"That's the fun!" said Florrie Willing. "Rush, rush, rush from morning to night. That's little old New York in a nutshell."

Carlisle had expected to be thoroughly diverted by the rattle, bang, and glitter in which the Willings lived, but in this she was only partially gratified. Pure restlessness, it seemed, had entered her blood: she was no sooner fairly settled in the Wrexham than she began to wish herself back home again. The vague thought pursued her, even at the places, that she was missing something; that she had stepped aside from, not into, the real current of her life. Dazzling indeed were some of the dining-places to which the experienced Willings took their guest, but somehow none of them seemed so really interesting, after all, as home. What was happening away off there on Washington Street? Suppose Mr. Canning should return ahead of time for his farewell visit—return and find her not there?...

"You're changed somehow, Cally," cried Florrie Willing, on the third or fourth day—"I can't just put my little patty on it, but I can see it all the same."

They had just rushed up from breakfast, which the Willings took in the apartment cafe, and were now dressing furiously to go shopping. Cally, surprised with her mouth full of hatpins, said of course she had; she was getting frightfully old.

"You never used to rest a cheek on a pensive hand, and stare five minutes at a time into eternity. Out with it!" said Florrie. "You're disappointed in love."

"That's it, too. I loved a tall pretty soldier, and he rode away."

"We'll never ride away, at this rate. Get a move on, Cally! We've slews and slews of places to go to."

Cally, who considered that she already had a move on, did her best to get on another one.

Young Mrs. Willing added: "Whatever became of the gay young thing with the eyelashes you flirted so outrageously with, the time we were up at Island Inn? What was his name—oh—Mr. Dalhousie?"

Carlisle winced a little in spite of herself.... Banquo could not have been more impossible to forget than this.

"Oh—why, he and I had the worst kind of smash-up—and he went away somewhere. I never like to think of him any more.... Let's fly!"

Fly they did, that morning and many others. It was all very different from life at home. Born and bred in a town where social life is large, constant, and gay, Carlisle could not help being struck by the fact that the Willings, roughly speaking, had no friends. One other young couple in the same hotel, the Jennisons, appeared to be about the limit of their intimate circle: a phenomenon, no doubt at least partly explained by the fact that the Willings moved every year, or sometimes twice a year, "to get a change." Thus, in the huge rabbit-warren, they were constantly cutting themselves off from their past.

"I can't endure to poke about in the same little spot year after year," said Florrie Willing. "If I don't have something new, I simply froth at the mouth and die."

However, Mr. Willing of course had his connections downtown, and knowing his duty in the premises, he would frequently "bring up" men in the evening, brisk, lively, ambitious young fellows like himself. One of the men so brought up fell abruptly and deeply in love with Carlisle, which helped considerably to pass the time away.

"You'd better hold on to Pierce," said Florrie, talking seriously as a married woman: "He's one of the coming men—dead certain to make a pile of money some day."

Cally said she'd dearly love to hold on to Pierce, but to herself she smiled, thinking if Florrie only knew. By this time she had been a fortnight in New York, and had decided to leave at the end of another week. Whatever else the visit was or was not, it had more than justified itself by providing her with just the perspective she needed, to see things once again in their true proportions. Distance seemed wonderfully to soften away all the horridnesses. Nothing had really happened. On the contrary, against this stimulating background it was reassuringly plain that everything was agreeably settled at last, or very soon to be so settled. More and more, as April drew steadily nearer, Mr. Canning towered shiningly in the foreground of her thought.

The days passed quickly enough. She and Florrie spent many absorbing mornings in the shops, Carlisle for the most part "just looking," under the coldly disapproving eyes of the shop-ladies. But her intentions were serious at bottom, in view of three hundred dollars which papa had privately given her, at the last moment, companied by a defiant wink. (The wink indicated collusion against mamma, whose design it had been to cut her daughter off penniless for the trip.) After a great deal of looking, for she was a thrifty buyer, Cally expended one hundred and twenty-five dollars for a perfectly lovely two-colored dress, bewitchingly draped, and seventy-five dollars for a little silk suit. Both were dirt cheap, Florrie agreed. She looked four times at a dear of a hat going begging for seventy dollars, but with only three hundred you have to draw the line somewhere, so Cally simply purchased a plain gray motor-coat lined with gray corduroy, which she really needed, at sixty dollars. She also sought a gift for papa, in recognition of his liberality, and finally selected a silver penknife as just the thing. The knife, luckily enough, could be got for only $2.50.

The young broker who had fallen in love with Carlisle came up four times with Willing, called five times in between, and became host at two of the "out" evenings for the party of four. Carlisle forbore to give him any encouragement, though she rather liked his eyes, and the way his mouth slanted up at the right corner.

"I'm wild about you," said he, on her last evening,—his name, if it is of the smallest interest, was Pierce Watkins, Jr.,—"I'll shoot myself on your doorstep to-morrow if it'll give you even a moment of pleasure."

Carlisle assured him that she desired no suicidal attentions.

"You're the loveliest thing I ever looked at," said he, huskily. "God bless you for that, anyway. And no matter what else happens to me, I'll love you till I die."

"Don't look so glum, Mr. Watkins dear," said Cally.

They did not go to any matinee on the last afternoon, the reason being that it was Monday and there weren't any, except the vaudevilles, which were voted tiresome. Florrie and Carlisle lunched quietly at "home"; had a rubber of bridge afterwards in the apartment of Edith Jennison (who produced for the necessary fourth an acquaintance she had made last week in the tea-room of the Waldorf-Astoria); and rushed from the table for hats, veils, and a drive on the Avenue.

Carlisle was to leave at ten o'clock. Her trunks were packed; her "reservations" lay in the heavy gold bag swinging from her side. Home, somehow, beckoned to her as it had never done before. Besides, New York, with its swarming population (mostly with palms up) and its ceaseless quadruple lines of motor-cars, began to oppress her.

"It's too full of people," she laughed to Mrs. Willing as they shot down in the lift. "It's too big. Some day it will swell up and burst."

"Why, that's the fun of it, rusticus! How I love the roar!"

"I like it, too," said Carlisle. "But I do think it's nice to live in a city where you can sometimes cross Main Street without asking four policemen, and then probably having your leg picked off, after all."

They dashed across the onyx lobby for the main entrance, as fast as they could go, Mrs. Willing remarking that they were almost too late to catch the crowds as it was. From the small blue-velvet parlor, across the corridor from the clerk's desk, a tall man rose at the sight of them, and came straight forward. For a moment Carlisle's heart stopped beating as she saw that it was Hugo Canning.

He advanced with his eyes upon her, brought her to a halt before him. If the imps of memory must have their little toll at this remeeting, the flicker passed through her too quickly for her to take note of it. It woke no palest ghost of rebellion, to walk now. The girl's heart, having missed a beat, ran away in a wild flutter....

"Did my cards reach you?" said the remembered voice, without preface. "They just went up, I believe. But I see you mean to go out."

He looked a little pale under the lobby's brilliant lights, but never had he seemed so handsome and impressive. Carlisle looked up and looked down, and the sight of him there was an exaltation and heavenly fulfilment and a garland upon her brow.

"We must have passed them as we came down," said she. "How do you do? I had no idea you were in this part of the world."

He said that he was just off the train. She presented him to Mrs. Willing, who hardly repressed a start as she heard and identified his name.

"Will you come with us for a little drive?" said Carlisle. "We were just starting out to take the air. Or ..."

Florrie Willing looked intensely eager. Canning hesitated. The feminine intuitions, of which we have heard so much, naturally divined the cause of his hesitation, and Florrie rushed into the breach.

"You're excused from our engagement, Cally!" said she, with archness, and some nobility, too. "I know Mr. Canning doesn't care to parade the Avenue in our last year's model. You shall have the city to yourselves. Why not go up to the apartment?"

Carlisle glanced at Canning, who said: "You are very nice and kind, Mrs. Willing." Mrs. Willing looked at him as much as to say, "I can be five times as nice as that, if you only knew...."

When she had rushed off, Canning said: "Do you feel like a little walk?"

"Oh, how nice!" said Carlisle.

"Let's stroll up to the Plaza and have tea."

They went out, turned east and came into the Avenue, where, the afternoon being fine, one million people were methodically stepping on each other's heels. However, these were people without existence, even when they jostled into one.

The moment they were out of earshot of the listening clerk, Canning said, looking straight in front of him:

"Haven't you missed me at all, Carlisle?"

"Oh, yes! I seem to have done hardly anything else."

"I've been learning your name, you see," said Canning, after five steps in silence. "You won't mind?... Miss Heth would be a sham, after thinking nothing but Carlisle all these weeks."

She said that she didn't mind. His presence here beside her seemed to fill every reach and need of her being: here was what her soul had cried for, through all the empty days. It did not seem that she could ever mind anything any more....

"I'm very lucky to see you," she went on, quite naturally, "for I'm going back home to-night. Your six months' sentence isn't quite up yet, is it? Is it business that brings you?"

"What do you call business? Of course I've come," said he, "only to see you."

He went on, after a glorious pause: "And this is the second time—or is it the fourth or fifth? Did you happen to hear of me at Eva Payne's in January?"

"Oh, yes! Only not till four hours after you were gone."

"You'd hardly guess, though, how I've been torn between my—wish, and what it pleases me to call my pride.... I was in Florida and going on to Cuba for February, at least, by special request of Heber. I thought I should like to see you again before I got so far away. Only when I came in sight of your door once more, I couldn't bring myself to knock...."

