And Mrs. Crowe, though dutifully rebuking her for her flippant treatment of a brother's pain, agreed with the sense of her remarks, if not with the wording. It had taken a good deal of quiet obstinacy on the part of the whole family to get Oliver to accept Peter Piper's invitation—Mrs. Crowe, who was understanding, knew at what cost—the cost of a man who has lost a hand's first appearance in company with the stump unbandaged—but anything would be better than the mopey Oliver of the last two weeks and a half, and Mrs. Crowe had been taught by a good deal of living the aseptic powers of having to go through the motions of ordinary life in front of a casual audience, even when it seemed that those motions were no longer of any account. So Oliver took clean flannels and a bitter mind to Southampton on the last day of August, and, as soon as he got off the train, was swung into a reel of consecutive amusements that, fortunately, allowed him little time to think.

When he did, it was only to wonder rather frigidly if this fellow with glasses who played tennis and danced and swam and watched and commented athletically on the Davis Cup finals, sitting between Elinor Piper and Juliet Bellamy whom he had taken to dances off and on ever since he had had his first pair of pumps, could really be he. The two people didn't feel in the least the same.

The two Mr. Crowes, he thought. "Mr. Oliver Crowe—meet Mr. Oliver Crowe." "On our right, ladies and gentlemen, we have one of the country's greatest curiosities—a young gentleman who insists upon going on existing when there is nothing at all that makes his existence useful or interesting or proud. A very realistic wax figure that will toddle, shoot a line and play almost any sort of game until you might easily believe it to be genuinely alive. Mr. Oliver Crowe."

The house-party was to last a week, except for Ted Billett who would have to go back after Labor Day—and before eight hours of it were over, Oliver was watching Ted with grandmotherly interest, a little mordant jealousy, and humor, that, at times, verged toward the hysterical. Nancy—and especially the loss of her—had made him sensitive as a skinless man to the winds and vagaries of other young people in love—and while Ted could look at and talk with Elinor Piper and think himself as safe as a turtle under its shell from the observations and discoveries of the rest of the party he could no more hide himself or his intentions from Oliver's painful scrutiny than he could have hidden the fact that he had suddenly turned bright green. So Oliver, a little with the sense of his own extreme generosity, but sincerely enough in the main, began to play kind shepherd, confidante, referee and second-between-the-rounds to Ted's as yet quite unexpressed strivings—and since most of him was only too willing to busy itself with anything but reminiscences of Nancy, he began to congratulate himself shortly that under his entirely unacknowledged guidance things really seemed to be getting along very well.

And here too his streak of ineradicable humor—that bright plaything made out of knives that is so fine to juggle with light-handedly until the hand meets it in its descent a fraction of a second too soon—came often and singularly to his aid. He could see himself in a property white beard stretching feeble hands in blessing over a kneeling and respectful Elinor and Ted. "Bless you my dear, dear children—for though my own happiness has gone with yester-year, at least I have made you—find each other—and perhaps, when you sit at evening among the happy shouts of your posterity—" but here Oliver broke off into a snort of laughter.

Of course Ted had confided nothing formally as yet—but then, thought Oliver sourly out of his own experience, he wouldn't; that was the way you always felt; and Ted had never been a person of easy confidences. The most he had done had been to take Oliver grimly aside from the dance they had gone to last night and explain in one ferocious and muffled sentence delivered half at Oliver and half at a large tree that if Hinky Selvage didn't stop dancing with Elinor that way he, Ted, would carry him unobtrusively behind a bush and force him to swallow most of his own front teeth. And again Oliver, looking back as a man might to the feverish details of a major operation, realized with cynic mirth that that was a very favorable symptom indeed. Oh everything was going along simply finely for Ted, if the poor fool only knew it. But that he would no more believe of course than you would a dentist who told you he wasn't going to hurt. People in love were poor fools—damn fools—unutterably lucky, unutterably perfect—fools.

