Lucy chose her thoughts as she would have selected neckties, choosing the pretty ones, tossing the ugly ones aside and never thinking of them again, or, for that matter, of the bill for the pretty neckties that would be sent to her husband. Only very great matters, such as love and death, could have occupied her mind against her will.

Toward one o'clock the dance became hilarious. One or two men had the good sense to go home, two or three others had not. One of them—the King boy—made quite a nuisance of himself, and to revenge himself for a snub (greatly exaggerated by the alcoholic mind), sought and found the hotel switchboard and in the midst of a fox trot shut off all the lights.

But the music went right on, and so did many of the dancers. There were violent collisions, shouts of laughter, and exclamations of pain.

I was facing the nearest wall of the room when the lights went out and I backed Lucy toward it, and then, groping, for I hadn't a match in my clothes, found it and stood guard over her, one hand pressing the wall on each side of her and my back braced. I received one thundering jolt over the kidneys, and one cruel kick on the ankle bone. And then the lights went on again, and we finished our dance.

Lucy said she hated people who weren't cool and collected in time of danger. That if she was ever in a theater when it caught fire she hoped there'd be somebody with her, like me, to take care of her! "That was the neatest thing," she said, "the way you got us out of that. We might have been knocked down and trampled to death."

When that dance ended, we went out of doors for a few minutes to get cool. We took a turn the length of the narrow, sanded yard and back. We could hear the buggy boys just beyond the tall privet hedge. Some were cracking jokes; others were heavily snoring, and there were whispered conversations that had to do, no doubt, with mischief, and petty crimes.

"It's been a grand party," I said. "By and by I'm going to give one."

"But not for me, you know, just a spontaneous party. Oh, do please, will you?"

"Of course I will. But it will really be given——"

"I mustn't know."

"You shall never know if you mustn't."

"I think you ought to dance once with Evelyn."

"I have danced with her, but only half a dance. She said she was tired—and then she finished it with Dawson Cooper."

"I wish they'd get to like each other."

"So do I. They're the right age. They've the right amount of money between them, and they like the same sort of things. But it rests with Evelyn. Dawson would fly to a dropped handkerchief as a pigeon flies home; but he's very shy and doesn't think much of himself."

It seemed a good omen when we entered the main hall and found them sitting out a dance together.

Dawson rose, but with some reluctance, it seemed to me.

"Isn't it about my turn, Lucy?" he said. "Will you?"

"Did Evelyn tell you you had to?"

He blushed like a schoolboy, and Evelyn burst out laughing.

"Then I will," said Lucy, "when I see a man trying to do his duty like a man, I help him always, and besides you dance like a breeze."

So they went away together, he apologizing and she teasing.

"How about me?" I said to Evelyn. "Is it my turn?"

"No," she said, "it isn't. I want to talk to you."

I sat down facing her in the chair that Dawson Cooper had occupied. "Just now," she said, "when you and Lucy went outside, I heard someone say to someone else——"

"Hadn't they any names?"

"No. She said to him, 'It's about time John Fulton came back. Lucy's making a fool of herself.'"

Somehow I seemed to turn all cold inside.

"Of course," said Evelyn, "Lucy knows and you know and I know, but the man in the street who sees you ride out together day after day, and the woman who's no particular friend of yours, who sees you dance dance after dance together—they don't know. Aiken is a small place, but like the night, it has a thousand eyes, and as many idle tongues. If I didn't know Lucy so well, and you so well, I'd be a little worried."

"Why," I said, "it's a golf year. Nobody would rather ride, except Lucy and me."

"The reason doesn't matter," said Evelyn. "When two young people are together a whole lot, their feelings don't stand still. They either get to like each other less and less, or more and more. You and Lucy don't like each other less and less. Anybody can see that, so it must be more and more. And there's always danger in that. Isn't there?"

I thought for a moment, and then said: "Not for her, certainly."

"You knew Lucy when she was a little girl, but you didn't see her often when she was growing up, did you? Her best friend never thought that she would ever settle to any one man. She was the most outrageous little flirt you ever saw. No, not outrageous, because each time she thought she was really in love herself. It was one boy after another, all crazy about her, and she about them. Then it was one man after another. What Lucy doesn't know about moonlight and verandas, and the sad sounds of the sea at night, isn't worth knowing. But all the time, from the time she was fifteen, there was John Fulton in the background. He was never first favorite till she actually accepted him and married him, but he was always in the running, in second or third place, and whether he won her down by faithfulness and devotion nobody knows. Nobody quite knows how or why she changed toward him. I don't believe she does. He was just about the last man anybody thought she'd marry. But anyway her young and flighty affections got round to him at last, and fastened to him. They fastened to him like leeches. No man was ever loved as hard as she loved him when she got round to it. She made up for all the sorry dances she'd led him. She was absolutely shameless. She made love to him in public, she——"

"She still does, Evelyn," I said. "I think that's one reason why I like her so much, and him. There's nobody else so frank and natural about their feelings for each other. Why, it's beautiful to see."

"Archie," said Evelyn, "for short periods of time she loved some of the men she didn't marry almost as hard."

After a moment's silence, she said with hesitation,

"It's a lucky thing for her that all the men she thought she cared about were gentlemen. You must have noticed yourself how little yesterday means to her, how less than nothing tomorrow means, until it becomes today."

"Well," I said, "it all bolls down to this, that after many vicissitudes, she found her Paradise at last."

"Who can be sure that a girl who had as many love affairs as she had is—all through!"

Just then Dawson Cooper came back and took Evelyn away with him. I was immensely interested in all that she had told me about Lucy. I rather wished that I might, for a while, have been one of the many. And I was annoyed to learn that people were undertaking to make our business theirs.

"I'll tell John about it when he comes back," I said, "and if he thinks best, why I won't see so much of her."

But when he came back it did not seem worth while to tell him.



X

I had forgotten that John Fulton was to return Monday, until Lucy gave it as a reason for not being able to ride on that afternoon.

"Even if the train is on time," she said, "I don't think I ought to go chasing off, do you? He'd like us all to be at home together and maybe later he'd like me to take him for a little drive."

She was rather solemn for Lucy. I did not in the least gather that she would rather ride with me than play around with her husband. I did gather that she was not using her own wishes and preferences as an excuse, but the physical fact of John's home-coming. And I learned in the same moment that I wished his return might be indefinitely postponed, and that Monday afternoon with no Lucy to ride with promised to be a bore.

I saw her doing chores in the village, Jock and Hurry crowded into the seat beside her, just before the arrival of the New York train. From the back of the runabout dangled the reed-like, moth-eaten legs of Cornelius Twombley. For him, too, the return of the master was a joyous occasion; there would be a quarter for him if he had been a good boy, and some inner voice evidently was telling him that he had. There was a red-and-white-striped camellia in his buttonhole, and his narrow body was beautified by a dirty white waistcoat.

The New York train whistled. Lucy flicked the horse with the whip, three handsome hatless heads were jerked backward, Cornelius Twombley's peanut-shaped head was jerked forward, the voices of Jock and Hurry made noises like excited tree frogs, and away they all flew toward the station.

It was easy to picture the beaming faces that John Fulton could see when he got off the train; it was [Transcriber's note: two words obliterated here] hear the happy joyous voices all going at once, that would greet him. If there was trouble in his life he would forget it in those moments.

I turned into the Aiken Club feeling a little lonely. How good, I thought, it would be to be met, even once, as Fulton is being met.

And now I must set down things that I did not know at this time, and only found out afterward. And other things that are only approximately true, things that wouldn't happen in my presence, but which I am very sure must have happened.

When Lucy drove off at such a reckless pace to get to the station before the train, I don't think it even occurred to her that during his absence her feelings for her husband had changed in any way. It was he, I think, who was the first to know that there was a change. He did not realize it at the station or on the way home. How could he with Jock and Hurry piled in his lap, and both talking two-forty, and Lucy at his side, trying to make herself heard and even understood? No man could. It must have been shortly after he got home, at that moment, indeed, when he was alone with her, and his arms went out to her with all the love and yearning accumulated at compound interest during absence. Habit, and the wish to hurt no one, must have carried her arms to tighten a little about him, and to lift her lips to him. Then I think she must have turned her head a little, so that it was only her cheek that he kissed. I imagine that until that time Fulton's love-making had always found the swiftest response, that with those two passion had always been as mutual and spontaneous as passion can be; and that now, perhaps the very first time, his fire met with that which it could not kindle into answering flame.

I do not think that he at once let her go. I think that first his arms that held her so close loosened (already the pressure had all gone out of hers). I think she was sorry they had to loosen, and glad that they had. Then his arms must have dropped to his sides. He did not at once turn away, but kept on looking at her, as she at him—he, hurt, he did not know why, but brimming with love and compassion and tenderness and a little desperate with the effort to understand and to make allowances for whatever might have to be understood. Her great blue eyes looked almost black for once, prayer upon prayer was in their depths, they were steady upon his and unfaltering. It was as if she was giving him every opportunity to look down through them and see what was in her soul.

It could not have been till many days later that a whole sequence of episodes which hurt and could not be understood forced him into speech. I think he must suddenly in a moment of trial, have come out with something like this:

"Why, Lucy, it sometimes seems as if you didn't love me any more."

When she didn't answer, it must have flashed through him like a streak of ice-cold lightning that perhaps she really didn't.

I am glad that it is only in imagination that I can hear his next question and her answer. There must have been a something in his voice from which the most callous-hearted would have wished to run, as from the deathbed of a little child.

