"I know all this, John," I said; "I could wish that you had been unhappy together."

"I wish to make several things clear," he said. "According to all civil and moral law, I am an absolutely undivorceable man. There is only one ground for divorce in this state. To clear the decks for you and Lucy, I should have to smirch myself and take a black eye."

"But the people who count always understand these things."

"In order to secure my own unhappiness, to make it everlasting, I should have to perjure myself. I know that it is the custom of the country for married gentlemen who are no longer loved to perjure themselves. But it seems to me a custom that would bear mending. However, it is not yet a question of that."

"Still undecided?"

"No. My mind is made up. I am prepared to step down and take my black eye on certain conditions."

I bowed my head.

"Lucy," he said, "doesn't love the children as much as I do. She has allowed herself to forget how dear they are to her, so it would have to be understood among us three that I should retain the children. You see, I've got to keep something of what belongs to me—to keep me going. Lucy will agree to this, because just now all she wants is new clothes and you. There is another point upon which I feel that I must be satisfied."

"What is that?"

"How long is your young people's infatuation for each other going to last? If it is to be brief and evanescent, it would be absurd for me to take a black eye. But if it is to be stable and enduring, I should be ashamed to stand in the way of it. Knowing something of Lucy's history, how long do you think her fancy for you will last?"

"These things are on the lap of the gods."

"Well, then, yours for her? Now, I know that my love for her, which has been tried by fire and ice and time, will last until I die, or lose my reason. With me it is not a question of thinking, but of knowing. How long do you know that your love for her will last?"

"That is an impossible question to answer. I think it will always last."

"Thought won't do, Archie, on this all-important phase of the situation, we must have the light of definite knowledge. Now, as a man who has had many love affairs, some innocent and some not, you should have a good working knowledge of your endurance in such matters. If you were cast away on a desert island with a very pretty woman, you to whom women have always been necessary, you from whose hand there has always been some woman or other ready to eat, how long would your love for Lucy last?"

I was amazed momentarily by his question, but it was not one which I could answer.

"A week?" He rather shot this at me, and for a moment there was a satiric gleam in his eye.

I nodded.

"You know that it would last a week?"

I began to feel a little angry, and I said, quite sharply: "I know it."

"A month?"

"Yes, a month."

Both our voices had risen. His became easy and level once more.

"A year, Archie?"

"How can I know that, John?" I tried to meet his quick change of manner. "I think so. I'm very sure of it."

"But you don't know?"

"I can't know."

"And if the very pretty woman on the island came to you in the night and said she had seen hob-goblin eyes in the dark, and was afraid—how long, though you still love her, would you be faithful to Lucy? A man like you, in good health, with an incompletely developed moral sense?"

"We are getting nowhere," I said, determined to keep my temper.

"We are getting to this," said he, "that if a year from today, you and Lucy still love each other, and have been faithful to each other, and still want each other—you shall have each other."

"A year?" I think he smiled at the surprise and disappointment in my voice.

"During which year," he said, "you will not meet each other except by accident, and you will not correspond."

I said nothing, but he read my thoughts.

"It isn't fair to you and Lucy? At least it is fair to me. Nobody has thought about me. I have had to think for myself, and for the children. Admit this—if your love stands a year's test you will stand a far greater chance of happiness than if you ran away together now, unblessed by the man you had wronged, and unclergied. Admit this, too—that if your love doesn't stand the test, then my life has been ruined for as futile, puerile, misbegotten a passion as ever reared its head under an honest man's roof. Admit it! Admit it."

"I'm not sure that I admit any such thing."

"Then, my dear fellow," he said, "your mental and moral capacity are on precisely the same plane. . . . I'm sure you don't want to injure Lucy. Give her this chance to straighten out and get untangled. If there is any truth in your love for her you will see that this way is best for her."

"I am thinking of her happiness."

"Are you?"

"She's been very patient, John. I can't tell you how patient."

"For God's sake don't try to tell me. Haven't I had enough to bear?"

"I think Lucy won't be willing to wait a year."

"She must be made willing. You must help. A year soon passes—soon passes. If things then are as they are now, then I shall believe that your love for each other is strong and fine, and I shall renounce my claim with a good grace—a good grace."

"If we can't wait a year, John!"

"You mean if you won't? In that case I shall not feel that Lucy is entitled to a divorce, or either of you to any money at my hands. Among the people who are necessary to you and Lucy, a wronged and upright husband has great power. If you are such children, such fools, as not to be willing to stand a test of your love, you will have to be punished. It would mean that your passion has nothing to do with what is understood by love. You would merely be pointed at and passed up as a rather well-known young couple with adulterous proclivities."

There was a long, charged silence.

"The law and the prophets are all on your side, John, but——"

"You'll not answer now, please. You'll think it over. And don't forget all the pleasant things that you can do in a year. There's that hunting trip in Somaliland you used to talk about so much—there's London and Paris—wonderful places for a man who's trying to cure himself of an unlawful love."

"Trying to cure himself?"

"Of course. Jesting aside, don't you think that what you and Lucy want to do to Jock and Hurry and me is wrong? Of course you do. You're not a devil. If, by uttering the wish, you could bring it about that you had never loved Lucy, that she had never fallen out of love with me and loved you over the heads of her children, that all might be as it was when you first began to come to our house, wouldn't you utter that wish? Of course you would."

He was smiling at me now, very gently and cunningly, and there was, at the same time, in his eyes an awful pathos.

"Why, yes," I said, "I suppose so."

"Just bear out what I've always maintained," said he; "I've always maintained that you were a good fellow—at heart."

"Am I to see Lucy again—before the year begins?"

"Is it very necessary?"

"I suppose not. But——"

"Well, I imagine Lucy will insist on seeing you. It will be a pity, but after all she's only a little child in some ways. It's all going to be very hard for you both, at first," he said gently. "So you shall see each other again—if she says so."

Suddenly he reached out his hand, and I took it.

"Oh," he said, "I needed your help."



XXX

It seemed to me, at the time, that I had showed myself very weak in the conference in the taxi-cab. It seemed to me that my acquiescence in Fulton's proposals reflected on the strength of my love for Lucy. Perhaps it did. But in the clearer light of today it seems to me that to his questions I made the only answers possible; and that only a demented person could have found serious flaws in the logic of his position.