Ted and Oliver must have one talk though before it all happened beyond redemption and Ted started wearing that beautiful anesthetized smile and began to concoct small kindly fatal conspiracies with Elinor and Oliver and some nice girl. They hadn't had a real chance to talk since Oliver came back from St. Louis, and shortly—oh very shortly indeed by the way things looked—the only thing they would be able to talk about would be Elinor and how wonderful she and requited love and young happy marriage were—and however glad Oliver might be for Ted and his luck—he really wouldn't be able to stand that, under the present circumstances, for very long at a time. Ted would be gone into fortune—into a fortune that Oliver would have to be the last person on earth to grudge him—but that meant the end of eight years of fighting mockery and friendship together as surely as if those years were marbles and Elinor were dropping them down a well. They could pick it up later—after Ted had been married a year say—but it would have changed then, it wouldn't be the same.

Oliver smiled rather wryly. He wondered if that was at all like what Ted might have thought when he and Nancy—But that wasn't comparable in the least. But Nancy and he were different. Nancy—and with that, the pain came so dazzlingly for a minute that Oliver had to shut his eyes to bear it—and something that wasn't just stupidly rude had to be said to Juliet Bellamy in answer to her loud clear question as to whether he was falling asleep.

All up to and through Labor Day Oliver bluffed and manoeuvered like the head of a small but vicious Balkan State in an International Congress for Ted and Elinor, and towards tea-time, decided sardonically that it was quite time his adopted infants took any further responsibilities off his shoulders. There was no use delaying conclusions any longer—Oliver felt as he looked at his victims like a workmanlike god who simply must finish the rough draft of the particular world he is fussing with before sunset, in spite of all rebellious or slipshod qualities in its clay. There would be a dance that evening. There would be, Oliver thought with some proprietary pride, a large sentimental moon. A few craftily casual words with Elinor before dinner—a real talk with Ted in one of the intermissions of the dance—a watchdog efficiency in guarding the two from intrusion while they got the business over with neatly in any one of several very suitable spots that Oliver had picked out already in his mind's eye. And then, having thoroughly settled Ted for the rest of his years in such a solid and satisfactory way—perhaps the queer gods that had everyone in charge, in spite of their fatal leaning toward practical-joking where the literary were concerned, might find enough applause in their little tin hearts for Oliver's acquired and vicarious merit to give him in some strange and painful way another chance to be alive again and not merely the present wandering spectre-of-body that people who knew nothing about it seemed to take so unreasonably for Oliver Crowe.

So he laid his snares, feeling quite like Nimrod the mighty, though outwardly he was only kneeling on the Piper porch, waiting for the dice to come around to him in a vociferous game of crap that Juliet had organized—he seldom shot without winning now he noticed with superstitious awe. And tea passed to a sound of muffled crumpets, and everyone went up to dress for dinner.



XXIX

Mrs. Winters' little apartment on West 79th Street—she heads letters from it playfully "The Hen Coop" for there is almost always some member of her own sex doing time with the generous Mrs. Winters. Mrs. Winters is quite celebrated in St. Louis for her personally-conducted tours of New York with stout Middle-Western matrons or spectacled school girls east for visits and clothes—Mrs. Winters has the perfectly-varnished manners, the lust for retailing unimportant statistics and the supercilious fixed smile of a professional guide. Mrs. Winters' little apartment, that all the friends who come to her to be fed and bedded and patronized tell her is so charmingly New Yorky because of her dear little kitchenette with the asthmatic gas-plates, the imitation English plate-rail around the dining-room wall, the bookcase with real books—a countable number of them—and on top of it the genuine signed photograph of Caruso for which Mrs. Winters paid the sum she always makes you guess about, at a charity-bazaar.

Mrs. Winters herself—the Mrs. Winters who is so interested in young people as long as they will do exactly what she wants them to—every inch of her from her waved white hair to the black jet spangles on her dinner gown or the notes of her "cultivated" voice as frosted and glittery and artificial as a piece of glace fruit. And with her, Nancy, dressed for dinner too, because Mrs. Winters feels it to be one's duty to oneself to dress for dinner always, no matter how much one's guests may wish to relax—Nancy as much out of place in the apartment whose very cushions seem to smell of that modern old-maidishness that takes itself for superior feminist virtue as a crocus would be in an exhibition of wool flowers—a Nancy who doesn't talk much and has faint blue stains under her eyes.

