuntarily: "Vivian?... Ah! I'd—have expected a different-looking man!"

The pause then, the suspense of all action from the world, was infinitesimal. But it seemed long to Cally. And she thought she could never forgive her father if he turned away, leaving this slight upon her friend.

"Papa," she began, unsteadily, "I don't think...."

But once again her sentence hung unended. V.V., advancing, came then into her line of vision; and Cally saw that he had no thought for the cover of her skirt. Her father's forbidding deportment had not escaped the young man; there were both a diffidence and a dignity in his bearing. And yet she saw that his face wore like a flower that guileless and confiding look he had, the look of a man who cannot doubt that, in their hearts, all mean as kindly as he himself. He moved upon her silent father as if singing aloud an immortal faith in the goodness of his fellows: Though he slay me, yet will I trust him....

But what his audible voice was saying was very simple, and a little embarrassed:

"I've felt that I've just come to know you to-day, Mr. Heth ... to understand things better. I suppose it's too much to hope that you can forget what's past, all at once. But I'd be mortified to feel.... Ah, sir!—I've felt honored by your House to-day...."

That was all; the mists lifted. He saw no difficulties, and so there were none. Papa's face was thawing back, through several surprised looks, to its natural kindliness; he had taken the offered hand, in the middle of the little speech; and then, within a minute, he was saying, quite amiably, that well, well, we'd say no more about it ... s'posed the thing to do was to let bygones be bygones....

And papa's daughter, Cally, turned away quickly from that spectacle, winking furiously, and wondering when she had got to be such a baby....

* * * * *



Strange things had been happening of late, it seemed; strange memories gathering for backward thought hereafter; novel pictures ranging in the immaterial storehouse that opens down the years. But in all Cally's invisible collection, then or thenceforward, there was never a scene that she saw so vividly as this: herself standing silent by the newel-post in the wide hall; her father, distinct and genial in the light through the open door, observing to Mr. V.V. that hard words buttered no parsnips, as the fellow said; and V.V., half-smiling at her over papa's broad shoulder, and saying to her with his eyes that of course this was the way it was meant to be, all along.



XXXIII

Her Last Day, in this History; how she wakes with a Wonder in her Heart, has her Banquet laid at the Board of the Cooneys, dreams back over the Long Strange Year; finally how she learns Something that not Everybody Knows: what it is like at the End of the World.

A morning in October, and she had waked to fare forth and capture, by hook or by crook, the most eligible parti who was ever likely to swim into her ken. Another morning in October, and all her waking horizon seemed filled by the knowledge that, at half-past four in the afternoon, she would meet and talk of cheroot factories with a man so little eligible that he trusted the crows to bring his raiment. In the wide world was there another person whose life's pendulum, in a twelvemonth, had swung so wildly far?

Eight o'clock now, by the little clock on the mantel: eight hours and a half to Mr. Pond's meeting for workers at the old Dabney House. One needn't be an astronomer to calculate that. And Cally Heth lay wide-eyed in her great bed, and thought how strange, how wonderful is life....

In the watches her mind had gone back and back over the long year; and she had marvelled at the tininess of turnings upon which, it was all clear now, great issues had hung. She could put her finger on time after time, last year and even this, when the smallest shifting in the course would have brought her, to-day, far otherwhere. 'Had she said that, had she done this'.... Was it all the wild caprice of Chance, then, that had no eyes? Were people so helpless, the slight sport of Luck, thistledown blowing in the winds of the gods? Ah, but she saw clearer than that. Had she not felt all along how powerfully this sequence of happening and encounter had pressed toward far other ends? And the divinity that had shaped them at last, acting and reacting and giving circumstance a soul, had been only that mysterious divinity that makes human beings what they are. There was truth in the saying that destiny is only character under its other name.

No chance here, surely, that had waked her so still and shining-eyed, such a wonder in her heart....

She had marked this day for diligent study. Last night an unknown hand had left at the door a hard-used copy of "The New Factory Idea," by T.B. Halton. And Cally, at the end of a second long business conference with her father, had read three chapters of the absorbing work, and slept upon the resolve to devote this morning to it altogether. But she had seen at the first look of the flooding sunshine upon the shutters, that she did not feel studious at all. Let books look to themselves to-day. Her desire was to be outdoors; to be alone, and to muse awhile. Surely nobody ever had so much, so much, to think about.

However, as a daughter one wasn't altogether free; nor yet again as a member of organized society. All day the claims of the familiar encroached upon the real world within, and thoughts, the radiant aliens, had to range themselves in as they could.

* * * * *

She was breakfasting with her father. They were to forage for luncheon to-day, these two, and spoke of it; he naming the club, she electing her cousins the Cooneys. And here was the token of the more cheerful atmosphere prevailing this morning in the house. Mrs. Heth was entertaining a lunch-party of seven ladies, her contemporaries, at two o'clock this day. True, the invitations had been issued before the crash: but the hopeful point, as even the servants were aware, was that they had not been recalled.

They were glad that mamma felt like seeing people again; and said so. And Cally then asked her father if he had any engagement for the evening.

Mr. Heth glanced at her over his "Post," and his glance feared that he saw yet another conference advancing upon him. Yet, it was fair to say, he had not been by any means inconvincible about the new Works. Real estate was real estate, say what you would; and it might be that the violent shake-up in the family plans had made the immediate future of the business a somewhat concrete issue.

He said, guardedly perhaps: "To-night?—let's see.... Well, not that I think of just now."

But Cally merely wanted to propose a table of bridge in the library, he and she against a third and fourth. And papa's changed expression said at once that that was a horse of another color.

"Well, that'd suit me.... Suit me first-rate."

Their evening was so arranged. She warned him gaily to be on his mettle; she would pick up two of the keenest players to be found. Papa, with gathering zest, admitted that practice was what he needed, most particularly as to the bids. Had a rubber at the club Saturday night, and Carmichael and those fellows took nine dollars from her old daddy....

"Let's make it a standing engagement, papa—one evening a week, the same table!... Oh, I'd love to!..."

This, too, seemed remarkably suited to her father's whim. A decidedly amiable-looking gentleman he was, with his fresh coloring, spotless waistcoat and fine blond mustaches; a home-loving man, not much used to having parties given for him.

And Cally regarded him with eyes which held new depths of affection. The last moment of the interview yesterday had brought an undreamed development, strangely endearing: her father, in the nicest way, had invited Dr. Vivian to call on him at the Works this afternoon and see the plant for himself. Part of this perfect consummation had been due, without doubt, to Vivian himself, a little, perhaps, to the direction she had artfully given the conversation; but she well knew that most of it had sprung spontaneously from the father-love which had never failed her yet....

"And, Cally, hunt up that book I saw kicking around here last year," said Mr. Heth, when he rose. "If we're going to do it at all, we might as well take the thing seriously, and get the bids straight."

"I'll find it, papa. We might read up a little before dinner. I'm awfully rusty."