"Don't you, Lucy?"

And how terribly it must have hurt her to answer that question! Considering what he had been to her and she to him, for how long a period of time neither had been able to see anything in this world beyond the other, and considering with even more weight than these things their own children for whom the feelings of neither could ever really change, I think that Lucy ought to have lied. I think she ought to have lied with all her might and main, lied as John Fulton would have lied if the situation had been reversed, and that thereafter, until his death or hers, she ought to have acted those lies, with unflagging fervor and patience. Tenderness for him she never lost. She might, upon that foundation, have built a saintly edifice of simulated love and passion.

But it was not in her nature to lie. I think she probably said: "I don't know. I'm afraid not." And then I think her sad face must have begun to pucker like that of a little child going to cry, and I think it is very likely, so strong is habit, that she then hurried into her husband's arms and had her cry upon his breast.



XI

I imagine that thereafter for a time John Fulton's attitude toward Lucy was now dignified and manly, and now almost childlike in its despair. Having made her love him once, he must have felt at first that he could make her love him again. I imagine him making love to her with all the chivalry and poetry that was in him, and then breaking off short to rail against fate, against the whole treacherous race of women, perhaps, and to ask what he had done to deserve so much suffering? "Why didn't you do this to me when I was proposing? Why did you wait till I was stone broke and worried half sick, with everything going from bad to worse? Is it anything I've done, anything I've failed to do? Why, Lucy, we were such a model of happiness that people looked up to us. How can anybody suddenly stop caring the way you have? If it had been gradual! But you were in love with me the night I went away, weren't you? Weren't you?"

Here he catches her shoulders and forces that one admission from her, and makes the great praying woebegone eyes meet his. Then, almost, he pushes her away from him.

"And I go away for a few days," he cries, "and come back and everything is changed. I who had a sweetheart, haven't even a wife. Why have you changed so? There must be a reason? What is it? Are you sick? Have you eaten something that has made you forget? Have you been bewitched? That's no fool question. Have you? Have you?"

"Have I what?"

"Have you been bewitched? Tell me, dear, who has done this thing to you?"

Again he has her by the shoulders.

"Lucy, is there someone? Never mind the other things, just tell me that? You've gotten to like someone else? Is that it?"

And Lucy must have answered that there was no one else. And there is no question but that to the best of her belief and knowledge she was telling the truth.

But the mere thought that there might be someone else had moved Fulton as he had never been moved before. He once told me that even as a little boy he had never in all his life known one pang of jealousy. He will never be able to make that boast again. And like some damned insidious tropical malaria, the passion has taken root in his system, so that only death can wholly cure him.

Like some vile reptile it had found within him some cave from which it might emerge to brandish its hideous envenomed horned head, and into which betimes it might withdraw.

I can imagine no one so stupid as to question any serious statement of fact that Lucy might make. Her eyes were wells of truth; her voice fearless and sure, like that of some kingly boy.

So when she said there was no one, Fulton, who knew her far better than anyone else, believed her without any question. And a great weight must have been lifted from his heart. With the truth that he had wrung from her, I think he must have rested almost content for a few hours.

But contentment is far off from a man who hears the great edifice of love and happiness which he has reared, crashing about his ears.

He could not make up his mind to any definite course of action. Now, calm and judicial, I hear him discussing matters with coolness, and self-forgetfulness.

"If there is any chance for me, ever," he would say, "it would be silly of us to take any action which would be final. And, besides, I don't see how I could reconcile my conscience to giving you a divorce. Or you yours to getting one. It would be hard enough for you to lie about the most trifling thing. You couldn't, you simply couldn't face the court and tell them that I had been cruel and unfaithful. You couldn't accuse me of anything so gross, and so unlike me, as the other woman who would have to be hired for the occasion. There's another side to it. I think the children are better off with you than with me. You're the best mother that ever was, the most sensible and the most careful. But I don't think I could give them up. If you and the babies were all three to drop out of my life, I'd have nothing left but the duty of finding money to support you. There's a certain pleasure in doing your duty, of course, but in this case hardly enough. Honestly, dear, with never a sight or touch of you, I simply couldn't keep things going long."

Then perhaps Lucy asked some such question as this: "Don't people often, when they've stopped caring about each other, go on living together just the same, as far as other people know? And really just be good friends and live their own lives?"

"This is very different. We haven't stopped caring about each other. You've stopped caring about me. I care about you, just as I did in the beginning, and always shall. We couldn't lead separate lives under the same roof. God knows I feel old enough, but I'm still a young man, and like it or not, you are still my wife. It is something to own the shell that once contained the pearl."

Another time he goes hurrying through the house, prayer-book in hand, a thumb marking the marriage ceremony. He has been brooding and brooding and snatching at straws.

"Read this, Lucy. Just look it over. It's what you and I stood up and promised before a lot of people. I'm glad I looked it up. You'll see right away that it's a contract which nobody could have the face to break. I want you to read it over to yourself."



Finally she does, just to please him, in the sad knowledge that no good will come of it.

"You'd forgotten, hadn't you? But just see what you promised. Didn't you mean to keep these promises when you made them?"

"Oh, of course I did. Why ask that?"

"But now you want to back out."

Then the old argument that a promise which one is powerless to keep isn't a bona fide promise and cannot be so regarded. Fulton sees that for himself presently.

"No, of course," he says. "If you don't love me, you can't make yourself by an effort of will. And if you don't honor me . . ."

"You know I do."

"How about the other thing, the promise to obey? That is surely in your power to keep."

She admits that she can keep that promise; but she leaves herself a loophole. She does not say that she will keep it.

And so the words of the prayer book shed no light on the situation, and I shouldn't wonder if Fulton raged against the book, and flung it into a far corner, and was immediately sorry.

For a man situated as Fulton was, some definite plan of action is necessary; and to my mind the one that would be best would be one in which the least possible consideration for the woman should be shown. When Lucy began to play clench-dummy with her own life, with her husband's love, and with the institution of marriage, Fulton, I think, would have made no mistake if he had stripped her to the skin and taken a great whip to her.

Her whole life had been one of self-indulgence. She had indulged herself with Fulton's love till she was glutted with it; that she was the mother of two children may, perhaps, be traced to self-indulgence, and surely it must be laid down to self-indulgence that she was not the mother of more than two. Her self-indulgence kept Fulton poor and in debt, and it had come to this: that her impulse to self-indulgence would now stop at nothing unless circumstances should prove too strong for it.

It is not the gentle, faithful, self-sacrificing man who keeps his wife's love; it never was. It was always the man who had in him a good deal of the brute.

But, except in a moment of insanity, a man does not go against his nature. Fulton has too good a brain not to think that if Lucy were locked up for a week or so, and fed on bread and water, good might come of it. But his was not the hand to turn the key in the lock. He could no more have done it than he could have struck her. This sudden failure of her love for him was only another evidence of that wastefulness and extravagance which had so often hurt him financially. Surely it must have occurred to him more than once to publish notices in the newspapers to the effect that he would only be responsible for his own debts. He must, I think, have threatened the thing from time to time, knowing in his heart that he could never bring himself to put it into execution.

I wonder how Fulton felt when hard upon the knowledge that she no longer loved him, he received the bill for the dance which she had given against his wishes, and in full knowledge of his present financial predicament?

She had treated him so badly that it is a wonder of wonders that he kept on loving her.

For one thing they deserve great credit. Even Evelyn Gray, a guest in the house, did not know that there was any trouble between them. All she thought was that owing to financial and other worries, which time would right, Fulton seemed a little graver and less enthusiastic than usual.

Nor was I any wiser. I had not, of course, so many chances of seeing the two together, but I saw as much of Lucy as ever, for we rode together nearly every day.



XII

If nothing more definite had come of all this, I should now see but little significance in those long afternoons of riding with Lucy. She could leave the substance of her trouble behind, as easily as she could have left a pair of gloves, and she took into the saddle with her only a shadow of the tragedy that was glowering upon her house.

I see now, that, at this time, we must have begun to talk more seriously and upon more intimate topics; that we laughed less and that there were longer silences between us. We began to take an interest in the trees and flowers among which we rode, to learn their names, and to linger longer over those which did not at once strike the eye.

And I see now that Lucy talked more than usually about her husband. It was as if by doing constant justice to his character she hoped to make up to him for her failure of affection. In his domestic relations he was a real hero by all accounts. Didn't I think they lived nicely? She thought so, too, but it wasn't her fault. She was so extravagant, and such a bad manager, it was a wonder they could live at all. She admitted so much with shame. But if I could understand how it is with some men about drink, then it must be easy for me to understand how it is with some women about money. Oh, she'd spent John into some dreadful holes; but he had always managed to creep out of them. How he hated an unpaid bill! It wasn't his fault that there were so many of them. For her part (wasn't it awful!) they filled her neither with shame nor compunction. And he'd been so fine about people. His instinct was to be a scholar and a hermit. But she loved people, she simply couldn't be happy without them, and (wasn't it fun?) she had had her way, and now John liked people almost as much as she did. And he had a knack of putting life and laughter into the simplest parties.

Sometimes when we had finished riding, we had tea in the garden. It would be turning cool, and she would slip a heavy coon-skin coat over her riding things; and there was a long voluminous polo-coat of John's that I used to borrow. Evelyn nearly always joined us, John not so often. Sometimes Dawson Cooper came. He was getting over his shyness. Sometimes he was quite brazen and facetious. It looked almost as if he was being encouraged by someone.