"So everything went very satisfactorily indeed today, dear Nancy?"

Mrs. Winters' voice implies the uselessness of the question. Nancy is staying with Mrs. Winters—it would be very strange indeed if even the least important accompaniments of such a visit were not of the most satisfactory kind.

"Yes, Mrs. Winters. Nothing particularly happened, that is—but they like my work."

"Yes, dear," Mrs. Winters croons at her, she is being motherly. The effect produced is rather that of a sudden assumption of life and vicarious motherhood on the part of a small, brightly-painted porcelain hen.

"Then they will be sending you over shortly, no doubt? Across the wide wide sea—" adds Mrs. Winters archly, but Nancy is too tired-looking to respond to the fancy.

"I suppose they will when they get ready," she answers briefly and returns to her chicken-croquette with the thought that in its sleekness, genteelness, crumblingness, and generally unnourishing qualities it is really rather like Mrs. Winters. An immense desire, after two weeks of Mrs. Winters' mental and physical cuisine for something as hearty and gross as the mere sight of a double planked steak possesses her achingly—but Mrs. Winters was told once that she "ate like a bird."

"Well, in that case, dear Nancy, you certainly must not leave New York indefinitely without making the most of your opportunities," Mrs. Winters' tones are full of genteel decision. "I have made out a little list, dear Nancy, of some things which I thought, in my funny old way, might possibly be worth your while. We will talk it over after dinner, if you like—"

"Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Winters" says Nancy with dutiful hopelessness. She is only too well acquainted with Mrs. Winters' little lists. "As an artist, as an artist, dear Nancy, especially." Mrs. Winters breathes somewhat heavily, "Things That Should Interest you. Nothing Bizarre, you understand, Nothing Merely Freakish—but some of the Things in New York that I, Personally, have found Worth While."

The Things that Mrs. Winters Has Found Personally Worth While include a great many public monuments. She will give Nancy a similar list of Things Worth While in Paris, too, before Nancy sails—and Nancy smiles acceptably as each one of them is mentioned.

Only Mrs. Winters cannot see what Nancy is thinking—for if she did she might become startlingly human at once as even the most perfectly poised of spinsters is apt to do when she finds a rat in the middle of her neat white bed. For Nancy is thinking quite freely of various quaint and everlasting places of torment that might very well be devised for Mrs. Winters—and of the naked fact that once arrived in Paris it will matter very little to anybody what becomes of her and least of all to herself—and that Mrs. Winters doesn't know that she saw a chance mention of Mr. Oliver Crowe, the author of "Dancer's Holiday" today in the "Bookman" and that she cut it out because it had Oliver's name in it and that it is now in the smallest pocket of her bag with his creased and recreased first letter and the lucky piece she had from her nicest uncle and a little dim photograph of Mr. Ellicott and half a dozen other small precious things.



XXX

The dance is at the Piper's this time—the last Piper dance of the Southampton season and the biggest—other people may give dances after it but everybody who knows will only think of them as relatively pleasant or useless addenda. The last Piper Dance has been the official period to the Southampton summer ever since Elinor's debut—and this time the period is sure to be bigger and rounder than ever since it closes the most successful season Southampton has ever had.

Nothing very original about its being a masquerade, from Mr. Piper a courteously grey-haired mandarin in jade-green robes beside Mrs. Piper—lovely Mary Embree that was—in the silks of a Chinese empress, heavy and shining and crusted as the wings of a jeweler's butterfly, her reticent eyes watching the bright broken patterns of the dancing as impassively as if she were viewing men being tortured or invested with honor from the Dragon Throne, to Oliver, a diffident Pierrot who has discovered no even bearably comfortable way of combining spectacles and a mask, and Peter who is gradually turning purple under the furs of a dancing bear. Nothing much out of the ordinary in the tunes and the three orchestras and the fact that a dozen gentlemen dressed as the Devil are finding their tails very inconvenient as regards the shimmy and a dozen Joans of Arc are eying each other with looks of dumb hatred whenever they pass. Nothing singular about the light-heart throb of the music, the smell of powder and scent and heat and flowers, the whole loose drifting garland of the dancers, blowing over and around the floor in the idle designs of sand, floating like scraps of colored paper through a smooth wind heavy with music as the hours run away like light water through the fingers. But outside the house the Italian gardens are open, little lanterns spot them like elf-lights, shining on hedge-green, pale marble; the night is pallid with near and crowded stars, the air warm as Summer water, sweet as dear youth.