One interesting coincidence about the reasoning of beautiful ladies is that it is sometimes right. Continuing as they swung up the crowded street, Canning said:

"It seemed to me that ... However, that's no matter now. Unfortunately I've the devil's own temper. To be packed off so, and then to surrender without a condition—I needed more weeks of silent self-communion for that. I've had them now, under pretty skies where the moon shines bright o' nights. I believe the breezes have blown my humors away. I'm happy to be here with you, Carlisle."

"I like it, too.... How on earth did you ever find me?"

"Kerr's been writing me notes from time to time, you know. In one of them he mentioned that you were away from home. I wired him yesterday from Tampa for your address."

"Dear Willie!" said Carlisle. "Do you know I'm mad to be at home again?"

They came to the shining hotel, and passed into the tea-room, which was now rapidly filling up. The doorman greeted Mr. Canning by name. An obsequious majordomo wafted him and his lady, with smiles, to the little table of his choice. Many eyes were drawn to the young pair. He was a man to be noticed in any company, but in presence and in air she was his not unworthy mate. He himself became aware, even then, perhaps more than ever then, that this provincial girl stood transplanting to a metropolitan setting with unimpaired distinction....

"And tea-cakes, ma'am?" implored the loving waiter.

"Muffins," said Canning, and abolished him by a movement of his little finger.

Carlisle would have preferred the tea-cakes, but she loved Hugo's lordly airs.

He dropped his gloves into a chair, and there descended upon him a winning embarrassment.

"Tell me now, for my sins and my penitence," he said in a low voice, his strong fingers clasping a spoon, "that you have blotted away what is past."

She said that she had blotted it all away.

He went on, with considerable loss of ease: "I suppose the accursed dilettante habit has got into my blood. I needed these unhappy days and nights, for my soul's good—"

"Oh, please!" said Carlisle, her eyes falling from his grave face. "Let's not talk of it any more."

He stopped, as if glad to leave the subject; but after a silence he added with entire continuity:

"Your spirit's very fine.... It's what I've always admired most in women, and found least often."

The loving waiter set tea and muffins. Peace unfolded white wings over the little table. A divine orchestra played a dreamy waltz that had reference to a beautiful lady. Carlisle poured, and remembered from Willie's apartment that Canning liked one lump and neither cream nor lemon. He seemed absurdly pleased by the small fact. The topic of the Past having been finally disposed of, the man's ordinary manner seemed abruptly to leave him. His gaze became oddly unsettled, but he perpetually returned it to Carlisle's face. He appeared enormously interested in everything that she said and did, yet at the same time erratically distrait and engrossed. He became more and more grave, but simultaneously he gave evidences of a considerable nervous excitement within....

If Carlisle noticed these eccentricities at all, she could have had no difficulty in diagnosing them, having observed them in the demeanor of young men before now. The case was otherwise with Canning, to whom his own unsteadinesses were a continuing amazement. Heart-whole he had reached his thirtieth year, and his present enterprise had furnished him with the surprise of his life. He was, indeed, a man who had lately looked upon a miracle. He had watched three humiliating rebuffs turn under his eye, as it were, to so many powerful lodestones. He himself hardly understood it, but it was a truth that no degree of cunning on the part of this girl could have so captured his imagination as her spirited independence of him (in mamma's vocabulary, her flare-up). A man who held himself naturally high, he had been irresistibly magnetized by her repulses of him. Rebuffed, he had sworn to go near her no more, and had turned again, an astonishment to himself, and tamely rung her bell....

Canning looked and looked at Carlisle across the little table, and it was as if more miracles went on within him. Not inexperienced with the snarers, he had learned wariness; and now, by some white magic, wariness seemed not worth bothering for. If marriage was to come in question, his dispassionate judgment could name women clearly more suitable; but now dispassionateness was a professor's mean thumb-rule, too far below to consider. Of a sudden, as he watched her loveliness, all his instincts clamored that here and now was his worthy bride: one, too, still perilously not broken to his bit. But ... Was it, after all, possible? Was it conceivable that this unknown small-capitalist's daughter, rated so carelessly only the other day, was the destined partner of his high estate?...

"I can't bear to think of your going to-night," he exclaimed suddenly, with almost boyish eagerness. "You know this town is home to me. I can't explain how perfect it seems to be here with you."

She mentioned demurely her hope of his return to the Payne Fort in a month or so: a remark which he seemed to find quite unworthy of notice.

"Stay over till to-morrow, Carlisle! Let's do that! And we'll take the day train down together."

"Goodness! With my tickets all bought? And my trunks packed since morning?"

Canning glanced hurriedly at his watch. "I can arrange about the tickets in three minutes. As for the trunks, Mrs. Willing's maid will be only too glad to unpack them for you. Do—do stay."

She laughed at his eagerness, though at it her heart seemed to swell a little.

"And if they've already gone to the station?"

"I can put my hand on ten men who will drive like the devil to bring them back."

"And if my mother confidently expects me for breakfast to-morrow?"

"I will write the telegram to her myself." He added: "Ah, you can't refuse me!"

Cally said: "I'm afraid you are one of the terrible masterful men that we read about, Mr. Canning. But—perhaps that's why I shall be glad to stay."

He thanked her with some unsteadiness, and said: "Where shall we dine?... And we could be excused from dressing, couldn't we? I can't bear to lose sight of you, even for an hour."

Of course he had his way there, too. In adjoining booths they did their telephoning, he to somebody or other about the reservations, she to leave a message for Florrie Willing. Later they dined in a glittering refectory, just opened, but already of great renown....

* * * * *

It was an unforgettable meal. So long as she lived, this evening remained one of the clearest pictures in Carlisle's gallery of memorabilia. Before the dinner was half over, Canning's immediate intentions became apparent to her. Doubts and hesitancies, if he had had any, appeared to recede abruptly from his horizon. With the serving of dessert, the words were spoken. Canning asked Carlisle to be his wife. He did it after an endearingly confused preamble, which involved his family and his natural pride in upholding and continuing the traditions of his house. Critically speaking, his remarks might have been considered too long and too much concerned with the Cannings; but of the genuineness of his love, Carlisle could not entertain a doubt. As she and mamma had planned it, so it had fallen out. She accepted Hugo with her eyes while an affectionate servitor offered her some toasted biscuit. She accepted the biscuit, too.

It was later agreed that the betrothal should not be announced for the present, except to the parents of the contracting parties. Canning had argued strongly for a day in June, but Carlisle at length carried her point that the interval was quite too short. It was now the 20th of March, The final decision, reached on the train next day, was that Canning should join Mrs. and Miss Heth abroad, in June or July, and the formal announcement of the coming alliance should be made then, from London or Paris. The wedding itself would take place early in October.



XVI

Of Happiness continuing, and what all the World loves; revealing, however, that not Every Girl can do what the French People once did.

The row of maiden's testimonials had received their crowning complement. The beginning at the Beach had touched its shining end. As she and mamma had planned it, so it had magically fallen out.

When Mrs. Heth heard the tidings (which she did within three minutes of Carlisle's arrival at home) the good lady hardly restrained the tears of jubilee. Having all but abandoned hope, she was swept off her feet by the overwhelming revulsion of feeling, and her attitude—for of course mamma always produced an attitude about everything upon the spot—was not merely ecstatic, but tender and magnanimously humble. For it was clear now that the daughter had outpointed the mother at the Great Game; Cally had justified her flare-up; and Mrs. Heth, with eyes nobly moist, begged forgiveness for all the hibernal harshnesses.

"You must make allowances for the natural anxieties of a loving mother's heart," said she, in the first transports.... "You've done me so proud, dear little daughter. Proud!... How Society will open its eyes!..."

"So he is coming to dinner with us!" she added a moment later, exulting with her eyes. "He will speak to your father then.... It's not too late to add a course or two. And we must have out the gold coffee-set...."

Canning dined in state at the House that night, with coffee from the gold set. Next evening, there were similar ceremonies. Accompanying Carlisle homeward on the day following their re-meeting, Canning had meant to return at once to New York; for his long furlough had now run out, and he had felt a man's call of duty upon him. Moreover, it was already arranged that he should come again for a real betrothal visit, sometime before the first of May. Yet he lingered on for four days now, a man magnetized beyond his own control. Radiant days were these.

In view of Carlisle's desire that her news should not tamely leak out, depriving the Announcement of its due eclat, some little discretion was of course necessary at this period: else people would talk and say afterwards that they knew it all along. She saw that she must still make engagements which did not include her betrothed; she must meet the archnesses of her little world with blank looks above the music in her heart, with many evasions, and even, perhaps, a harmless fib or two. Nevertheless, the lovers secured many hours all to themselves. Shut from public view in Mr. Heth's study, and more especially in long motor rides down unfrequented by-lanes they were deep in the absorptions of exploring each other, of revealing themselves each to each. And to Carlisle these hours, marked upon their faces with the first fresh wonder of her conquest, were dazzling beyond description.

Spring was coming early this year, slipping in on light bright feet. And in the House of Heth there was felt a vernal exuberance, indeed: permeating papa even, extending to the very servants. Mr. Heth had received the news of the great event with profound satisfaction, asserting unequivocally that Canning was the finest young man he had ever seen. And yet, unlike mamma, his joy was tempered with a certain genuine emotion at the prospect of so soon losing the apple of his eye.

"You know the old rhyme, Cally," said he, pinching her little ear—"'Your son's your son all his life, but your daughter's your daughter till she becomes a wife.'... Don't let it be that way, my dear. You're all the son your old father's got...."

