Not so the stage director, whose language in describing the effect it had upon him would have done credit to a gunman under the influence of cheap brandy and fright. The rehearsal, which had commenced at eight o'clock, had been hung up for a time considerable enough to allow him to give vent to his sentiments. The pause enabled Mosely, squatting frog-wise in the middle of the orchestra stalls, to surround himself with several women whose gigantic proportions were horribly exposed to the eye. The rumble of his voice and the high squeals of their laughter clashed with the sounds of the vitriolic argument on the stage, and the noises of a bored band, in which an oboe was giving a remarkable imitation of a gobbling turkey cock, and a cornet of a man blowing his nose. The leader of the band was pacing up and down the musicians' room, saying to himself: "Zis is ze last timer. Zis is ze last timer," well knowing that it wasn't. The poor devil had a wife and children to feed.

Bevies of weary and spirit-broken chorus girls in costume were sprawling on the chairs in the lower boxes, some sleeping, some too tired to sleep, and some eating ravenously from paper bags. Chorus men and costumers, wig makers and lyric writers, authors and friends of the company, sat about singly and in pairs in the orchestra seats. They were mostly bored so far beyond mere impatience by all this super-inefficiency and chaos as to have arrived at a state of intellectual coma. The various men out of whose brains had originally come the book and lyrics no longer hated each other and themselves; they lusted for the blood of the stage director or saw gorgeous mental pictures of a little fat oozy corpse surrounded by the gleeful faces of the army of people who had been impotent to protest against the lash of his whip, the impertinence of his tongue or the gross dishonesty of his methods.

One other man in addition to the raucous, self-advertising stage director, Jackrack, commonly called "Jack-in-office," showed distinct signs of life—a short, overdressed, perky person with piano fingers and baldish head much too big for his body, who flitted about among the chorus girls, followed by a pale, drab woman with pins, and touched their dresses and sniggered and made remarks with a certain touch of literary excellence in a slightly guttural voice. This was Poppy Shemalitz, the frock expert, the man milliner of the firm, who was required to make bricks out of straw, or as he frequently said to the friends of his "bosom," "make fifteen dollars look like fifty." Self-preservation and a sense of humor encouraged him through the abusive days of a dog's life.

Sitting in the last row of the orchestra, wearing the expression of interest and astonishment of a man who had fallen suddenly into another world, was Martin. He had been there since eight o'clock. For over six hours he had watched banality emerge from chaos and had listened to the blasphemy and insults of Jackrack. He would have continued to watch and listen until daylight peered upbraidingly through the chinks in the exit doors but for the sudden appearance of Susie Capper, dressed for the street.

"Hello, Tootles! But you're not through, are you?"

"Absobloominlootely," she said emphatically.

"I thought you said your best bit was in the second act?"

"'Was' is right. Come on outer here. I can't stand the place a minute longer. It'll give me apoplexy."

Martin followed her into the foyer. The tragic rage on the girl's little, pretty, usually good-natured face worried him. He knew that she had looked forward to this production to make her name on Broadway.

"My dear Tootles, what's happened?"

She turned to him and clutched his arm. Tears welled up into her eyes, and her red lips began to tremble. "What did I look like?" she demanded.

"Splendid!"

"Didn't I get every ounce of comedy out of my two scenes in Act One?"

"Every ounce."

"I know I did. Even the stage hands laughed, and if you can do that there's no argument. And didn't my number go over fine? Wasn't it the best thing in the act? I don't care what you say. I know it was. Even the orchestra wanted it over again."

"But it was," said Martin, "and I heard one of the authors say that it would be the hit of the piece."

"Oh, Martin, I've been sweating blood for this chance for five years, and I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to get it. I wish I was dead." She put her arms against the wall and her face down on her arms and burst into an agony of tears.

Martin was moved. This plucky, struggling, hardworking atom of a remorseless world deserved a little luck for a change. Hitherto it had eluded her eager hands, although she had paid for it in advance with something more than blood and energy. "Dear old Tootles," he said, "what's happened? Try and tell me what's happened? I don't understand."

"You don't understand, because you don't know the tricks of this rotten theater. For eleven weeks I've been rehearsing. For eleven weeks—time enough to produce a couple of Shakespeare's bally plays in Latin,—I've put up with the brow-beating of that mad dog Jackrack. For eleven weeks, without touching one dirty little Mosely cent, I've worked at my part and numbers, morning, noon and night; and now, on the edge of production, he cuts me out and puts in a simpering cow with a fifteen-thousand-dollar necklace and a snapping little Pekinese to oblige one of his angels, and I'm reduced to the chorus. I wish I was dead, I tell you—I wish I was dead and buried and at peace. I wish I could creep home and get into bed and never see another day of this cruel life. Oh, I'm just whipped and broke and out. Take me away, take me away, Martin. I'm through."

Martin put his arm round the slight, shaking form, led her to one of the doors and out into a narrow passage that ran up into the deserted street. To have gone down into the stalls and hit that oily martinet in the mouth would have been to lay himself open to a charge of cruelty to animals. He was so puny and fat and soft. Poor little Tootles, who had had a tardy and elusive recognition torn from her grasp! It was a tragedy.

It was not much more than a stone's-throw from the theater to the rabbit warren in West Forty-sixth Street, but Martin gave a shout at a prowling taxi. Not even policemen and newspaper boys and street cleaners must see this girl as she was then, in a collapse of smashed hopes, sobbing dreadfully, completely broken down. It wasn't fair. In all that city of courageous under-dogs and fate-fighters, there was not one who pretended to careless contentment with a chin so high as Tootles. He half carried her into the cab, trying with a queer blundering sympathy to soothe and quiet her. And he had almost succeeded by the time they reached the brownstone house of sitters, bedrooms and baths, gas stoves, cubby-holes, the persistent reek of onions, cigarettes and hot cheese. The hysteria of the artistic temperament, or the natural exaggeration of an artificial life, had worn itself out for the time being. Rather pathetic little sobs had taken its place, it was with a face streaked with the black stuff from her eyelashes that Tootles turned quickly to Martin at the foot of the narrow, dirty staircase.

"Let's go up quiet," she said. "If any of the others are about, I don't want 'em to know tonight. See?"

"I see," said Martin.

And it was good to watch the way in which she took hold of herself with a grip of iron, scrubbed her face with his handkerchief, dabbed it thickly with powder from a small silver box, threw back her head and went up two stairs at a time. On the second floor there was a cackle of laughter, but doors were shut. On the third all was quiet. But on the fourth the tall, thin, Raphael-headed man was drunk again, arguing thickly in the usual cloud of smoke, which drifted sullenly into the passage through the open door.

With deft fingers Tootles used her latchkey, and they slipped into the apartment like thieves. And then Martin took the pins out of her little once-white hat, drew her coat off, picked her up as if she were a child and put her on the sofa.

"There you are, Tootles," he said, without aggressive cheerfulness, but still cheerful. "You lie there, young 'un, and I'll get you something to eat. It's nearly a day since you saw food."

And after a little while, humanized by the honest kindness of this obvious man, she sat up and leaned on an elbow and watched him through the gap in the curtains that hid her domestic arrangements. He was scrambling some eggs. He had made a pile of chicken sandwiches and laid the table. He had put some flowers that he had brought for her earlier in the evening in the middle of it, stuck into an empty milk bottle. In her excitement and joy about the play, she had forgotten to put them in water. They were distinctly sad.

"Me word!" she said to herself, through the aftermath of her emotion. "That's some boy. Gee, that's some good boy." Even her thoughts were conducted in a mixture of Brixton and Broadway.

"Now, then," he said, "all ready, marm," and put his handiwork in what he hoped was an appetizing manner on the table. The hot eggs were on a cold plate, but did that really matter?

Not to Tootles, who was glad to get anything, anyhow. That room was the Ritz Hotel in comparison with the slatterly tenement in which she had won through the first unsoaped years of a sordid life. And Martin—well, Martin was something out of a fairy tale.

Between them they made a clean sweep of everything, falling back finally on a huge round box of candies contributed the previous day by Martin.

They made short work of several bottles of beer, also contributed by Martin. He knew that Tootles was not paid a penny during rehearsals. She laughed several times and cracked one or two feeble jokes—poor little soul with the swollen eyes and powder-dabbed face! Her bobbed hair glistened under the light like the dome of the Palace of Cooch Behar under the Indian sun.

"Boy," she said presently, putting her hand on his knees and closing her tired eyes, "where's that magic carpet? If I could sit on it with you and be taken to where the air's clean and the trees are whisperin' and all the young things hoppin' about—I'd give twenty-five years of me life, s'elp me Bob, I would."