Of the sorrow that was gnawing at John Fulton's heart I saw no sign. He was alert, hospitable, humorous often, and toward Lucy his manner was wonderfully considerate and gentle. If I had guessed at anything, it would have been that the wife was in trouble and not the husband. He could not sit still for long at a time, but he did not in the least suggest a man who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His activity and sudden shiftings from place to place and from topic to topic were rather those of a man who superabounds in physical and mental energy.

At this time he did not know whether he and Lucy were going to separate or not. If they should, he was already preparing dust to throw in the world's eyes. He let it be known that at any moment he might have to go to Messina in the interests of his cartridge company (this was a polite fiction) and that he might have to be gone a long time. Business was a hard master. He had always tried to keep it out of his home life, but in times like these a man must be ready to catch at straws.

And Lucy, just her head and fingers showing from the great coon-skin coat, would give him a look that I should not now interpret as I did then. I thought that it made her feel sick at heart even to think of his going to some far-off place without her!

"Speaking of far-off places," I said once, "Gerald Colebridge is taking some men to Burlingham to play polo. He's asked me, and I'm tempted almost beyond my strength. What does everybody think?"

"I'd go like a shot," said Dawson Cooper. "Gerald will take his car and everything will be beautifully done; and California just about now!" Here he bunched his fingers, kissed them and sent the kiss heavenward.

"Wish I was asked!" exclaimed Evelyn.

"Ever been to California?" Fulton asked. "Because if not, go. And still I've thought sometimes that spring in Aiken is almost as lovely."

Poor fellow, it must have been quite obvious that he didn't think so any more. But then Evelyn, Dawson, and I were blind and deaf, at this time.

"When," said Lucy at last, "would you go, if you go?"

"Why, in a day or two," I said. "I'd probably leave day after tomorrow on the three o'clock and join the party in New York."

"Oh, dear," she said, "I'll have to take up golf then. You're the only man in Aiken who likes to ride. And John won't let me ride alone."

"Why not," said he, "ask me to ride with you?"

"Oh, I know you'd do it," she said. "You're a hero, but I'm not quite such a brute."

I wish I could have gone to California.

I rode with Lucy the next afternoon, for the last time as we both thought. As we came home through Lover's Lane, the ponies walking very slowly, she leaned toward me a little, turned the great praying eyes upon me, and said, her mouth smiling falteringly:

"Please don't go away. I hate it. Everything's gone all wrong with the world. And if you're not my friend that I can talk to and tell things to, I haven't one."

"Are you serious, Lucy?"

"Oh, it's no matter!" she said lightly, and began to gather her reins, preparatory to a gallop.

"It's only that it didn't seem possible that you could need one particular friend out of so many. Of course, I stay. Will you tell me now what it is that's gone all wrong?"

"Yes," she said with a quickly drawn breath. "I've had to tell John that I don't love him any more, and don't want to be his wife."

If one of those still and stately pines which lend Lover's Lane the appearance of a cathedral aisle had fallen across my shoulders, I could hardly have been more suddenly stunned.

When I looked at her the corners of her lovely mouth were down like those of a child in trouble.

"Please don't look at me," she said.

We rode on very slowly in silence. Sometimes, without looking, I could not be sure that she was still crying. Then I would hear a little pathetic sniffling—a catching of the breath. Or she would fall to pounding the thigh with her fist.

But she pulled herself together very quickly and borrowed my handkerchief and when we reached the telegraph office her own husband could not have known that she had been crying.

She held my pony while I telegraphed Gerald Colebridge that I could not go to California with him.

Far from looking like one who had recently been crying, she looked a triumphant little creature, as she sat the one pony, and held the other. The color had all come back to her face, and she looked—why, she looked happy!



XIII

"Well, my dear," said my mother, "we shall miss you."

"Oh," I said, "I've given it up. I'm not going."

As she had said that she would miss me, this answer ought to have given my mother unmixed pleasure. It didn't seem to. She smiled upon me with the greatest affection, and at the same time looked troubled.

"When you came into my room this morning your mind was definitely made up. Has anything happened?"

"Only that I've changed my mind. Aiken is too nice to leave."

"I sometimes think," said my mother, "that the life you lead is narrowing. At your age, how I should have jumped at the chance to see California in spring! But I shan't ask you why you don't jump. I know very well you'd not tell me."

"Must I have a reason? They say women don't have reasons for doing things. Why should men?"

"A woman," said my mother, "does nothing without a reason. But often she has to be ashamed of her reasons, and so she pretends she hasn't any. Men are stronger. They don't have to give their reasons, and so they don't pretend."

"Maybe," I said, "I'm fond of my family and don't want to be away from them."

My mother blushed a little, and laughed.

"I shall pretend to myself," she said, "that that is why you have given up your trip. But I'm afraid it isn't your father and me that you've suddenly grown so fond of."

"Now look here, mamma," I said, "we thrashed that all out the other day."

"Thrashed all what out?—Oh, I remember—your attentions to Lucy Fulton, or hers to you, which was it?"

"It wasn't our attentions to each other, as I remember. It was the attention which Aiken is or was paying to us."

"So it was," said my mother.

She gave me, then, a second cup of tea, and talked cheerfully of other things. Some people came in, and I managed presently to escape from them.

It hadn't been easy to tell my mother that I had given up the California trip. I knew that her triple intuition would connect the change of plan with Lucy Fulton, and I was not in the mood to meet such an accusation with the banter and levity which it no longer deserved.

Like it or not, I was staying on in Aiken because Lucy had asked me to. That we had been gossiped about had angered me; but it could do so no longer. That we were good friends, and enjoyed riding and being together, was no longer the whole truth. There was in addition this: that Lucy no longer loved her husband, and that she had made me her confidant.

From the first to the last of my dressing for dinner that night, everything went wrong. I stepped into a cold tub, under the impression that I had told my man to run a hot one. He had laid out for me an undershirt that had lost all its buttons, and a pair of socks that I hated. I broke the buckle of the belt that I always wear with my dinner trousers; I dropped my watch face downward on the brick hearth, and I spilled a cocktail all over my dress shirt, after I had got my collar on and tied my tie!

Usually such a succession of misadventures would have given rise to one rage after another. But I was too busy thinking about Lucy. I could no longer deny that she attracted me immensely. Perhaps she had from the beginning. I can't be sure. But I should never have confessed this to myself, or so I think, if I had not learned that she had suddenly fallen out of love with her husband. In that ideal state of matrimony, in which I had first gotten to know her, she had seemed a holy thing upon a plane far above this covetous world. But now the angel had fallen out of that which had been her heaven, and come down to earth. That I had had anything to do with this, I should even now have denied to God or man with complete conviction. I had no interest in the causes of her descent, only in the fact of it. And all that time of bungling dressing for dinner I kept thinking, not that I should help her look for a new heaven, but that I must try, as her true friend, to get her back into her old one. At that time John Fulton had no better friend than I. It seemed to me really terrible that things should have gone wrong with these two.

My father came in while I was still dressing.

"Hear you've given up California," he said bluntly; "do you think that's wise? . . . Where do you keep your bell?"

I showed him.

"How many times do you ring if you want a cocktail?"

"Twice. If you'll ring four times I'll have one with you. I spilt mine."

So my father pushed the bell four times and complimented me on my love of system and order, and then he returned to his first question.

"Do you think it wise?"

"Well, father," I said, "we've always been pretty good friends. Will you tell me why you think it isn't wise?"

"Yes, I will," he said; "I think it's foolish for a man to run after women in his own class for any other purpose than matrimony."

"So do I!" said I.

"A man," he persisted, "doesn't always know that he is running after a woman. Nature will fool him. Look at young lovers! Why, they actually believe in the beautiful fabric of spiritual poetry that they weave about each other. And nature lets 'em. But men who have seen life, and have lived, as I shouldn't be at all surprised if you had, for instance, are able to see the ugly mundane facts through the rosy mist. My boy, you and Lucy Fulton are being talked about. You don't have to tell me it's none of my business, I know that. But I can't help wanting you to steer clear of rows, and I don't want to see any woman get mud thrown on her because of you. For a man of course, unfortunately, consequences never amount to much. It's for the woman that I should plead if I had any eloquence or persuasiveness. I'd say to you, don't run away for your own sake, that's not worth while; but run away for hers. Now you will forgive me, my dear fellow, won't you, for butting in like this. . . ."

The cocktails came, and when the man who brought them had gone, I said:

"It's for her sake that I'm staying, father; will you listen a little? You're the only man in the world that I can talk to without fear of being repeated. As far as going to California is concerned I was going—until a late hour this afternoon. I felt more concern at leaving my mother than anyone else. You believe that?"

He nodded to what was left of his cocktail.

"Lucy and I may have been talked about, but there was absolutely no reason why we should have been. We rode together this afternoon and out of a clear sky she told me that she had fallen out of love with her husband—for no reason at all, that's the worst of it—and she doesn't know what to do, and has no friend she feels like talking to about it, except me. That's why I'm staying. She asked me not to go. And of course I said I wouldn't."

My father finished his cocktail, and blew his nose.

"Oh," I said, "I'm not infatuated with the situation either."

"Women certainly do beat the Dutch!" said my father. "I suppose she wants advice, and backing when she doesn't follow it."

"If I can keep her in the path of her duty, father, be sure I will."

"And if you can't?"

"It's a real tragedy," I said. "They were the happiest and most loving couple in the world, except you and mother, and only a short time ago."

"What time is it?" asked my father.