When we had parted, I walked for a long time in the most crowded streets, trying to reconcile myself to the long separation from Lucy, and to the weakness which I thought I had betrayed in agreeing to it.

Could I endure that separation? The world would be empty with no Lucy to go to, no Lucy even to hear from. I loved her too much to part with all but the thought of her. It did not seem possible that the mere passage of time could dull the edge of my passion. Yet cold memory blinked at this very possibility.

I had parted from other women, thinking that thoughts of them must fill the rest of my life to the exclusion of everything else; only to find that after a little lapse of time their images faded, and even the memory of what they had been to me had no power to think.

So might it be with Lucy. "You know it might," said cold memory. "Don't be a fool—you think it won't, but you know it might."

"But," I argued, "this is different. No other woman ever loved me as she does. I may be a fool, but her eyes have spoken, and I know the truth when I hear it."

"She does love you," said my other self, which I have called cold memory, "and she did love him, and before his time, others, if only briefly. Without the sight of you to feed on, her love will starve and die. It is almost always so."

"Almost."

"There are exceptions. Is it likely, considering your records, that you and she will be an exception? It is not likely."

It wasn't. John Fulton was probably right. He believed that time would cure us, and almost the whole of human experience agreed with him.

And wouldn't it be better if we were cured? Far better. I had to admit that. We ought, indeed, to hope that we should be cured; to help with all our strength in the effecting of that cure. And conversely, Lucy ought to try to return to her affection for John and to her duty.

Suddenly I felt cold and shivery as before undergoing an operation.

Poor little Lucy! Even now she must be listening to John's ultimatum, as I had listened, but with this difference; she could not see the justice and the logic of his position. She would only see that she was being cruelly hurt, and thwarted, and disappointed; that she was being curbed and punished by forces too strong for her to cope with. And I pictured her, all reserve gone at last, a tortured child—just sobbing. It seemed to me that I must go to her or die. And indeed I went a little way toward their hotel. Then I thought, perhaps her sobs would move him to a change of heart. Perhaps he will weaken, and let her go. Upon the strength of this thought I returned to my own hotel, rearing a blissful edifice of immediate happiness.

I sat in the lobby in a position of reading, a newspaper before my face; but I did not read. I was listening for the boy who would page me to the telephone. Many names were called in the lobby, but it was two o'clock before I started at the sound of my own.

Fulton was at the other end of the telephone, not Lucy. He sounded very much upset and depressed: "Lucy would like to see you right away, if you can come round."

"Of course."

We said no more.

Her face was white and tear-stained. I had no sooner closed the door of their sitting-room behind me, than she flung herself upon my breast and burst into a storm of sobs. After a long time words began to mingle with the sobs.

"It will kill me. Why does he want me to die? . . . I've only got you. . . . I want to belong to you—to you."

I talked and I talked, and I soothed and I soothed, but she was sick with grief and pain and a kind of insane resentment, as if she had gone through a major operation without an anesthetic. It would have been horrible to see anybody suffer so. And she was the woman I loved! The strain was so great upon me that at last my powers of resistance snapped. I flung honor to the winds, and became strong with resolution. And now my words seemed to pierce her consciousness and to calm her.

"It's all right, Lucy." I had to speak loudly at first, as if she was deaf. "You shan't suffer like this. I tell you you shan't—not if I am damned to hell."

I knew now that she was listening, the sobs became muffled and less frequent. "It's you and me against the world now," I said. "There'll be no more flimflamming. I promised John to wait a year. That doesn't matter. A promise made at your expense won't hold. . . . When is your husband coming back?"

". . . hour," was all the answer I got. . . .

"Then there's not much time left. Try to pull yourself together. We've got to make all our plans right now, and there's not much time."

"You will take me away?"

"Of course. Now listen. There's no sense in putting your husband on his guard. Let him think that we are both agreed to the year's probation. I'll look up things and engage passage. I'll do that this afternoon. Tonight I'll go to Hot Springs to see my father and get money. My own balance is very low, unfortunately. Day after tomorrow I'll be in town again. Now, how are we going to communicate?"

I can't say that she was calm now, but she no longer sobbed, and her mind was in working order again.

"By telephone," she said. "Every morning when I know John's plans for the day I'll let you know, and so you'll know when to call me up."

Already the anticipations of our great adventure were bringing back the color to her cheeks and the sparkle to her eyes. I smiled at her. "Don't be too cheerful," I said; "we might get ourselves suspected."

"Couldn't we just tell John that we had decided to go—and go?"

"Better not."

"I hate to deceive and play act and be underhanded."

"So do I—but—Lucy, darling, you're going to trust me in more important things than this. I think my way is best. We don't want any more agonies and recriminations and scenes. Do we?"

I took her in my arms and whispered, "It's only a few days now, but I don't see how I can wait. I don't see how."

And she burrowed with her face between my cheek and shoulder, and whispered back, "And I don't see how I can wait."

There was a little space of very tense silence, during which my eyes roved to the little silver traveling-clock on the mantel, and then I said in a voice that shook:

"I'd better get out before he comes back."



XXXI

My parents, loafing North, via Hot Springs, were delighted to see me. As soon as courtesy to my mother made it possible, I got my father aside, and told him that my real purpose in coming was to raise the wind.

"I need a lot of money," I said; "sooner or later you'll know why. So I may as well tell you."

My father's fine weather-beaten face of a country squire expressed an interest at once frankly affectionate and tinged with a kind of detached cynicism.

"I am going to run off with Lucy Fulton," I said.

"I supposed that was it," said my father, without evincing the least surprise.

"You did?"

"Oh, we old fellows put an ear to the ground now and then," he explained; "and sometimes sleep with one eye open. Punch's advice to the young couple about to marry was 'Don't.' My advice to you and Lucy is double don't. Why not give yourselves a year to think it all over, as John Fulton so sanely and generously suggests?"

Astonishment at my father's superhuman knowledge of events must have showed in my face. Still smiling with frank affection, he said, "John put me in touch with the whole situation before he left Aiken. The year of probation was my suggestion to him."