As to mamma, her feet remained in the clouds, but her head grew increasingly practical. She had been rather opposed to postponing the announcement, being ever one for the bird in the hand; but she had yielded with good grace, and within the hour was efficiently planning the "biggest" wedding, and the costliest wedding-reception, ever given in that town. By the second day she was giving intelligent thought to the trousseau—every stitch should be bought in Paris, except a few of the plainer things, in New York—and had finally decided that the refreshments at the reception should be "by Sherry." People should remember that reception so long as they all did live.

"All the Canning connection shall come," she cried,—"rely on me to get them here,—and all the most fashionable and exclusive people in the State. Every last one of them," said she, "except Mary Page."

After an interval, during which she sat with a glitter in her eye, she added explosively:

"I'll show her whether I'm probable!"

The remark, it seemed, had rankled even in the moment of supreme victory....

Spring, too, it became, the quintessence of spring, in the young maiden's heart. Nature but symbolized the brilliant new life henceforward to be her own. And the more she came to discern her lover against his background of wealth, place, and power, the more she saw how brilliant that life was to be, the more she thrilled with the magnitude of her own accomplishment. Of himself in their new relation, Canning talked much in these days, and with an unaffected earnestness: of the high nature of the career they would make together; of his own honors and large responsibilities to come; in chief of his family, whose name it would be their pride to uphold through the years ahead. And the girl's heart warmed as she listened. What was all the storied dignity of the Cannings now but so much sweet myrrh and frankincense upon her own girlish altar?...

He was her maiden's ideal. He was her prince from a story-book, come true. If any flaw were conceivable in so complete a fulfilment, it might have been imagined only in this very fact of Hugo's all-perfectness. Marrying upward, in the nature of the case, involved a large material one-sidedness: that was the object and the glory of it all. Yet now, in her romantic situation, there woke new emotions in Cally Heth, and she dimly perceived that her lifelong ambition carried, through its very advantages, a subtle disadvantage to the heart. Unsuspected tendernesses seemed to stir within her, and she was aware of the vague wish to bestow upon her lover, to make him a full gift for a gift. However, it was clear that Canning had everything. For the priceless boons he was to confer upon her, she saw that she had nothing to give him in return, except herself.

With this return, Canning, for his part, seemed amply content. When the hour came when, for his manhood, he must report himself again to that office in New York which had not known his face since October, he took the parting hard. He was to return again before April was out, for a fortnight's stay preceding his betrothed's departure for Europe; yet he seemed hardly able to tear himself away....

"I hope we shall have a long life together," said he, a bright gleam in his handsome eyes, "but it's certain, my own dear, that we'll never be engaged but once...."

Moved herself by the farewells, she teasingly reminded him of his one-time impatience to fly back to lights and home. But Canning, straining her to his heart, replied that home was where the heart is, and was admitted to have the best of the argument.

* * * * *

Carlisle's world had been knocked far out of its ordered orbit. Hugo Canning, possessed by her, was so towering a fact that it threw the whole horizon into a new perspective. Between this shining state and the winter of discontent, there was no imaginable connection. Cause and effect must turn a new page, life's continuity start afresh.

So it seemed, in love's first bloom. And yet, circumstances being as they were, it was hardly possible that Carlisle should at one stroke completely cut herself off from the past, as Florrie Willing constantly did, as the French people once did, by means of their well-known Revolution.

In Hugo's absence (full as the days were with questions of the trousseau, rendered doubly exciting by mamma's princely attitude toward expense), Carlisle began to recognize once more the landmarks of her former environment. Doubtless a certain period of emotional reaction was inevitable, and with it the reassociation of ideas began. Canning was away a solid month. One day soon after his return,—it was on a lovely afternoon in early May, as they were motoring homeward after four hours' delightful tete-a-tete in Canning's own car,—Carlisle said to him:

"Oh, Hugo, what do you think I did while you were away? Subscribed a hundred dollars to a Settlement House! My own money, too,—not papa's at all!"

Hugo, whose intensity of interest in his betrothed seemed only to have increased during the days of absence, cried out at her munificence.

"So, you've money, in those terms—well!" said he. "Aren't you mortally afraid of being gobbled up by a fortune-hunter some fine day?"

"A great many people have warned me about that—mentioning you specially, by the way. But I've always told them that you loved me for my fair face alone."

Canning made a lover's remark, a thoroughly satisfactory one.

"But don't you see," he added, "this business of your having money changes everything. I must double my working hours, I suppose! I'm too proud a man to be dependent on my wealthy wife for support."

"I'm glad to know you may be prosperous, too, some day, Hugo," said she; and, after a little more frivolous talk: "Did I mention that I'm soliciting subscriptions from visiting men for that Settlement I spoke of?"

"Great heavens!" cried Canning, amused. "Why, don't you think a Hundred Dollars is more than sufficient—for one little family?"

"They wouldn't say so," said Carlisle, laughing and coloring a little, "for they're asking for twenty-five thousand dollars and have raised about two so far. What could be more pitiful than that?"

Canning, who was driving his car to-day, as he occasionally liked to do, then asked, why was a Settlement? And as well as she could Carlisle retailed her rather sketchy information: how "they" planned to buy the deserted Dabney House, make it the headquarters for all the organized charities of the city, and use the rest of the great pile for working-men's clubs, night classes, lodgings, gymnasiums and so forth. Thanks to the influence of Rev. Mr. Dayne, Mrs. Heth had been induced to lend her name as a member of the Settlement Association's organization committee. But it was from her cousin Henrietta Cooney that Carlisle had got most of her facts, at a recent coming-to-supper while Hugo was away.

Canning, listening, was glancing about him. Having made an adventurous run to-day by way of the old Spring Tavern,—he had plotted it out himself, with maps and blue-books,—they had reentered the city by the back door as it were, and now spun over unaccustomed streets.

"I didn't know you went in for charity, my dear."

"Oh, a cousin of mine is drumming up funds for this, you see...."

Not clearly understanding it herself, how could she explain the impulse which had led her to offer Hen, without being dunned at all, her royal subscription? Perhaps she had a vague feeling that this would prove, to the complete satisfaction of the public, that she and her family were far from being shameless homicides, dead to all benevolent works. It appeared that mamma had already subscribed fifteen dollars to the Settlement, on personal solicitation of Mr. Dayne, but of course you could not prove anything much for fifteen dollars.

Hugo, having turned to look at Carlisle, lost interest in Settlements. His gaze became fixed, and it said, plainer than ardent print, that, if he had many possessions, here was far the best and dearest of them....

"Where's that ripping little hat you wore yesterday? You know—a brown one, sort of a toque, I suppose—all old rose inside?"

"Why, Hugo!... Don't you like this hat extremely?"

"Rather! Only, if there is a choice, I do think I'd vote for the toque.... You've gone and spoiled me by giving away how you can look when you try."

Carlisle laughed merrily. She was glad to have her lover so observant of what she wore, even though he did not know nearly so much about clothes as he imagined.

"It's not a toque at all," said she, "but I'll wear it for you to-morrow, provided you promise me now to run away from that tiresome secretary and come to lunch."

"Done! At one-thirty o'clock."

"That's the exact luncheon hour, as it happens, but I notice that many of the best fiances make it a practice to report for duty at least half an hour before the gong. It looks so much better."

"Running and eating's no better than eating and running, you allege. There's some small merit in the contention.... What of those sterling fiances who punch the time-clock a full hour before the whistle?"

"Oh, dear me, Hugo, are there any like that?"

"There's but one now in captivity, I believe. I—Hello!... Missed him, by Jove!"

"What was it? A cat?"

"Didn't you see? Our old hoodoo—that camp-meeting chap!..."

"Oh!"

"I wonder what ill wind he's blowing this time.... Poetic justice if I'd knocked him into the middle of next week."

Carlisle had involuntarily looked back, struck with a sense of coincidence, and also with the odd feeling of having received a douche of cold water. They were, it seemed, rolling along through old South Street, and behind her, sure enough, she saw the looming shape of the ancient hotel, which the Settlement Association could have for twenty-five thousand dollars cash. Of the "camp-meeting chap," however, she saw nothing: presumably, having evaded justice, he had already disappeared into his lair. Nevertheless she was effectually reminded that this man was still in the world.

"Is this where the fellow lives?" said Canning, also glancing back down the dingy street. "I thought somebody said he'd come into money from his lamented uncle."

She confirmed the conjecture, and Hugo then observed:

"Well, I'll give him a month to discover that it's his duty to God to remove to a more fashionable neighborhood."

"Oh! Do you think so?"

"Have you ever known one of these smooth religious fellows who wasn't keen after the fleshpots when his chance came?"

Carlisle laughed and said she hadn't, having indeed known few religious fellows of any kind in her young life. But she was struck with this new proof of Hugo's essential congeniality with her. His penetrating comment, born, it seemed, of that curious antipathy which she had noticed before, fell in astonishingly with trends of her own.

Many weeks had passed since Carlisle had decided to oust this religious fellow definitely from her thoughts, as belonging so clearly to that past upon which she had now turned a victorious back. And in these expulsive processes, she had found herself greatly assisted by the young man's confession of hypocrisy, as she regarded it, on this very subject of giving away money. Perhaps this had seemed a frail club once; she herself had hardly put much strength in it in the beginning; but she had been resolute, and time had strengthened her convincingly, according to her need. For if the man was a whited sepulchre, full of dead men's bones within, then clearly his opinions of people and their families were not of the slightest importance to anybody, so what was the good of anybody's thinking of them?...

Not to let the conversation lag, she had remarked, with no pause at all:

"It's strange our nearly running over him, just then and there. That old shack is the Dabney House, and you know it's he who got up the Settlement idea."