"Would you, Tootles?" A sudden thought struck Martin. Make use of that house in the country, make use of it, lying idle and neglected!

"Oh," she said, "to get away from all this for a bit—to shake Broadway and grease paint and slang and electric light, if only for a week. I'm fed up, boy. I'm all out, like an empty gasoline tin. I want to see something clean and sweet."

Martin had made up his mind. Look at that poor little bruised soul, as much in need of water as those sad flowers in the milk bottle. "Tootles," he said, "pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and be ready for me in the morning."

"What d'yer mean, boy?"

"What I say. At eleven o'clock to-morrow—to-day, I'll have a car here and drive you away to woods and birds and all clean things. I'll give you a holiday in a big cathedral, and you shall lie and listen to God's own choir."

"Go on—ye're pullin' me leg!"

She waved her hand to stop him. It was all too good to joke about.

"No, I'm not. I've got a house away in the country. It was my father's. We shall both be proud to welcome you there, Tootles."

She sprang up, put her hands on his face and tilted it back and looked into his eyes. It was true! It was true! She saw it there. And she kissed him and gave a great sobbing sigh and went into her bedroom and began to undress. Was there anything like life, after all?

Martin cleared the table and drew the curtains over the domestic arrangements. He didn't like domestic arrangements. Then he sat down and lighted a cigarette. His head was all blurred with sleep.

And presently a tired voice, called "Boy!" and he went in. The all-too-golden head was deep into the pillow and long lashes made fans on that powdered face.

"Where did you pinch the magic carpet?" she asked, and smiled, and fell into sleep as a stone disappears into water.

As Martin drew the clothes over her thinly clad shoulder, something touched him. It was like a tap on the heart. Before he knew what he was doing, he had turned out the light, gone into the sitting room, the passage, down the stairs and into the silent street. At top speed he ran into Sixth Avenue, yelled to a cab that was slipping along the trolley lines and told the driver to go to East Sixty-seventh Street for all that he was worth.

Joan wanted him.

Joan!

Joan heard the cab drive up and stop, heard Martin sing out "That's all right," open and shut the front door and mount the stairs; heard him go quickly to her room and knock.

She went out and called "Marty, Marty," and stood on the threshold of his dressing room, smiling a welcome. She was glad, beyond words glad, and surprised. There had seemed to be no chance of seeing him that morning.

Martin came along the passage with his characteristic light tread and drew up short. He looked anxious.

"You wanted me?" he said.

And Joan held out her hand. "I did and do, Marty. But how did you guess?"

"I didn't guess; I knew." And he held her hand nervously.

She looked younger and sweeter than ever in her blue silk dressing gown and shorter in her heelless slippers. What a kid she was, after all, he thought.

"How amazing!" she said. "I wonder how?"

He shook his head. "I dunno—just as I did the first time, when I tore through the woods and found you on the hill."

"Isn't that wonderful! Do you suppose I shall always be able to get you when I want you very much?"

"Yes, always."

"Why?"

She had gone back into the dressing room. The light was on her face. Her usual expression of elfish impertinence was not there. She was the girl of the stolen meetings once more, the girl whose eyes reflected the open beauty of what Martin had called the big cathedral. For all that, she was the girl who had hurt him to the soul, shown him her door, played that trick upon him at the Ritz and sent him adrift full of the spirit of "Who cares?" which was her fetish. It was in his heart to say: "Because I adore you! Because I am so much yours that you have only to think my name for me to hear it across the world as if you had shouted it through a giant megaphone! Because whatever I do and whatever you do, I shall love you!" But she had hurt him twice. She had cut him to the very core. He couldn't forget. He was too proud to lay himself open to yet another of her laughing snubs.

So he shook his head again. "I dunno," he said. "It's like that. It's something that can't be explained."

She sat on the arm of the chair with her hands round a knee. A little of her pink ankle showed. The pipe that she had dropped when his voice had come up from the street lay on the floor.

His answer had disappointed her; she didn't quite know why. The old Marty would have been franker and more spontaneous. The old Marty might have made her laugh with his boyish ingenuousness, but he would have warmed her and made her feel delightfully vain. Could it be that she was responsible for this new Marty? Was Alice too terribly right when she had talked about armor turning into broadcloth because of her selfish desire to remain a kid a little longer? She was afraid to ask him where he was when he had felt that she wanted him, and she hated herself for that.

There was a short silence.

These two young things had lost the complete confidence that had been theirs before they had come to that great town. What a pity!

"Well," he asked, standing straight like a man ready to take orders, "why did you call?"

And then an overwhelming shyness seized her. It had seemed easy enough in thought to tell Martin that she was ready to cross the bridge and be, as Alice had called it, honest, and as Gilbert had said, to play the game. But it was far from easy when he stood in the middle of the room in the glare of the light, with something all about him that froze her words and made her self-conscious and timid. And yet a clear, unmistakable voice urged her to have courage and make her confession, say that she was sorry for having been a feather-brained little fool and ask him to forgive—to win him back, if—if she hadn't already lost him.

But she blundered into an answer and spoke flippantly from nervousness. "Because it's rather soon to become a grass widow, and I want you to be seen with me somewhere to-morrow."

That was all, then. She was only amusing herself. It was a case of "Horse, horse, play with me!"—the other horses being otherwise occupied. She wasn't serious. He needn't have come. "I can't," he said. "I'm sorry, but I'm going out of town."

She saw him look at the clock on the mantelshelf and crinkle up his forehead. Day must be stretching itself somewhere. She got up, quickly. How could she say it? She was losing him.

"Are you angry with me, Marty?" she asked, trying to fumble her way to honesty.

"No, Joan. But it's very late. You ought to be in bed."

"Didn't you think that I should miss you while you've been away?"

"No, Joan. Look. It's half-past two. A kid like you ought to have been asleep hours ago." He went over to the door.

"I'm not a kid—I'm not" she burst out.

He was too tired to be surprised. He had not forgotten how she had hidden behind her youth. He couldn't understand her mood. "I must get to bed," he said, "if you don't mind. I must be up pretty early. Run along, Joany."

He couldn't have hurt her more awfully whatever he had said. To be treated like a naughty girl! But it served her right, and she knew it. Her plea had come back like a boomerang.

"Well, have a good time," she said, with her chin high. "I shall see you again some day, I suppose," and she went out.

It was no use. She had lost him—she had lost him, just as she had discovered that she wanted him. There was a girl with a white face and red lips and hair that came out of a bottle. Martin watched her go and shut the door, and stood with his hands over his face.



VIII

Mr. and Mrs. George Harley had made an appointment to meet at half-past eleven sharp on the doorstep of the little house in Sixty-seventh Street. Business had interrupted their honeymoon and brought them unexpectedly to New York. Harley had come by subway from Wall Street to the Grand Central and taken a taxicab. It was twelve o'clock before he arrived. Nevertheless he wore a smile of placid ease of mind. His little wife had only to walk from the Plaza, it was true, but he knew, although a newly married man, that to be half an hour late was to be ten minutes early.

At exactly five minutes past twelve he saw her turn off the Avenue, and as he strolled along to meet her, charmed and delighted by her daintiness, proud and happy at his possession of her, he did a thing that all wise and tactful husbands do—he forced back an irresistible desire to be humorous at her expense and so won an entry of approval from the Recording Angel.

If they had both been punctual they would have seen Martin go off in his car to drive the girl who had had no luck to the trees and the wild flowers and the good green earth.

Joan's mother, all agog to see the young couple who had taken life into their own hands with the sublime faith of youth, had made it her first duty to call, however awkward and unusual the hour. Her choice of hats in which to do so had been a matter of the utmost importance.

They were told that Mr. Gray had gone out of town, that Mrs. Gray was not yet awake and followed the butler upstairs to the drawing-room with a distinct sense of disappointment. The room still quivered under the emotion of Gilbert Palgrave.

Rather awkwardly they waited to be alone. Butlers always appear to resent the untimely visitation of relations. Sunlight poured in through the windows. It was a gorgeous morning.

"Well," said George Harley, "I've seen my brokers and can do nothing more to-day. Let the child have her sleep out. I'm just as happy to be here with you, Lil, as anywhere else." And he bent over his wife as if he were her lover, as indeed he was, and kissed her pretty ear. His clothes were very new and his collar the shade of an inch too high for comfort and his patent leather shoes something on the tight side, but the spirits of the great lovers had welcomed him and were unafraid.