"I've broken my watch."

"Well, it doesn't matter if we are a little late for dinner."

He cleared his throat, and turned a fine turkey-cock red, and looked very old-fashioned and handsome.

"I never thought to tell you this," he said; "it's like throwing mud on a saint. Once your mother came to me and said she didn't love me any more and that she loved another man and wanted to go away with him."

"I feel as if you'd kicked my feet out from under me."

"It doesn't seem to have come quite to that with Lucy, but it may, and in some ways the cases are parallel. I took counsel with your grandfather. He advised me to whip her. When I refused to do that, he gave less drastic advice, which I followed. I told your mother and the man that if after a year during which they should neither see each other nor communicate they still wanted each other, I would give your mother a divorce. I don't know when they stopped caring about each other. I think it took your mother less than three months to get over him. And if he lasted three weeks, why I'm the dog that—he was."

I detected a ring of passionate hatred in my father's voice.

"So she came back to me," he said presently, "in a little less than a year. Your little sister was your mother's offering of conciliation. And we have lived happily. But things have never been with us quite as they were. I have never known if your mother really got to loving me again, or if she has raised a great monument of simulation and devotion upon a pedestal of shame and remorse. Even now, if I drink a little more than is good for me, she never criticizes. She feels that she has forfeited that prerogative."

"What became of the man?"

"He died of heart failure," said my father, "in a disreputable place. They tried to hush it up, but the facts came out. When I heard of it, I plumped right down in a chair and laughed till I was almost sick. I knew what he was," he said with sudden savageness, "all along. But there is no making a woman believe what she doesn't want to believe. He was fascinating to women, and a cur. He kept his compact with me, not because of his given word, but because he was physically afraid of me."

"Thank you for telling me all this, father," I said; "I like you better and better. But in one way the cases aren't parallel. In Lucy's case there is no other man."

"Not yet," said my father; "but when a woman no longer loves her husband, look out for her. She has become a huntress—she is a lovely sloop-of-war that has cleared her decks for action. . . . Are you ready?"

I slipped my arm through my father's and we went downstairs together.

"I'm sorry you're mixed up in this," he said; "but you couldn't go when she made a point of your staying. I'm obliged to you for telling me."



XIV

It grew very warm during the evening and windy. By bedtime there was a hot, lifeless gale blowing from the southeast. Now and then the moon shone out brightly through the smother of tearing clouds, and was visible for a moment in all her glory, only to be submerged the next moment and blotted out. About two o'clock single raindrops began to splash so loudly on the veranda roof just outside my window that the noise waked me; after that I only slept fitfully, and my ears were never free from the loud roaring of the tropic rain that began presently to fall upon Aiken. I dreamed that somebody had stolen the Great Lakes and while being hotly pursued had dropped them. All day it rained like that, and all the following night, and only let up a little the afternoon of the second day. I got into an oilskin then and walked out to the Fultons'.

Theirs was a nervous household. Jock and Hurry confined indoors for nearly two days had had too little exercise and too many good things to eat. They were quite cross and irrepressible. John had the fidgets. He couldn't even stay in the same room for more than a minute, and he wouldn't even try sitting down for a change. Lucy had had to give up at least a dozen things that required dry weather and sunshine. She seemed to take the rain as something directed particularly against herself by malicious persons. Evelyn, also cross and nervous, was on the point of retiring to her own room to write letters. Just then Dawson Cooper telephoned to know if she cared to take a little walk in the rain and she accepted with alacrity.

"It's gotten so that he only has to whistle," said Lucy petulantly, when Evelyn had gone. "I think she's made up her mind to be landed."

Fulton came and went. Every now and then he dropped on the piano-stool for a few moments and made the instrument roar and thunder; once he played something peaceful and sad and even, in which one voice with tears in it ran away from another.

The piano was in the next room, and whenever it began to sound, Lucy dropped her work into her lap and listened. At such time she had an alert, startled look. She resembled a fawn when it hears a stick snap in the forest.

We heard him leave the piano, cross the hall and go into the dining-room.

"He's hardly touched his piano in years," said Lucy. "But now he's at it in fits and starts from morning till night. Night before last when the rain began he got up and went down in his bare feet and played for hours. I had to fetch him and make him come back to bed."

Then she seemed to feel that an explanation was necessary. She bent rosily over the work, and said: "We don't want the servants to know."

Again the piano began to ripple and thunder. Again we heard John go into the dining-room.

I must have lifted an eyebrow, for Lucy said:

"Yes. I'm afraid so, but it doesn't seem to go to his head. Oh," she said, "it wrings my heart, but I haven't the right to say anything."

"Lucy," I said, "have you thought out anything since I saw you last?"

"I think in circles," she said; "one minute I'm for doing my duty to him, the next minute I can only think of myself. It can't be right for me to be his wife when I've stopped being—Oh, anything but awfully fond of him."

"You are that?"

"Of course I am."

"It's just about the saddest thing that ever came to my knowledge," I said; "and you won't be angry if I say that I think you ought to stick to him and make the best of it?"

"You're not a woman. No man understands a woman's feeling of degradation at belonging to a man she doesn't love. Oh, it's an impossible situation. And I can't see any way out. I couldn't take money from John, if I left him; I haven't got a penny of my own. And I think it would kill me to go away from Jock and Hurry for long. And the other thing would just kill me."

"That," I said, "Lucy, I don't believe."

"You don't know. Not being a woman, you can't know."

"Men," I said, "and women too survive all sorts of things, mental and physical, that they think can't be survived. I read up the Spanish Inquisition once for a college essay, and the things they did to people were so bad that I was ashamed to put them in, and yet lots of those people survived and lived usefully to ripe old ages."

"Who did?"

Unheard by us, John had finished in the dining-room and had come to pay us a flying visit.

"People that were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition," I said.

"A lot they know about torture," said he. "They only did things to people that the same people could imagine doing back to them. Nothing is real torture if you can see your way to revenge it—if only in imagination. Torture is what you get through no fault of your own from somebody you'd not torture back for anything in the world. It's what sons do to mothers, husbands to wives, wives to husbands. Isn't that so, Lucy?"

"I suppose so," she said very quietly, her head bent close to her work.

"But what," exclaimed John, "has all this to do with the high cost of living?"

He would neither sit down nor stand still. He moved here and there, changing the positions of framed photographs and ash trays, lighting cigarettes, and throwing them into the fire. He had the pinched, hungry look of a man who is not sleeping well, and whose temperature is a little higher than normal.

"Were you in the Spanish War?" he asked me suddenly.

(At the moment I was thinking: "If you go on like this you'll never win her back, you'll only make matters worse!") I said: "In a way, but I didn't see any fighting. I got mixed up in the Porto Rico campaign."

"I was with the Rough Riders," he said; "I've just been remembering what fun it all was. I wish you could go to a war whenever you wanted to, the way you can to a ball game."

Then as quickly as he had introduced war, he switched to a new subject.

"I want you to try some old Bourbon a man sent me."

He had crossed the room, quick as thought, and pushed a bell; when the waitress came he told her to bring a tray.

"Isn't whiskey bad for you when you're so nervous?" said Lucy quietly, and without looking up.

"I don't know," said John, with a certain frolicking quality in his voice; "I'm trying to find out."

"What was that you were playing a while ago?" I asked. "The slow, peaceful, sad sort of thing."

"This?" And he whistled a few bars.

I nodded.

"I made it up as I went along," he said; "music's like a language. When a man's heard a lot of the words and the idioms he can make a bluff at talking it; but I can only speak a few words. I've only got a child's vocabulary. I can only say, 'I'm hungry,' or 'I'm sleepy,' or 'I want a set of carpenter's tools,' or 'Brown swiped my tennis bat and I'm going to punch his head,' or 'The little girl over the fence has bright blue eyes and throws a ball like a boy and climbs trees.'"

He had to laugh himself at the idea of being able to express such things in musical terms, but when he had sponged up a long glass of very darkly mixed Bourbon and Apollinaris, the picture of the little girl over the fence must have been still in his mind, for having left us abruptly for the piano, he preluded and then began to improvise upon that theme. He talked rather than sang, but always in tune and with the clearest enunciation, and any amount of experience.

He began merrily, and in no time had us both laughing; I think the first air which he tortured to fit his unrhymed and unrhythmical words belonged once to Mozart, but I am not sure. It was made out of merriness, sunshine, and dew.

"The little girl over the fence, the fence Has bri-i-i-ight blue-ooo eyes And throws a ball like a boy, a boy, And cli-i-i-i-i-i-imbs trees."

He repeated in the minor, modulated into a more solemn key, and once more talked off the words. He left you with a slight feeling of anxiety. You began to be afraid that the little girl would fall out of the trees and hurt herself. But no, instead he grabbed something by the hair right out of a Beethoven adagio, and began to want that little girl with the blue eyes as a little girl with blue eyes has seldom been wanted before; she became Psyche, Trojan Helen, a lover's dream; all that is most exquisite and to be desired in the world—and then suddenly he lost all hope of her and borrowed from Palestrina to tell about it, and the last time she climbed trees it was plump on up into Heaven that she climbed, and from hell below, or pretty close to it, there arose the words "And climb trees" like a solemn ecclesiastical amen.

It was an astounding performance, almost demoniac in its cleverness and in its power to move the hearer.

Lucy's eyes were filled with tears.

"I wish he wouldn't," she said.