"But Lucy and I can't agree."

"Then you can't. Do you sail, fly, entrain, or row—and when?"

"We sail, father, next Wednesday."

"A week from today. I am profoundly sorry. It's very rough on Fulton, just when he has closed with this Russian contract and is by way of getting rich."

"It's our one chance for happiness, father."

He cocked an eyebrow at me. "And I think it is your one sure road to misery."

"But you'll see me through?"

"Come to me a year from today. Tell me that during that time you have neither seen Lucy nor communicated with her, but that you still love each other—then I'll see you through."

"My dear father, it's so much better for you to put up the money than for me to borrow it from one of my friends."

"Only because the friend would expect you to pay him back. How would you live when his money was gone—keep on borrowing?"

"Why, father, you're acting like a parent in an old-fashioned novel. Are you threatening to cut me off?"

"My son," said he, "a man who had done well, and who deserved well of the world came to me and showed me his heart—a heart tormented beyond endurance with unreturned love, with jealousy, and with despair. He threw himself upon my mercy. And I said that I would help him, with whatever power of help I have at command. I don't love that man, my son. I love you. But I am on his side. All my fighting blood is aroused when I learn that still another American husband has been wronged by his wife, and by an idle flirting bachelor. God keep me firm in what must seem to you like cruelty in one to whom you have always turned with the utmost frankness and loyalty in your emergencies. And from whom until this moment you have always received help."

I was appalled and thunderstruck. After a while I said, "Father, she sobbed so that I thought she would break a blood vessel. I couldn't stand it. I had to say I would take her away. If I don't, I think she will die or kill herself."

My father drew himself up very straight, and looked very handsome and stern, for a moment. Then his frame relaxed and his eyes twinkled, and he said, "Die? Kill herself? My grandmother!"

"Oh, father," I cried, "don't! Don't! She is all the world to me. You talk as if——"

"I talk as if she was an excellent example of the modern American wife in what the papers call 'society.' And that is precisely what she is. You know that as well as I do. Just because you love her is no reason for pretending that she's a saint and a martyr and the victim of a grand historical passion. She is lovely to look at. She is charming to be with. But that doesn't prevent her from being a bad little egg."

"Father," I said, as gently as I could, "I love her with all my heart. Why, she's like a little child, and she's being so hurt. You've never refused me anything. Help me to make her happy."

"When she has gotten over her fancy for you, when Fulton has plenty of money for her to spend, she will be as happy as she deserves to be—until she makes herself miserable again by indulging in some affair similar to this. Now, my dear boy, go back to her, tell her that you haven't enough money to elope on and no way of getting it. Tell her also that if at the end of a year's probation you and she still want each other, nobody will oppose you, and that you, on the day of your marriage to her, will be made a rich man in your own right."

"Father, I want her so."

"And I want champagne so," said my father. "And the accursed doctor has forbidden it. Do I torture myself? Not at all. I turn for solace to an excellent bottle of Scotch whiskey. And this has at least the effect of making me want the champagne less. Don't get confused between psychology and physiology. If I were in your boots I'd slip over to Paris—and drink Scotch whiskey."

So I went back to New York, and, as soon as possible, I talked to Lucy over the telephone, and told her about the interview with my father.

"But," I finished, "we'll do whatever you say. We can't very well land in Europe without any money; but I've still got most of the passage money; and if you say so, we can stay right in this country and live on that for a few weeks, while I try to get a job. I could borrow some money, but it would have to be paid back. Oh, Lucy, this is such a humiliating confession to make, but what can I do?"

"Everybody is against us," she said, "everything—I don't suppose there's any use struggling."

She sounded cold and tired.

"I suppose," she went on slowly, "we'll have to wait, the way John says. Shall we?"

"You say it, Lucy. Don't make me say it."

"So we'll wait," she said; "not see each other, and not communicate. I don't see how I can stand it, but I suppose I can. . . . A whole year—a whole year!"

"At the end of it, my darling, all that there is in the world for me, nobody will stand in our way; there'll be plenty of money and a long life before us."

"Listen . . . all the long time will you take care of yourself?"

"Yes, Lucy."

"And not notice any other ladies?" . . .

"Lucy . . . let's take a chance on what I have got."

A long silence. Then: "Oh, no. I suppose John's right. Everybody's right. . . . But"—there was a valiant ring in her voice, "we'll show 'em they were wrong and cruel. Won't we?"

"Yes, Lucy."

"Good-by, then, and God bless and keep you."

"It's only for a year, Lucy."

I heard a short, dry sob. It was mine.



XXXII

I don't know how I got through the next ten days. After three of them had passed I began to fear a mental breakdown, because my mind kept working all by itself, without orders. If I wanted to think forward, to the end of the probationary year, I couldn't. Always I kept thinking I ought to have done, or said, so and so. I ought to have been firmer. I was always reviving that drive in the taxicab with Fulton, or that last interview with my father. If my love was strong and fine I ought never to have knuckled under. They had had too easy a time with me. I had played into their hands, and they had treated me like a child. From pure humiliation I could not sleep at night.

And what was Lucy doing? How was she bearing it? What sort of life was she leading, the poor, abused child? The world seemed to have all joined against me in a conspiracy of silence. Nobody mentioned Lucy in my hearing. Although the same city held us, until they moved to Stamford, I had no accidental glimpse of her. Our last talk had not been in the least satisfactory. It seemed to me that I must see her once more to preach courage and hope. During those first ten nights I hardly slept at all. Sometimes I would picture out Lucy's whole course of life during the next few months. And I imagined that, grown at last utterly indifferent through suffering, she might drift back into her former relations with Fulton, if only because he loved her so much, and no one can keep on saying no forever. Such imaginings had sometimes the vividness of scenes actually witnessed and threw me into tortures of jealousy.

Not until a short period of the tenth day was Lucy ever actually out of my mind. I had been sitting in a chair staring at a newspaper, all my nerves tense and hungry, when suddenly they seemed to have relaxed and to have been fed. The skin of my face no longer seemed tightly stretched. I felt as if I had waked from a refreshing sleep; but this was not the case. I had simply, without deliberation, forgotten Lucy for half an hour, and been making agreeable personal plans for the year of probation.