And then her father stood by her chair, pinching her smooth cheek, looking down at her with an odd expression, half quizzical, half grave and speculative. So she had found him looking at her last night, as she sought to explain to him how different Dr. Vivian was from the articles he wrote, and hated....

"So I'm to be on my company manners with this young man, eh? Ask him won't he please be kind enough to teach an old man how to run his business, that it?"

"I didn't say that, papa dear.... I feel I haven't thanked you half enough for being so sweet to me ... about it all."

"Rather surprised at my sweetness myself.... Well," said Mr. Heth, musing down at the apple of his eye. "There must be something a good deal out of the common about a boy who could get you so worked up about a factory, I'll say that.... And he certainly looks a whole lot better'n he writes."

He quoted something about an old dog's new tricks, kissed her with tenderness, said, "Well, if we come to blows, I'll 'phone you for help," and went off humming an air.

For Cally was not to be of the Works party this afternoon. It had stood as an ideal opportunity for the two men's better acquaintance; her presence, she had thought, might only mar it. Now, gazing after her father's departing back, she rather wished she had decided otherwise....

She searched and found So-and-So's "Auction Bridge." A time passed: and she was in the big bedroom, making her peace with mamma.

She had supposed the thing to do was simply to go on, as nearly as she could, as if nothing had happened. But when she saw her mother's face, marked as from an illness, she remembered nothing of any plan. She was on her knees by the morris-chair, her arms flung about the strong little figure whose dearest hopes she had spoiled: begging mamma to forgive her for being such a disappointment and failure as a daughter, for seeming so ungrateful and unreasonable, saying that she would do anything, anything to make up for all that had gone amiss.

And mamma, already somewhat propitiated, it had seemed, by the return of the money, said presently, with some emotion of her own, that she would try to regard it as a closed episode. She, with her tireless energies, was not one to cry forever over milk hopelessly spilt. But neither was she one to temper justice with too much mercy, and her final word on the matter was a final one, indeed: "But of course you can never make it up to me, Carlisle, never...." And Carlisle, rising, knew even better than mamma how sad and true this was. There was only one thing that her mother had wanted of her, and that thing she had not done. Life, even on this day of song and mist, was seen to be inexorable....

She was in her room for a little while, and it came to be eleven o'clock: five hours and a half.... While she unwisely lingered there, dreamily irresolute between a walk and a drive, she was summoned to the drawing-room by a call from Mattie Allen, not seen of her since the dinner at the New Arlington last week. Mattie stayed a long time; and before she went—of course—other callers had drifted in....

"Are you going to Sue Louise's bridge to-night?" demanded Mattie, continuing to inspect her with evident curiosity.

"Oh, Mats! I forgot all about it—horrors!... And I've made another engagement!"

"That means you don't want to go, Cally. You know it does...."

Cally confessed to a certain want of enthusiasm; asked her friend if she, too, didn't weary of their little merry-go-round at times. Nothing of the sort, however, would be admitted by Mats, who was now known to be having a really serious try for J. Forsythe Avery.

"Dear," she went on before long, "do you know you seem to be changing entirely lately? And toward me specially.... I—I've wondered a great deal if I've done something to offend you."

Cally embraced her; spoke with reassuring tenderness. And there was compunction in these endearments. She and Mattie had been intimate friends as long as she could remember; and now it had come over her suddenly that it would nevermore be with them quite as it had been before. Must life be this way, that greetings over there would always mean farewells here?...

And then Mats, quite mollified, was speaking in her artless way of Hugo Canning, who had so obviously been on her mind all along.

"People keep asking me," she said, still just a little plaintive, "and I have to say I don't know one thing. It makes me so ashamed. They think I'm not your best friend any more."

Cally observed that all that was too absurd. For the rest, she seemed somewhat evasive.

"I feel, dearie," said Mats, "that I ought to know what concerns your life's happiness. You don't know how anxious I've been about you while you were sick...." If there seemed a tiny scratch in that, the next remark was more like a purr: "People say that he did something perfectly terrible, and you threw him over."

"Well, Mats, you know people always get things exactly wrong."

"Then you didn't?" demanded her best friend, with a purely feminine gleam.

And Cally, ardently wishing to be free of this subject, said gaily that Mr. Canning had thrown her over—the second time, too! So she had told him that she had some spirit, that some day he would do that once too often....

"Oh, you're joking," said Mats, quite pettishly. "Dear, I don't care for jokes."

And then, as she gazed, not without envy, at her friend's profile, so strangely sweet and gay, she exclaimed suddenly in a shocked tone: "I believe you really did do it!"

"Whisper it not in Gath," said Cally, with shining calm....

It was a belief, so mamma had cried in the midnight, which nobody outside of institutions for the feeble-minded would ever hold. But Cally was struck only with Mattie's enormous seriousness. Self-reproach filled her for the interval that seemed to lie between them....

"Mats, you know I've never kept secrets from you. I'll tell you everything you want to hear about it, from beginning to end. Only—not to-day."

The kaleidoscope shifted: Mattie faded out of the purview, and in her stead sat the Misses Winton, who had helped to pass the time in Europe last year, but whose presence had a contrary effect to-day. And she wondered how they could not see for themselves what a shell of a hostess they were talking at. All her being was so far away from company: one half of her continually flowing back over the months; the rest always going forward to the afternoon, and beyond; nothing at all left here....

Certainly she would tease him a little about the neat way he and papa had dropped her out of the Works. "And I thought I was the one who was doing it, too!..."

Callers gone; and then mamma, in the vein of dignity, was inviting her opinion about the color scheme of her luncheon-table. And with what an uprush of affection she responded, what eagerness to help, to be friends again!... And then it was time for her to make ready for luncheon herself. One-thirty o'clock; a long day....

In the May-time, once, Hugo had asked her to name a day, and she had named the seventeenth of October. And now the seventeenth was here, to-day. Her wedding-day it might have been, but for this or that: and behold, her high banquet was laid at the board of the Cooneys, cold corned beef and baked potatoes, with sliced peaches such as turn nicely from the can for an unexpected guest.

Cally was glad to be with her cousins to-day. The simple and friendly atmosphere here was mightily comfortable. Never had they seemed so poor to her, never so fine and merry in their poverty. Her heart went out to them.

They were all well now, the Cooneys, and the table was their clearing-house. There was much talk, of the new Works and other matters; great argument. Two faces were missing: Tee Wee, who pursued his studies at the University, and Chas, who was lunching from a box at his desk, snowed under with work accumulated during his sickness. In their places, however, sat Cousin Martha Heth, who was described as "very miserable" with her various ailments, but whose strength at conversation, regarding symptoms, seemed as the strength of ten.

Round Cally the Cooney talk rattled on; family jokes kept flickering up; strange catchwords evoked unexpected laughter. The woman of all work waited spasmodically upon the table; she proved to be Lugene, none other than the girl Hen and Cally had found on Dunbar Street, that day long ago.... Old times; so, too, when the Major told with accustomed verve how papa, a little shaver then, had brought the note from Aunt Molly down to camp, fifty years ago....