There was quite a long silence, but as we did not hear him moving about, he probably sat on at the piano, for presently, in a whisper, you may say, more to himself than to us, he sang that Scotch song, "Turn ye to me," which to my ear at least stands a head and shoulders taller and lovelier than any folk song in all the world, unless it's that Norman sailor song that Chopin used in one of the Nocturnes.

"The waves are dancing merrily, merrily, Ho-ro, Whairidher, turn ye to me: The sea-birds are wailing, wearily, wearily, Horo Whairidher, turn ye to me.

"Hushed be thy moaning, love bird of the sea, Thy home on the rocks is a shelter to thee; Thy home is the angry wave, mine but the lonely grave, Horo Whairidher, turn ye to me."

Lucy rose abruptly and left the room. I could hear her whispering to him, pleading.

Surely he must have sung that song to her when she was only the little girl with blue eyes over the fence, and it must have had something to do with making her love him. But the qualities of his voice that could once make her heart beat and fire her with love for him could do so no more. He had left, poor fellow, only the power to torture her with remorse and make her cry.



XV

The next day I kept a riding engagement with Lucy, but she didn't.

"She's gone for a walk with John," said Evelyn, who had come out of the house to give me Lucy's messages of regret and apology.

"Lucy gone walking!" I exclaimed. "Have the heavens fallen?"

"Sometimes I think they have," said Evelyn. "But you know more about that than I do."

"Know more about what?"

"Haven't you noticed?"

I shook my head.

"Why, John is all up in the air about something or other, and Lucy is worried sick about him. I thought probably she'd told you what the trouble was. I've asked. She said probably money had something to do with it; and that was all I could get out of her. Come down off that high horse and talk to me. I'm not riding till four."

So I left my pony standing at the front gate and Evelyn and I strolled about the grounds.

"Money isn't the whole trouble," said Evelyn presently. "I know that. Something even more serious has gone terribly wrong. And I want to help."

"Won't they work it out best by themselves?" I suggested.

"Sometimes," she said, "it seems almost as if they had quarreled. Sometimes John looks at her—Oh, as if he was going to die and was looking at her for the last time. Could he have something serious the matter with him?"

"He could, of course, but it doesn't seem likely."

"He doesn't look well."

"True."

"Look here, Archie, don't you know what's wrong?"

"I wish I did," said I. "If I could right it."

As a matter of fact I didn't know what was wrong. I knew only that Lucy no longer loved her husband. But why she no longer loved him was the real trouble, and she had not told me that, even if she knew It herself. But wishing to strengthen my answer, I said: "You're the one who ought to know what's wrong. You're on the spot. And besides, you're a woman and a woman is supposed to have three intuitions to a man's one."

Evelyn ignored this.

"Sometimes," she said, "John's so gentle and pathetic that I want to cry. Sometimes he is cantankerous and flies into rages about trifles. It's getting on my nerves."

"Why not pack up your duds and move on?"

"Oh, because——"

I laughed maliciously. "We might move on together," I suggested.

"You were going to move on," she said, "but you have stayed. I wonder why?"

I did not enlighten her.

"If," she said presently, "people find out that things in this house are at sixes and sevens I wonder if they won't find fault with you and Lucy? Has that occurred to you?"

"It has occurred to you," I said, "to my own mamma and doubtless to other connections. But it hasn't occurred to me. We see too much of each other?"

"Altogether."

"You really think that?"

Evelyn shrugged her shoulders. "For appearance' sake, yes," she said. "Of course you do. But it's my opinion that if you'd been going to get sentimental about each other you'd have done it long ago."

"Evelyn," I said, "I've never made trouble in a family."

"Is that because of your natural virtue or because you have never wanted to?"

"A little of both, I think. People fall in love at first sight. That can't be helped. Or they fall in love very quickly, and that's hard to help. But people who fall in love gradually through long association have no good excuse for doing so, if they oughtn't. They should see it coming and quit seeing each other before it's too late."

"But I don't agree," said Evelyn. "I think love is always a first-sight affair. I don't mean necessarily the first time two people see each other, but that suddenly after years of association even, they will see each other in a new light."

"A light that was never on sea or land?"

"A light that is always where people are, just waiting to be turned on."

At that moment we heard Dawson Cooper's voice calling: "Hallo there! Where are you?"

Presently he hove into sight, and did not seem altogether pleased at finding Evelyn and me together.

"Archie thought he was going to ride with Lucy," Evelyn explained, "but she threw him down, and I suppose we have got to ask him to ride with us!"

"Yes," I said, "I think you have, but I don't have to accept, do I? You're just doing it so's not to hurt my feelings, aren't you? Of course if you really want me——"

"Come along, Coops," said Evelyn. "He's trying to tease us. He wouldn't ride with us for a farm."

We separated at the mounting-block, and I watched them a little way down the road. And felt a little touch of envy. Evelyn was looking very alluring that afternoon.

I rode in the opposite direction until I came to the big open flat north of the racetrack; there, a long way off, I saw John Fulton and Lucy walking slowly side by side. John was sabering dead weed stalks with his stick. So I turned east to avoid them, then north, until I had passed the forlorn yellow pesthouse with its high, deer-park fence, and was well out in the country.

Then I left the main road, and followed one tortuous sandy track after another. Suddenly Heroine shied. I looked up from a deep, aimless reverie, and saw sitting at the side of a trail a withered old negress. She looked like a monkey buried in a mound of rags.

"Evening, Auntie," I said.

"Evening, boss."

Heroine had broken into a sweat, and was trembling. She kept her eyes on the old negress and her ears pointed at her, her nostrils widely dilated.

"My horse thinks you're a witch, Auntie," I said. "Hope you'll excuse her."

"I allows I got ter, boss, caze that's jes what I is."

"Honest to Gospel?" I laughed.

"You got fifty cents, boss?"

I found such a coin in my pocket and tossed it to her.

"I used to have," I said.

She rose to her feet and Heroine drew away from her, firmly and rudely.

"Don' min' me, honey," said the old woman, and she held out a hand like a monkey's paw. To my astonishment Heroine began to crane her head toward the hand, sniffed at it presently, gave a long sigh of relief and stood at ease, muscles relaxed, and eyelids drooping.

"Now I believe you," I said. "What else can you do?"

She turned her bright, beady eyes this way and that, searching perhaps for anyone who might be watching and listening. Then she said, "I kin tell fo'tunes, boss."

"Just tell me my name."

"You is Mista Mannering, boss."

"Hum, that's too easy," I said. "I've been coming to Aiken a great many years. What is my horse's name?"

"Her name is He'win, boss."

"Hum," I said and felt a little creepy feeling of wonder.

"Does you want to know any mo'?"

I nodded.

"You's flighty, boss, but you ain't bad. You is goin' ter be lucky in love, 'n then you is goin' ter be unlucky. You is goin' ter risk gettin' shot, but dere ain't goin' ter be no shootin'. When summer come around you is goin' ter have sorrer in you' breas', and when winter comes around dere'll be de same ole sorrer, a twistin' and a gnawin'."

"What sort of a sorrow, Auntie?"

"Sorrer like when you strikes a lil chile what ain't done no harm, only seem like he done harm, sorrer like you feels w'en you baby dies, 'case you is too close-fisted ter sen' fer de doctor, sorrer like——"

She broke off short, looking a little dazed and foolish.

"You've had your share of sorrow, Auntie, I can see that."

"Is I a beas' o' de fiel'?" she exclaimed indignantly, "or is I a humanous bein'?"

"Must all human beings have sorrows?"

"Yes, boss, but each has he own kin'! Big man has big sorrer, little man have little sorrer, and dem as is middlin' men dey has middlin' sorrers."

"It's all one," I said, "each gets what he can stand and no more. Put a big sorrow on a little man and he'd break under it; put a little sorrow on a big man and he wouldn't know that he was carrying it. What else can you tell me, Auntie?"

"I ain't goin' ter tell yo' no mo'."

"Not for another half-dollar?"

"No, boss."

"Well, there it is anyway. Good evening."

"Good evening, boss."

She had made me feel a little shivery and I rode off at the gallop.

XVI

I was surprised to find John Fulton in the Club. As a home-loving man he was not a frequent visitor. He had dropped in, he said, to get a game of bridge, had tired of waiting for somebody to cut out, and had been reading the newspapers to find out how the world was getting along.

"I haven't more than glanced at them in a week," he said, "but there's nothing new, is there? Just new variations of public animosity and domestic misfortunes. Have you read this Overman business?"

"I haven't."

"It's a case or a hard-working, thoroughly respectable man who, for no reason that is known, suddenly shoots down his wife and children in cold blood, and then blows his own head to smithereens."

"But of course there was a reason," I said; "he must have felt that he was justified."

"He seems to have had enough money and good health. And he passed for a sane, matter-of-fact sort of fellow."

"If it was the regular reason," I said, "jealousy, he wouldn't have hurt the children."

"Only a very unhappy man could kill his children," said Fulton. "His idea would be to save them from such unhappiness as he himself had experienced. But in nine cases out of ten it would be a mistaken kindness. Causes similar to those which drove the father into a despair of unhappiness would in all probability affect the children less. No two persons enjoy to the same degree, suffer to the same degree or are tempted alike. How many wronged husbands are there who swallow their trouble and endure to one who shoots?"

"Legions," I said. "Fortunately. Otherwise one could hardly sleep for the popping of pistols."

"Do you believe that or do you say it to be amusing?"