"Good Lord," I thought; "has living without her, already begun to be easier?"

It had. I began to take pleasure in seeing my friends; to look forward to the Newport season, to the international tennis, to the golf championship at Ekwanok, to the thousand and one things that make for the happiness of a butterfly's summer.

After a month of Newport, days passed with only hurried thoughts of Lucy. Chance mention of her name gave me no uneasiness; they affected my heart, like sudden trumpets, but I knew that my face had become an inscrutable mask, and that my voice was in perfect control. Those who had thought that there was something between us began to think differently.

And then, after days of suspense, surmise, and real consternation, the legs of civilization seemed to have been knocked from under it, and the greatest nations of Europe flew at each other.

Now indeed there seemed an easy way to the year's end. The Germans rolled through Belgium and into France, outraging humanity. It looked as if they would roll right into Paris, and sow salt where the world's first city had stood.

I rushed up to Bar Harbor to tell my parents that I was going to France to enlist in the foreign legion. Oh, how swiftly the time would fly, I thought. That I might get crippled or killed never occurred to me. I thought only that having failed at everything else, I must obviously be possessed of military genius. I pictured myself climbing the bloody ladder of promotion to high command and winning the gratitude of that country which next to my own I love the most.

My mother, to whom I first broached the news, did not cry or make a fuss. But I saw that I had distressed her terribly.

"It isn't our war," she said; "and what use will one more enlisted man be to them? And besides, my dear, only sons are always the first ones to get hurt; only sons and men whose families are dependent upon them. But . . ." and here she gave me a wonderful look . . . "I think I know why you want to go. And that makes me very proud."

"I think you do know, Mumsey," I said. "It's because we'd rather get hurt trying to do something worth while, than go on the way we've always gone on, amounting to nothing, and disappointing everybody."

Then she got me in her arms, and cried over me a little.

My father, as usual, took my decision with the most good-natured indifference.

"Fine experience," he said, "for any man that's free to go. Makes me wish I were younger and without obligations. Still I can enjoy the music at the swimming-pool with a free conscience; because I'm sending over all the money I can spare. . . . How did you reach the conclusion that you could go?"

"Could go?"

"Yes. Of course you've no complication in your life that should keep you from going. Well, I'm glad of that."

"It seems to me that if anyone is free to go, I am."

He smiled upon me, somewhat too playfully for my comfort, and shook his head slowly. "So Fulton and I were right about the year's probation. I'm delighted. How soon did you and Lucy find out that absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder?"

"Oh," I said, "it isn't that. What has that to do with it? There's a year to be got over, and fighting's the most agreeable and the quickest way I can think of just now."

My father looked disappointed.

"I hoped you had got over caring. And—you haven't?"

For a few moments I met his eyes. But only for a few moments. He didn't laugh. "I'm glad," he said simply.

I tried to explain exactly how I felt.

"Of course not seeing her or hearing from her—why—you see—but when I do see her it will all come right back. I know that."

He smiled a little grimly. "Normally," he said, "there are years of pleasant living before you. But not if you get yourself killed—not if you lose an arm or a leg, or come back with half your face shot off, and your one remaining ear stone deaf from cannon fire. But anyway I'm glad the Fulton business is over. Your love has cooled and, even if Lucy's hasn't—there could never be anything between you now?"

He was speaking sarcastically. He went on in the same vein: "The year over—even if you found that Lucy was still wrapped up in you, that her happiness depended on you, you would not, of course, feel that you were under any obligation to pretend that you still cared for her and to do a gentleman's best to make her happy."

"I get your point, father," I said; "and of course if she still cares, I must try to make good. Of course I must."

"Suppose," he said, no longer sarcastically, but very earnestly, "suppose the year is up. Suppose Lucy still cares, and as a reward for her faithfulness and her patience there is nothing but your grave 'somewhere in France'? This is why I asked you if you could go."

"I'll look like a fool," I said. "I've told several people that I was surely going."

"That's too bad," he said; "but you'll have to stand it. You have a good reputation for physical pluck, though, and nobody will say anything very nasty. And as for us," his voice rang a little, "who are on the inside, we know that it is braver of you to stay than to go."

"Anyway," I said, "if she—if Lucy—doesn't care any more—why I can go then."

"You can go then. But it seems to me that a man of education is wasted in a trench. That, however, is a matter of taste."



XXXIII

It was not until the early winter that I saw Lucy. It was by accident. I sat just behind her at a musical comedy. She was with her husband. They looked very prosperous. They seemed to be comradely enough. Mostly I saw only the back of her head; once, her full profile; and then at last she turned half around in her seat, and saw me. I don't know what I did. I think I smiled, half rose to my feet, and lifted my hand as if to take off a hat—which of course I didn't have on. She nodded, and smiled brightly; but her eyes had that expression of praying that I have so often mentioned.

It was long since I had thought of her for more than a few minutes at a time. But now my heart began to beat furiously and all my sleeping love for her waked in my heart.

And now she was telling her husband who was sitting just behind them.

I went out after the act, intending to stay out. But Fulton followed so quickly that he caught me just as I was leaving the theater. "Hello, Archie," he said.

"Hello, John. How are you all?"

"Pretty well," he said; "and you?"

"Pretty well. Cartridges still looking up?"

"Yes. We're doubling the capacity of the plant for the second time since the war started. Have a drink?"

We walked to the nearest saloon. "We heard that you were going to enlist."

"I did think of it, and then I got cold feet."

"Like hell you did!"

"Well, reasons against it were found for me. Reasons which I ought to have thought of for myself. Here's how."

"Sante!" said John. A moment later, "Going to Aiken?" he asked.

"Why, it depends."

There was an awkward silence.

"Lucy is very anxious," he then said, "to open our house again this winter."

"As a matter of fact," said I glibly, "I've more than half decided on Palm Beach."

A bell rang shrilly.

"Time to go back," he said.

"One moment, John. I'm not going back—of course. How is Lucy?"

"Oh, pretty well," he said stiffly; "I think she'll come through all right. Had a tough time for a while."