"No, I didn't know it," said Canning, slowing down to take a corner which led on to civilization. "Still," he added, "I shan't let that stay my generosity. I resolved three blocks back to subscribe five hundred—just to throw you in the shade—and I will not be deterred."

Having been duly applauded for his prodigality, he inquired: "How much, by the way, is the good doctor donating out of his forty thousand?"

"Not a cent!" said Carlisle, who had questioned Hen on this very point.

It was thus, indeed, that circumstances had given demolishing weight to her club. "If I had money I'd probably hang on to every cent," the man had said, that winter morning on his uncle's doorstep; and now he had money, a lot of it, and hanging on he undoubtedly was. Hen herself had confessed it, with a certain defiance, trying to create the impression that the man was merely reserving his funds for some other good purpose....

The triumphant ring in Carlisle's voice might have struck Canning as odd, if he had happened to notice it. Still more obscure, however, were the inner processes which led him to say:

"Does he make any charge for the thought?... Well, it's a fine thought, all the same; a fine work. On reconsideration I raise my subscription to a thousand. Hang the expense!..."

There was another gay burst of felicitation, after which Carlisle became somewhat silent. Canning, bowling proficiently up Washington Street, spoke of his honored maternal grandmother, the great lady Mrs. Theodore Spencer, and her famous Brookline home. Beside him, Carlisle, listening with one ear only, considered the strangeness of life. Transfigured within, she had seemed to look out upon a new universe, yet was not this somehow the face of an old familiar, slyly peeping? Of what use, then, were clubs? When were things ever settled, if she could be conscious of a little cloud no larger than a man's hand even now, with the living guarantee of her omnipotence at her side?...

"Who was that?" said Canning, suspending conversation to bow, with Carlisle, to a passing female pedestrian.

"Oh," she laughed, a little vexedly, roused from her meditations—"just one of my poor relations."

"Ah?" said he, a trifle surprised.

A far cry, indeed, from the celebrated dowager, friend of diplomats and presidents, to Miss Cooney of Saltman's bookstore, in a three-year-old skirt. And how like Hen, instead of quietly looking the other way, to yell out some Cooneyesque greeting and wave that perfectly absurd umbrella....

To Hen it was, a day or two later, that Carlisle mailed the two Settlement checks, hers for a hundred and Hugo's for ten times that amount. She licked the stamp with intense satisfaction. However, the rewards of her generosity seemed somewhat flat. Hen, indeed, called her up immediately upon receipt of her communication, and contents noted, with excited thanksgiving. However, that was all: the checks were turned over to Mr. Dayne, and there the matted ended. Carlisle was oppressed with a sense of anti-climax. She even thought of sending another and larger check straight to Dr. Vivian.

Canning, it developed rather to Carlisle's surprise, took his business quite seriously. His indolences of the sick-leave period were now sloughed from him. He had returned this time, not merely with his favorite car and mechanic for the afternoon excursions, but accompanied by mysterious "papers" and a man stenographer; and, occupying rooms in the New Arlington Hotel, gave his mornings and even some of his evenings religiously to work.

"Why, Hugo, are you a lawyer?" cried Carlisle, when he first explained these matters to her.

"I am, and a pretty keen one," said he.

"And do you know how to reorganize banks?"

"I can reorganize 'em like the devil," said Hugo sincerely; for if a man does not want a woman to boast a little before now and then, he does not want her at all....

His papers and his telegrams, his periods of engrossment in business and telephone-calls from his secretary, seemed to invest him with a certain new dignity. A subtle change in his manner was now perceptible. It was as if he had moulted some of the gay plumage of the wooing-season, and unconsciously begun to gather something of the authority of the coming head of a great house. Like many men who have long enjoyed but eluded the wiles of lovely woman, Canning clearly contemplated the married estate with profound gravity. In his absence he had communicated his good news to both his parents, though one was in Boston and the other, his father, in Washington: testifying, in short, before a Congressional Investigation Committee. He was not especially detailed as to what they had said, beyond their general expressions of pleasure; but it was clear that he regarded it as of the first importance that they should be pleased.

Matters now, indeed, began to assume a distinctly serious and responsible complexion. The days of purely idyllic romance seemed to slip behind; the engagement more and more took shape as the gateway to an alliance of institutional consequence, entailing far-reaching reactions in various directions. Mamma's remarks made it plain that, with Cally's establishment as Mrs. Hugo Canning, her own career of brilliant aspiration had reached its final goal. Even papa's future seemed to be affected to its roots. Already he spoke with satisfaction of taking a smaller house next year; ultimately of "retiring" to an undefined "little place in the country," toward which in recent years his talk had slanted somewhat wistfully....

Mrs. Heth and Carlisle were to go to New York on the 20th of May, do a few days' preliminary shopping there, and sail on the 26th. Canning's visit lasted till near the middle of the month, running over his allotted two weeks. And deepening intimacy only brought into stronger relief his great advantages of position, antecedents, and experience; only showed Carlisle the more clearly how distinguished, cultivated, and superior a man she had won. With her pride, there came now, it seemed, a certain new humility. She was aware that never in the days of the thundering feet had she been so desirous of pleasing Hugo as now: when he was no shining symbol or distant parti, but the exceedingly personal and living man who was so soon to call her to the purple. She caught herself at times, with some amused surprise, in the deliberate processes—editing her vocabulary, manner, and wardrobe, for example, in the light of the preferences she intuitionally read in his eye. So, as the husbandly dignity descended upon him, she found herself possessed by something of the wifely duty....

Whenever was this ticklish business of the dovetailing of two lives accomplished without some small mutual effort? No more could be said than that Carlisle felt, in rare and weak moments, a certain sense of strain. An immaterial subtlety this, properly out of the range of mamma's concrete observations. But papa's heart was tender: did he possibly suspect that his darling might feel herself just a little overshadowed at times?

He called Cally into the study one evening before dinner, and with a mysterious air handed over to her a bulky packet of very legal-looking papers.

"Why, papa! What is it?"

"Stock!" answered papa, with a chuckle. "Mostly Fourth National. There's a little more than fifty thousand dollars there in your hand, Cally."

"But—why, papa!... You don't mean it for me!"

"A little weddin' present from your old father. I meant to give it to you next fall, and then I thought, why wait? Had it all put in your name to-day."

"Oh—papa!..."

She threw her arms around his neck, suddenly and oddly touched; not so much by the gift, for she would have plenty of money soon, as by this evidence of her father's affectionate thought.

"Your daughter's your daughter till she becomes a wife...." remarked Mr. Heth. "It won't be that way, will it, Cally, eh?"

"Never in the world.... Oh, papa, how sweet—how good—you are to me!..."

"You've got a fine man," said papa, presently, patting her cheek. "But my judgment is it's always just as well for a girl to have a little money of her own. Feels independent. You'll have more when I'm gone, of course. That'll give you a little better'n three thousand a year. Non-taxable, too."

She reported her new wealth to Hugo, quite proudly, within two hours. For he had proved willing this evening to purloin night hours from his grave duties as attorney-at-law, and by telephone had easily cajoled Carlisle into breaking an engagement she had made for other society. In the nicest sort of way, Canning agreed that her father had made her a handsome dowry. He added, holding her hand tight, that she was to let him do something for her, too, on their wedding day. Of course she must have her own money; all she could spend.

"I can spend lots, my dear. You'll find me a frightfully expensive young person.... There are cigarettes in the drawer, Hugo. I bought the kind you like, this time...."

She got one for him, struck the match herself. He watched her, loafing lordly; very handsome and dear he looked in his beautiful evening clothes.

And thence, in the lamplit privacy of the little study,—Mr. Heth having fared forth to a Convention "banquet,"—the talk ranged wide. Late in the evening, it returned again to Carlisle, as the possessor of large independent funds, a topic of pleasurable possibilities from her standpoint.

She said idly: "Do you believe it makes you happy to give away money, Hugo? That's a rule I heard somewhere."

"Unquestionably one of the most refined ways known of tickling one's little vanity.... How full of good deeds you are these days. You're thinking of the poor again, I'm right?"

"I must have been. There's nobody else who'd take money from you, is there?"

"Oh, isn't there? I must introduce you to high finance some day."

"Well," said Carlisle, "I meant just to give it away—to anybody—just to show how free and superior you are, or something.... Silly, isn't it? What's your happiness rule, Hugo?"

He replied with the readiness of a man who has been over this path long ago:

"To have the capacity to want things very much, and the ability to get them."

And he squeezed the little hand he held, as if to say that he had both wanted much and gotten much.

Carlisle was much struck with this rule, which she now saw to have been her own and mamma's all their lives long. After duly complimenting Hugo upon it, she said:

"Here's another one, a man told me once: 'Cultivate your sympathies all the time, and do something useful.'"

"That's orthodox! It was a young curate with a lisp who told you, I'll wager."

"Very warm!" she laughed, struck again by his astuteness. "It was your hoodoo—Dr. Vivian! And, oh, now that I think of it, he gave me that other pointer, too,—about giving away money."

Hugo replied: "The man seems to be dripping with wise old saws, in a thoroughly inexpensive sort of way.... Well, we'll show him something about giving away money some day."

He was silent a moment, and Carlisle then remembered her thought of another large subscription to the Settlement, which she, for her part, could easily make now with fifty thousand dollars all her own. But Canning obliterated all such reflections by turning and taking her abruptly in his arms.

"This is what I want to make me happy. Darling—darling!..."

They sat on the shabby old leather lounge which papa had held fast to, by winter and by summer, for thirty years. Here they had sat down soon after eight o'clock, and now the soft-toned chimes in the hall had just sounded eleven-thirty. In the first days of their engagement, Carlisle had observed that Hugo was "very demonstrative." And now, at the end of their loverly evening together, he became suddenly and strangely moved, professing, in a voice unlike his own, his inability to live longer without her. Then, ignoring all their elaborate plannings, he abruptly begged her to marry him in June, as he had first asked her....