He won a most affectionate and grateful smile from the neat little lady whose brown hair was honestly tinged with white, and whose unlined face was innocent of make-up. Mrs. Harley had not yet recovered from her astonishment at having been swept to the altar after fifteen years of widowhood by this most simple and admirable man. Even then she was not quite sure that she was not dreaming all this. She patted his big hand and would have put her head against his chest if the brim of her hat had permitted her to do so.

"That's very sweet of you, Geordie," she said. "How good you are to me."

He echoed the word "Good!" and laughed and waved his hands. It was the gesture of a man whose choice of ready words was not large enough to describe all that he longed and tried to be to her. And then he stood back with his long legs wide apart and his large hands thrust into his pockets and his rather untidy gray head stuck on one side and studied her as if she were a picture in a gallery. He looked like a great big faithful St. Bernard dog.

Mrs. Harley didn't think so. He seemed to her to be the boy of whom she had dreamed in her first half-budding dreams and who had gone wandering and come under the hand of Time, but remained a boy in his heart. She was glad that she had made him change his tie. She loved those deep cuts in his face.

"Very well, then," she said. "Although it is twelve o'clock I'll let her sleep another half an hour." And then she stopped with a little cry of dismay, "Let her! ... I'm forgetting that it's no longer in my power to say what she's to do or not to do!"

"How's that?"

"She's no longer the young, big-eyed, watchful child who startled us by saying uncanny things. She's no longer the slip of a thing that I left with her grandparents, with her wistful eyes on the horizon. She's a married woman, Geordie, with a house of her own, and it isn't for me to 'let' her do anything or tell her or even ask her. She can do what she likes now. I've lost her, Geordie."

"Why, how's that, Lil?" There was surprise as well as sympathy in Harley's voice. He had only known other people's children.

She went on quickly, with a queer touch of emotion. "The inevitable change has come before I've had time to realize it. It's a shock. It takes my breath away. I feel as if I had been set adrift from an anchor. Instead of being my little girl she's my daughter now. I'm no longer 'mammy.' I'm mother. Isn't it,—isn't it wonderful? It's like standing under a mountain that's always seemed to be a little hill miles and miles away. From now on I shall be the one to be told to do things, I shall be the child to be kept in order. It's a queer moment in the life of a mother, Geordie."

She laughed, but she didn't catch her tears before they were halfway down her cheeks. "I'm an old lady, my dear."

Harley gave one of his hearty, incredulous laughs. "You, old. You're one of the everlasting young ones, you are, Lil," and he stood and beamed with love and admiration.

"But I've got you, Geordie," she added, and her surprised heart that had suddenly felt so empty warmed again and was soothed when he took her hand eagerly and pressed it to his lips.

Grandfather and Grandmother Ludlow, Joan and many others who had formed the habit of believing that Christopher Ludlow's widow would remain true to his memory, failed utterly to understand the reason for her sudden breakaway from a settled and steady routine, to plunge into belated matrimony with a self-made man of fifty-five who seemed to them to be not only devoid of all attractiveness but bourgeois and rather ridiculous. But why? A little sympathy, a little knowledge of human nature,—that's all that was necessary to make this romance understandable. Because it was romance, in the best sense of that much abused word. It was not the romance defined in the dictionary as an action or adventure of an unusual or wonderful character, soaring beyond the limits of fact and real life and often of probability, but the result of loneliness and middle age, and of two hearts starving for love and the expression of love, for sympathy, companionship and the natural desire for something that would feed vanity, which, if it is permitted to die, is replaced by bitterness and a very warped point of view.

Christopher Ludlow, a wild, harum-scarum fellow who had risked his life many times during his hunting trips, came to his death in a prosaic street accident. For fifteen years his widow, then twenty-five, lived in the country with his parents and his little daughter. She was at their mercy, because Christopher had left no money. He had been dependent on an allowance from his father. Either she lived with them and bore cheerfully and tactfully with their increasing crotchetiness and impatience of old age, or left them to eke out a purposely small income in a second-rate hotel or a six by six apartment barely on the edge of the map. A timid woman, all for peace, without the grit and courage that goes with self-direction, she pursued the easy policy of least resistance, sacrificed her youth on the altar of Comfort and dwindled with only a few secret pangs into middle age. From time to time, with Joan, she left the safe waters of Lethe and put an almost frightened foot into the swift main stream. As time went on and Spring went out of her and Summer ripened to maturity, she was more and more glad to return from these brief excursions to the quiet country and the safe monotonous round. Then the day came when her no longer little girl came finally out of school, urgent and rebellious, kicking against the pricks, electrically alive and eager, autocrat and individualist rolled into one. Catching something of this youthfulness and shocked to wake to a realization of her lost years, she made a frantic and despairing effort to grasp at the tail-end of Summer and with a daughter far more worldly than herself escaped as frequently as possible into town to taste the pleasures that she had almost forgotten, and revive under the influence of the theater and the roar of life. It was during one of these excursions, while Joan was lunching with Alice Palgrave, that she caught an arrow shot at random by that mischievous little devil Cupid, which landed plum in the middle of a heart that had been placid so long. In getting out of a taxicab she had slipped and fallen, was raised deferentially to her feet, and looked up to catch the lonely and bewildered eyes of George Harley. They were outside their mutual hotel. What more natural and courteous than that he should escort her into the hotel with many expressions of anxious regret, ascend with her in the elevator to their mutual floor, linger with her for a polite few minutes in the sunlight that poured through the passage windows and leave her to hurry finally to her room thrilling under the recollection of two admiring eyes and a lingering handshake? She, even she, then, at her time of life, plump and partridge-like as she was, could inspire the interest and approval of a man. It was wonderful. It was absurd. It was ... altogether too good to be true! Later, after she had spent a half-amused, half-wistful quarter of an hour in front of her glass, seeing inescapable white hairs and an irremediable double chin, she had gone down to the dining room for lunch. All the tables being occupied, what more natural or disconcerting than for this modern Raleigh to rise and rather clumsily and eagerly beg that she would share the one just allotted to himself.

To the elderly man, whose nose had been too close to the grindstone to permit of dalliance, and who now, monied and retired, found himself terribly alone in the pale sun of St. Martin's Summer, and to the little charming woman of forty, led back to life by an ardent and impetuous girl, this quite ordinary everyday incident, which seemed to them to be touched by romance, came at a moment when both were pathetically receptive. They arranged to meet again, they met again, and one fine afternoon while Joan was at a theater with Alice, he spoke and she listened. It was in the more than usually hotel-like drawing-room of their mutual hotel. People were having tea, and the band was playing. There was a jangle of voices, the jingle of a musical comedy, the movement of waiters. Under the leaves of a tame palm which once had known the gorgeous freedom of a semi-tropical forest he stumbled over a proposal, the honest, fearful, pulsating proposal of a man who conceived that he was trying hopelessly to hitch his wagon to a star, and she, tremulous, amazed, and on the verge of tears, accepted him. Hers presumably the dreadful ordeal of facing an incredulous daughter and two sarcastic parents-in-law and his of standing for judgment before them,—argument, discussion, satire, irony, abuse even,—a quiet and determined marriage and a new and beautiful life.

"What a delightful room," said Mrs. Harley. "It looks so comfortable for a drawing-room that it must have been furnished by a man."

"We'll have a house in town by October, around here, and I'll bet it won't be uncomfortable when you've finished with it."

The raucous shouts of men crying an "extra" took Harley quickly to the open window. He watched one scare-monger edge his way up one side of the street and another, whose voice was like the jagged edge of a rusty saw, bandy leg his way up the other side. "Sounds like big sea battle," he said, after listening carefully. "Six German warships sunk, five British. Horrible loss of life. But I may be wrong. These men do their best not to be quite understood. Only six German ships! I wish the whole fleet of those dirty dogs could be sunk to the bottom."