The unmasking is to take place at midnight and it is past eleven when Oliver drops back into the stag line after being stuck for a dance and a half with a leaden-footed human flower-basket who devoted the entire time to nervous giggles and the single coy statement that she just knew he never could guess who she was but she recognized him perfectly. He starts looking around for Ted. There he is, scanning the clown's parade with the eyes of an anxious hawk, disgruntled nervousness plain in every line of his body. Then Oliver remembers that he saw a slim Chinese girl in loose blue silks go off the floor ten minutes or so ago with a tall musketeer. He goes over and touches Ted on a particolored arm—the latter is dressed as a red and gilt harlequin—and feels the muscles he touches twitch under his hand.

"Cigarette? It's getting hotter than cotton in here—they'll have to open more windows—"

"What?" Then recognizing voice and glasses "Oh yeah—guess so—awful mob, isn't it?" and they thread their way out into the cool.

They wander down from the porch and into the gardens, past benches where the talk that is going on seems to be chiefly in throaty undertones and halts nervously as their steps crunch past.

"The beautiful and damned!" says Oliver amusedly, then a little louder "Amusez vous bien, mes enfants" at a small and carefully modulated shriek that comes from the other side of the low hedge, "The night's still young. But Good Lord, isn't there any place in the whole works where two respectable people can sit without feeling like chaperones?"

They find one finally—it is at the far end of the gardens—a seat the only reason for whose obvious desertion seems to be, comments Oliver, that some untactful person has strung a dim but still visible lantern directly above it—and relapses upon it silently. It is not until the first cigarettes of both are little red dying stars on the grass beside them that either really starts to talk.

"Cool," says Oliver, stretching his arms. The night lies over them light as spray—a great swimming bath and quietness of soft black, hushed silver—above them the whole radiant helmet of heaven is white with its stars. From the house they have left, glowing yellow in all its windows, unreal against the night as if it were only a huge flat toy made out of paper with a candle burning behind it, comes music, blurred but insistent, faint as if heard over water, dull and throbbing like horse-hoofs muffled with leather treading a lonely road.

"Um. Good party."

"Real Piper party, Ted. And, speaking of Pipers, friend Peter certainly seems to be enjoying himself—"

"Really?"

"Third bench on the left as we came down. Never go to a costume-party dressed as a dancing-bear if you want to get any quiet work in on the side. Rule One of Crowe's Social Code for Our Own First Families."

Ted chuckles uneasily and there is silence for another while as they smoke. Both are in very real need of talking to each other but must feel their way a little carefully because they are friends. Then—

"I," says Ted and—

"You," says Oliver, simultaneously. Both laugh and the little tension that has grown up between them snaps at once.

"I suppose you know that Nancy's and my engagement went bust about three weeks ago," begins Oliver with elaborate calm, his eyes fixed on his shoes.

Ted clears his throat.

"Didn't know. Afraid it was something like that though—way you were looking," he says, putting his words one after the other, as slowly as if he were building with children's blocks. "What was it? Don't tell me unless you want to, of course—you know—-"

"Want to, rather." Ted knows that he is smiling, and how, though he is not looking at his face. "After all—old friends, all that. My dear old College chum," but the mockery breaks down. "My fault, I guess," he says in a voice like metal.

"It was, Ted. Acted like a fool. And then, this waiting business—not much use going over that, now. But it's broken. Got my—property—such as it was all back in a neat little parcel two weeks ago. That's why I quit friend Vanamee—you ought to have known from that."

"Did, I suppose, only I hoped it wasn't. I'm damn sorry, Ollie.