"Why, Hugo!" she said, surprised and a little uncomfortable. "That's so much dear foolishness—and not a stitch of clothes made yet! October's just around the corner.... Do sit up, Hugo dear. There's papa, I think."

Hugo sat up. Reason reasserted its sway. But later, Carlisle remembered this moment with a dim sense of trouble, not entirely new.... She wondered with a certain disquiet whether all this was some everlasting difference between men and women, or whether she, Carlisle, was by nature a cold and undemonstrative sort of person? Indeed, there did seem to be a falling short in her somehow; for if not with herself and the expressions of her love, with what was she to return Hugo's royal gifts?...

There were three more days; and then young lovers must say farewell. In little more than a week they would meet again in New York; but still this seemed a real parting to both. It was the 13th of May, the day which marked the end of three weeks of cloudless skies. The rain long predicted by the weather sharps had come in the night, and the dreary downpour continued throughout the day. Each of the young pair seemed somehow conscious that the first chapter in their joint story had reached an end. Better days they might certainly have, but never again days just like these....

"Keep well, dear heart," begged Canning at the last, "and take care of all your loveliness for my sake."

Proud of her beauty he ever was, and especially now when she was so soon to meet his mother in New York. And at the final parting, he said, visibly moved:

"Understand me, Carlisle, you are mine through all eternity. Whatever happens to you or me, this is a love that shall not die."

Saying which, having now lingered to the last possible moment, he dashed from her to his waiting taxicab—his own car having already gone by express—with just five minutes to catch his train.

From the drawing-room window, Carlisle waved her hand to him; kissed it, too, since nobody was looking. And then the car leapt forward and shot away out of sight down the glistening street. Hugo was gone, and Carlisle was alone.

She stood at the window, looking out blankly into the leaden wetness. It was just after five, and the rain poured. A curious depression settled quickly upon her, which was hardly fully accounted for as "missing Hugo already."... Why? Who upon earth had less cause for depression than she? No girl lived with more all-embracing reasons for being superlatively happy. What, then, was the lack in her?—or was this some lack in the terms of life itself? Was it the mysterious law of the world that nobody, no matter what she had or did, should ever long keep the jewel happiness unspotted by a doubt?



XVII

Cally crosses the Great Gulf; and it isn't quite Clear how she will ever cross back again.

Baffling questions these, even to young philosophers. Dismissing them as foolish, Cally Heth turned from the rain-swept window, designing to rest awhile in her own room, before dressing for a little dinner at Evey McVey's. Forsaken as she felt, she was yet not unconscious of a certain remote desirability in being alone; that is, in having a little time to herself now. It occurred to her that perhaps she and Hugo had been together rather too constantly in these weeks, going forward just a little too fast....

In the hall she encountered her mother, descending the stairs in mackintosh, hat, and veil. Carlisle looked surprised, but mamma's look under the veil was roguishly dolorous, in reference to the recent farewell.

"Why, mamma, where are you going in all the rain?"

Mrs. Heth replied: "What, no tears!... I'm off to the old Dabney House, my dear—the first time in twenty years—"

"Oh!... The Settlement!"

"I promised Mr. Dayne I would go," said the capable little lady, eyeing her daughter expectantly—"it's the organization meeting and election of officers. The man has got together some excellent people for his committee. And, by the way, Cally—"

"But they haven't raised all the money already!"

At this Mrs. Heth looked still more knowing. "Confess, Cally—didn't Hugo do it? Didn't he make another big subscription after his thousand?"

Cally, arrested at the foot of the steps, stared at her mother. "Why—not that I know of. What do you mean?"

Now her mother looked somewhat disappointed, but said, snapping a glove button: "It would be like him to do it, and say not a word to anybody. Why, there's a foolish story Mrs. Wayne told me this morning that the whole thing had fallen through, when Mrs. Berkeley Page came forward anonymously with a gift of twenty-five thousand—simply buying the building outright, in fact. I don't, of course, believe a word of it. She's exactly the kind to let her right hand know what her left was doing. Still, I did think perhaps Hugo might possibly have done something of the sort. He was so interested—he spoke of the Settlement to me only yesterday...."

The girl gazed at her mother, and a sudden light broke into her eyes. Across her memory there flashed Canning's cryptic remark, only the other night: "We'll show him something about giving away money some day."... This, then, was what he had meant: perhaps he had already done it that night. She knew that Hugo had curiously disliked Dr. Vivian at sight, and that, by the bond between her and him, he had somehow entered into her own feminine feeling that to give handsomely to the fellow's own charity (to which he himself gave nothing at all) was to show him up completely in the interest of public morals. The gift of such a sum as twenty-five thousand dollars simply exploded him off the horizon....

Her heart glowing toward her understanding lover, she clapped her small hands and cried: "He did!—I remember something he said about it now. Oh, I know he did!"

"I felt morally certain of it," said mamma, calmly, peering through the plate glass of the door. "Don't tell me Mary Page would do a thing like that. Ah, here is the car at last...."

Carlisle said with sudden eagerness: "Do wait a minute for me, mamma! I believe I'll go to the meeting, too."

Naturally some discussion followed this whimsical request. The upshot was that Mrs. Heth, being late already, promised to send the car back.

Cally, gloom banished, ran up the stairs, her mother's voice following behind like a trade-wind.

"It's to be in the office of that Dr. Vivian—you know?... one flight up. No difficulty in finding ... Sure to put on rubbers...."

The last words to be distinctly heard were: "Look for me right up at the front."

In her own room Carlisle flew about quite blithely, making ready for the unexpected excursion with odd anticipations beyond mamma's guessing. She felt grateful to Hugo, attached to him by a new tie; for he, however clearly he had understood it himself, had beautifully put her in just that position toward the religious fellow which she had so long desired to occupy: the position, in short, of overwhelming moral superiority. How easy now, choosing her own moment, to say what would dispel forever the man's odd little power of causing her to worry....

The streets were slippery, the journey was from pole to pole of the town and yet five minutes sufficed for it, bringing Settlementers to their destination. So easily does forty horse-power traverse the mile between Houses of Heth and Houses of Dabney. Cally Heth rolled up to the door of the abandoned hotel. Large and dismal it looked in the slanting rain. Archaic, too, so the modern of the moderns thought, glancing upward over the face of the shabby pile as the car halted, and William, who was ever attentive to his young mistress, sprang out with the umbrellas. It was an odd place for anybody to live, certainly; an even odder place to draw in storm the world of fashion foregathering to its bosom. Yet this indubitably was the spot. There was the little procession of motor-cars, lined against the broken sidewalk in the wet, to prove it. The girl's upward eye fell, too, upon a name, inscribed in white paint upon a window directly above the decayed grand entrance:

DR. VIVIAN

Carlisle became conscious of a certain excitement. She hoped very much that they hadn't read out the names of subscribers yet.

She was late, so there was nobody to show her in. From the sidewalk she stepped under a queer little portico, which seemed to waft one back to a previous century. Here, at the vestibule step, she was obliged to move carefully to avoid treading on two dirty little denizens of the neighborhood, who knew no better than to block the way of the quality. They were little Jew girls,—little Goldnagels, in short,—and while one of them sat and played at jackstones with a flat-looking rubber ball, the other and smaller lay prone upon her stomach, weeping with passionate abandon.

Her agonized wails indicated the end of the world, and worse. Carlisle said kindly:

"What's the matter, little girl?"

The lamenting one, who was about four years old, rolled around and regarded the lady with a contorted face. Her wails died to a whimper: but then, curiosity satisfied and no solace offering, she burst forth as with an access of mysterious pain.

"Did she hurt herself?" said Carlisle, third-personally, to the elder girl, who had suspended her game to stare wide-eyed. "What on earth is the matter?"

The reply was tragically simple:

"A Lady stepped on her Junebug."

Sure enough, full on the vestibule floor lay the murdered slumbug, who had too hardily ventured to cross a wealthy benevolent's path. The string was yet tied to the now futile hind-leg. Carlisle, lingering, repressed her desire to laugh.

"Oh!... Well, don't you think you could catch her a new one, perhaps?"

"Bopper he mout ketch her a new one mebbe to-morrow, mom.... Hiesh, Rebecca!"

Moved by some impulse in her own buoyant mood, Carlisle touched the littlest girl on the shoulder with a well-gloved finger.

"Here—Rebecca, poor child!... You can buy yourself something better than Junebugs."

The proprietor of the deceased bug, having raised her damp dark face, ceased crying instantly. Over the astounding windfall the chubby fingers closed with a gesture suggesting generations of acquisitiveness.

"Is it hers to keep?" spoke her aged sister, in a scared voice. "That there's a dollar, mom."

"Hers to keep ..." replied the goddess, smiling.

But her speech stopped there, shorn of a donator's gracious frills, and the smile became somewhat fixed upon the lovely lip....

There had appeared a man's face at the glass of the old doors, and the lady, straightening benignantly to sweep on to her triumph upstairs, had run suddenly upon his fixed gaze. Nothing, of course, could have been more natural than this man's appearance there: who upon earth more suitable for door-keeper to the distinguished visitors than he, who had given his office to the Settlement to-day, in lieu of more expensive gifts? Yet by some flashing trick of Carlisle's imagination, or of his air of immobility, seen darkly through the glass, it was almost as if he might have, been waiting there for her alone....