Across the table sat Looloo, the best-looking of all the good-looking Cooneys. She had lucid gray eyes, with the prettiest black lashes; and Cally found herself continually looking at them.... Strange how expressive eyes could be, how revealing, looking things unspoken that influenced one's whole life. Imagine somebody with eyes something like Looloo's, say, to have had totally different ones; small, glassy black eyes like shoe-buttons, for instance, or to have worn thick blue-tinged glasses, like Evey's grandmother....

A hand waved before her own eyes; a voice of raillery said: "Come back!"

"I'm right here.... What did you say?"

"You were picking flowers ten thousand miles away. 'Cause why? 'Not any, thank you,' isn't the right reply to 'Please give me the salt.'"

"She's in love," said the Major, a gallant in his day.

Cally, handing the salt to Hen, said: "I am, indeed,—with Looloo. Don't you notice that she's getting prettier every day?"

Looloo, fair as a lily, proved that blushes made her prettier still; the Major said finely, "Praise from Sir Hubert"; and Aunt Molly, giving the same truth a sound wholesome turn, observed that Loo needn't get set up, for she'd never be as pretty as Cally, no matter how she improved.

Cousin Martha's remark was: "But to go back to what I was saying, Cally. That Wednesday night was the worst I ever spent...."

And Cally felt apologetic to her poor relative to-day, a good deal ashamed before her. Her sudden impulse had been to ask papa's old cousin to come and stay in one of the four spare rooms at home (thus permitting Chas to come down from the Cooney attic); but she had had to put that impulse down. The Heths had not built walls around their little island for nothing....

They were in the limousine, she and Hen, driving down to Saltman's. Hen said she would be delighted to come in that evening, and play bridge with Uncle Thornton. She was a player of known merits, rather famous for successes with hare-brained no-trumpers. And Cally, thinking what man she should ask for Hen, discovered suddenly that her thought was going much beyond a table of bridge to-night; that what she was really planning was to marry her cousin off this year. And she found herself searching about for somebody very nice for Hen, very desirable.

"Oh, by the bye," she said, presently—"I was just thinking—do you remember that corduroy suit I had last year—striped gray, with a Russian blouse?"

Hen, it seemed, remembered this suit perfectly. And Cally said no wonder, since she had worn it till she would be ashamed to be caught in it again.

"I was wondering," said she, "if you could make it do for anything, Hen. It would honestly be a favor if you'd take it off my hands."

Henrietta swept on her a look of incredulous delight.

"Cally!... Why, you good old bluffer! You know perfectly well that suit's a beauty, as good as new—"

"No, oh, no! Indeed, it isn't," said Cally, quite eagerly. "You've forgotten—it's worn, oh, quite badly worn. I'll show you to-night when you come. And then you'd have to cut it down, too.... Only you mustn't ever wear it around me, Hen, I'm really so sick of the sight of it...."

So Hen presently said: "There's no use my pretending or being coy, Cally. Oh, I'd dearly love to have it. I've been wondering what on earth I'd do for a nice suit this year.... Why, it's like an answer to prayer...."

And what had she ever done in a human world to entitle her to be bestowing last-year's suits upon Henrietta Cooney, the busy and useful? "She's worth three of me," thought Cally, "and I've been looking down on her all this time just because they're poor. I seem to be little and mean clear through...."

And suddenly she saw that memories had been gathering here; that Saltman's hard-worked stenographer had grown intimate and dear....

Her hand closed over Hen's, and she was speaking hurriedly:

"Hen, do you know you're a great old dear? Don't look.... I've never told you how good you were to me this summer, when I was so unhappy, and nobody else seemed to care.... And since I've been back, too, helping me more than you know, perhaps. I didn't appreciate it all at the time, quite, but I do now. And I won't forget what a good friend you've been to me, what an old trump...."

Hen, taken quite by surprise, turned on her a somewhat misty gaze. She answered that Cally was a darling goose; with other things solacing and sweet. And then the two cousins were parting, the one to her typewriter, the other to her ease: but both feeling that a new tie bound them which would not loosen soon.

The car started from Saltman's door, and Cally glanced at her watch: it was just three o'clock. Probably at this moment Dr. Vivian and papa were shaking hands in the office at the Works. Why, oh, why, hadn't she said that she would go, too, as she had so much wanted to do? Surely she could not have harmed that meeting; she might even have helped a little.

About her were the bustle and clangor of busy Centre Street. People hurrying upon a thousand errands, each intent upon his own business, under the last wrapping each soul alone in the crowded world. And no one knew of his brother's high adventures. Men walked brushing elbows with angels, and unaware....

She had had a little sister named Rosemary, two years older than she, and very lovely in the little picture of her that papa always carried in the locket on his watch-chain. Often Cally had wished for her sister; never so much as through this day. There was one, she liked to think, whom she could have talked her heart out to, sure that she would understand all, share all. But Rosemary had been dead these twenty years....

"Drive me a little, William, please.... For half an hour, and then home...."

The car went far over familiar streets that she had first seen from a perambulator. She sat almost motionless, the tangible world faded out. It was good to be alone; this was a solitude peopled with fancies. Her mind dreamed back over the long strange year, while her steadfast face was shining toward the Future.

* * * * *

Strange enough it seemed now; but till the other day Hugo and Dr. Vivian had hardly once met in the thoughts of Cally Heth. They had hardly met in life, never exchanged a word since the night in the summer-house: so she, untrained to discernment, had supposed that they had nothing to do with each other. Now, in the last few days, it had come to seem that these two had, in her, been pitted against each other from the beginning.

Forces not of her making had cut and patterned her life; and she, driven on by feelings which she herself had hardly understood, had crumpled up that pattern and seized the shears of destiny in her own hand. The groove she had been set and clamped so fast into ran straight as a string into Hugo Canning's arms; but she had broken out of her groove, and Hugo was gone, to cross her path no more. And her mother thought, and Hugo had said almost with his parting breath, that she had been driven to these madnesses by mere foolish femininisms, new little ideas picked up from Cooneys or elsewhere.

It was true that she had these ideas; true, too, that she was not alone with them. She had been drilled from birth to the ranks of the beguilers of men, their sirens but their inferiors; and something in her, even before this year, had rebelled at that rating of herself, dimly perceiving—as she had heard a man say once—that marriage was better regarded as a career than as a means of livelihood. She had been drilled again to believe that her happiness depended on money in quantities, things had; but then, at the first pinch of real trouble, these things had seemed to sag beneath her, and she perceived dimly, once more, that she had built her house upon something like sand. And if her particular experiences here had been unique, she had seen that her experience was, after all, a common one. As if with eyes half-opened, she had divined all about her other people making the discoveries she had made; or, better yet, knowing these truths without having to discover them. She was but one of a gathering company, men as well as women, old with young....