There was nothing neutral or blind-eyed about George Harley. He had followed all the moves that had forced the war upon the nations whose spineless and inefficient governments had so long been playing the policy of the ostrich. He had nothing but detestation for the vile and ruthless methods of the German war party and nation and nothing but contempt for the allied politicians who had made such methods possible. He had followed the course of the war with pain, anguish and bated breath, thrilling at the supreme bravery of the Belgians and the French, and the First Hundred Thousand, thanking God for the miracle that saved Paris from desecration, and paying honest tribute to the giant effort of the British to wipe out the stain of a scandalous and criminal unpreparedness. He had squirmed with humiliation at the attempts of the little, dreadful clever people of his own country,—professors, parsons, pacifists and pro-Germans,—to prove that it was the duty of the United States to stand aloof and unmoved in the face of a menace which affected herself in no less a degree than it affected the nations then fighting for their lives, and had watched with increasing alarm the fatuous complacency of Congress which continued to deceive itself into believing that a great stretch of mere water rendered the country immune from taking its honest part in its own war. "Oh, my God," he had said in his heart, as all clear-sighted Americans had been saying, "has commercialism eaten into our very vitals? Has the good red blood of the early pioneers turned to water? Are we without the nerve any longer to read the writing on the wall?" And the only times that his national pride had been able to raise its head beneath the weight of shame and foreboding were those when he passed the windows of Red Cross Depots and caught sight of a roomful of good and noble women feverishly at work on bandages; when he read of the keen and splendid training voluntarily undergone by the far-sighted men who were making Plattsburg the nucleus of an officers' training corps, when he was told how many of his young and red-blooded fellow-countrymen had taken up arms with the Canadian contingents or had slipped over to France as ambulance men. What would he not have given to be young again!

He heaved a great sigh and turned back to the precious little woman who had placed her life into his hands for love. The hoarse alarming voices receded into the distance, leaving their curious echo behind.

"What were we talking about?" he asked. "Oh, ah, yes. The house. Lil, during the few days that I have to be in the city, let's find the house, let's nose around and choose the roof under which you and I will spend all the rest of our honeymoon. What do you say, dear?"

"I'd love it, Geordie; I'd just love it. A little house, smaller than this, with windows that catch the sun, quite near the Park, so that we can toddle across and watch the children playing. Wouldn't that be nice? And now I think I'll ring for some one to show me Joan's room and creep in and suggest that she gets up."

But there was no need. The door opened, and Joan came in, with eyes like stars.



IX

Three o'clock that afternoon found the Harleys still in Martin's house, with Mrs. Harley fidgetting to get George out for a walk in order that she might enjoy an intimate, mother-talk with Joan, and Joan deliberately using all her gifts to keep him there in order to avoid it.

Lunch had been a simple enough affair as lunches go, lifted above the ordinary ruck of such meals by the 1906 Chateau Latour and the Courvoisier Cognac from the cellar carefully stocked by Martin's father. From the psychological side of it, however, nothing could well have been more complicated. George had not forgotten his reception by the Ludlows that day of his ever-to-be-remembered visit of inspection—the cold, satirical eyes of Grandmother, the freezing courtesy of Grandfather, and the silent, eloquent resentment of the girl who saw herself on the verge of desertion by the one person who made life worth living in intermittent spots. He was nervous and overanxious to appear to advantage. The young thoroughbred at the head of the table who had given him a swift all-embracing look, an enigmatical smile and a light laughing question as to whether he would like to be called "Father, papa, Uncle George or what" awed him. He couldn't help feeling like a clumsy piece of modern pottery in the presence of an exquisite specimen of porcelain. His hands and feet multiplied themselves, and his vocabulary seemed to contain no more than a dozen slang phrases. He was conscious of the fact that his collar was too high and his clothes a little too bold in pattern, and he was definitely certain for the first time in his life, that he had not yet discovered a barber who knew how to cut hair.

Overeager to emphasize her realization of the change in her relationship to Joan, overanxious to let it be seen at once that she was merely an affectionate and interested visitor and not a mother with a budget of suggestions and corrections and rearrangements, Mrs. Harley added to the complication. Usually the most natural woman in the world with a soft infectious laugh, a rather shrewd humor and a neat gift of comment, she assumed a metallic artificiality that distressed herself and surprised Joan. She babbled about absolutely nothing by the yard, talked over George's halting but gallant attempts to make things easy like any Clubwoman, and in an ultra-scrupulous endeavor to treat Joan as if she were a woman of the world, long emancipated from maternal apron strings, said things to her, inane, insincere things, that she would not have said to a complete stranger on the veranda of a summer hotel or the sun deck of a transatlantic liner. She hated herself and was terrified.

For two reasons this unexpected lunch was an ordeal so far as Joan was concerned. She remembered how antagonistic she had been to Harley under the first rough shock of her mother's startling and what then had appeared to be disloyal aberration, and wanted to make up for it to the big, simple, uncomfortable man who was so obviously in love. Also she was still all alone in the mental chaos into which everything that had happened last night had conspired to plunge her and was trying, with every atom of courage that she possessed, to hide the fact from her mother's quick solicitous eyes. SHE of all people must not know that Martin had gone away or find the loose end of her married life!

It was one of those painful hours that crop up from time to time in life and seem to leave a little scratch upon the soul.

But when quarter past three came Mrs. Harley pulled herself together. She had already dropped hints of every known and well-recognized kind to George, without success. She had even invented appointments for him at the dentist's and the tailor's. But George was basking in Joan's favor and was too dazzled to be able to catch and concentrate upon his wife's insinuations as to things and people that didn't exist. And Joan held him with her smile and led him from one anecdote to another. Finally, with no one realized how supreme an effort, Mrs. Harley came to the point. As a rule she never came to points.

"Geordie," she said, seizing a pause, "you may run along now, dear, and take a walk. It will do you good to get a little exercise before dinner. I want to be alone with Joan for a while."

And before Joan could swing the conversation off at a tangent the faithful and obedient St. Bernard was on his feet, ready and willing to ramble whichever way he was told to go. With unconscious dignity and a guilelessness utterly unknown to drawing-rooms he bent over Joan's reluctant hand and said, "Thank you for being so kind to me," laid a hearty kiss on his wife's cheek and went.

"And now, darling," said Mrs. Harley, settling into her chair with an air of natural triumph, "tell me where Martin is and how long he's going to be away and all about everything."

These were precisely the questions that Joan had worked so hard and skilfully to dodge. "Well, first of all, Mummy," she said, with filial artfulness, "you must come and see the house."

And Mrs. Harley, who had been consumed with the usual feminine curiosity to examine every corner and cranny of it, rose with alacrity. "What I've already seen is all charming," she said. "I knew Martin's father, you know. He spent a great deal of time at his house near your grandfather's, and was nearly always in the saddle. He was not a bit like one's idea of a horsey man. He was, in fact, a gentleman who was fond of horses. There is a world of difference. He had a most delightful smile and was the only man I ever met, except your grandfather, who could drink too much wine without showing it. Who's this good-looking boy with the trustworthy eyes?"

"Martin," said Joan. "Martin," she added inwardly, "who treated me like a kid last night."

Mrs. Harley looked up at the portrait. An involuntary smiled played round her mouth. "Yes, of course. I remember him. What a dear boy! No wonder you fell in love with him, darling. You must be very happy."

Joan followed her mother out of the room. She was glad of the chance to control her expression. She went upstairs with a curious lack of the spirit of proprietorship. It hurt her to feel as if she were showing a house taken furnished for the season in which she had no rights, no pride and no personal interest. Martin had treated her like a kid last night and gone away in the morning without a word. Alice and Gilbert had taunted her with not being a wife. She wasn't, and this was Martin's house, not hers and Martin's ... it hurt.

"Ah," said Mrs. Harley softly as she went into Joan's bedroom. "Ah. Very nice. You both have room to move here." But the mass of little filet lace pillows puzzled her, and she darted a quick look at the tall young thing with the inscrutable face who had ceased to be her little girl and had become her daughter.

"The sun pours in," said Joan, turning away.

Mrs. Harley noticed a door and brightened up.

"Martin's dressing room?" she asked. "No. My maid's room!" Joan said.

Mrs. Harley shook her head ever so little. She was not in sympathy with what she called new-fashioned ideas. It was on the tip of her tongue to say so and to forget, just this once, the inevitable change in their relationship and speak like mammy once more. But she was a timid, sensitive little woman, and the indefinable barrier that had suddenly sprung up held her back. Joan made no attempt to meet her halfway. The moment passed.

They went along the passage. "There are Martin's rooms," said Joan.

Mrs. Harley went halfway in. "Like a bachelor's rooms, aren't they?" she said, without guile. And while she glanced at the pictures and the crowded bootrack and the old tallboys, Joan's sudden color went away again.... He was a bachelor. He had left her on the other side of the bridge. He had hurt her last night. How awfully she must have hurt him!

"When will Martin be back?"

"I don't know," said Joan. "Probably to-morrow. I'm not sure." She stumbled a little, realized that she was giving herself away,—because if a bride is not to know her husband's movements, who is?—and made a desperate effort to recover her position. "It all depends on how long he's kept. But he needed exercise, and golf's such a good game, isn't it? I sha'n't hurry him back."