But the meeting of eyes was over as soon as it began. With so prompt a courtesy did the Dabney House physician swing open the door that it was as if he had been opening it all along, as if she hadn't caught him looking at her....

"How do you do, Miss Heth?... Such a dreadful day!—you were brave to venture out."

"How d'you do?" said Carlisle, in the voice of "manner," a rising voice, modulated, distant and superior. And over her shoulder, she addressed the little Jew girls, with an air of more than perfect ease:

"Well, then, good-bye! Be sure to catch her the new one to-morrow...."

She had seen that the strange young man was smiling. And by that she knew that he remembered their last meeting, and wanted to trade upon her queer weakness at that time, pretending that he and she were pleasant acquaintances together. Presently she should inform him better as to that. But why, oh, why, that small flinching at the sight of him, the very man she had fared into the downpour to explode, not pausing even to mourn her lover's going?...

"I'm a search-party of one," said Dr. Vivian, throwing wider the door, "for Mr. Pond. I wondered if he could have got lost, somewhere down here—he's never turned up yet."

"Mr. Pond?"

"The director of the Settlement, you know, when it opens for business in the fall. He happened to be in Washington, and was good enough to run down to-day to make us a little address."

"Oh."

Carlisle found herself, beyond the door, in a quaint high-ceiled court, enfolded with peristyles in two long rows, and paved with discolored tiles loose under the foot. At the farther end of the court there ran away a broad corridor into the dusk, and here also, full fifty feet distant, rose the grand stairway with ornate sweeping balustrade ending in a tall carved newel-post. Obsolete and ruined and queer the whole placed looked, indeed....

"Luckily," added Dr. Vivian, "I'm in good time to serve as a guide."

But Miss Heth was already walking past him with an expensive rustle, moving straight toward the stairway. For this, needless to say, was not the moment to speak that pointed word or two which should unmask the man; there would be an unavoidable vulgarity about it here, in this solitude. And even if she should get no further opportunity upstairs—well, after all, the situation spoke for itself; nay, thundered. Had not Hugo—come to think of it—struck the note of the subtler victory, he who had given magnificently and said nothing? Noblesse oblige, as the Gauls say....

"Oh, no, that's not necessary," she replied, walking on. "There are the stairs...."

The young man fell in behind her.

"The old house is really quite bewildering, upstairs. It happened that my office was the only place available. Perhaps you will let me show you—"

"Oh, I don't think I need trouble you, thank you."

"It is no trouble," said V. Vivian.

Good sentences these, and well pronounced. With them, conversation seemed to languish. The processional pair moved across the shadowy court in entire silence. The benevolent lady led, never so securely entrenched in the victorious order, the beloved of prodigal Hugo Canning, to whom no harm should befall. After her proceeded the slum doctor: the hard marble betrayed the inequality of his footsteps. A minute more and they would be upstairs, swallowed and dispersed in the publicity of the meeting. Floor and ceiling above them brought down the sounds of a company near at hand, the scraping of a chair-leg, the muffled echo of voices. Carlisle's foot trod upon the bottom step of the broad stairway.

"I wonder if you would give me five minutes after the meeting, Miss Heth?" said the young man's voice behind her. "There's a—a matter I've wanted very much to speak to you about."

Cally's heart seemed to jump a little.

"What is it that you want to speak to me about?" she asked coolly, not turning. And, to her own surprise, she brought her other foot up on the stair.

"Well, it concerns the Works," said Vivian.

And he added at once, hastily: "Oh, nothing that you need object to at all, I hope. Not at all...."

She had stopped short at the fighting-word, and turned, pink-cheeked. Certes, there was a point at which noblesse oblige becomes mere flabby spinelessness.

And upstairs Mrs. Heth, complacent right up at the front, craned round her neck, and thought that Cally was very long in coming....

"Yes? What about the Works?" said Cally, her breath quickening.

"Oh, I don't mean to detain you now, of course—"

"But now that you have detained me?" she pursued, with no great polish of courtesy.

The young man raised a hand and pushed back his hair, which was short but wavy. It was observed that he wore, doubtless in memory of his uncle, a mourning tie of grosgrain silk, replacing the piquant aquarium scene.

"I could hardly explain it all in just a few sentences," said he, affecting reluctance, "and I—certainly don't want to give you a wrong impression.... To begin quite at the end, I've been wondering if I—I might be allowed to make one or two small improvements there, at the Works, I mean,—in fact, out of a—a sort of fund I have."

Carlisle stared at him spellbound. She stood on the bottom step of the old grand stairway, one gloved hand on the balustrade; and, as she so stood, her eyes just came on a level with those of the tall doctor. His hare-brained audacity almost took her breath away.

"Oh," said she. "Out of a fund you have."

And she thought wildly of accepting his offer at once, compelling him to name a definite sum, just for the fun of seeing how he would wriggle out of it afterwards.

"I'm tremendously interested in the Works, you know," the man rushed on, quite as if he found encouragement in her reply, "because I have so many friends who work there. It's to gratify my peace of mind, just to know that they have—everything they need. As I say, I happen to—to have a sort of fund—a little public fund, you might say—for—for purposes of the kind. And the idea of outside cooeperation in such a matter is a perfectly sound one, as you doubtless know, a—a sound, advanced socialistic idea. It's simply the community acknowledging some responsibility where it already claims the right to regulate ..."

At this point her stare seemed to penetrate him with a doubt, and he said, with the air of having skipped hastily and turned back:

"I mustn't detain you now to give the full argument, of course, but I assure you the idea is sound and—mutually beneficial, as I believe. Unfortunately," he added, with a certain embarrassment, "I don't know your father."

"Tell me," said Carlisle, feeling an excitement mounting within her, "how is it that you are always thinking up these plans for doing good to other people?"

Before Dr. Vivian could meet this poser, the front door opened with a bang, and a youngish man in a wet yellow raincoat came striding rapidly across the court toward them. He was a powerfully built man with a blue-tinged chin, and wore the air of a person of authority.

"Meeting not begun yet?" he demanded, without salutation, apparently addressing Carlisle. "Thought I was late."

"Ah, Mr. Pond—glad to see you," said Vivian, stepping forward a little to meet the newcomer. "They've just begun—you'll find an ovation waiting for you."

"In your office? Aren't you going up, to lead the applause?"

The doctor bowed gravely. "In my office. I'll join you directly."

"I see," said the man, nodding, having never checked his stride.

But all that he had seemed to see with his keen black eyes was the lovely girl posed on the last step of the ornamental stairway. He almost brushed against her as he strode by.

The Pond person's footsteps diminished up the long stairs. A moment later a volley of hand-clapping, sounding very near, indicated his arrival in the meeting-room. But his interruption and his irritating stare had accomplished no mollifying purpose down in the court. But one end, indeed, could justify the proud Miss Heth in lingering in a public hall with the slanderer of herself and her family.

"Doesn't it occur to you," she said, hardly waiting for the intruder to get out of earshot, "that so much preaching about other people's business seems rather—odd, coming from you?"

Dr. Vivian now affected to look troubled.

"There was just that difficulty," said he, slowly, "that you might think I was preaching. I'm not, this time, really—"

"Don't you know perfectly well you only said that in a—a horrid way to try to make me feel uncomfortable?"

She paused for a reply; her excitement was growing. Her figure was enveloped in a slim raincoat of fine gray; she wore a yellow straw hat of an intriguing shape, and over it a white veil closely drawn to keep the wet wind from her face. Now and then, as her eyes moved, a descending black-and-gold eyelash became entangled with this veil; that occurrence, in fact, took place at this precise moment, creating an emergency situation of some consequence. It was a matter of considerable public interest to see how it would all work out. However, the girl merely raised an indifferent hand, and plucked the veil out a little. The man V.V. looked hurriedly away.

He was saying: "I assure you I meant nothing of the kind. However, doubtless it's natural that you should think so—"

"It seems very natural to me—especially here in the new Settlement building!... What about the parable of the rich young man now?"

He stood looking at her without a reply; one of his quaint looks, it was.

However, Carlisle knew positively that he did not want to improve the Works out of any fund he pretended to have, and was resolved to show him no mercy now. She had really meant to spare him, and he, mistaking magnanimity for weakness, had said what he had said. On his head be it: his deceptive trusting look should not save him now.

"Why don't you say something?" she demanded.

The young man gave an embarrassed laugh.

"Well, to tell the honest truth, I don't seem to think of anything to say—"

"Oh!... So the Settlement suggests nothing to you—as to picking the beam from your own eye?"

"Not at this moment, I think. In fact, I don't seem to grasp at all—"

"Oh!" said Cally, with a little gasp.

And then, stung on by his reckless hardihood, she struck to kill:

"How can you look at me, and pretend that you're so anxious to help other people's businesses, when you know you wouldn't even give to your own Settlement—not a cent!"

The two stood facing each other, hardly a yard apart, their eyes dead-level. V.V., as Henrietta Cooney called him, continued to look at her, and though he was far from a florid young man, it seemed now as if he must have been so, so much color did he have to lose. And Cally discovered that the man had somehow managed to keep, over all these brilliant weeks, that mysterious trick he had of making her feel unfair, and even rather horrid and common, when she knew perfectly well she wasn't. For the look on his unreliable face was that of one stabbed from behind in a company where he had trusted, and his eyes seemed to be saying to her quite distinctly: "Don't you worry about me! Just give me a minute or two, and I'll be all right...."

But all that his actual voice said, in rather a remote way, was:

"What a terrific hypocrite you must think me!... I hadn't realized ..."