"I think that the number of husbands who find out that they have been wronged is only exceeded by the number who never even suspect it. But they are not the husbands we know, the modern novelist to the contrary notwithstanding. In our class it is the wives who are wronged as a rule; in the lower classes, the husbands. I've known hundreds of what the newspapers call society people; the women are good, with just enough exceptions to prove the rule: the men aren't."

"When you say that the women are good, you mean they are technically good?"

"Who is technically good?"

"Hallo, Harry!"

Colemain, having pushed a bell, pulled up a big chair and joined us.

"We were saying that the average woman we know is technically good."

"You bet she is!" said Colemain. "She has to be! If she wasn't how could she ever put over the things she does put over? And as a rule her husband isn't technically good and so she has power over him. She says nothing, but he knows that she knows, and so when she does something peculiarly extravagant and outrageous, he reaches meekly for his checkbook. For one man who is ruined by drink there are ten ruined by women; and not by the kind of women who are supposed to ruin men either; not by the street-walker, the chorus girl or the demi-mondaine. American men are ruined by their wives and daughters who are technically good. Don't we know dozens of cases? When there is a crash in Wall Street how many well-to-do married men go to smash to one well-to-do bachelor? A marriage isn't a partnership. It's the opposite except in name. It's a partnership in which the junior partner gives her whole mind to extracting from the business sums of money which ought to go back into it. And she spends those sums almost invariably on things which diminish in value the moment they are bought. It isn't the serpent that is the arch enemy of mankind. It's the pool in which Eve first saw that she was beautiful, or would be if she could only get her fig-leaf skirt to hang right."

"But I think," said Fulton gently, "that women ought to have pretty clothes, and bright jewels and luxuries. If a girl loves a man, and proves it and keeps on loving him, how is it possible for him to pay her back short of ruining himself? Haven't you ever felt that if the whole world was yours to give you'd give it gladly? Why complain then when afterwards you are only asked to give that infinitesimal portion of the world that happens at the moment to be yours? If a man is ruined for his wife, if cares shorten his life, even then he has done far, far less than he once said he was willing and eager to do."

He looked at the big clock over the mantelpiece, sat silent for a moment, then rose, wished us good-night and went out.

"You wouldn't think," said Harry, "to hear him talk that a woman was playing chuck-cherry with that infinitesimal portion of the world that happens to be his. I was in the bank this morning and I saw him come out of the President's room. He looked a little as if he'd just identified the body of a missing dear one in the morgue."

"I'm afraid he is frightfully hard up," I said, "but he hasn't said anything to me about it, and I don't like to volunteer."

"He's a good man," said Harry, "one of the few really good men I know, and it's a blamed shame."

"Oh, it will all come out in the wash."

"It depends on how dirty the linen is!"

"American men," I said, "never seem to have the courage to retrench. Why not take your family to a cheap boarding-house for a year or two? Cut the Gordian knot and get right down to bed rock? Boarding-house food may be bad for the spirit, but it's good for the body. My father had dyspepsia one spring, and his doctor told him to spend six weeks in a summer hotel—any summer hotel—and take all his meals in it."

Just then one of the bell-boys interrupted us. He said that Mrs. Fulton wished to speak with me. He followed me into the coat room, where the telephone is, in a persistent sort of way, so that I turned on him rather sharply and asked what he wanted.

His eyes were bulging with a look of importance and his black face had an expression of mystery. "She ain't on de telephone," he said, "she's outside."

"Well, why couldn't you say so?"

I went out bareheaded into the dusk and walked quickly between the bedded hyacinths and the evergreen hedges of Carolina cherry to the sidewalk. But she wasn't there. Far up the street I saw a familiar horse and buggy, and a whip that signaled to me.

She was all alone. Even Cornelius Twombley, as much a part of the buggy as one of the wheels, had been dropped off somewhere.

"I haven't seen you all day," she said. "I thought maybe you'd like to go for a little drive."

I simply climbed into the buggy and sat down beside her.

"Evelyn and Dawson," she explained, "were crowding the living-room, so I thought of this. Is John in the Club?"

"He was, but he said good-night to Harry Colemain and me, and I think he went home. . . . How is everything? I saw you and John from afar, walking together. I knew you could run because I've seen you play tennis, but I didn't suppose you'd ever learned to walk. You're always either on a horse or behind one."

"Was it very bold of me to come to the Club for you? I suppose I ought to have telephoned." Then she laughed. "I ought to have had more consideration of your reputation," she said.

"My reputation will survive," I said. "But look here, Lucy——"

"I'm looking!"

"I meant look with your mind. I don't know if I ought to bring it up; it's just gossip. Harry saw John coming out of the President's room in the bank. He said it looked to him as if John had been trying to make a touch and hadn't gotten away with it. You know I hate to see him distressed for money, especially now when other things are distressing him, and I wonder if there isn't some tactful arrangement by which I could let him have some money without his knowing that it came from me."

"Aren't you good!" she exclaimed. "Oh, I suppose he makes things out as bad as he can so as to influence me as much as possible; but he says we are in a terrible hole, that we oughtn't to have come here at all, that if he'd had any idea how much money I'd been spending in New York before we came he wouldn't have considered coming, that everybody is hounding him for money, and that he doesn't see how he can possibly pay his bills at the end of the season. Of course it's mostly my fault; but I can't help it if the Democrats are in power and business is bad, can I?"

"Well," I said, "I'm flush just now and I'll think up a scheme. Meanwhile let's forget about everything that isn't pleasant. Where are you going to drive me?"

"I don't care. Let's get away from the lights. What time is it? John doesn't like me to be late; and besides I haven't kissed the kiddies good-night. Let's just take a little dip in the woods. On a hot night it's almost like going for a swim. Oughtn't you to have a hat or something? If you get cold you can put the cooler on like a shawl."

Her manner affected me as it had never affected me before.

The dip from the hot dusk of the dusty road into the cool midnight of the pine woods had all the exhilaration of an adventure. The fact that she had sent into the Club for me flattered my vanity. She wanted me and not another to be with her. I felt a tenderness for her that I had never felt before. I wanted a chance to show that I understood her and was her friend without qualification. Shoulder touched shoulder now and then and it seemed to me as if I was being appealed to by that contact for support, countenance, and protection.

We chattered about the night and the pale stars, and the smells of flowers. We wished that there was no such thing as dinner, that the woods lasted forever, and that we might drive on through the soft perfumed air until we came to the end of them.

Then there was quite a long silence, and for the first time in my life I experienced the wish, well, not to kiss her, but to lay my cheek against hers. It was a wish singularly hard to resist.

"I suppose we ought to turn back."

"You know best," I said.

"Do you want to?"

"No, do you?"

"No."

But we turned back and came up out of the woods into the lights of the town.

"Where shall I drop you—at the Club?"

"Let me drop you," I said, "and borrow your buggy afterward to take me home. You ought not to drive alone at night."

"Maybe it would be better if I did," she said.

We said good-night at the door of her house, but not easily. For once it seemed hard to say anything final.

"Was I very brazen," she said, "to ask you to go with me, when I didn't want to be alone?"

"You were not," I said, "it was sweet of you. I loved it."

Cornelius Twombly lunged from the black shadow of a cedar tree and went to the horse's head.

"Good-night, Lucy. Good luck!"

Just then we heard John calling.

"That you, Lucy? You're late. I was getting anxious."

We could see him coming down the path, a vague shadow among the shadows, his cigarette burning brightly.

"Hallo, who is it? I can't see."

"It's Archie Mannering," said Lucy.

"Oh, is it? Won't you come in?"

"Can't, thanks. Got to dress. Lovely night, isn't it? Good-night. Good-night, Lucy."

When I had driven a little way I turned and looked over my shoulder, but though I could only see the fire of John's cigarette, I imagined that I could see his face—a little puzzled, a little anxious, and very sad.

It was on that same night that he said to Lucy: "Aren't you seeing a good deal of Archie Mannering?"

And she answered:

"Am I? I suppose I am. I like him awfully."



XVII

I awoke the next morning with the feeling that something or other was impending. I had no idea what it might be, pleasant or unpleasant. I felt a little the way you feel just before a race on which you have bet altogether too much money, a little excited, a little nervous, equally ready for laughter or anger. I had also the feeling that I had a great many things to do, and could not possibly get them done in so short a space of time as one day.

I hurried through breakfast. I hurried through the papers. And then I realized with a sense of anti-climax that until four o'clock, when I was to ride with Lucy, I had but one thing of any possible importance to do. And upon that business from first to last including the walk to the village and thence to the Club I spent no more than three-quarters of an hour. It had been an eccentric piece of business, and I was rather pleased with myself for having brought it to a satisfactory conclusion. But I wanted others to know what I had done and to be pleased with me for doing it; and to tell anyone was quite out of the question.

In the Club letter-box under "M," I saw a small gray envelope. Instinct told me that it was for me, and that it was from Lucy. Then somehow all my feeling of restlessness and suspense melted away like a lump of sugar in hot tea. I felt at once serene and comfortable.

I carried the note to a writing-table, for I imagined that it would require an immediate answer, and then read it. Like all Lucy's notes it began without the conventional endearment, and ended with initials. It contained also her usual half-dozen mistakes in spelling.

John says he has no money and can't get any. So we've got to close the house and go back north, and live very cheaply till better times. So I've got to begin packing. So I can't ride this afternoon. Isn't it all a beastly shame? But please drop in and say how-dy-do just the same, and don't mind if you have to sit on a trunk. And please be a little sorry because I'm going away and we can't have any more rides. And please don't say anything about this; because John isn't just himself and maybe when we get all packed up he'll change his mind.