She looked straight into her mother's anxious eyes, saw them clear, saw a smile come—and took a deep breath of relief. If there was one thing that she had to put up the most strenuous fight to avoid, in her present chaotic state of mind, it was a direct question as to her life with Martin. Of all people, her mother must be left in the belief that she was happy. Pride demanded that, even to the extent of lying. It was hard luck to be caught by her mother, at the very moment when she was standing among all the debris of her kid's ideas, among all the broken beams of carelessness, and the shattered panes of high spirits.

She was thankful that her mother was not one of those aggressive, close-questioning women, utterly devoid of sensitiveness and delicacy who are not satisfied until they have forced open all the secret drawers of the mind and stuck the contents on a bill file,—one of those hard-bosomed women who stump into church as they stump into a department store with an air of "Now then, what can you show me that's new," who go about with a metaphorical set of burglar's tools in a large bag with which to break open confidences and who have no faith in human nature.

And with a sudden sense of gratitude she turned to the woman whom she had always accepted as a fact, an institution, and looked at her with new eyes, a new estimate and a new emotion. The little, loving, gentle, anxious woman with the capacity of receiving impressions from external objects that amounted to a gift but with a reticence of so fine and tender a quality that she seemed always to stand on tiptoes on the delicate ground of people's feelings, was HERS, was her mother. The word burst into a new meaning, blossomed into a new truth. She had been accepted all these years,—loved, in a sort of way; obeyed, perhaps, expected to do things and provide things and make things easy, and here she stood more needed, at the moment when she imagined that the need of her had passed, than at any other time of her motherhood.

In a flash Joan understood all this and its paradox, looked all the way back along the faithful, unappreciated years, and being no longer a child was stirred with a strange maternal fellow feeling that started her tears. Nature is merciless. Everything is sacrificed to youth. Birds build their nests and rear their young and are left as soon as wings are ready. Women marry and bear children and bring them up with love and sacrifice, only to be relegated to a second place at the first moment of independence. Joan saw this then. Her mother's altered attitude, and her own feeling of having grown out of maternal possession brought it before her. She saw the underlying drama of this small inevitable scene in the divine comedy of life and was touched by a great sympathy and made sorry and ashamed.

But pride came between her and a desire to go down on her knees at her mother's side, make a clean breast of everything and beg for advice and help.

And so these two, between whom there should have been complete confidence, were like people speaking to each other from opposite banks of a stream, conscious of being overheard.



X

Day after day went by with not a word from Martin. April was slipping off the calendar. A consistent blue sky hung over a teeming city that grew warm and dry beneath a radiant sun. Winter forgotten, spring an overgrown boy, the whole town underwent a subtle change. Its rather sullen winter expression melted into a smile, and all its foreign characteristics and color broke out once more under the influence of sun and blue sky. Alone among the great cities of the world stands New York for contrariety and contrast. Its architecture is as various as its citizenship, its manners are as dissimilar as its accents, its moods as diverse as its climate. Awnings appeared, straw hats peppered the streets like daisies in long fields, shadows moved, days lengthened, and the call of the country fell on city ears like the thin wistful notes of the pipes of Pan.

Brought up against a black wall Joan left the Roundabout, desisted from joy-riding, and, spending most of her time with her mother, tried secretly and without any outward sign, to regain her equilibrium. She saw nothing of Alice and the set, now beginning to scatter, in which Alice had placed her. She was consistently out to Gilbert Palgrave and the other men who had been gathering hotly at her heels. Her policy of "who cares?" had received a shock and left her reluctantly and impatiently serious. She had withdrawn temporarily into a backwater in order to think things over and wait for Martin to reappear. It seemed to her that her future way of life was in his hands. If Martin came back soon and caught her in her present mood she would play the game according to the rules. If he stayed away or, coming back, persisted in considering her as a kid and treating her as such, away would go seriousness, life being short, and youth but a small part of it, and back she would go to the Merry-go-round, and once more, at twice the pace, with twice the carelessness, the joy-ride would continue. It was all up to Martin, little as he knew it.

And where was Martin?

There was no letter, no message, no sign as day followed day. Without allowing herself to send out an S. O. S. to him, which she well knew that she had the power to do, she waited, as one waits at crossroads, to go either one way or the other. Although tempted many times to tap the invisible wire which stretched between them, and to put an end to a state of uncertainty which was indescribably irksome to her impulsive and imperative nature, she held her hand. Pride steeled her, and vanity gave her temporary patience. She even went so far as to think of him under another name so that no influence of hers might bring him back. She wanted him to return naturally, on his own account, because he was unable to keep away. She wanted him, wherever he was and whatever he was doing, to want her, not to come in cold blood from a sense of duty, in the spirit of martyrdom. She wanted him, for her pride's sake, to be again the old eager Marty, the burning-eyed, inarticulate Marty, who had brought her to his house and laid it at her feet with all that was his. In no other way was she prepared to cross what she thought of as the bridge.

And so, seeing only her mother and George Harley, she waited, saying to herself confidently "If he doesn't come to-day, he will come to-morrow. I told him that I was a kid, and he understood. I've hurt him awfully, but he loves me. He will come to-morrow."

But to-morrow came and where was Martin?

It was a curious time for this girl-woman to go through alone, hiding her crisis from her mother behind smiling eyes, disguising her anxiety under a cloak of high spirits, herself hurt but realizing that she had committed a hurt. It made her feel like an aeroplane voluntarily landed in perfect condition at the start of a race, waiting for the pilot to get aboard. That he would return at any moment and take her up again she never doubted. Why should she? She knew Martin. His eyes won confidence, and there was a heart of gold behind his smile. She didn't believe that she could have lost him so soon. He would come back because he loved her. Hadn't he agreed that she was a kid? And when he did come back she would take her courage in both hands and tell him that she wanted to play the game. And then, having been honest, she would hitch on to life again with a light heart, and neither Alice nor Gilbert could stand up and flick her conscience. Martin would be happy.

To-morrow and to-morrow, and no Martin.

At the end of a week a letter was received by her mother from Grandmother Ludlow, in which, with a tinge of sarcasm, she asked that she might be honored by a visit of a few days, always supposing that trains still ran between New York and Peapack and gasolene could still be procured for privately owned cars. And there was a postscript in these words. "Perhaps you have the necessary eloquence to induce the athletic Mrs. Martin Gray to join you."

The letter was handed to Joan across the luncheon table at the Plaza. She read the characteristic effusion with keen amusement. She could hear the old lady's incisive voice in every word and the tap of her stick across the hall as she laid the letter in the box. How good to see the country again and go through the woods to the old high place where she had turned and found Martin. How good to go back to that old prison house as an independent person, with the right to respect and even consideration. It would serve Martin right to find her away when he came back. She would leave a little note on his dressing table.

"No wonder the old lady asks if the trains have broken down," said Mrs. Harley. "Of course, we ought to have gone out to see her, Geordie."

"Of course," said George, "of course"—but he darted a glance at Joan which very plainly conveyed the hope that she would find some reason why the visit should not be made. Would he ever forget standing in that stiff drawing-room before that contemptuous old dame, feeling exactly like a very small worm?

The strain of waiting for Martin day after day had told on Joan. She longed for a change of atmosphere, a change of scene. And what a joke it would be to be able to face her grandfather and grandmother without shaking in her shoes! "Of course," said Joan. "Let's drive out to-day in time for dinner, and send a telegram at once. Nothing like striking while the iron's hot. Papa Geordie, tell the waiter to bring a blank, and we'll concoct a message between us. Is that all right for you, Mother?"

Mrs. Harley looked rather like a woman being asked to run a quarter of a mile to catch a train, but she gave a little laugh and said, "Yes, dear. I think so, although, perhaps, to-morrow—"

"To-day is a much better word," said Joan. She was sick of to-morrow and to-morrow. "Packing won't take any time. I'll go home directly after lunch and set things moving and be here in the car at three thirty. We can see the trees and smell the ferns and watch the sun set before we have to change for dinner. I'm dying to do that."

No arguments or objections were put forward.

This impetuous young thing must have her way.

And when the car drove away from the Plaza a few minutes after the appointed time Joan was as excited as a child, Mrs. Harley quite certain that she had forgotten her sponge bag and her bedroom slippers, and George Harley betting on a time that would put more lines on his face.

There was certainly more than a touch of irony in Joan's gladness to go back so soon to the cage from which she had escaped with such eagerness.

There had been no word and no sign of Martin.

But as Joan had run upstairs Gilbert Palgrave had come out from the drawing-room and put himself deliberately in her way.

"I can't stay now, Gilbert," she had said. "I'm going into the country, and I haven't half a second to spare. I'm so sorry."