"Thanks, Ted."

They shake hands, but not theatrically.

"Oh well—oh hell—oh dammit, you know how blasted sorry I am. That's all I can say, I guess—"

"Well, so am I. And it was my fault, chiefly. And that's all I can say."

"Look here, though." Ted's voice is doing its best to be logical in spite of the fact that two things, the fact that he is unutterably sorry for Oliver and the fact that he mustn't show it in silly ways, are fighting in him like wrestlers. "Are you sure it's as bad as all that? I mean girls—-" Ted flounders hopelessly between his eagerness to help and his knowledge that it will take ungodly tact. "I mean, Nancy's different all right—but they change their minds—and they come around—and—"

Oliver spreads out his hands. It is somehow queerly comforting not to let himself be comforted in any degree. "What's the use? Tried to explain—got her mother—Nancy was out but she certainly left a message—easier if we never saw each other again—well—Then she sent back everything—she knew I'd tried to phone her—tried to explain—never a word since then except my name and address on the package—oh it's over, Ted. Feenee. But it's pretty well smashed me. For the present, at least."

"But if you started it," Ted says stubbornly.

"Oh I did, of course—gentlemanly supposition anyhow—that's why—don't you see?"

"Can't say I do exactly."

"Well?"

"Well?"

"We're both of us too proud, Ted. And too poor. And starting again—can't you—visualize—it wouldn't be the way it was—only both of us thinking about that all the time—and still we couldn't get married. I've got less right than ever, now—oh, but how could we after what we've said—" and this time his voice has lost all the attitudes of youth, it is singularly older and seems to come from the center of a place full of pain.

"I wish I could help, though, Ollie. You know," says Ted.

"Wish you could." Then later, "Thanks." "Welcome."

Both smoke and are silent for a time, remembering small things out of the last eight years.

"But what are you going to do, Ollie, now you've kissed the great god Advertising a fond good-by?"

Ollie stirs uneasily.

"Dunno—exactly. I told you about those two short stories Easten wanted me to take out of my novel? Well, I've done it and sent 'em in—and he'll buy 'em all right."

"That's fine!"

"It's a little money, anyhow. And then—remember Dick Lamoureux?"

"Yes."

"Got a letter from him right after—I came back from St. Louis. Well, he's got a big job with the American Express in Paris—European Advertising Manager or something like that—he's been crazy to have either of us come over ever since that idea of the three of us getting an apartment on the Rive Gauche fell through. Well, he says, if I can come over, he'll get me some sort of a job—not much to go on at first but they want people who are willing to stay—enough to live on anyway—I want to get out of the country, Ted."

"Should think you would. Good Lord—Paris! Why you lucky, lucky Indian!" says Ted affectionately. "When'll you leave?" "Don't know. He said cable him if I really decided—think I will. They need men and I can get a fair enough letter from Vanamee. I've been thinking it over ever since the letter came—wondering if I'd take it. Think I will now. Well."

"Well, I wish I was going along, Crowe."

And this time Oliver is really able to smile.

"No, you don't."

"Oh well—but, honestly—well, no, I suppose I don't. And I suppose that's something you know all about, too, you—private detective!"

"Private detective! Why, you poor ass, if you haven't noticed how I've been playing godmother to you all the way through this house-party—"

"I have. I suppose I'd thank anybody else. Coming from you, though, I can only say that such was both my hope and my expectation."

"Oh, you perfect ass!" Both laugh, a little unsteadily.

"Well, Ollie, what think?" says Ted, finding some difficulty with his words for some reason or other.

"Think? Can't tell, my amorous child. Coldly considered, I think you've got a good show—and I'm very strong for it, needless to say—and if you don't go and put it over pretty soon I'll be intensely annoyed—one of the pleasures I've promised myself for years and years has been getting most disgracefully fried at your wedding, Ted."

"Well, tonight is going to be zero hour, I think." Ted proceeds with a try at being flippant and Oliver cackles with mirth.

"I knew it. I knew it. Old Uncle Ollie, the Young Proposer's Guide and Pocket Companion." Then his voice changes. "Luck," he says briefly.