Upon that he hurried off to rejoin her, and I turned my face once more to the bar, and gave an order. I felt as if I had been through a terrible ordeal. I was all in.

From now on I heard more often of the Fultons, for they were leading a conspicuously gay life. Somebody had loaned them a house for six weeks, and by all accounts Lucy was making money fly.

I saw her in the distance three times. Twice to bow and exchange smiles. The other time she didn't see me. Seeing her meant two or three days of torture; then her image and desirability would begin to fade once more. But at least no other woman interested me in the least.

Presently they went to Aiken. A few days later I entrained for Palm Beach; but found that I could not stand the place or the pace for long periods of time, and fell into the habit of commuting with New York. It was the war, I think, which made me so restless. It seemed to me that the night had not been well slept, nor the most promising day well begun until I had read the headlines in the papers. My hot wish to fight as a soldier had cooled. More and more I wanted to be of service, but in some way which seemed to me more imaginative and intelligent. But I could not hit on the way. I must go to Paris, I thought, then surely the inspiration of helpfulness would come. But I could not very well go to Paris until the year of probation was up. If Lucy still cared—well, it would be easy enough for me to care. I knew now that her physical presence was sufficient to make me care—at any given moment. "Oh," I thought, "I can't lose. Either I'll go to Paris and be useful, or I'll begin a new life with the girl I love who loves me."

Late in February Harry Colemain joined me at Palm Beach. He had wintered at Aiken, and I had all the Aiken news from him. The place had never been so full—people who usually went abroad, etc., etc.—some delightful new people, about all the old standbys. It was not a sporting winter. Most of the men were feeling too poor for high stakes. Would I believe it, the golf course was crowded all day? The new hotel? It looked as if it was going to be a success. The clubs were having the biggest year in their history. The golf club would be able to reset the green with Bermuda grass. Some of the holes had come through the summer splendidly. Some were better than they ever had been, others were worse, etc., etc.

I asked him about this and about that. At last I said: "How are the Fultons?"

"Well, John comes and goes. He seems to have gotten back his health. The kids are fine . . . of course they are not what they were as a family. That's obvious. But Lucy seems to have come to her senses. She was very gay at first. Then she went round looking—well, she looked frightened. Lots of people noticed it. It was as if the doctor had told her she had lung trouble. She quit riding and dropped out of everything—except very quiet little dinners. Then she got very interested in her yard, and had experts over from Berckman's and did a lot of new planting . . ."

"But why did she look frightened? There wasn't anything the matter, was there?"

"Well, you know the trouble she made for John, wouldn't be his wife and all that? Well, he seems to have won her round to his way of looking at compromise—or she got more or less fond of him again. I don't know."

"I don't quite understand what you're driving at."

"You don't? Why, she's to have a baby. And everybody who knew there had been trouble says, 'Thank God for that.'"

My hands began to tremble so that I had to hide them under the table at which we were sitting.

"Bully, isn't it?" said Harry; fortunately he had turned his head to look at two very lovely young women who had strolled into the palm garden.

"Bully," I said.

"See those two, Archie?" he said in a guarded voice.

"Sure I see them."

"One of 'em's the famous Mrs. Paxton, who——"

"I know."

"Met her last autumn at——" He rose suddenly to his feet, and advanced to meet the two women. "Hello, there! Glad to see you."

Mrs. Paxton's cool demure face broke into a delighted smile.

"Why, Harry!" she exclaimed. "Miss Coles, let me introduce Mr. Colemain."

A moment later Harry had dragged me forward (literally) and I was being introduced. Miss Coles had very beautiful brown eyes, very white teeth, and a very deep dimple.

"Why," said Harry, "shouldn't all you good people dine with me?"

"Why not?" exclaimed Mrs. Paxton.

I started to say that I had a pressing engagement, discovered Miss Coles' exceedingly beautiful eyes lifted to mine, and saw upon her face an expression of the most alluring mockery, and so—"Why not?" said I.

We had a long and a merry dinner. I felt defiant of life, a man without responsibilities, who owed nothing and to whom nothing was owed.

After dinner we went strolling in the moonlight. Harry and Mrs. Paxton strolled in one direction, Miss Coles and I in another.

Miss Coles looked very beautiful, and she wore an expression of childlike proprietorship which was very becoming to her.

"Why are you Miss Coles?" I asked.

"I'm not—really." Her voice was little more than a whisper. "It's more fun to be Miss while the divorce is pending. I'm from California—nobody knows me here."

"And you're getting a divorce?"

She nodded slowly. And then with a flash of engaging frankness: "No, I'm not," she said; "he is."

"Oh!"

We strolled on in silence for a moment, and then as if by agreement came to a sudden halt and looked at each other.

Then she laughed softly, her head tilted back, and her round bare throat showing very white in the moonlight.

I threw my cigar into a bed of scarlet flowers.



XXXIV

I had passed through one of those stages of mental and spiritual depression during which a man does not even ask forgiveness of himself for any of his acts. If "Miss" Coles had wished me to marry her I would have done so; but the suggestion was never made by either of us. We parted, a little gloomily, but not unhappily, and before there was even a breath of scandal. It was just after she heard that her husband had secured his decree against her. That hard cold fact, that proof of things which no woman likes to have proved against her, seemed to sober her, you may say, and bring her up with a round turn. From now on she was going to be good, she said. No. I mustn't blame myself for anything. Everything was her fault. Everything always had been. I was ashamed too? She was glad of that. We'd always be good friends. Why, yes! From a friend, yes—if he was really as rich as all that. It would help her to look around, to get her bearings for the new and better life. It had been a frightfully expensive winter. It had been sweet of me to keep her rooms so full of flowers. She loved flowers. . . . Oh, nobody was hurt much, and nobody but us anyway.

Reform is a great thing. I learned from Harry that the very night I left Palm Beach she lost all the money I had "conveyed" to her at gambling, and only the other day she ran off with a man I know very well indeed—and a married man at that. I hope she won't talk too much in the first few weeks of her infatuation.

I reached New York feeling like the cad that I suppose I am. But it was pretty bitter hearing about Lucy, and the baby. At least I had kept faith longer than she had. I wondered if she once more loved her husband. Did I hope so? Yes, of course, in the same way that you express conventional horror when you hear of the latest famine in China.