He had held his place. "You've got to give me five minutes. You've got to," and something in his eyes had made her take hold of her impatience.

"You don't know what you're doing to me," he had said, with no sign of his usual style and self-consciousness, but simply, like a man who had sat in the dark and suffered. "Or if you do know your cruelty is inhuman. I've tried to see you every day—not to talk about myself or bore you with my love, but just to look at you. You've had me turned away as if I were a poor relation. You've sent your maid to lie to me over the telephone as if I were a West Point cadet in a primitive state of sloppy sentiment. Don't do it. It isn't fair. I hauled down my fourth wall to you, and however much you may scorn what you saw there you must respect it. Love must always be respected. It's the rarest thing on earth. I'm here to tell you that you must let me see you, just see you. I've waited for many years for this. I'm all upheaved. You've exploded me. I'm different. I'm remade. I'm beginning again. I shall ask for nothing but kindness until I've made you love me, and then I shall not have to ask. You will come to me. I can wait. That's all I want you to know. When you come back ring me up. I'll be patient."

With that he had stood aside with a curious humbleness, had gripped the hand that she had given him and had gone downstairs and away.

The country round Peapack was in its first glorious flush of young beauty. The green of everything dazzled under the sun. The woods were full of the echo of fairy laughter. Wild flowers ran riot among the fields. Delicate-footed May was following on the heels of April with its slight fingers full of added glory for the earth.

There was something soft and English in the look of the trees and fields as they came nearer to the old house. They might have been driving through the kind garden of Kent.

Framed in the fine Colonial doorway stood the tall old man with his white head and fireless eyes, the little distinguished woman still charged with electricity and the two veteran dogs with their hollow barks.

"Not one blushing bride, but two," said Grandmother Ludlow. "How romantic." She presented her cheek to the nervous Mrs. Harley. "You look years younger, my dear. Quite fluttery and foolish. How do you do, Mr. Harley? You are very welcome, Sir." She passed them both on to the old man and turned to Joan with the kind of smile that one sees on the faces of Chinese gods. "And here is our little girl in whose marvellous happiness we have all rejoiced."

Joan stood up bravely to the little old lady whose sarcasm went home like the sharp point of a rapier.

"How do you do, dear Grandmamma," she said.

"No better than can be expected, my love, but no worse." The queer smile broadened. "But surely you haven't torn yourself away from the young husband from whom, I hear, you have never been parted for a moment? That I can't believe. People tell me that there has never been such a devoted and love-sick couple. Martin Gray is driving another car, of course."

Joan never flicked an eyelash. She would rather die than let this cunning old lady have the satisfaction of seeing that she had drawn blood. "No, Grandmamma," she said. "Martin needed exercise and is playing golf at Shinnecock. He rang me up this morning and asked me to say how sorry he was not to have the pleasure of seeing you this time." She went over to her grandfather and held up a marvellously equable face.

The old dame watched her with reluctant admiration. The child had all the thoroughbred points of a Ludlow. All the same she should be shown that, even in the twentieth century, young girls could not break away from discipline and flout authority without punishment. The smile became almost gleeful at the thought of the little surprise that was in store for her.

The old sportsman took Joan in his arms and held her tight for a moment. "I've missed you, my dear," he said. "The house has been like a mausoleum without you. But I've no reproaches. Youth to youth,—it's right and proper." And he led her into the lofty hall with his arm round her shoulder.

There was a sinister grin on Gleave's poacher-like face when Joan gave him a friendly nod. And it was with a momentary spasm of uneasiness that she asked herself what he and her grandmother knew. It was evident that they had something up their sleeves. But when, after a tea during which she continued to fence and play the part of happy bride, she went out into the scented garden that was like an old and loving friend, this premonition of something evil left her. With every step she felt herself greeted and welcomed. Young flowers as guileless as children waved their green hands. Heads nodded as she passed. The old trees that had watched her grow up rustled their leaves in affectionate excitement. She had not understood until that very moment how many true friends she had or how warm a place in her heart that old house had taken. It was with a curious maternal emotion that clouded her eyes with tears that she stood for a moment and kissed her hands to the right and left like a young queen to her subjects. Then she ran along the familiar path through the woods to the spot where she had been found by Martin and stood once more facing the sweep of open country and the distant horizon beyond which lay the Eldorado of her girl's dreams. She was still a girl, but she had come back hurt and sorry and ashamed. Martin might have lost his faith in her. He had gone away without a word or sign. Gilbert Palgrave held her in such small respect that he waited with patience for her to come, although married, into his arms. And there was not a man or a woman on the Round-about, except Alice, who really cared whether she ever went back again. The greedy squirrel peeked at her from behind a fern, recognized his old playmate, and came forward in a series of runs and leaps. With a little cry Joan bent down and held out her hand. And away in the distance there was the baying of Martin's hounds. But where was Martin?



XI

"Rather beg than work, wouldn't he? I call him Micawber because he's always waiting for something to turn up."

Joan wheeled round. To hear a stranger's voice in a place that was peculiarly hers and Martin's amazed and offended her. It was unbelievable.

A girl was sitting in the long grass, hatless, with her hands clasped round her knees. The sun lit up her bobbed hair that shone like brass and had touched her white skin with a warm finger. Wistful and elfish, sitting like Puck on a toadstool, she might have slipped out of some mossy corner of the woods to taste the breeze and speculate about life. She wore a butter-colored sport shirt wide open at the neck and brown cord riding breeches and puttees. Slight and small boned and rather thin she could easily have passed for a delicate boy or, except for something at the back of her eyes that showed that she had not always lived among trees, for Peter Pan's brother of whom the world had never heard.

Few people would have recognized in this spring maid the Tootles of Broadway and that rabbit warren in West Forty-sixth Street. The dew of the country had washed her face and lips, and the choir voices of Martin's big cathedral had put peace and gentleness into her expression.

She ran her eyes with frank admiration over the unself-consciously patrician Joan in her immaculate town clothes and let them rest finally on a face that seemed to her to be the most attractive that she had ever seen, for all that its expression made her want to scramble to her feet and take to her heels. But she controlled herself and sat tight, summoned her native impertinence to the rescue and gave a friendly nod. After all, it was a free country. There were no princesses knocking about.

"You don't look as if you were a pal of squirrels," she said.

Joan's resentment at the unexpected presence of this interloper only lasted a moment. It gave way almost immediately before interest and curiosity and liking,—even, for a vague reason, sympathy.

"I've known this one all his life," she said. "His father and mother were among my most intimate friends and, what's more, his grandfather and grandmother relied on me to help them out in bad times."

The duet of laughter echoed among the trees.

With a total lack of dignity the squirrel retired and stood, with erect tail, behind a tuft of coarse grass, wondering what had happened.

"It's a gift to be country and look town," said Tootles, with unconcealed flattery. "It's having as many ancestors as the squirrels, I suppose. According to the rules I ought to feel awkward, oughtn't I?"

"Why?"

"Well, I'm trespassing. I saw it in your eyes. 'Pon my soul it never occurred to me before. Shall I try and make a conventional exit or may I stay if I promise not to pinch the hill? This view is better than face massage. It rubs out all the lines. My word, but it's good to be alive up here!"

The mixture of cool cheek and ecstasy, given forth in the patois of the London suburbs, amused Joan. Here was a funny, whimsical, pathetic, pretty little thing, she thought—queerly wise, too, and with all about her a curious appeal for friendship and kindness. "Stay, of course," she said. "I'm very glad you like my hill. Use it as often as you can." She sat down on the flat-topped piece of rock that she had so often shared with Martin. There was a sense of humanity about this girl that had the effect of a magnet. She inspired confidence, as Martin did.

"Thanks most awfully," said Tootles. "You're kinder than you think to let me stay here. And I'm glad you're going to sit down for a bit. I like you, and I don't mind who knows it."

"And I like you," said Joan.

And they both laughed again, feeling like children. It was a characteristic trick of Fate's to bring about this meeting.

"I don't mind telling you now," went on Tootles, all barriers down, "that I've come up here every evening for a week. It's a thousand years since I've seen the sun go to bed and watched the angels light the stars. It's making me religious. The Broadway electrics have always been between me and the sky.... Gee, but it's goin' to be great this evening." She settled herself more comfortably, leaned back against the stump of a tree and began to smile like a child at the Hippodrome in expectation of one of the "colossal effects."