Hugo had stood rock-like across the way she was moving. And so Hugo had lost her.

But these things seemed hardly to matter now; it all went down so much deeper. Surely it was over something bigger than her "little views" that her story-book prince had locked arms with the lame slum doctor, curiously recognized by him as an adversary at sight.

They had entered her life in almost the same hour, two men so different that she had come at last to see them as full opposites. So entering together, they had both become involved with her in the first moral problem of her life, which also began in that hour. And upon that problem each had been called, in turn, to ring his mettle. One, the fine flower of her own world, with a high respect for that world's opinions and on the whole a low esteem of the worth of a woman, had found her completely satisfying as she was. The other, a wanderer from some other planet, with his strange indifference to the world's values and his extraordinary hope of everything human, had been so passionately dissatisfied with her that he, a kind man surely, had broken out in speech that had left a scar upon her memory. And upon the stranger's shocking appraisement of her, there had, indeed, hung a tale.

There were times when it had seemed that everything she had done afterwards had been but stages of an effort, months prolonged, to shake herself free from that compassionate God pity you....

But no; she knew it was not that way exactly. Before that night she had felt vague reachings and had put them down; and similarly afterwards. Buttressed about with her island's social security, strong in her woman's faculty for believing what she needed to believe, she could easily persuade herself, or almost, that there had been only an unfortunate misunderstanding about Jack Dalhousie, that she personally hadn't done anything at all. She remembered that she had all but put the matter where it would trouble her no more. And then there had come a night when she saw that the stranger, by a certain gentleness and trust there were in him, had not been able to believe his own hard words of her. This man believed that she was good; believed it because he himself was good. And the moment of that revelation had been terrible to her. She had felt in Hen's parlor the smart of coals of fire, the strange, new shame of being trusted, but untrustworthy. So there had entered her a guilty disquiet: and afterwards, however she had struggled, however Hugo's protecting strength had compassed her about, that novel sense had kept growing through the months, steadily gathering momentum....

All this was quite clear to her now. Nothing had made her tell the truth about Jack Dalhousie except that one man had expected her to. Of all that had happened to her, here was the beating heart.

No one in her life had met her on this ground before. She had been expected to be a charming woman if she could, a woman as ornamental as possible. He only had expected her to be a good woman; and something in her had found the strange call irresistible. He, by the trusting eyes he had, had put her upon her honor; not her "woman's honor," but her honor; and she, who had never had an honor before, had grown one, all for him. As long as she could remember, men had paid tribute to her in all the ways of men with maids. But he alone had put any trust in her as a free and moral being; and she had bent the high heavens and all but broken her mother's heart that he should not have trusted her in vain.

She was far, far from being a good woman. Hugo certainly was anything but a bad man. Yet, when all was said, it was her expanding desire to be good that Hugo had stood against. And the collision had destroyed him.

Was this the great mystery then, the world's secret? Was this the wish that each human being had, planted away in the deeps, overlaid and choked, forgotten, yet charged with omnipotence: the wish to be good? Were they all waiting for somebody to pass by, sounding the secret call, to drop all and follow?...

Oh, wonder, wonder, that the simple faith of one good man should have power to overthrow princes and powers!...

The car rolled swiftly, its windows open to the sunny day. All about were the sights and noises of city streets. But the flying panorama brought no distraction: out there, men walked as trees. There blew a light autumn wind, gently kicking at Cally's veil, waving tendrils of fine hair about her face. Unaware, suffering had laid its touch upon her; this face was lovely with a deeper meaning: and yet the young girl's April-freshness clung to her still. She was in the first exquisite bloom of her womanhood. And she sat very still in the rolling car, full of a breathless wonder at the miracle of life.

It had been the year of her spirit's Odyssey. And now, when she came at last to fair haven, marvel fell upon marvel: and the quest of her heart stood saluting her from the shore. What need had she to ponder or to justify, she who, setting out to find happiness upon the shining earth, had so strangely found it among the yet more shining stars?

Very slowly, very delicately, had knowledge unfolded within her. On a day there had been pain, and nothing. On a day there had been thrilling peace, and luminous wings beating so strong, so sure....

To love; to love unasked....

She knew that women thought this a shame to them; she had thought it so herself. Yet could it be? Had he not taught her this, or nothing, that to give was ever a finer thing than to take? Was it a shame to love what was lovable, and fine and beautiful and sweet? Ah, no; surely the shame for her would be, knowing these things now at their value, not to love them, to hold back thriftily for the striking of a bargain. Was not here, and no otherwhere, the true badge of the inferior, to measure the dearest beats of one's heart as a prudent trader measures?

So Cally Heth, the often loved and lovely, was strong to feel on her wonderful day. Beneath the maiden's invincible reserve, under the mad sweetness of this unrest, clear upon that Future which was so enveloped in a golden haze, she felt a pride in her own human worthiness, as one who now does the best thing of her life. She had always wanted to love above her: how time and this man had invested her ideal with a richer meaning!... Was not this the touchstone of that change within herself she had sought, that day when Colonel Dalhousie's rod had chastened her?

Many symbols of happiness had shone and beckoned about her, and she had turned her back on all of them to follow a man in a patched coat whose power was only that he spoke simply of God, and believed in the goodness of his fellows. Over the gulf that lay between their worlds, this man had called to her: and now she had made him her last full response, which was herself. He was the saint in her life; and she had found him beneath all disguises, and laid her heart at his feet.

* * * * *

Home again; dreams laid by. There was action for a space. Anticipation painted the world in rose.

It was after four; by the clock on the mantel. Cally stood at the window, dressed, waiting. She was bound for a workers' meeting in a somewhat dilapidated Settlement House in the slums, which only the other day had been an abandoned hotel, for cause. And never in her vivid life had she dressed with greater care....

She gazed down, upon a street which she did not see. Ten minutes past four: but twenty minutes more, out of the long day. By now, he had already left the Works for the Dabney House.... And she was thinking that never but once had he made a personal remark to her: when he had thought, among the hard things, that she was lovely to the eye. But all that was a long, long time ago....

From the door below there issued her mother's guests, departing. Two strolled away up the afternoon street; one drove off in an open car; two stepped into an old-fashioned family carriage. Then, after a little interval, Mrs. Heth herself came out with two more women; and these three drove away in the Byrd car, which had been observed waiting down there.

Cally was alone in the house. And it was good to be alone.

There whizzed up, from the opposite direction, yet another car, jerking to a standstill at the door. It caught the girl's notice; her vague thought was that it was William, come a little early. But she saw at once that this was a strange vehicle, a hired one by the look of it, and consciousness dreamed out of her eyes again....

The tide of her being pulsed strong within her now. All day her strange feeling was as if an enveloping shell had, somewhere lately, been chipped from about her, revealing to her half-startled gaze a horizon far wider than any guessed before. By the new summonings that made music in her heart, by these undreamed aspirations and reaching affections, there was the thrilling seeming that always heretofore she had lived in some dull half-deadness. And she could not doubt that this port where she had arrived at last was no other than the gate of Life....