Well, for better for worse, I was a free man again. Free—if it is free to be tormented by remorse, to feel cheap, futile, a waster—a thing of no account to anyone. If this is freedom it isn't good to be free. No man is happy who comes and goes as he pleases. There must be responsibilities to shoulder, and ties which bind him. If he lives for himself alone and for what, in the first glad bursts of unattachment he imagines to be pleasure, a day will come when the acid of self-contempt begins to corrode him.

I determined to go to France, via London for I needed clothes, and if I had a definite place it was to volunteer as a nurse in the American hospital. So I took out a passport, and engaged my passage.

A few days later, while crossing from Madison Avenue to Fifth, I found myself suddenly face to face with Hilda. She averted her head and tried to pass without being recognized, but I called her name, and she stopped short and turned back.

"It's just to ask how you are getting on, Hilda."

"I've just left Mrs. Fulton," she said; "I'm going home."

"Home?"

"England."

"You don't mean it! But why?"

"Oh," she said, "it's all gotten on my nerves—the war. I want to help. I've saved enough money to take me over, and to keep me if I have to look round a bit."

"I'm going over, too," I said.

"To help?"

"Oh, Hilda, I don't know. I hope so."

"Oh, I hope so, too, Mr. Mannering."

"But, Hilda, I want to talk to you. There may not be another chance. Where are you going now?"

"I'm staying with friends till I sail."

"Well, tell them you're going for a motor ride with another friend, and to dine somewhere along the Sound, will you?"

"Oh, I couldn't, not very well."

"Hilda," I said, "there are so many things I want to know, and only you can tell me about Stamford—about last winter—is it true that Mrs. Fulton is going——?"

"Yes, she is."

We were silent for a moment. Then she spoke. "Do you still——?"

"No, I don't think so, Hilda."

"Then I'll come—if you want me to, and think I ought. But if any of your friends——?"

"Do I have to tell you that you are one of the smartest looking people I know, Hilda? They'll think you are the Marchioness of Amber——" I glanced at her red hair, which did have amber lights in it, "and they'll envy. So do come. Will you?"

I borrowed a fine new racing runabout, and at six o'clock called for her at the address she had given me. She had gotten herself up with the most discreet good taste, and looked perfectly charming. She must have read the approval in my glance, for the color flew to her cheeks, and she looked triumphantly pleased.

"Going to be warm enough?"

"Yes, thank you."

"It's mighty nice of you to come."

"Oh, when you held out half an excuse to me, I couldn't help coming."

"What's your idea—for England? To be a nurse—or what?"

"A nurse, sir."

"I'm not sir, please. I'm going to be a nurse, too. I told you once that I'd always be your friend. And a friend isn't ever sir. So don't do it again."

"I'll not," she said.

Presently I began to ask her about the Fultons. At first her answers were short and unsatisfactory, but presently she began to warm to the topic.

Stamford? Oh, it had been awful. The house had never been divided in its allegiance, but nobody could have remained callous to Mrs. Fulton's grief. Meals were especially awful. Mr. and Mrs. Fulton tried to make conversation. Sometimes just when it seemed as if she was going to be a little cheerful—phist! her eyes would fill with tears, and she would bolt from the room. At such times Mr. Fulton's face was a study of pity for her and grief for them both. She was good to the children; no question about that. Sometimes she grabbed them into her arms and hugged them too hard. It was as if she was trying by sheer physical effort to give them back what she had taken away from them.

Sometimes one thought one heard little Hurry crying very softly and bitterly, and it would turn out to be Mrs. Fulton, locked in her bedroom. Pressure of business, success, kept Mr. Fulton going. Sometimes the two tried to talk things over. But it was an irritating, mosquitoey house. Always their voices ended by rising to the point where they could be heard all over the ramshackle paper-thin dwelling.

It stood on a lawn that sloped to tidal waters, very ugly and muddy at low tide. A long gangway reached to a float for boats; here the water was deep enough to dive into at half tide. Often at dawn, if the tide was right, and you happened to be awake, you might see Mr. Fulton descend the wet lawn in wrapper and bare feet for the swim that seemed to make up to him for his sleepless nights. You knew that he was in trouble by the way that he took to the water. It's always a little shivery at dawn, but he never hesitated. His wrapper was coming off by the time he reached the float—it was too far off to mind watching him—and into the water he'd go, head first, as quick as he could get in. It was almost as if he was afraid he'd die before he got to it. He was a fine swimmer, but oftenest he just lay about, sometimes with his face under. Then he looked like a drowned man. Sometimes he went in earlier than dawn. She had seen phosphorescence off the float in the black night, and heard the clean, quiet splash of his dive.

Once he stayed in so long that Mrs. Fulton called to him from her window, "Please come in, John, I'm frightened." Oh, yes, she wanted to be free from him, perhaps she still does, but not that way. If anything had happened to him, if he had taken his life, for instance, one imagined that in the first agonies of remorse she would have taken hers too.

It must have been terrible for her—at first—never hearing from you, not knowing where you were, or what you were doing, whether you were sick or well. Of course she wanted you to be happy, but with her. It would have been a comfort to know that you were suffering as much as she was. And she couldn't know.

She had a calendar in her room. She kept tab on it of the days as they passed, beginning with the first day of the probationary year. She'd draw a line through each day—each day when she went to bed, and hoped that the day was really over. She had her bad, wicked, black, sleepless nights, too. You could always tell by how late she was in the morning. She had a child's happy faculty of being able to make up for lost sleep. Well, when the day seemed over she drew a line through it. One day the chambermaid came below stairs (it was the first we knew of it) and propounded a conundrum. "When is a day not a day?" No one could guess. So she said, "When Mrs. Fulton doesn't draw a line through it." So it seemed that the forty-ninth day of her probation had not been a passage of time. Time had stood still. Why? Well, in the afternoon Mrs. Fulton had gone as crew with a young gentleman who owned a knockabout, and they had got wet to the skin, and had won a leg on some pennant or other after a close, well-sailed race. Mrs. Fulton had come home about dark, drenched, blooming, buoyant, and chattering about the events of the afternoon. She had had her first heart-felt good time of the probationary year. For once, time had not dragged. Time had stood excitingly, exhilaratingly still. She had forgotten to scratch off the day.