"Thanks. Need it."

"Of course I'm not worthy," Ted begins diffidently but Oliver stops him.

"They never are. I wasn't. But that doesn't make any difference. You've got to—n'est-ce pas?"

"You old bum! Yes. But when I think of it—-"

"Don't"

"But leaving out everything else—it seems so damned cheeky! When Elinor's got everything, including all the money in the world, and I—"

"We talked that over a long time ago, remember? And remember what we decided—that it didn't matter, in this year and world at least. Of course I'm assuming that you're really in love with her—"

"I am," from Ted very soberly. "Oh I am, all right."

"Well then, go ahead. And, Theodore, I shall watch your antic motions with the greatest sarcastic delight, both now and in the future—either way it breaks. Moreover I'll take anybody out of the action that you don't want around—and if there were anything else I could do—"

"Got to win off my own service," says Ted. "You know. But thanks all the same. Only when I think of—some incidents of Paris—and how awful near I've come to making a complete fool of myself with that Severance woman in the last month—well—"

"Look here, Ted." Oliver is really worried. "You're not going to let that—interfere—are you? Right now?"

"I've got to tell her." Ted's smile is a trifle painful. "Got to, you know. Oh not that. But France. The whole business."

"But good heavens, man, you aren't going to make it the start of the conversation?"

"Well—maybe not. But it's all got to be—explained. Only way I'll ever feel decent—and I don't suppose I'll feel too decent then."

"But Ted—oh it's your game, of course. Only I don't think it's being—fair—to either of you to tell her just now."

"Can't help it, Ollie." Ted's face sets into what Oliver once christened his "mule-look." "I've thought it over backwards and sideways and all around the block—and I can't squirm out of it because it'll be incredibly hard to do. As a matter of fact," he pauses, "it'll tell itself, you know, probably," he ends, more prophetically than he would probably care to know.

"Well, I simply don't see—"

"Must," and after that Oliver knows there is very little good of arguing the point much further. He has known Ted for eight years without finding out that a certain bitter and Calvinistic penchant for self-crucifixion is one of his ruling forces—and one of those least easily deduced from his externals. Still he makes a last effort.

"Now don't start getting all tied up about that. Keep your mind on Elinor."

"That's not—hard."

"Good—I see that you have all the proper reactions. And you'll excuse me for saying that I don't think she's too good for you—and even if she were she'd have to marry somebody, you know—and when you put it, put it straight, and let Paris and everything else you're worrying about go plumb to hell! And that's good advice."

"I know it. I'll tell you of course."

"Well, I should think you would!"

Oliver looks at his watch. "Great Scott—they'll be unmasking in twenty minutes. And I've got to go back and cut Juliet out of the herd and take her to supper—"

They rise and look at each other. Then

"Hope this is the last time, Ted, old fel—which isn't any reflection on the last eight years odd," says Oliver slowly, and their hands grip once and hard. Then they both start talking fast as they walk back to the house to cover the unworthy emotion. But just as they are going in the door, Oliver hisses into Ted's ear, an advisory whisper,

"Now go and eat all the supper you can, you idiot—it always helps."



XXXI

The parti-colored harlequin and the young Chinese lady in blue silks are walking the Italian gardens, talking about nothing in particular. Ted has managed to discuss the moon—it is high now, a round white lustre—the night, which is warm—the art of garden decoration, French, English and Italian—the pleasantness of Southampton after New York—all with great nervous fluency but so completely as if he had met Elinor for the first time ten minutes ago that she is beginning to wonder why, if he dislikes her as much as that, he ever suggested leaving the dance-floor at all.

Ted, meanwhile, is frantically conscious of the fact that they have reached the end of the garden, are turning back, and still he is so cripplingly tongue-tied about the only thing he really wishes to say that he cannot even get the words out to suggest their sitting down. It is not until he stumbles over a pebble while passing a small hard marble seat set back in a nest of hedge that he manages to make his first useful remark of the promenade.

"Ah—a bench!" he says brightly, and then, because that sounded so completely imbecile, plunges on.