"Why, that's Chas Cooney!" said Cally, suddenly, gazing down.

From the cab below there had stepped a tall young man, out upon her sidewalk. She recognized her cousin with instant surprise; and consciousness, returning to her again, set a little frown between her level brows. Chas made her think at once of the Works. How was it that he, so busy that he could not even stop for dinner, came driving up here in the middle of the afternoon? Above all, who was it that he was helping, so slowly and carefully, from his hired car?

The girl gazed with growing tensity; her hat-brim pressed the window. The downward view was unimpeded, all clear; only, things moved so slowly. However, a little at a time, the second person in the car came emerging into the sunshine.

And Cally's heart lifted with an appalling wrench as she saw that it was her father.

There had been an accident at the Works: that was clear in one eye-sweep. Her father had been hurt. He was bareheaded; a long splotch ran up his cheek, into his hair. He was dragging over the sidewalk, leaning heavily upon Chas's arm. One of his own arms hung unnaturally still at his side. More horrible than any of these things was his face, so ghastly green in the light.

And in the watcher at the window, life shocked instantly to death. For in the flash in which she saw her father's face, she knew. No need of speech; no more news to break. Had she not felt that something terrible would happen at the Works some day? There had happened a thing more terrible than all her nightmares had devised....

She did not remember going downstairs at all. But she must have gone down very fast, for when she opened the door the two men were just stepping into the vestibule, Chas's hand reaching out toward the bell....

One look went between her and papa. Did he see death in her face?

"You heard ..." he said, standing there, his voice so curious. And she could have screamed for that look in his eyes.

"No," said Cally. Yet surely she had heard.

He was limping through the door toward her; dirt on his clothes; dark stains on his fine snowy waistcoat. And then his arm was hard round her neck; papa's head buried upon her breast, like a sorry boy's.

"My poor little girl."

So there had been a glimmer within, after all. It went out, with a mortal throe. All was black.

But surely this was quite, quite unreal; but one more horror of the night, the last and the worst. Ah, surely, surely, she had but to make one great effort to find herself sitting up in the dark; trembling, but alive.

"How badly are you hurt?"

"Nothing.... Arm's broke.... No one else."

Then they were standing in the wide dim hall. The door was shut, and she was holding by the knob. And she heard a voice, so small, so strangely calm.

"How did it happen, papa?"

Papa had his sound arm raised, his hand rubbing vaguely at his lips. But it was not his own pain and shock that had bleached those lips so white.

"Floor crashed in—without warning ... broke through. He'd made a suggestion—some braces. So I took him up to look. We were standing there ... standing underneath. Standing there, talking. And the floor gave way ... cracked ... caved in on us. One machine came down...."

The voice, too, seemed to cave in. And some one was squeezing her hand, very hard.

So nothing was wanting from the finished picture, not the last exquisite stroke. He, the believer, had believed even in her father's floors. It was she who had doubted, she who had asked the help that never failed. Had he not told her not to worry?...

But if only she hadn't stopped going inside. If only her heart would soon begin to beat again....

Chas Cooney was winking his keen eyes.

"He'd got clear—there was plenty of time.... One of the negro women was knocked over by a flying splinter.... Things were falling all around. So he stopped for her.... She wasn't hurt at all, when we pulled her out.... Of course Uncle Thornton was back in it all. A beam knocked him senseless...."

"Surgeon said it was instantaneous," came papa's shadowy voice. "Well.... It's on my head. I'm responsible. I know that."

And he sat down uncertainly, and somewhat pitifully, on the tall hall-chair....

Then nobody said anything more. There would never be anything more to say. Time would go on a long while yet, but no one would ever add another touch here. This was the end of the world.

He had trusted the Heths too far.

And how strange and void it was at the world's end, how deadly still but for the faint roarings of waters far off.

She was walking toward her father. Through the roaring there came a voice, so little and so remote.

"Papa, you must come up to bed.... I'll telephone for the doctor."

But she did not go to the telephone; not even to her father. She brushed her hand upward vaguely, fending away the advancing blackness. And then it would have been with her as with poor Miller that day at the Works, but that Charles Cooney, who had been watching her closely, was quick and strong.



XXXIV

In which to love much is to be much loved, and Kern's Dearest Dream (but one) comes True.

Beyond the Great Gulf, there was news coming, too: coming with the click of hoofs on cobble-stones, and the harsh clanging of a wagon; seeping and spreading through the shabby street with mysterious velocity. Windows rattled up; a word flew from lip to lip; people were running.

There came the Reverend George Dayne, of the Charities, and hard behind him Labor Commissoner O'Neill, mopping his face as he ran. These two were known to the neighborhood, with their right of going in, and no questions asked. Out again came the ambulance surgeon, shaking his head jauntily at all inquiries. Out lastly, after an interval, issued Mr. Pond, and disappeared into the establishment of Henry Bloom, who was known to have loaned his camp-chairs free, the day Doctor got up this here Settlement....

Then stillness enveloped all. Nothing seemed to stir. And no one could remember when he had seen those windows dark before.

Within, upstairs, the two men, alike only in this one tie, stood about, waiting; waiting for Pond's return; waiting only because they were loath to go. What little had been for their hands to do was done now.

The men of the yellow wagon, breathing hard as they came up the steps, had sought out the bedroom. But Mr. Dayne said that a soldier should lie in his tent. So they had made sure that the three-legged lounge in the office was steady, and got a fresh counterpane from red-lidded Mrs. Garland. Then, when Pond was gone, the other two had thought to make ready against the arrival of Bloom. However, they were soon brought to pause here, finding nothing to make ready with. There was an overcoat hung in the clothes closet, but otherwise it was entirely bare; hangers dangling empty. The men had found the sight somewhat sad.

But Mr. Dayne, who had been a parson before he was a Secretary, had said no matter. Let him go in his patches upon his great adventure....

It had seemed natural to these two to be doing the last small services. There was no family here; friends' love was needed. But now there was only waiting....

Mr. Dayne, in Canal Street in his own business, had been at the Heth Works in the first uproar. At intervals, he had told the story to the others: a story of one machine too many unloaded on a strained floor; of a dry beam breaking with a report like a cannon; of men and women stampeding in the wild fear that the building was about to collapse. On the second floor, but two had kept their heads; and the young doctor, for all his bad foot, had been the quicker. It was supposed that the base of the machine itself had struck him, glancing. Mr. Heth, found two feet away, was buried by a litter of debris; his escape from death was deemed miraculous. And when they brought him round, it was told that his first word had been: "Vivian hurt?..."

Much remained puzzling: in chief the strange amiability of the master of the Works toward the man he had once threatened to break for libel. They had stood there chatting like friends, laughing.