Joan's curiosity was more and more piqued, but it was rather to know what than who this amazingly natural little person was. For all her youth there were lines round her mouth that were eloquent of a story begun early. Somehow, with Martin away and giving no sign, Joan was glad, and in a way comforted, to have stumbled on some one, young like herself, who had obviously faced uncertainty and stood at the crossroads. "I'd like to ask you hundreds of questions," she said impulsively. "Do you mind?"

"No, dearie. Fire away. I shan't have to tell you any fables to keep you interested. I broke through the paper hoop into the big ring when I was ten. Look! See those ducks flyin' home? The first time I saw them I thought it was a V-shaped bit of smoke running away from one of the factories round Newark."

She had told Martin that. His laugh seemed still to be in the air.

"Are you married?" asked Joan suddenly.

"Not exactly, dearie," replied Tootles, without choosing her words. But a look at the young, eager, sweet face bent towards her made her decide to use camouflage. "What I mean is, no, I'm not. Men don't marry me when it isn't absolutely necessary. I'm a small part chorus lady, if you get my point."

Joan was not quite sure that she did. Her sophistication had not gone farther up than Sixty-seventh Street or farther down than Sherry's, and it was bounded by Park Avenue on the one side and Fifth Avenue on the other. "But would you like to have been married?" All her thoughts just then were about marriage and Marty.

Tootles shook her head and gave a downward gesture with an open hand that hardly needed to be amplified. "No, not up to a few weeks ago. I've lived by the stage, you see, and that means that the men I've come across have not been men but theatricals. Very different. You may take my word. When I met my first man I didn't believe it. I thought he was the same kind of fake. But when I knew that he was a man alright,—well, I wanted to be married as much as a battered fishing smack wants to get into harbor." She was thinking of Marty too, although not of marriage any more.

"And are you going to be?"

"No, dearie. He's got a wife, it turns out. It was a bit o' cheek ever to dream of hitting a streak of such luck as that. All the same, I've won something that I shall treasure all the days of my life.... Look. Here come some of the mourners." She pointed to three crows that flapped across a sky all hung with red and gold.

Joan was puzzled. "Mourners?"

"Why, yes. Isn't this the death bed of a day?"

"I never thought of it in that way," said Joan.

"No," said Tootles, running her eyes again over Joan's well-groomed young body. "That's easy to see. You will, though, if ever you want every day to last a year. You're married, anyway."

"Not exactly," said Joan, unconsciously repeating the other girl's expression.

Tootles looked at Martin's ring. "What about that, then?"

Joan looked at it too, with a curious gravity. It stood for so much more than she had ever supposed that it would. "But I don't know whether it's going to bind us, or not."

"And you so awfully young!"

"I was," said Joan.

The girl who had never had any luck darted a keen, examining glance at the girl who had all the appearance of having been born lucky. Married, as pretty as a picture, everything out of the smartest shops, the owner, probably, of this hill and those woods, and the old house that she had peeped at all among that lovely garden—she couldn't have come up against life's sharp elbow, surely? She hoped not, most awfully she hoped not.

Joan caught the look and smiled back. There was kindness here, and comradeship. "I've nothing to tell," she said, "yet. I'm just beginning to think, that's the truth, only just. I've been very young and thoughtless, but I'm better now and I'm waiting to make up for it. I'm not unhappy, only a little anxious. Everything will come right though, because my man's a man, too."

Tootles made a long arm and put her hand on Joan's. "In that case, make up for it bigly, dearie," she said earnestly. "Don't be afraid to give. There are precious few real men about and lots of women to make a snatch at them. It isn't being young that matters. Most troubles are brought about, at your time of life, by not knowing when to stop being young. Good luck, Lady-bird. I hope you never have anything to tell. Oh, just look, just look!"

Joan followed the pointing finger, but held the kind hand. And they sat in silence watching "the fair frail palaces, the fading Alps and archipelagoes, and great cloud-continents of sunset seas." And as she sat, enthralled, the whole earth hushed and still, shadows lurking towards the east, the evening air holding its breath, the night ready behind the horizon for its allotted work, God's hand on everything, it was of Marty that Joan thought, Marty whom she must have hurt so deeply and who had gone away without a word or a sign, believing that she was still a kid. Yes, she WOULD make up for it, bigly, bigly, and he should be happy, this boy-man who was a knight.

And it was of Martin that Tootles, poor, little, unlucky Tootles, thought also. All her life she would have something to which to look back, something precious and beautiful, and his name, stamped upon her heart, would go down with her to the grave.

And they stayed there, in silence, holding hands, until the last touch of color had gone out of the sky and the evening air sighed and moved on and the night climbed slowly over the dim horizon. They might have been sisters.

And then Joan rose in a sort of panic. "I must go," she said nervously, forgetting that she had grown up. "Good night, Fairy."

Tootles stood up too. "Good night, Lady-bird. Make everything come right," and held out her hand.

Joan took it again and went forward and kissed the odd little girl who was her friend.

And a moment later Tootles saw her disappearing into the wood, like a spirit. When she looked up at the watching star and waved her hand, it seemed all misty.



XII

"And now, Mr. Harley," said Grandmother Ludlow, lashing the septuagenarian footman with one sharp look because he had spilt two or three drops of Veuve Cliquot on the tablecloth, "tell me about the present state of the money market."

Under his hostess's consistent courtesy and marked attentions George Harley had been squirming during the first half of dinner. He had led her into the fine old dining room with all the style that he could muster and been placed, to his utter dismay, on her right. He would infinitely rather have been commanded to dine with the Empress of China, which he had been told was the last word in mental and physical torture. Remembering vividly the cold and satirical scorn to which he had been treated during his former brief and nightmare visit the old lady's change of attitude to extreme politeness and even deference made him feel that he was having his leg pulled. In a brand new dinner jacket with a black tie poked under the long points of a turned-down collar, which, in his innocence, he had accepted as the mode of gentlemen and not, as he rightly supposed of waiters, he had done his best to give coherent answers to a rapid fire of difficult questions. The most uneasy man on earth, he had committed himself to statements that he knew to be unsound, had seen his untouched plate whisked away while he was floundering among words, and started a high temperature beneath what he was perfectly certain was lurking mockery behind apparently interested attention.

If any banker at that moment had overheard him describing the state of the money market he would have won for himself a commission in the earth's large army of unconfined lunatics.

The old sportsman, sitting with Joan on his right and his daughter-in-law on his left, was more nearly merry and bright than any one had seen him since the two great changes in his household. His delight in having Joan near him again was pathetic. He had shaved for the second time that day, a most unusual occurrence. His white hair glistened with brilliantine, and there was a gardenia in his buttonhole. Some of the old fire had returned to his eyes, and his tongue had regained its once invariable knack of paying charming compliments. In his excitement and delight he departed from his rigid diet, and, his wife's attention being focussed upon George Harley, punished the champagne with something of his old vigor, and revived as a natural result many of the stories which Joan and her mother had been told ad nauseam over any number of years with so much freshness as to make them seem almost new.

Mrs. Harley, wearing a steady smile, was performing the painful feat of listening with one ear to the old gentleman and with the other to the old lady. All her sympathy was with her unfortunate and uneasy husband who looked exactly like a great nervous St. Bernard being teased by a Pekinese.

Joan missed none of the underlying humor of the whole thing. It was amusing and satisfactory to be treated as the guest of honor in a house in which she had always been regarded as the naughty and rebellious child. She was happy in being able to put her usually morose grandfather into such high spirits and moved to a mixture of mirth and pity at the sight of George Harley's plucky efforts. Also she had brought away with her from the girl she called the fairy a strengthened desire to play the game and a good feeling that Marty was nearer to her than he had been for a long and trying week. It's true that from time to time she caught in her grandmother's eyes that queer look of triumphant glee that had disturbed her when they met and the same expression of malicious spite at the corner of Gleave's sunken mouth which had made her wonder what he knew, but these things she waved aside. Instinct, and her complete knowledge of Mrs. Cumberland Ludlow's temperament, made her realize that if the old lady could find a way to get even with her for having run off she would leave no stone unturned, and that she would not hesitate to use the cunning ex-fighting man to help her. But, after all, what could they do? It would be foolish to worry.

Far from foolish, if she had had an inkling of the trap that had been laid for her and into which she was presently going to fall without suspicion.