It was precisely the point that Carlisle Heth had been trying to establish, for a long, long time. Yet now, in the moment of triumph, her gaze suddenly wavered from his; and she heard herself, to her own secret confusion, saying hurriedly and weakly:

"At least, I understood—some one told me—you hadn't.... Of course you—you might have given something, and—this person not have known...."

But Jack Dalhousie's friend only answered, in the same detached way:

"It's unpardonable, my detaining you this way. I'd no idea ... May I show you the way up—"

"No—no! Please wait!..."

He waited, silent. Carlisle, having paused long enough to take firm hold of her consciousness of vast superiorities, resumed more strongly:

"Perhaps I ought to explain why I—thought that. I was told that the whole thing had fallen through, when a—a wealthy subscriber stepped in and secretly gave a very large amount—had bought the building for you. So I—I naturally thought—"

"It was absolutely natural. In fact, it's quite true.... Shall we go to the meeting now?"

But no, something in her required that he must state in plain words the fact that would justify her accusation, alleged by his eyes to be so unjust: namely, that it was (practically) a member of her family who had done this splendid thing for him. Yet she went rather further than she had intended when she said, glancing away over the queer dusky court:

"I will tell you. Some one gave us to understand—not he himself, of course,—that it was a friend of ours who had done this ... Mr. Hugo Canning."

He made no answer.

An uncontrollable desire carried the girl yet further. She said, in a weakening voice:

"Was it?"

In saying this, she brought her eyes back fully to her victim. And if ever guilt was written large upon a human countenance, it was upon the face of V. Vivian at that moment. Brightly flushed he was, with an embarrassment painful to witness. And yet, so strange is the way of life, the joy of victory once again seemed to slip from the clutch of Cally Heth. What house of cards was this she had pulled down upon herself?...

"Really, you must appreciate," the man was saying, in a light, dry voice, "I shouldn't feel at liberty to betray a secret of that sort, even if I knew. I'm sorry, but—"

But the girl's sickening sensations of falling through space broke out in faltering speech:

"Oh!... Do you mean ..." She halted, to steady herself, and took a fresh start, no better than the first: "Do you mean—that—"

"I mean only, Miss Heth, that I haven't the slightest idea what this is all about. I thought," he said, in a voice of increasing hardness, "that we were talking of the Works. If, at another time, you can give me a few minutes—"

"Was it YOU?" said Carlisle, breaking through his defenses ... "Do you mean—it was YOU, all along?..."

"I mean nothing of any sort. Does it occur to you that these questions are quite unfair?—that they put me in a ..."

She demanded in a small voice: "Did you buy this house for the Settlement?"

Shot down with the pointblank question, the tall young man, whose coat was so extremely polished at the elbows, died game, saying with sudden gentleness:

"No, it was my Uncle Armistead."

And then there was no sound but the steady beat of the rain upon sidewalk and roofs ...

Upstairs, just a floor and a ceiling away, Mrs. Heth, craning her neck for the last time, perceived that Cally had decided not to come to the meeting; also that it was just as well, viewing the inclement weather. Downstairs, almost directly beneath her, Cally stood front to front with the family enemy, her face quite white.

"Of course you understand," the enemy was saying, hurriedly and yet firmly too, "he gave me the money expecting it to be used for the public good. I've considered that I merely had it in trust, as a fund for—for these purposes, as I've explained. And this—well, you may easily imagine that it was the most perfect form of self-indulgence.... I've gotten so fond of this old place ... But I can't imagine how we came to be talking of it, and I beg that you'll forget the whole matter. I—my uncle would have been very much annoyed to—to have it known or talked about...."

Not in that singular experience in the Cooney parlor, not even in the memorable New Year's moment in her own library, had Carlisle been swept with such a desire to dissociate herself from her own person, to sneak away from herself, to drop through the floor. Nevertheless, some dignity in her, standing fast, struck out for salvage; and out of the uprush of humiliating sensation, she heard her voice, colorless and flat:

"I'm sorry I said that. You make me ... quite ashamed...."

The flush deepened abruptly on the tall doctor's cheek.

"Don't say that! Don't you suppose I understand how absolutely natural it was?... Everybody'd have thought just the same, in your place...."

Carlisle had turned away from his translucent eye, finding it unbearable; she descended from the stair, took an irresolute step or two over the ruined floor of the once stately court. And then she halted, having really nowhere to go, staring fixedly toward the distant doors....

Mamma's nearness could not help her now. Hugo's fortifying love was no buffer against this extraordinary moment. All alone Cally stood with the contemned religious fellow who had unhorsed and disarmed her once again, and now there would be no more weapons. And there was a worse thing here than her mean looking for hypocrisy, and the discovery, instead, of a mad generosity, a princely folly. Bad enough all that seemed; very bad indeed: but Cally's painful moment seemed to cut deeper yet.

After all the struggling, had it come to this? Was the author of the Beach opinion of her a man whom she must greatly admire?...

Behind her stood the stairway, which led on up to mamma and the embracing security of the victorious order. Behind her also stood the man, the royal giver of the granary where finer-feathered birds now made merry among the spoils. With what speech should Cally Heth, mocked and jeered by her feeble "I'm sorry," turn now and pass him?...

She heard the sound of his unequal footstep, and then his voice behind her, stirred with a sudden feeling:

"Why, it's not a thing to be sorry about—how could you possibly have thought otherwise?... Don't you suppose I realize what cause I've given you to—to distrust and dislike me? You'd be more than human if you could forgive and forget—what I said to you one night. How could you, when it was so unforgivable? And since then—"

"Don't!" Carlisle said, in a muffled sort of voice. And then, clearly and distinctly: "Don't!... I can't quite stand that!"

She turned on the old floor, with the sound of her own strengthening voice, and came again face to face with the man, V.V. There had seemed to come to her a light. And back into her smooth young cheek trickled that color so loved by her betrothed, who had not bought the Settlement House after all....

She was a brilliantly successful girl, the chosen wife of the most shiningly eligible of men; and he was a lame slum doctor in a worn-out suit, beneath her notice as a man altogether. And yet, as Hugo stood above her in all those material aspects which had always summed up her whole demand of life, so this man stood above her in some more subtle and mysterious way. And it had always been so: by bright swift flickers of intuition she had seemed suddenly to see that now. All the restlessness and discontent which the thought and sight of him had power to awake in her from the beginning came from just this; and she had never been able to put him down, no matter how she had chafed and denounced, because the final fact had always been that he, in his queer way, stood above her ...

And now, in this unsteadied moment, with all hope of bringing him down beaten finally to death, there had seemed to rise and beckon a finer way of bridging this gap between them. All that was best in the girl suddenly rose, demanding for once to be allowed to meet the shabby alien on his own reckless level.

"Look here," said Cally, with a kind of tremulous eagerness, "I want to tell you something...."

Yes, surely it was all a matter between herself and him: she could meet his eyes now with no sense that did not add to her curious inner exaltation. Had not these eyes said to her from the beginning that they would give her no peace till she came to this?...

"You were right to say what you did that night. A puff of wind blew the boat over after he got out. Mr. Dalhousie never knew I was upset."

The words dropped unafraid into a perfect silence. The girl's manner was as simple, as undramatic, as possible. Yet, considering who these two were, considering the intentions with which she had entered his Dabney House not ten minutes before, no more startling words could have been devised by the wit of man.

"He never knew," repeated Vivian, in a voice suddenly mechanical.

No doubt it was by his good fortune alone that he had avoided any alarming change of expression, as he listened to the announcement which seemed to shake and stagger his visible world. The girl was soaring upon her unimagined moment of spiritual adventure. But V. Vivian stood like a man turned to stone, gazing blind into a void....

Presently, out of the general chaos the young man's dazed mind stirred; leapt to life. Thought shook him through like waves of pain. It came upon him first, with crushing force, that this sweet-voiced girl with a face like all the angels had after all coldly lied, murderously lied, and maintained her lie through many months. Hard upon that, blotting it out, there swept the juster knowledge that, no matter what she had done, truth had triumphed at last; what was good in her had overcome her poor weakness. Lastly, he thought of Jack Dalhousie who, from the clouds, had received his release from prison. Yes, old Dal could come home now....

"He never knew," said V.V., in his curious voice. "I'm so glad ... This clears him ... I never understood how he could have ... I'm so glad to—have it settled...."

If he was so glad, his face libelled him past forgiveness. But Cally Heth still soared, too high in the unplumbed blue to note, even now, what house was this she had destroyed.

"I really didn't realize at all at the time," she said, with the same simplicity. "It all happened so quickly, and it was so bewildering, and I didn't have time to think. The story about him just seemed to spring up of itself, and then it grew and grew all the time. I've worried a great deal about it, all along...."

A kind of passion came into the man's face, and he said:

"Thank God, there's still time to make it all right."

Then his look brought her down a little.... "To make it all right?"

Vivian gazed down. He thought of what lay ahead for her now; and his heart seemed to turn within him.... However, sympathy was not desired of him: his lot was but to strengthen the hands of the brave.

"Miss Heth—indeed, I could envy you all the happiness you are going to give. Think—just think what it means ... I know you must be eager—to begin, to—"

"To begin?" she echoed again, feeling somehow that their privacy was being invaded. "Why—what do you mean?... I don't understand."

"I jump ahead too fast, of course. But—you must be so anxious ... to have it all off your mind, and not think of it any more. I know you must be impatient to get word to Dal at the first possible moment—it means so much to him. More than meat and drink.... And then there's his poor old father ..."

Cally stared at him, speechless. There was no exaltation now; no more soaring. Rooted in her tracks she stood, yet seemed to herself to shrink and recoil from him, in her sudden self-horror. What, oh what, had she done?