But here Commissioner O'Neill could give little light. Last night his friend had told him, indeed, with evidences of strange happiness, that there was to be a new Heth Works at once. But he was mysteriously reserved as to how this triumph for the O'Neill administration had been brought to pass, saying repeatedly: "It's a sort of secret. I can't tell you that, old fellow." But O'Neill remembered now one thing he had said, with quite an excited air, which might be a sort of clue: "Don't you get it, Sam?... It's all good. Everybody's good ... Why, I've known it all the time."...

Now the two men had fallen silent. They were in the old waiting-room, with the office door fast shut between. Royalty had slept in this room once. It was decaying now, and bare as your hand but for the row of kitchen chairs along the wall. The minister kept walking about; kept humming beneath his breath. Once Sam O'Neill caught a line of that song: The victory of life is won. A strange sentiment at this time certainly; thoroughly clerical, though. It was a professional matter with Dayne; only he, O'Neill, had been really close to V.V. And he was continually burdened with a certain sense of personal responsibility for it all....

"I'd like to have the doctor for that little girl in there," said Mr. Dayne.

The Commissioner, who was getting really stout these days, cleared his throat.

"How's she goin' to get on without him?"

"Ah, how?" said the clergyman, musing.

The stillness was like the silence before the dawn. Oppressive, too, was the sense of emptiness. Two men in this chamber; one small watcher beyond the door; otherwise emptiness, sensed through all the two hundred rooms of the deserted pile. Life died from the world. People forgot. Stillness, death, loneliness, and destitution. They had picked him to the bone, and left him....

And then, as thoughts like these saddened the thoughts of the two men, there was heard as it were the whir of wings in his old hotel. And the crows came.

I say the crows came. They came in their own way; but so they had always come. Came in the guise of an elderly tramp, vacant-eyed and straggly-bearded, soiled, tentative, and reluctant. But what mattered things like this: since in his wings, which were only hairy arms that needed soap, he brought the raiment? Such a pile of them, too, such royal abundance. A fine black cutaway coat, a handsome pair of "extra" trousers, shirts, and shoes, and, peeping beneath all, glimpses of a pretty blue suit quite obviously as good as new.

There stood the wonder, silent and uncouth, in the doorway. Do you doubt that Sam O'Neill and Mr. Dayne knew, the moment their eyes saw, that here were the crows come? How they gazed and gazed, and how poor Mister Garland, ever retiring of habit, squirmed and shifted over an uneasy heart....

He did not care to talk with gentlemen, did not Mister; gentlemen of that cloth particularly. Doubt not that in institutions men wearing such vests as this had had their cleanly will of him on winter nights. So he asked his question dumbly, with a movement of matted head and eyebrow; and when Mr. Dayne answered in a curious voice, "Yes ... he's gone," the last expectancy faded from the rough vague face. He sidled in, timid and unwilling; laid his burden, speechless, upon a chair. And then he was shambling furtively out the door again, when the parson's hand took his shoulder.

"Why are you bringing them back now? He gave them all to you, didn't he?"

The visitor spoke for the first time, suddenly, low and whining.

"'S a Gawd's truth, Reverend, I never hooked nothin' off him, an' I was goin' to bring 'em back anyways. Nothin' wore at all, gents, you can see yourself, cep a time or two mebbe outen that there derby...."

The man himself could see no point in it all except that gents had him in charge; a threatening predicament. But Mr. Dayne's gentle suasion prevailed. Out, gradually, came the little story which he was to tell sometimes in after years, and think about oftener....

Mister was bringing back Doctor's things because he had never felt right about taking them.

The cutaway coat had been the beginning of it all, it seemed. The gift of so fine a Sunday coat had bewildered the recipient; he had been on the point of handing it back right there. However, nature had conquered, then and subsequently; there had accumulated a collection of clothing secretly laid away in a place he had. The man had kept asking, he said, out of habit—"more jest to see if he'd give 'em to yer like." But he seemed to feel, in a certain dim way, that there was a sort of contest on between him and Doctor.

"The innercent look he had to him, yer might say," he said, groping for words to answer the high-vested inquisitor. "Like a child like. Never scolded yer wunst.... Just up and give yer all yer wanted...."

The blue suit, given yesterday, seemed to have been conceived as a kind of test case. The man appeared to feel that, once refused, a sort of spell on him would be broken; he would then get out all his store and wear them freely. So he had told a tall story in the office: how he was surely going to settle down and be respectable this time, and was obliged to have him a good nice suit fer to git started in.... And Doctor had given him such a funny look that for a minute he thought sure he had him. But no, the young man had laughed suddenly, as at a joke, and said: "Well, you sit there, Mister, till I take these off...." Only not to tell Mrs. Garland. Took him right back, sure did....

"So then I thinks," said Mister, the professional quaver returning to his voice, "it's no better'n thievin' for to take off an innercent like him, and thinks I, I'll git the lot of 'em, and give him like a surprise. 'S a Gawd's truth, gents, like I'm tellin' yer. Nothin' at all wore but mebbe that there derby, like I up and tole yer...."

His word had never been doubted: this passed invention. And he was thanked, not chidden for his narrative, and Reverend said:

"He shall wear that suit for his burial...."

So the crows flitted out of the door again, their errand done; and behind them was a deeper stillness than they had found.

The old waiting-room, a little dark at best, grew dimmer. Sunlight faded from the ruined floor. The glorious afternoon was drawing in. The men did not speak. And then in the lengthening silence, there floated up small noises: a door creaking open; quiet feet upon the stairs; a faint swishing as of a skirt.

The parson was standing by the half-open door.

"D'you think, sir," he spoke suddenly aloud, "there's any way to preach to a man, like just being better than he is?"

O'Neill roused, but made no answer. He had been thinking of the day he had seen this fellow Garland dodging down the hall with those trousers there. Then, becoming aware of the footsteps, he said:

"Pond back ... Is it?"

But Mr. Dayne, looking out down the corridor, said no. After a pause, he added, in a yet lower voice:

"It's young Cooney, from the Works ... And a lady."

A change had gone over the parson's kind face, making it still kinder. His sense of surrounding desolation ebbed from him. People acknowledged their heavy debt; paid as stoutly as they could. On the stairs there he saw, coming, the daughter of the man whose negligence had taken to-day a young life not easily to be spared.

"They're both friends of mine," added Mr. Dayne, gently. "Perhaps you will excuse me a moment?"

And he stepped out into the hall, shutting the door quietly behind him.

* * * * *

So Mr. Dayne thought. But under the heavy veil she wore, this was less a daughter than a woman: Cally, who had loved for a day and in the evening heard that her love was dead.

The thought behind the venture had been Chas's. Nothing required him at the House of Heth; he was for getting his sister and going to see what help the Dabney House might need. And at the last minute, she had put on her hat again, and gone too. Nothing that Mr. Dayne had felt about the loneliness of this end could touch what Cally had felt. Of whom, too, was help more required than of her, now or never any more? So they had driven three from Saltman's to the old hotel, where she had thought to come to a meeting to-day. And then Henrietta, who had come out from her typewriter strong and white as ice, methodically sticking in hatpins as she crossed the sidewalk; Hen, the iron-hearted, had quite suddenly broken down; laying her cold face in Cally's lap, weeping wildly that she would not bear it....