Things went better after that. Twice a week, rain or shine, she was crew of the young gentleman's knockabout. Often they went for practice sails. Sometimes they took Jock and Hurry. In hot weather they wore bathing suits. The young gentleman? He was to be a Yale senior, come autumn. He rowed on the Yale crew. My! you should have seen his arms and legs—so strong and so brown, so becoming to his dark blue bathing suit. His hair was so sunburnt that it looked like molasses candy. He could stay in the water all day and fetch from the bottom anything that was thrown in for him. Sometimes he came to meals. He was very quiet and shy. He blushed a good deal. And there was a weight on his mind. He had a condition to make up—political economy. He could hold Jock and Hurry out at arm's length, one in each hand, but the weight on his mind was too much for him. Every time the Fultons mentioned it to him, he groaned. He was truly comical when he groaned. Toward autumn he began to get gloomy. Summer was over, college would open. No more sails; no more Mrs. Fulton. Below stairs one knew that he was in love with Mrs. Fulton. How? Well, when one let him out at the front door, he always drew in a sigh that he held all the way to the front gate. One waited to hear him let it out. It would have blown out a gas jet across a good-sized room. There were other ways of telling. And since the forty-ninth day that was not a day, no one had heard Mrs. Fulton crying.

He came to say good-by. One never knew just what happened. They were in the front hall. Suddenly the front door must have opened. Fulton must have come in, for suddenly one heard his laugh. It was the strangest laugh in the world, full of joy, full of laughter, and full of scorn.

He saw the young gentleman to the front gate. He clapped the young gentleman on the back, and said (the parlor maid had heard); "Don't worry! It's all right! Don't make a mountain out of a mole-hill!" and then in a different voice, "Bless you, my son!"

Then he had come back to the house still laughing, and one heard him shouting, "Where are you, Lucy? Come here! The game's up now! You must see that for yourself! Don't be a goat!"

Did she see for herself? Oh, yes. She hadn't loved the young gentleman, not really. She had liked him enough to get over you being a life and death matter to her. That was all. She had liked him enough to let him kiss her at parting. That must have been what Mr. Fulton had caught them at.

"But, Hilda," I interrupted, "why didn't he tell me that it was all over, when I saw him in New York—just before Christmas?"

"Well, they couldn't know how you felt, could they? Maybe he wanted you to have your full year. Maybe he thought you'd fall down as she had, and that she'd hear of it and that it would be a lesson to her. How should I know?"

She told me more. The very night of the young gentleman's departure, late, a telegram had come to Mr. Fulton. She, Hilda, had gone down to the front door, signed for the telegram, and carried it to Mr. Fulton's room. He did not answer to her first light knock; nor to a first or second loud knock. She pushed the door open. The room was full of moonlight. Mr. Fulton's bed was empty. It had not been slept in.

Hilda tiptoed to the end of the corridor, laid the telegram on the floor in front of Mrs. Fulton's door, knocked very firmly, and the moment she heard someone stirring within, turned upon her heel and fled.

So much for the average strength of those grand passions upon which so many marriages are wrecked!

"Are they happy now, Hilda—the way they used to be?"

Oh no, not happy, fairly contented. She would never love him the way she used to. Her fantastics [Transcriber's note: fantasies?] had taken the beauty plumb out of their lives. But something remained. A loving husband, an unloving, but naturally kind, good-natured and affectionate wife, trying to do her duty by the two children that were and the one that was to be.

"Oh, Mr. Mannering," said Hilda; "you mustn't blame yourself too much. If it hadn't been you, it would have been someone else. I didn't think so, but now I do. And he might not have been a gentleman."



XXXV

We had dinner on the terrace of the Tamerlane Inn, overlooking the Sound.

"But, Hilda," I was arguing, toward coffee, "we might have gone on caring forever—if we hadn't been separated. Propinquity feeds love; absence starves it."

"Love? Indeed it doesn't. Fancy? Yes."

She looked straight in my eyes.

"Hilda," I said, "you—you don't still—that way—about me?"

"Don't I?" she said slowly. "Why else would I lie awake to hear Mr. Fulton go swimming? Why else would I be wanting to go with the Red Cross to the front where the bullets are?"

"But you told me in Aiken that you—that you despised me."

"It would be a poor love," she said, "that couldn't live down a little contempt that had jealousy for its father and mother."

We continued to look at each other while the waiter brought and served the coffee. Then I said: "Hilda, I know one thing. What you've got to give ought not to go begging."

Her eyes part-way filled, but she gave her shoulders a valiant little shrug. Then, with a sudden strong emotion, and a thrill in her voice: "That's for you to say," she said.

"Do you mean that?"

"You had only to ask," she said; "ever."

I was deeply moved, and a conviction that for me there might still be something true and fine raced into my mind. And was followed by a whole host of gentle and unselfish and pitying thoughts, as to a tree at evening flocks of starlings come to roost.

"Hilda," I said, "if there is no power of loving in me, but only of fancying, still you have said that fancy feeds on propinquity. I have no right to say that I love you; no right to promise that I ever will. It's not your sweet pretty face that's moving me now. It's your power of loving—your power of loving me—your constancy—your trust—your courage in saying that these things shall not go begging—if I say they shall not. What I thought another had, what I thought I had, only you have. I dare not make promises. I dare not boast. But caring the way you care, if you think you can make anything out of me—say so."

She thought for a while, her eyes lowered, her lips parted in a peaceful sort of smile. Then she said; "It'll be good to have heard all that."

"It'll be better to have tried," I said.

"Not if you don't want me at all."

"But I do."

"Well," she said, looking up now, and a valiant ring in her sweet English voice: "If I wanted to say no, I couldn't. If I thought I ought to say no, I wouldn't. But I don't think I ought to. I think when the Lord God put what's in my heart in it, he meant for there to be something for me at the end of torment. So I say yes. For I've knelt on cold floors and hot floors to pray God that some day I could give myself to the man I love."