"Don't you want to sit down a minute, Elinor?—I—you—it's so cool—so warm, I mean—" He closes his mouth firmly—what a ghastly way to begin!

But Elinor says "Yes" politely and they try to adapt themselves to the backless ornamental bench, Ted nervously crossing and recrossing his legs until he happens to think that Elinor certainly never would marry anybody with St. Vitus' Dance.

"Can't tell you how nice it's been this time, Elinor. And you've been—" There, things are going better—at least, he has recovered his voice.

"Why, you know how much we love to have you, Ted," says Elinor and Ted feels himself turn hot and cold as he was certain you never really did except in diseases. But then she adds, "You and Ollie and Bob Templar, and, oh, all Peter's friends."

He looks at her steadily for a long moment—the blue silks of her costume suit her completely. She is there, black hair and clear eyes, small hands and mouth pure as the body of a dream and elvish with thoughts like a pansy—all the body of her, all that people call her. And she is so delicately removed from him—so clean in all things where he is not—that he knows savagely within him that there can be no real justice in a world where he can even touch her lightly, and yet he must touch her because if he does not he will die. All the things he meant to say shake from him like scraps of confetti, he does not worry any more about money or seeming ridiculous or being worthy, all he knows at all in the world is his absolute need of her, a need complete as a child's and so choosing any words that come.

"Listen—do you like me?" says the particolored harlequin and all the sharp leaves of the hedge begin to titter as wind runs over them at one of the oldest and least sensible questions in the world.

The young Chinese lady turns toward the harlequin. There is some laughter in her voice and a great deal of surprise.

"Why, Ted, of course—why, why shouldn't I?—You're Peter's friend and—"

"Oh, I don't mean that!" The harlequin's hands twist at each other till the knuckles hurt, but he seems to have recovered most voluble if chaotic powers of speech.

"That was silly, asking that—but it's hard—when you care for anybody so much you can't see—when you love them till they're the only thing there is you care about—and you know you're not fit to touch them—not worthy of them—that they're thousands of times too good for you but—oh, Elinor, Elinor, I just can't stand it any more! Do you love me, Elinor, because I love you as I never loved anything else in the world?"

The young Chinese lady doesn't seem to be quite certain of just what is happening. She has started to speak three times and stopped each time while the harlequin has been waiting with the suspense of a man hanging from Heaven on a pack-thread. But then she does speak.

"I think I do, Ted—-oh, Ted, I know I do," she says uncertainly—and then Oliver, if he were there, would have stepped forward to bow like an elegant jack-knife at the applause most righteously due him for perfect staging, for he really could not have managed better about the kiss that follows if he had spent days and days showing the principals how to rehearse it.

And then something happens that is as sudden as a bubble's going to pieces and most completely out of keeping with any of Oliver's ideas on how love should be set for the theatre. For "Oh, what am I doing?" says the harlequin in the voice of a man who has met his airy double alone in a wood full of ghosts and seen his own death in its face, and he crumples into a loose bag of parti-colored silks, his head in his hands. It would be nothing very much to any sensible person, no doubt—the picture that made itself out of cold dishonorable fog in the instant of peace after their double release from pain. It was only the way that Elinor looked at him after the kiss—and remembering the last time he saw his own diminished little image in the open eyes of a girl.

The young Chinese lady is shrinking inside her silks as if frost had touched her—all she knows is that she doesn't understand. And then there is the harlequin looking at her with his face gone suddenly pinched and odd as if he had started to torture himself with his own hands; and the fact that he will not touch her, and what he says.

"Oh, Elinor, darling. Oh, I can't tell you, I can't."

"But what is it, Ted?"

"It's this—it's what I meant to tell you before I ever told you I loved you—what I haven't any right not to tell you—and I guess that the fact I didn't, shows pretty well what sort of a fellow I am. Do you really think you know about me, dear—do you really think you do?"

"Why, of course, Ted." The voice is still a little chill with the fright he gave her, but under that it is beautifully secure.

"Well, you don't. And, oh Lord, why couldn't it have happened before I went to France!—because then it would have been all different and I'd have had some sort of a right—not a right, maybe—but anyhow, I could have come to you—straight. I can't now, dear, that's all."