So Cally must brave the stairs without her, must speak to who might be here. But she did not mind. Strength had come to her with the consciousness that had returned all too quickly: the dead strength of the inanimate. She was dark and cold within as the spaces between the worlds....

And now the two cousins met Mr. Dayne in this strange endless corridor; and knew that no services were asked of them.

They greeted with little speech. Mr. Dayne told of the simple dispositions they were making. Chas explained how Mr. Heth had tried to communicate with Mrs. Mason,—whom Mr. Dayne had quite overlooked, it seemed,—but found that she was out of town; had telegraphed; how he would have come down with them now, but had had to stop for the setting of his arm. Uncle Thornton would come this evening....

"Ah, that's kind of him," said Mr. Dayne. "He must be in much pain...."

Then silence fell. There seemed nothing to say or do. How think that she could serve—mitigate these numb horrors of pain and self-reproach? All was over.

"Where is he?" said Cally, her voice so little and calm.

The clergyman told her. And then all three stood looking down the corridor to the door at the end of it: a shut door marked in white letters: DR. VIVIAN.... But nothing could hurt her now.

"We thought that was right," said Mr. Dayne.... "Will you go in for a moment?"

Briefly the girl's veiled eyes met his. He was aware that a little tremor went through her; perhaps he then understood a little further. And he thought he had never seen anybody so beautiful and white.

He added in his comforting way: "There's no one at all with him except the little girl here, Corinne, that he was kind to...."

Surely there was never a loneliness like this loneliness.

"I will go, if I may," said Cally.

Chas was eyeing her, unbelievably grave, turning his hat between his hands. And then she remembered Hen, left alone, who would not be comforted.

She whispered: "Don't wait for me.... I'll come in a minute."

The young man hesitated; they spoke a moment; it was so arranged. Chas was tipping away from her down the well of the stairs.

And she and the clergyman were walking up the corridor, his hand at her elbow, to the door with the white letters on it.

As Mr. Dayne's hand touched the knob, she spoke again, very low.

"Is he.... Is he—much ...?"

"No," said Mr. Dayne, "the injuries were internal. There's hardly a mark...."

So, opening the door softly, he left her.

And she was within, the door a step or two behind her, in front a long space, drawn blinds, and the indistinguishable twilight. Somewhere before her was the mortal man who had pledged her one day that he would prove his friendship with his life.

And how came she here; by what right?

She had perceived remotely that she was not alone. Out of the dim great stretches there emerged advancing a little figure, black-clad; advancing silent, with lowered head. Drawing near, she did not look up, did not speak: she was merely fading from the room.

The figure was vaguely apprehended, as one upon another planet. But Cally, stirring slightly as she slipped past, made a movement with her hand and said, just audibly:

"Don't go."

The girl must have paused. There came a tiny voice:

"Yes, ma'am. I'll ... just step out." And then, yet fainter: "I was wishin' you'd come, ma'am."

It was the stillness of the world's last Sabbath. Gathering dusk was here, and mortal fear. Her limbs ran to marble. There came again the lifeless whisper.

"Don't be afraid, ma'am.... He looks so beautiful."

The understanding speech, the voice, seemed to penetrate her consciousness. Her eyes drew out of the dusk, turned upon the small figure at her side: the little girl he had been fond of, her father's three years' buncher. And then she heard herself breathing suddenly, faintly:

"Ah!... You poor, poor child!..."

And her heart, which had been quite dead, was suddenly alive and twisting within her....

She had been engulfed in her own abyss. Tragedy was on every side, horrors pouring in, swamping her being. Feeling had drowned in the icy void. Not Hen's tears had touched her, not her father's stricken grief. But when her eyes came upon this small face, something written there pierced her through and through. Such a shocking little face it was, so pinched with no hope of tears....

In the darkness of the shuttered office, two stood near who were worlds apart. And, for the first time since she had looked down from her window at home, Cally was lifted out of herself....

"I—you must let me see you—in a day or two, won't you?" she said hurriedly, below her breath. "I should like so much ... to help you, if I could...."

A quiver went over the little mask; but the girl spoke in the same stony way:

"Oh, ma'am ... it's so kind.... I'll go now."

But the hollowness of Cally's speech had mocked the sudden sympathy upwelling within her. Her arm was upon the work-girl's frail shoulder; her indistinct voice suddenly tremulous.

"Don't think I imagine that any one can ever replace.... You must know I understand ... what your loss is."

Kern shrunk against the wall by the door. No moment this, to speak of what had so long been hid.

"He was like a father to me, ma'am, an' more...."

And then, as if to prove that she claimed no right at all in this room, as if all depended on her establishing finally the humble and spiritual nature of her regard, she breathed what in happier days had been close to her heart:

"He was teaching me to be a lady...."

Who shall say how marvels befall, and the dearest dream comes true? Was it the pitifulness of the little hope laid bare? Or the secret shrinking behind that, but surprised at last? Or was it the knowledge of a beautiful delicacy shown by this little girl before to-day?

Miss Heth's arm was about her neck, and her voice, which was so pretty even when you could hardly hear it, said, true as true:

"I think you've been a lady all along, Co-rinne."

And then the bands about Kern's heart snapped, and she could cry....

The storm came suddenly, like the bursting of a dam. A bad time certainly; it was hard to be torn so, yet to make no cry or sound; in any case, distressing to others. And surely salt water couldn't be good for this lovely cloth, where her face lay....

Yet one doesn't think overmuch of things like that, when the barriers on the great common go toppling down. And there was Sisterhood there all the time....

And above the stillness and the racking, Kern heard his beautiful lady's voice once more, speaking to her own heart now, so low, oh, so broken:

"Ah, but he was teaching me...."

And then Kern must go quickly, lest she disgrace herself forever; screaming aloud as she had heard women who were not ladies....

The girl was gone, her head between her hands. And Cally Heth stood alone in the more than churchly stillness.

She was breaking up within. The drowned being stirred to life, with multiplying pains. And yet, in giving comfort, she had mysteriously taken it. There came to her a fortitude that was not of death.

* * * * *

No sound penetrated to the silent waiting-room.

The two men there spoke little. They had talked what they had to say. Sam O'Neill looked at his watch; it was twenty-five minutes to six. And, a moment later, Director Pond came up the steps, entered and said:

"Bloom will be here at six o'clock."

They spoke briefly of this. The friends of the neighborhood were to be admitted; it was agreed that this should be arranged for to-morrow morning. Pond then said:

"Is Miss Heth in there?"

Mr. Dayne said that she was. And Sam O'Neill, who had not known who the visitor was, first looked startled and then lapsed off into heavy musings....

The Director sat down on a chair by the door. His strong face looked tired.

"Won't you, a little later," he said to Mr. Dayne, "go down and say a few words to the people outside? They'd appreciate it."