"And that shall be when you are married to him. . . . Don't look so frightened . . . it's got to be like that. Give a man a chance to make good. Do you think I'm such a fool as to throw away the love you've got for me? . . . We'll try this nursing game together, but not at the front, where the bullets are. I want us to live and to have our chance, you yours and I mine—taken together. Don't you see that I am speaking with every ounce of sincerity there is in me? I couldn't take such love as yours and not make good. That's in my heart. I couldn't, I couldn't. Isn't it in my face, too—isn't it?"

She did not answer at first, only looked in my face, her eyes flooding.

Then she said: "I don't see your face any more—only a kind of glory."

We ran slowly back to the city, slowly, and very peacefully. Now and again we talked a little, and argued a little.

"But," she said, "it will ruin your life if you marry a servant. So please, please don't! What would I do when I knew I'd hurt you?"

"There's no life to ruin, Hilda. What's been is just dust and ashes. You and I—we'll live for each other, and we'll try to help where help's needed. It will be fine for me to have helped, after all these foolish years—when I did only harm, and only half-hearted harm at that."

"It would be so different if only—if only——"

"If only I loved you?" I freed one hand from the steering wheel and put my arm around her. "But you feel tenderness?"

"I feel tenderness."

I pressed her close to my side.

"Was I ever unkind to you?"

"Never."

"Tenderness and kindness—that's something to go on."

She turned her head and kissed the hand that pressed against her shoulder. It was the slightest, gentlest, softest kiss, and a lump rose in my throat.

"If the angels could see me now," she said, "and know what was in my heart, they'd die of envy."

"And what's in your heart, Hilda?"

"You," she said.

The house where she was staying had an inner and an outer door. In the obscurity between these two we stood for a little while at parting, and kissed each other.

And as soon thereafter as could be, we were quietly married.

When I began to put down this story about the Fultons, I was still head over heels in love with Lucy, and I did not know how it was all going to end. And I don't know now. I began to write before Hilda became a definite figure in my life, to write in order to pass the time. And so I wrote until I realized that I had failed Lucy, and began to hope that she had failed me. Even then I expected to live the same old fleeting life of a butterfly bachelor to the end. Then I began to think that out of the thing I was writing, there was beginning to rise a kind of lesson, a preachment. It seemed to me that I was going through an experience that others would do well to know about.

Can a man live down the shame of scorching another man's happiness, after finding that the cause which drove him to do so, has lost its power to impel? I am not ashamed of having loved Lucy; I am ashamed of not having loved her enough. Thank God no greater harm was done to Fulton than was done. He has his Lucy, what there is left of her, his children, and a greater financial success than ever he hoped for. And he has had his triumph over me. He must have told her, in some of his bad moments, just what kind of a man I was—a waster, a male flirt, a man who had the impulse to raise the devil, but lacked the courage, and the character. And she knows now, after her short period of over-powering love for me and belief in me, that he was right. That is his triumph. I think he is too good a gentleman to rub it in.

My father and mother accepted Hilda with the sweetest good grace. She was not what they had hoped for; she was not what they had expected or feared. To my father it seemed, he was good enough to say so, that I had played the man. And he could not, he said, help loving any woman, whether she came from the roof of the world or its cellar, who had loved his son so faithfully and so long.

And the rings on Hilda's finger, and the pride in her new estate, and the pretty clothes that my mother helped her to buy worked a wondrous change in her. People couldn't help looking after her, she was so pretty, so graceful, and had so much faith and worship in her eyes.

We had put off our date of sailing a little, so that my friends might see that I was not ashamed of what I had done, but that I gloried in it, and that my parents showed a face of approval to the world. Those days of postponement were, I think, the best days of my life. A treasure had been given into my guardianship, and it seemed to me that I was going to be worthy of the trust.

Then, the very day before we were to sail, I met Lucy face to face in the street; and began to tremble a little. She held out both hands; she was always so natural and frank.

"So you've done it!" she exclaimed; "I think she's sweet, and so good-looking."

Then the smile faded from her lips, and she made the praying eyes at me, and I knew that I had only to be with her a moment to love her.

"Of course," she said, "it's all right our meeting and speaking now."

"Of course," I said, and they sounded lame words, lamely spoken.

"Do you believe in post-mortems?" she asked.

"No," I said, "but I like them."

"We—Oh, it's lucky we had parents and guardians, isn't it? When did you come to the end of your rope?"

I could only shake my head.

"Was it when you—heard about me?"

"I like post-mortems, but I don't approve of them."

So she abandoned the post-mortem.

"Tell me," she said, "why you married her? Was she an old flame?"

"No, Lucy—a new flame."

"I hope you will be very, very happy," she said.

"But you doubt it."

"Why shouldn't I?"

"Why indeed?"

"Listen. It—it wasn't any of it your fault. I tried to make you like me, and succeeded, and the harm was done—but now we've settled down to a harmless and quiet old age."

Had we? Oh, why had that pansy face and those great praying eyes come into my life again? Would it be always so when we met, the heart leaping, and the brain swimming, and the body shaken with tenderness and desire?

I spoke no word of betrayal, but so standing a little to one side of the passing crowds on the sidewalk, looking into that upturned face, seeing those eyes so sad and prayerful above the smiling mouth, I betrayed my wife for the first time, and Lucy read me like a primer, and she knew that I loved her—either still or once more. Of her own emotions her face told me nothing.

"I hear," she said, "that you are both to volunteer as nurses. I think that is splendid."

"If only I can live so as to help someone, Lucy. I am going to try very hard. And I am going to try very hard to be a good husband, for my wife has showered me with noble and priceless gifts."

After a moment: "I hope," said Lucy, "you're going on the American line. The Germans seem to be torpedoing everything else in sight."

"We're sailing on the Lusitania."

"When?"

"Tomorrow."

"They couldn't do anything to her. She's too big. You'll have some distinguished company."

"Really! I haven't seen the passenger list."

"Why, there's Justus Miles Forman, and Charles Frohman, and Alfred Vanderbilt and I don't know who all. . . . Well," she held out her hand suddenly; "I've chores to do, thousands of them, so good luck to you, and good-by, if I don't see you again."

THE END