And by chance at this very moment—doubtless through some Settlementer's opening a door for air—there came floating down to her the distinct voice of her mother, the strong voice of authority and no nonsense, the voice of Wealth and Permanence, of the victorious knowledge that God thinks twice before he condemns a person of quality.... "In accepting the Chairmanship of the Finance Committee, I desire to say ..."

Cally raised a gloved little hand to her veiled lips. Plainer than speech her frightened eyes said: Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?

"You—you've misunderstood. No ... no! I didn't mean that at all."

"Oh!... Do you mean—you don't wish to see Colonel Dalhousie—personally? Of course not!... It wouldn't be necessary in the least. Perhaps you would let me.... And as to a telegram to Dal—"

"No—no!... You mustn't go to see him. You mustn't send a telegram. I can't allow that—you've misunderstood entirely. You mustn't tell anybody...."

They stared at each other with the same colorless faces, and again the rain became audible. In the man's too-confiding eyes, hope died hard.

"Not tell anybody? Why, I don't see ... There's no other way of making it right, I'm afraid.... And you have told me—"

"But I didn't tell you to tell anybody else. I didn't. I only meant to tell you, don't you see?..."

This subtlety was past the vision of the donator of the Dabney House. North, south, east, or west, he could see nothing but a seraph-faced girl whose misery it was to feel the penitential pangs, yet not be able quite to rise to the fulness of reparation. That she had reached for that fulness was to him the one thing certain in all the world. What want of delicacy in him had caused her to falter and look backward?...

Into the lucid gray of his eyes had come that look which more than once before Carlisle Heth had found intolerable. Little she recked for it now. Was not this the heart of her present dilemma, that she had already followed his ocular incitements too fatally far? By what religious prestidigitation he had trapped her secret from her must remain a thick mystery now. Nothing mattered but that he, having deceitfully seemed to agree that it was all a matter between herself and him, should not now turn and betray her.... Tell now? The sudden vista of scandal horrified her. How would she ever face mamma again? How would Hugo, whose bride and pride she was, regard her then?...

"Don't you see?" she said, with gathering tensity—"I—I meant it as a confidence to you. You mustn't dream of telling anybody else...."

"But neither you nor I own the truth. This belongs to Dalhousie...."

"Oh, it doesn't!—it doesn't! How can you! You misunderstand!—What I said to you gave you a totally wrong impression. He was entirely to blame for my upsetting. Entirely! He behaved abominably—and I—"

"Tell now!" cried the man, with his strange stern passion. "Once it's done, you'll always be glad. Don't you know you must, now! Don't you see you can't be happy, till you let the truth be known?..."

There came from above the unmistakable movement of chairs, the sound of many feet. It appeared that the Settlement meeting was breaking up. The man's entreaties bounded back dead.

"I couldn't!—Don't you understand? There's nothing to tell. It was not my fault. The story was distorted, distorted, and distorted! I regretted that as much as any one. But I could do nothing, nothing to stop it. And don't you understand I couldn't possibly tell this broadcast now, when it's been done with for months! What would people think of me? Don't you—"

"What will you have to think of yourself if you don't tell?"

But the hard shot missed fire, the reason being that what she thought of herself did not matter in the least just now. She was mamma's daughter, Hugo Canning's betrothed, fighting for her own: and now that movement upstairs warned her that she had no moment to lose.

Carlisle seized the slum doctor's arm with a resolute little hand. Her voice, though panicky, was as inexorable as mamma's own.

"Promise me," said she, "that you will never repeat to anybody what I told you in confidence."

The face of the young man, which was usually so harmless-looking, had suddenly become quite stern. He looked as if he might ask God to pity her again, given a very little more. When he spoke, he spoke brusquely:

"What you ask is a conspiracy of silence. I cannot make such a promise. I cannot."

"Oh, how can you be so hard! You've never meant anything but trouble to me since the first minute I saw you! It isn't fair, don't you see it isn't? This has happened so suddenly—I must have time to think. Promise that you won't say anything—at least till you hear from me again...."

Silence. And then V. Vivian said, in a suddenly hopeless voice:

"I will agree to say nothing without first seeing you...."

Cally Heth dropped his arm instantly, turned from him. She fled, not up the grand stairway, but over the court for the doors, with the protecting arms of the House of Heth beyond. And none of her other routs from the family enemy had been quite like this one.



XVIII

Night-Thoughts on the Hardness of Religious Fellows, compelling you to be Hard, too; Happier Things again, such as Hugo, Europe, Trousseaux, etc.; concluding with a Letter from Texas and a Little Vulgarian in a Red Hat.

The tireless William retraced the wet streets to the Dabney House in ample time for Mrs. Heth, but the Chairman of the Finance Committee, being in agreeable converse with fellow philanthropists, came home in Mrs. Byrd's car instead, after all. Accordingly she did not say to William, "Miss Carlisle decided not to come, Banks?"—which she liked to call William for the English sound of it—and Banks, or William, did not look respectfully surprised and say, "Yas'm, she came ..."

Arriving at home, the good little lady presently ascended to the third floor, where she entered her daughter's room without knocking, according to her wont. However, Carlisle had been ready for her for some time.

"You stayed," was mamma's arch conjecture, "to write a ream to Hugo, dear fellow, I suppose?..."

"No, I went!" said Cally, now in the last stages of an evening toilette. "Only when I got there, and peeped in, it all looked so dreary and hopeless that my heart failed me, and I turned right around and came back! Was it—"

"You did! How long were you there? There's a little too much powder on your nose, my dear—there! Did you come upstairs?"

"Oh, no! I just slipped in for a moment or two and glanced about that queer old court downstairs. Quaint and interesting, isn't it? How was the meeting?"

"Most interesting and gratifying," said mamma, sinking into a rose-lined chair. "We begin a noble work. You may go now, Flora. I am made a governor, as well as chairman of the most important committee...."

She monologized for some time, in a rich vein of reminiscence and autobiography, revealing among other things that she had rather broadly hinted, to Mrs. Byrd and others, who was the anonymous donor of the Settlement House; a certain wealthy New Yorker, to wit. However, it was clear that she saw nothing amiss, nor did she say anything more germane to her daughter's inner drama than, in the moment of parting:

"Rub your cheeks a little with the soft cloth. You look quite pale."

Carlisle rubbed faithfully, aware of a lump of lead where her heart should have been. Later she went downstairs, and then on for dinner at the McVeys'. Most grateful she was for this mental distraction; to-night she would have played three-hand bridge with papa and Mattie Allen with enthusiasm.

Evey's dinner, of course, was far ahead of three-hand. The McVeys were very rich, far richer than the Heths (theirs had been the marriage of McVey's Drygoods and Notions, Wholesale Only, and Herkimer's Fresh Provisions), and were considered "not quite" by some people, though Evey certainly went everywhere and was very refined. Accordingly, the evening's viands were of the best and the table talk at least good enough for all practical purposes. Carlisle, who was almost feverishly animated, lingered till the last possible moment: Evey actually asked her to spend the night, and she actually came very near doing it. Escorted home in a maritime hackney-coach by young Mr. Robert Tellford (whose heart had been lacerated by rumors that persistently reached him), Canning's betrothed permitted Robert to linger in the library, positively detained him in the library, till eleven-thirty o'clock: courtesies which would have run like wine to the young Tellford head but for the lady's erratic and increasing distraitness....

The bibulous metaphor is here reversible. It possessed mutuality, so to say. Cally herself would drown trouble to-night with intoxicating draughts of human society. But there came a time when this resource was denied her; when the human bars closed, as it were; in short, when all the society in reach must sorrowfully put on his tall hat and go. And then there came the nocturnal stillness of the house, and then the solitariness of the bedchamber, and after that the dark.

Now the question that had rumbled all evening cloud-like in the background of her consciousness, swam and took shape in the midnight shadows, dangling before the eye of her mind in gigantic and minatory capitals:

WOULD HE TELL?

To this stark inquiry all the girl's problem came down. Gone like a fever-mist was the emotional flare-up (as mamma would have said) which had tricked her into blurting out a secret scarcely even formulated before in her own inmost soul. That mysterious moment remained merely as an astonishment. It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to her; she had simply been swept away by some unfathomable madness. And at present Nature's first law was working in her with obliterating force. Would the man tell? Here in the sane and ordered surroundings, with mamma sleeping and satisfied one floor below, and a long, long letter to be written to her knight among men the first thing to-morrow, there was nothing in the world that mattered but that. If Vivian would not tell, then, indeed, all was well with her. If he did tell ...

He had said that he would not tell without first seeing her. But of course there was nothing under heaven to prevent his seeing her, or sending word to her, at any time, by day or by night. And then what?

Carlisle lay upon her back, rather small and frightened in the tall bed, struggling to pluck away the veil from the face of the menacing future. What would "telling" mean, exactly?...

There was a hopeful view. The whole thing was so confused, just as he himself had admitted, more than once. It might all be put on the ground of a mistake, a little misunderstanding, recently discovered. You could tell, and not go into all the mixed-up details. Jack Dalhousie would then gratefully return from Texas (where he was really getting on much better than he had ever done at home—Dr. Vivian had practically said so); his father would quietly take him back; and it would be generally understood that Jack was not a coward now, and was greatly improved morally by the disciplinary exile, and everything would be all right. But of course the difficulty here was that somebody (like Colonel Dalhousie, for instance) might think to ask why the discovery of the little misunderstanding came now, instead of six months ago. You could hardly reply to such an one that you had just discovered the mistake as the result of a flare-up, caused by a slum doctor's giving twenty-five thousand dollars to buy an old hotel. Who would understand that, when you didn't yourself?...