The parson, biting his crisp mustache, said that he would.

Pond sat absently eyeing the pile of men's clothes beside him; and after a time he asked what they were there for. Mr. Dayne seemed less and less disposed for conversation. So it was Sam who told, in a somewhat halting fashion, of the coming of the crows....

Pond, whom no one could have taken for a sentimentalist, made no comment whatever. Presently he felt Mr. Dayne's eye upon him.

"Well, would it work out, do you think?"

The Director shook his head slightly, disclaiming authority. But after a time he said:

"Not as long as men'll try it only once every two thousand years."

The parson's eyes dreamed off.

"He believed in miracles. And so they were always happening to him.... Oh, it's all so simple when you stop to think."

Then there was silence and the creeping twilight. Sam O'Neill stood picking at a splotch on the ancient plaster, with strong, yellow-gloved hands. Mr. Dayne walked about, his arms crossed behind him. Upon Pond there came a sort of restlessness.

He said abruptly: "How long' has Miss Heth been here?"

"Oh—a—little while," said the parson, rousing.... "Long enough, no doubt."

The dark-eyed Director was standing. The two men exchanged a look; they seemed to feel each other. Here was a matter with which the Labor Commissioner had nothing to do.

"Well, then," said Pond, with a little intake of breath, "I'll go in."

The Director shut the door into the hall, took his hat from the chair. He crossed the bare waiting-room, and turned the knob of the frequented door into the office.

This door he opened, gently, just far enough to let himself in; he closed it at once behind him. Nevertheless, by the chance of their position, the other two saw, through the darkness of the room beyond, what was not meant for their eyes.

A simple scene, in all truth; none commoner in the world; it really did not matter who saw. Yet the two men in the waiting-room, beholding, turned away, and Sam O'Neill bit a groan through in the middle.

He had never understood his friend, but he had loved him in his way. Old memories twitched; his poise wavered. He lacked the parson's inner supports. He paced about for some time, making little noises in his throat. And then he tried his voice on a question.

"Did you ever hear him speak of John the Baptist?"

Mr. Dayne halted, and looked.

And Sam O'Neill, with some difficulty and in his own way, told of V.V.'s creed about the Huns. Of how he had maintained that they needed awakening, nothing else, and were always ready and waiting for it, no matter how little they themselves knew that. And, finally, how he had said one day—in a phrase that had been brought flashing back over the months—that if a man but called to such as these in the right voice, he could not hide himself where they would not come to him on their knees....

Mr. Dayne had stood listening with a half-mystical look, a man groping for elusive truths. Now his fine composure seemed to cloud for a moment; but it shone out again, fair and strong. And presently, as he paced, he was heard humming again his strange paradoxical song, which he, a parson, seemed to lean upon, as a wounded man leans on his friend.

* * * * *

Her spirit returned to her body from the far countries, not without some pain of juncture. But there was no strangeness now in being in this room; none in finding Mr. Pond at her side, his saddened gaze upon her. Happen what might, nothing any more would ever seem strange....

"Won't you come with me now?"

She stood, whispering: "Come with you?"

And Pond's strong heart turned a little when he saw her eyes, so circled, so dark with tears that were to come.

"Your cousins are waiting, aren't they?... And don't you think your father might need you?"

A little spasm distorted the lovely face, unveiled now.

She inclined her head. Pond walked away toward the door; stood there silently, drawing a finger over faded panels. Behind him was the absence of all sound: the wordlessness of partings that were final for this world....

She had seen in his great dignity the man who had given to the House of Heth the last full measure of his confidence. And it was as his little friend had said. He was beautiful with the best of all his looks; the look he had worn yesterday in the library, as he went to meet her poor father.

They had slain him, and yet he trusted.

No design of hers had led her alone beside this resting-place: that was chance, or it was God. But now it seemed that otherwise it would henceforward not have been bearable. For with this first near touch of death, there had come, strangely hand in hand, her first vision of the Internal. The look of this spirit was not toward time, and over the body of this death there had descended the robe of a more abundant Life.

So she turned quickly and came away....

She was outside now. The door was shut behind. And she was walking with Mr. Pond down the corridor, which was so long, echoing so emptily. She became aware that her knees were trembling. And Corinne's fear now was hers.

She desired to be at once where no one could see her. But at the head of the grand stairway, in the desolating loneliness, Mr. Pond stopped walking. And then he held a hand of hers between two of his; pressed it hard, released it.

He was speaking in a voice that seemed vaguely unlike his own.

"It's hard for you—for your father—for all of us down here. His life was needed ... wonderfully, for such a boy. And yet.... How could a man wish it better with himself? He wouldn't, that I'm sure of.... Gave away his life every day, and at the end flung it all out at once, to save a factory negro. Don't you know that if he'd lived a thousand years, he could never have put one touch to that?"

Cally said unsteadily: "I know that's true...."

She wished to go on; but the Director was speaking again, hurriedly:

"And you mustn't think that a blow on the head can bring it all to an end. If I know anything, his story will be often told. People that you and I will never know, will know of this, and it will help them—when their pinch comes. There's no measuring the value of a great example. When it strikes, you can feel the whole line lift...."

And then he added, in a let-down sort of way: "Freest man I ever saw."

There was no reply to make to these things. They went down the stairs together. Halfway down, the man spoke again:

"In the little while I've been here, I've seen and heard a great deal. Some day you must let me tell you—how much there is down here to keep his memory green."

The stairs were long. A kind of terror was growing within her. She would go to pieces before she reached the bottom. But that peril passed; and very near now was the waiting car, and merciful shelter....

They crossed, amid springing memories, the old court where, one rainy afternoon, there had happened what had turned her life thenceforward. Then they were safely through the door, and came out upon the portico, into the last light of the dying afternoon. And here, above all else that she felt, she encountered a dim surprise.

When she had passed this way a little while before, it was as if all power of feeling had been frozen in her. Sights and sounds were not for her. So now the sudden spectacle that met her eyes came as a large vague confusion.

The shabby street was black with people.

Her affliction had been so supremely personal, her sense of this man's tragic solitariness in the world so overwhelming, that she could not at once take in the meaning of what she saw. She must have faltered to a pause. And she heard Pond's voice, so strangely gentle:

"You see he was much loved here."

Her eyes went once over the dingy street, the memorable scene. Thought shook through her in poignant pictures.... Herself, one day, prostrated by calamity on calamity; and in the little island-circle where she had spent her life, not one heart that had taken her sorrow as its own. And beside that picture, this: a great company, men and women, old and young, silent beneath a window: and somewhere among them the sounds of persistent weeping....

And Cally seemed suddenly to see what had been hidden from her before. If he was much loved, it was because he had loved much.

Yet her confusion must have lingered. Was it so, indeed? Many, so many, to compensate his loneliness? It seemed to be important to understand clearly; and she turned her veiled face toward Pond, and spoke indistinctly:

THE END