L. F.

Long before they were "all packed up," John did change his mind. I was present when he changed it. Lucy, Evelyn, and I were in the living-room helping each other to pack large silver-framed photographs into the tray of a trunk. It was slow work. During the winter none of us had looked at the photographs or commented on the originals, but now that they were to be swathed in tissue paper and put out of sight each one had to be approved or disapproved, and long excursions had to be made into the life histories and affairs of the friends who had sat for them.

Lucy had just taken a large photograph of Evelyn from the top of the low bookshelves that filled one end of the room when John came in from the garden with an open letter in his hand. He was smiling in a puzzled sort of way.

"What do you know about this!" he exclaimed rather than asked.

"Nothing," said Lucy, "yet." And she began to wrap Evelyn's photograph in many folds of tissue paper.

"Yesterday," said John, "I tried to get some money from the bank, but they turned me down. Now they write that upon reconsideration I can have anything I like."

Well, Lucy's expression at that moment was worth a great deal more than the few thousands which her husband would see fit to borrow from the bank, and I couldn't but feel that there are moments when it is really worth while to be alive and rich.

"Wonder what made 'em change their minds?" said John.

"There's one thing sure," said Lucy. "You are not to look a gift horse in the mouth."

She unwrapped the photograph of Evelyn and put it back in its old place on top of the bookshelves.

"This settles everything, does it?" asked John. "We don't go back to New York?"

"We do not," said Lucy firmly.

"Well," said John, "I'd better see the bank before it changes its mind again. Is the buggy outside?"

"No, but you can take Archie's or Evelyn's. Can't he? I sent Cornelius Twombly to do some chores."

"I'll drive you down," said Evelyn, "having a telegram to send."

"And I'll stay and help Lucy unpack," I said. "Lord, people, I'm glad you're not going!"

The moment we were alone Lucy said: "You did it."

"Did what?"

"Don't beat about the bush! Don't pretend that you are not a blessed angel in disguise!"

Her face was very grave and lovely.

"It's the kindest, tactfulest thing that anybody ever did."

"I couldn't bear the thought of your going back to the city when it's such fun here."

"What can I say or do to thank you?"

"Nothing, Lucy. Yes, you can. You can ride with me this afternoon."

She looked a little troubled. "Last night, after you had gone," she said, "John said, 'Aren't you seeing a good deal of Archie Mannering?'"

For a moment I felt distinctly chilled and uncomfortable. Then I said: "Oh, dear! Now Brutus himself is beginning to worry about us. How silly!"

"How silly!" echoed Lucy, and we stood staring at each other rather vapidly, finding nothing to say.

After a while I asked if John had said any more on the subject. "Did he embroider the theme at all?" I asked.

Lucy took a photograph out of the trunk tray and began to unwrap it. "Yes," she said. "He did. He even held forth. He said that when a woman no longer cared for her husband, it was dangerous for her to see much of another man. He realized, he said, that ours was an exceptional case, but that soon people would guess about him and me, and that then they'd begin to talk about you and me. And he hates anything conspicuous, and so forth, and so forth."

"What did you say?"

She smiled up at me, but not very joyously. "I said, 'I'm not going to be rude to one of the best friends I've got, just for fun. If you forbid me to see him, why I suppose I'll obey you, but I'd have to explain to him, wouldn't I? I'd have to say, "John considers our friendship dangerous, so we're not to see each other any more!"' And of course he said that that was out of the question, and I agreed with him."

"Still you've said it."

And we smiled at each other.

"He didn't give me a good character," said Lucy dolefully. "He said I never think of yesterday or tomorrow, but only of the moment. He said I neglect the children, and Oh, I'd like to end it all! It's an impossible situation. I'd give my life gladly to feel about him the way I used to, but I can't—I can't ever."

She looked very tragic.

"Oh," she went on vehemently, "it's terrible. I'm all cold and dumb. Every power of affection that I had has gone out like a candle. I do neglect the children! It's because I can't look them in the face. I've failed him, and I've failed them, and I ought to tie a stone round my neck and jump into the nearest millpond."

"It's a good three miles to the nearest millpond," I said. "And there isn't a stone in this part of South Carolina. You are all up in the air now, because the situation you are in is so new to you. But you'll get used to it."

"If I don't go mad first."

"Why, Lucy?"

"You don't understand," she cried. "You have never had loving arms to go to when you were in trouble. I've had them and I've lost them. I mean I've lost the power to go to them and find comfort."

A picture of her running to my arms for comfort flashed through my mind, and troubled me to the marrow. And I had from that moment the definite wish to take her in my arms. And in that same moment I realized that those who thought we were too much together were not such meddling fools as I had thought them.

"Lucy," I said, and I hardly recognized my own voice. "Whatever happens, you've a friend who will never fail you."

"I know that," she said, and she held out her two hands, and I took them in mine.

"If you sent for me to the ends of the earth, I would come."

"I know that."

"There is nothing you could ask of me that I wouldn't give."

"I know that."

And that afternoon we rode together in the woods.



XVIII

A man must have descended to the very deepest levels of depression before he loses his power to laugh, or to be cheered by an unexpected bettering of his financial position. John Fulton was in a bad way, but certain things still struck him as funny, and the money which he had been enabled to borrow from the bank had eased his mind. Still, so Lucy told me, he could not sleep at night, and it must have been obvious to the most casual observer that he was a sick man. He had a drawn and hungry look. Jock and Hurry could by no means satisfy his appetite for affection. Indeed, I think the sight and touch and the sounds of them at play were no great comfort to him at this time. He must have felt in their presence something of that anguish of pity which a man feels for children who have lost their mother.

He had hoped at first that Lucy's failure of affection was but a temporary aberration. But at last he must have come to despair of any change in her feelings for him, at least under existing conditions. Indeed their relations were going from bad to worse. A man loved and beloved falls into habits of passion for which there is no cure but death or old age. Yet a man would readily believe that separation might affect him like an opiate, and it must have been in this belief that Fulton determined to accompany Harry Colemain on a trip to Palm Beach. To me he vouchsafed the explanation that he was not well and that he couldn't sleep, and that when he wasn't well, and that when he couldn't sleep, his one thought and desire was to get to salt water. "It always cures me," he said, just as if he had often been sick before. From Lucy I had the truth of the matter.

"He thinks," she said, "that if he goes away and stays away for a long time that perhaps I will miss him enough to want him back, and on the old footing. He isn't even going to write to me. It's going to be exactly as if he didn't exist."

"Do you think it wise for him to go, Lucy?"

"Perhaps it will do him good. It won't change me. I know that. If only he'd change. Haven't I done him enough harm to make him hate me? Archie, I'm so sorry for him that I wish I was dead. And yet I want to live. I'm too young to die. I want to live, and be happy—happy the way I used to be happy."

"And you can't with John?"

She shook her head quietly. "It's the most wonderful thing to be in love!" she said. "I wonder what I did to have that wonderful thing? I wonder what I've done to deserve to lose it? And even if—even if it happened again it could never be the same. There can be only one first time—even if you've got a silly memory that doesn't remember very well. And you make ties and habits and all these have to be thrown overboard when the second time happens, and there's scandal, and cold shoulders, and—what do you think I ought to do? If I can't give him what he's paying for oughtn't I to cut loose on my own, to support myself, and not be a burden to him and a ubiquitous reminder that we've failed to make a go of living together? What ought I to do?"

It had become very hard for me to tell her what I thought she ought to do. Ever since that moment when I had first known that I wanted to take her in my arms and comfort her, I had begun to have doubts of my own honesty. And now she had put that honesty to a definite test, and I was determined that it should come through the ordeal alive.

"Must I really tell you what I think you ought to do?"

"Yes."

"Some of the things I think you ought to do, are things that I know you don't want to do—things that you think perhaps you can't do. Women often say can't when they mean won't, don't they?"

"Maybe."

"I'm afraid you aren't going to like what I'm going to say, nor me for saying it."

"Try me," she said, and she gave me a look of great trust and understanding.

"I'm going to tell you what I think you ought to do, Lucy, and what I think you ought to have done."

Any teacher whose scholars looked at him with the trustfulness and expectation with which Lucy now looked at me, must be inspired, I think, to the very top notch of his sense of honor and duty. I am sure at least that I laid the law down of what I thought she should do, and should have done with complete honesty and without regard to consequences. If I got nothing better for my pains than dislike, at least I could criticize her conduct and character without being biased by my growing affection for her.

"In the first place," I said, "when you found out that you no longer loved your husband, you made your first mistake. By your own admission he had given you everything in the way of devotion and faithfulness that a man can give a woman. When you found that you no longer loved him, you shouldn't have told him. He ought never to have known. You should have summoned all your fortitude and delicacy to deceive him into thinking that you had not changed toward him, and never would."

"I couldn't!" exclaimed Lucy.

"You wouldn't," I said.

"It wouldn't have been honest."

"Perhaps not. But it would have been noble."

Lucy naturally enough preferred praise to blame, and this showed in her face and in her voice. I felt infinitely removed from our previous terms of intimate confidence, when she said: "Couldn't or wouldn't, it's history that I didn't."

"That being so," I said, "I think you should go now to your husband and tell him that love or no love you propose to be his faithful wife till death part you; to put him first in your head, if not in your heart. It may be that through a long course of simulation you will come once more to care for him. Self-sacrifice is a noble weapon. I think, Lucy, that you would be very wise if you told him that two is not a lucky number."