The facts were that Gleave had seen Martin drive up to his house with Tootles, had watched them riding and walking together throughout the week, had reported what he had seen to Mrs. Ludlow and left it to her fertile imagination to make use of what was to him an ugly business. And the old lady, grasping her chance, had written that letter to Mrs. Harley and having achieved her point of getting Joan into her hands, had discovered that she did not know where Martin was and had made up her mind to show her. Revenge is sweet, saith the phrasemonger, and to the old lady whose discipline had been flouted and whose amour propre had been rudely shaken it was very sweet indeed. Her diabolical scheme, conceived in the mischievous spirit of second childhood, was to lead Joan on to a desire to show off her country house to her relations at the moment when the man she had married and the girl with whom he was amusing himself on the sly were together. "How dramatic," she chuckled, in concocting the plan. "How delightfully dramatic." And she might have added, "How hideously cruel."

But it was not until some little time after they had all adjourned to the drawing-room, and Joan had played the whole range of her old pieces for the edification of her grandfather, that she set her trap.

"If I had my time over again," she said, looking the epitome of benevolence, "I would never spend spring in the city."

"Wouldn't you, dear?" prompted Mrs. Harley, eager to make the conversation general and so give poor George a rest.

"No, my love. I would make my winter season begin in November and end in February—four good months for the Opera, the theatres, entertaining and so forth. Then on the first of March, the kind-hearted month that nurses April's violets, I would leave town for my country place and, as the poets have it watch the changing skies and the hazel blooms peep through the swelling buds and hear the trees begin to whisper and the throstles break into song. One loses these things by remaining among bricks and mortar till the end of April. Joan, my dear, give this your consideration next year. If your good husband is anything like his father, whom we knew very slightly and admired, he is a lover of the country and should be considered."

"Yes, Grandmamma," said Joan, wondering if Marty had come back and found her note on his dressing-table.

"Always supposing, of course, that next year finds you both as much in love as you are to-day,—the most devoted pair of turtle doves, as I am told." She laughed a little roguishly to disguise the sting.

"They will be," said Mrs. Harley quickly. "There is no doubt about that."

"None," said Joan, looking full at the old lady with a confident smile and a high chin. Would her grandmother never forget that escape from the window?

"Why suggest the possibility of a break?" asked Mr. Ludlow, with a touch of anger. "Really, my dear."

"A little joke, Cumberland, merely a little joke. Joan understands me, I know."

"I think so," said Joan, smiling back. Not on her, whatever happened, would she see the white feather. Some one had told the tale of her kid's rush into the heart of things and her many evenings with Palgrave and the others, when "Who cares?" was her motto.

The old lady went on, with infinite artfulness. "During the coming summer, my love, you should look out for a pleasant little house in some charming part of the country, furnish it, put men to work on the garden, and have it all ready for the following spring."

"I know just the place," put in George. "Near a fine golf course and country club with a view across the Hudson that takes your breath away."

"That might necessitate the constant attendance of a doctor," said Mrs. Ludlow drily, "which would add considerably to the expenses. I would advise the Shinnecock Hills, for instance, which are swept by sea breezes and so reminiscent of Scotland. Martin would be within a stone's throw of his favorite course, there, wouldn't he, Joan?"

"Yes, Grandmamma," said Joan, still with a high head and a placid smile, although it came to her in a flash that her statement as to where Martin was had not been believed. What if Grandmother knew where Martin had gone? How absurd. How could she?

And then Mr. Ludlow broke in again, impatiently. The effect of the champagne was wearing off. He hated feminine conversation in drawing-rooms, anyhow. "Why go searching about for a house for the child when she's got one already."

"Why, so I have," cried Joan. "Here. I'd forgotten all about it!"

Nothing could have suited the old lady so well. Her husband could not have said anything more right if he had been prompted. "Of course you have," she said, with a cackle of laughter. "I had forgotten it too. Mr. Harley, can you believe our overlooking the fact that there is a most excellent house in the family a gunshot from where we are all sitting? It's natural enough for me, who have never met Joan's young husband. But for you, my love, who spent such a romantic night there! Where are your wits?"

Joan's laugh rang out. "Goodness knows, but I really had forgotten all about it. And although I've only been in it once I've known it by sight all my life. Martin's father had it built, Papa George, and it's awfully nice and sporting, with kennels, and tennis courts, and everything."

"Yes, and beautifully furnished, I remember. I dined there several times, years ago before Mr. Gray had—" Mrs. Harley drew up short.

Mrs. Ludlow finished the sentence. "A little quarrel with me," she said. "I objected to his hounds scrambling over this property and wrote pithily to that effect. We never spoke again. My dear, while we are all together, why not personally conduct us over this country house of yours and give us an unaccustomed thrill of excitement."

"Yes, do, darling," said Mrs. Harley. "George would love to see it."

"I will," said Joan. "I'd adore to. I don't know a bit what it's like, except the hall and the library. It will come as a perfect surprise to me."

"A very perfect surprise," said Mrs. Ludlow.

Joan sprang to her feet. "Let's go now. No time like the present."

"Well," said Mrs. Harley cautiously, though equally keen.

"No, no, not to-night. Bear with your aged grandparents. Besides, the housekeeper and the other servants will probably be in bed. To-morrow now, early—"

"All right," said Joan. "To-morrow then, directly after breakfast. Fancy forgetting that one possessed a country house. It's almost alarming." And she put her hands on her grandfather's shoulders, and bent down and kissed him. She was excited and thrilled. It was her house because it was Martin's, and soon she would be Martin's too. And they would spend a real honeymoon in the place in which they had sat together in the dark and laid their whispered plans for the great adventure. How good that would be!

And when she went back to the piano and rattled off a fox trot, Grandmother Ludlow got up and hobbled out of the room, on her tapping stick, to hide her glee.



XIII

It was ten o'clock when Joan stood once more in the old, familiar bedroom in which she had slept all through her childhood and adolescence.

Nothing had been altered since the night from which she dated the beginning of her life. Her books were in the same places. Letters from her school friends were in the same neat pile on her desk. The things that she had been obliged to leave on her dressing-table had not been touched. A framed photograph of her mother, with her hands placed in the incredible way that is so dear to the photographer's heart, still hung crooked over a colonial chest of drawers. Her blue and white bath wrap was in its place over the back of a chair, with her slippers beneath it.

She opened the door of the hospitable closet. There were all the clothes and shoes and hats that she had left. She drew out a drawer in the chest. Nothing had been disturbed.... It was uncanny. She seemed to have been away for years. And yet, as she looked about and got the familiar scent of the funny little lavender sachets made by Mrs. Nye, she found it hard to believe that Marty and Gilbert Palgrave, the house in New York, all the kaleidoscope of Crystal rooms and restaurants, all the murmur of voices and music and traffic were not the elusive memories of last night's dream. But for the longing for Marty that amounted to an absorbing, ever-present homesickness, it was difficult to accept the fact that she was not still the same early-to-bed, early-to-rise country girl, kicking against the pricks, rebelling against the humdrum daily routine, spoiling to try her wings.

"Dear old room," she whispered, suddenly stretching out her arms to it. "My dear old room. I didn't think I'd miss you a little bit. But I have. I didn't think I should be glad to get back to you. But I am. What are you doing to me to make me feel a tiny pain in my heart? You're crowding all the things I did here and all the things I thought about like a thousand white pigeons round my head. All my impatient sighs, and big ambitions, and silly young hopes and fears are coming to meet me and make me want to laugh and cry. But it isn't the same me that you see; it isn't. You haven't changed, dear old room, but I have. I'm different. I'm older. I'm not a kid any more. I'm grown up. Oh, my dear, dear old room, be kind to me, be gentle with me. I haven't played the game since I went away or been honest. I've been thoughtless, selfish and untamed. I've done all the wrong things. I've attracted all the wrong people. I've sent Marty away, Marty—my knight—and I want him back. I want to make up to him bigly, bigly for what I ought to have done. Be kind to me, be kind to me."

And she closed her arms as if in an embrace and put her head down as though on the warm breast of an old friend and the good tears ran down her cheeks.

All the windows were open. The air was warm and scented. There was no sound. The silent voices of the stars sang their nightly anthem. The earth was white with magic moonshine. Joan looked out. The old creeper down which she had climbed to go to Martin that night which seemed so far away was all in leaf. With what exhilaration she had dropped her bag out. Had ever a girl been so utterly careless of consequences then as she? How wonderfully and splendidly Martinish Martin had been when she plunged in upon him, and how jolly and homelike the hall of his house—her house—had seemed to be. To-morrow she would explore it all and show it off to her family. To-morrow.... Yes, but to-night? Should she allow herself to be carried away by a sudden longing to follow her flying footsteps through the woods, pretend that Martin was waiting for her and take a look at the outside of the house alone? Why not? No one need know, and she had a sort of aching to see the place again that was so essentially a part of Martin. Martin—Martin—he obsessed her, body and brain. If only she could find Martin.