"I don't understand."

"Jock and Hurry," I said, "are two."

She changed color to the roots of her hair. "Oh," she cried, "you don't understand how a woman feels about that! I'd rather die. I—I couldn't!"

"You won't."

"I thought you understood me better. I thought you wanted me to be happy!"

"Upon my soul, Lucy, I think that you might find happiness that way."

She shrugged her shoulders and her face looked hard as marble. "And that's your advice!" she said. And then with a sudden change of expression, "It's what you think I ought to do. Would it please you if I took your advice? Is it what you want me to do?"

I had spoken as I thought duty commanded. It hadn't been easy. With each word I felt that I had lost ground in her estimation. She asked that last question with the expression of a weary woebegone child, and I answered it without thought, and upon the urge of a wrong impulse.

"No—no," I cried. "It's not what I want you to do. I had almost rather see you dead."

There was a long silence.

"Do you mean that?"

"Yes, Lucy. Yes."

"Then you do care. Oh, thank God!"

I don't know how she got there. It was as if I had waked up and found her in my arms.

Kissed and kissing, we heard the opening of the distant front door. And Oh, how I wish I had found the courage when Fulton came into the livingroom, to tell him that I loved his wife, and that she loved me, and what was he going to do about it! I did have the impulse, but not the courage. When Fulton came in Lucy was knitting at an interminable green necktie, and I was talking to her from a far chair across an open number of the illustrated London News. We looked, I believe, as casual and innocent as cherubim, but my conscience was very guilty, and it seemed to me, rightly or wrongly, that for the first time Fulton showed me a certain curtness of manner, as if he was not pleased at finding me so often in his house.



XIX

With the knowledge that I loved Lucy and that she loved me, came also the knowledge that for a long time the situation had been inevitable—inevitable if we kept on being so much in each other's company. Passages between us of words and looks now recurred to my memory filled with portentous meaning. Oh, I thought, how could I have been so blind! A fool must have seen it coming. I ought to have seen it coming. I ought to have run from it as a man runs from a conflagration. When Lucy told me that she no longer loved her husband I ought to have known that the fault was mine, and I ought to have gone to a far place, and left that little family to rehabilitate itself in peace. Surely after a "blank" spell Lucy would have loved her husband again.

But all the thoughts that I carried to bed with me that night were not dark with remorse. It was possible for whole minutes of time, especially between sleeping and waking, to forget the complications of the situation and to bask in the blissful warmth of its serenities. The laughter, the prayers, the adoration of Lucy's lovely eyes were mine now. She loved me better than her children, better than life itself. She had not said these things to me, she had looked them to me. It was wonderful to feel that I had been trusted with so much that was beautiful and precious.

Once a spoiled child, always a spoiled child. In the scheme of things I would not at first give their proper place to those awful barriers which society has set up between a man and another man's wife. We loved each other with might and main, and our only happiness could be in passing over those barriers and belonging to each other. John Fulton and his children were but vague pale shadows across the sunshine.

The sleep that I got that night, short though it was, was infinitely refreshing. I waked with the feeling that happiness had at last come into my life, and that I was not thirty-five years old, but twenty years young.

I walked in my mother's garden waiting for servants to come downstairs and make coffee for me and poach eggs. It was going to be a lovely day. Already the sun had coaxed the tea-olives to give out their odor of ripe peaches. "How she loves them," I thought. "If only she were with me now."

The garden seemed very beautiful to me. For the first time in my life, I think, I took a flower in my hands and examined it to see how it was made. A great and new curiosity filled me. How beautiful the world was, and all things in it; how short the time to find out all that there was to be known about all those beautiful things! And what an ignoble basis of ignorance I must start from if I was to "find out," and to "understand!" There filled me a sense of unworthiness and a strong desire for self-improvement.

"I must learn the names of some of these things," I thought, and I began to read the labels which stood among the flowers and shrubbery, for in such matters my mother was very strict and particular: Abeleia grandiflora, Laurestinus, Olea fragrans, Ligustrum napalense, Rosa watsoniana—— Now really could that thing be a rose? It looked more like a cross between a fern and an ostrich plume. I looked closer. Each slender light green leaf was mottled with lighter green, a miracle of exquisite tracing, and the thing was in bud, millions and millions of buds no bigger than the eggs in a shad roe. Yes, it was a rose. I looked at the drop of blood on the ball of my thumb, and thought what a beautiful color it was, and how gladly, if need be, I would shed every drop of it for Her.

Dark smoke began to pour from the kitchen chimney, and I knew that the cook was down. Hilda must have seen me in the garden, for she was setting a place for me at one end of the big dining-table. How fresh and clean she always looked and how tidy. Almost you might have thought that her hair was carved from some rich brown substance. It was always as neat as the hair of a statue.

"Good morning, Hilda."

"Good morning, Mr. Archie."

"How about breakfast?"

"It will be ready directly."

"Wish you'd give me a long glass of Apollinaris with a lot of ice in it."

"With pleasure."

I heard her pounding ice in the pantry and then the pop as the bottle came open. She stood behind my chair while I drank. And somehow I got the feeling that she was smiling. I turned my head quickly. She was smiling, but tremulously, almost as if she was going to cry.

"What's the matter, Hilda—have I forgotten to brush the back of my hair?"

"No, sir—it's——"

"It's what?"

"Nothing, sir—only——"

"Don't be silly—— Tell me."

She told me, and for a moment, so odd was her statement, I thought she must have gone out of her mind.

"The window of my room," she said, "is just over one of the windows of yours."

I didn't know what to say. I really thought she must be slightly deranged. I said lamely: "Which window?"

"The one by your bed, the one you always leave open so's the air can get to you."

"Well, Hilda, what about it?"

"Sometimes I hear you talking in your sleep, and then I lean out of my window and listen."

With this admission she blushed crimson and no longer looked me in the eyes.

"Do you think that's quite fair?"

"I don't lead a very full life, Mr. Archie."

"And my unconscious prattle helps to fill it? Do I often talk in my sleep?"

"You talked last night."

Her voice was full of meaning and somehow I felt chilled and no longer so very gay and happy.

"What did I talk about?"

"About a lady."

With humiliation I realized that I was now turning red; but I laughed, and said: "We look like a couple of boiled lobsters, Hilda. What did I say about the lady?"

"You said—I only thought you ought to know that I know—so's—well so's you can keep that window shut, and fix it so no one else will know."

I felt like a convicted criminal.

"Did I—mention the lady's name?"

She nodded. "You were talking about Mrs. Fulton," she said in a low voice, "only you didn't call her that."

"Hilda," I said firmly. "Mrs. Fulton and I are very old friends—nothing more."

I could see that she didn't believe me, and I changed my tactics. "You'll not talk, Hilda?"

Her face had resumed its natural color, and she now looked me once more in the eyes. "I'd sooner die than hurt you, Mr. Archie."

"Why, Hilda——!"

All this time I had been sitting and talking over my shoulder, but now I got quickly out of my chair, and drew her hands away from her face. "Oh, Hilda, I am so sorry. What can I do? I'm so sorry, Hilda, and so proud, too."

She looked up at that.

"You poor child! I feel like a dog, a miserable dog!"

"You couldn't help it, Mr. Archie. You can't help being you. Can you?"

She tried to smile.

"How long," I asked, "has it been like this?"

"Ever since the day I came—three years and two hundred and twenty-one days ago—and I heard you say to Mrs. Mannering—to your mother—'Mother,' you said, 'that new maid is as pretty as a picture.' And that did it!"

"Hilda," I said as quietly as I could, "I'm more touched and flattered than I can express. I'll be a good friend to you as long as I live. But—I think I ought to say it, even if it's a cold rough thing to say. I don't believe I'm ever going to feel the same way about you, and so——"

"Oh, I know that, but—— Oh, do you still think I'm pretty?"

"Indeed I do. I've always thought that. Always known that."

"Well," she said, speaking very bravely but with a mouth that quivered, "that's something. I don't lead a very full life, but that's something."



XX

"Mother, are you very busy with those letters?"

"Yes, dear, very."

"I thought so; so put them down and come into the garden. There is a bench where the thyme and eglantine——"

"My dear, you frighten me. What has happened?"

My mother rose, one hand on her bosom.

"Nothing to be frightened about. It's only a little tragedy in a life that isn't very full. Come and talk it over."

I gave her my arm and we strolled into the garden like a pair of lovers.

"Do you remember when Hilda came to us?"

"Perfectly."

"I said to you on that day, 'Mother, the new maid is as pretty as a picture.' Do you remember?"

"No."

"Well, I said it, and Hilda heard me say it, and please don't laugh, it seems that my saying it made the poor child—Oh, care about me. She's cared ever since, and I'm afraid she cares a whole lot."

"How did you get to know?"

"She told me, this morning, practically out of a clear sky. One thing I want to make clear is that it's just as little my fault as it possibly can be. I feel like the devil about it, but I can't for the life of me find one little hook to hang a shred of self-reproach on. My morals aren't what they should be. But I am a fastidious man, and the roof under which my mother lives is to me as the roof of a temple. But you know all this. Now what's to be done? One thing is clear, I can't and won't be amorously waited on. I think the poor child will have to be sent away."

"Oh, dear!" cried my mother, "and just when she's getting to be a perfect servant, and your father so used to her now—says he never knows when she's in the room and when she isn't."

We returned to the house.

"I'll talk it over with her," announced my mother, "and try to decide what's best—best for her, the poor, pretty little thing."