The voice halts as if something were breaking to pieces inside of it.

"I can't bring you what you'd bring me. Oh, it isn't anything—physically—dangerous—that way—I—was—lucky." The words space themselves as slowly as if each one of them burnt like acid as it came. "It's—just—that. Just that—while I was in France—I went over—all the hurdles—and then a few more, I guess—and I've got to—tell you about it—because I love you—and because I wouldn't dare love you, even—if I didn't—tell you the truth. You see. But, oh my God, I never thought it would—hurt so!" and the parti-colored body of the harlequin is shaken with a painful passion that seems ridiculously out of keeping with his motley. But all that the young Chinese lady feels is that for a single and brittle instant she and somebody else had a star in their hands that covered them with light clean silver, and that now the conjuror who made the star out of nothing and gave it to her is showing her just why there never was any star. Moreover, she has only known she was in love for the last five minutes—and that is hardly long enough for her to discover that love itself is too living to be very much like any nice girl's dreams of it—and the shock of what Ted has said has brought every one of her mother's reticent acid hints on the general uncleanliness of Man too prickling-close to her mind. And she can't understand—she never will understand, she thinks with dull pain.

"Oh how could you, Ted? How could you?" she says as he waits as a man walking the plank might wait for the final gentle push that will send him overboard.

"Oh, I know it was fine of you to tell me—but it's just spoiled everything forever. Oh, Ted, how could you?" and then she is half-running, half-walking, up the path toward the porch and all she knows is that she must get somewhere where she can be by herself. The harlequin does not follow her.



XXXII

Oliver, in the middle of a painfully vivid dream in which he has just received in the lounge of a Yale Club crowded with whispering, pointing spectators the news that Miss Nancy Ellicott of St. Louis has eloped with the Prince of Wales, wakes, to hear someone stumbling around the room in the dark.

"That you, Ted?"

"Yes. Go to bed."

"Can't—I'm there. What's time?"

"'Bout five, I guess." Ted doesn't seem to want to be very communicative.

"Um." A pause while Oliver remembers what it was he wanted to ask Ted about and Ted undresses silently.

"Well—congratulations?"

Ted's voice is very even, very controlled.

"Sorry, Ollie. Not even with all your good advice."

"Honestly?"

"Uh-huh." "Well, look here—better luck next time, anyway. It's all—"

"It's all over, Ollie. I'm getting out of here tomorrow before most of them are up. Special breakfast and everything—called back to town by urgent legal affairs." He laughs, rather too barkingly for Oliver to like it.

"Oh, Hell!"

"Correct."

"Well, she's—"

"She's an angel, Ollie. But I had to tell her—about France. That broke it. D'you wonder?"

"Oh, you poor, damn, honorable, simple-minded, blessed, blasted fool! Before you'd really begun?"

Ted hesitates. "Y-yes."

"Oh, hell!"

"Well, if all you can do is to lie back in bed there and call on your Redeemer when—-Sorry, Ollie. But I'm not feeling too pleasant tonight."

"Well, I ought to know—"

"Forgot. You ought. Well—you do."

"But I don't see anything yet that—"

"She does."

"But—"

"Oh, Ollie, what's the use? We can both of us play Job's comforter to the other because we're pretty good friends. But you can see how my telling her would—oh well there isn't much percentage in hashing it over. I've done what I've done. If I'd known I'd have to pay for it this way, I wouldn't have—but there, we're all made like that. There's one thing I can't do—and that is get away with a thing like that on false pretences—I'd rather shoot the works on one roll and crap than use the sort of dice that behave. I went into the thing with my eyes open—now I've got to pay for it—well, what of it? It wouldn't make all the difference to a lot of girls, perhaps—a lot of the best—but it does to Elinor and she's the only person I want. If I can't have her, I don't want anything—but if I've made what all the Y.M.C.A. Christians that ever sold nickel bars of chocolate for a quarter would call a swine out of myself—well, I'm going to be a first-class swine. So put on my glad rags, Josie, I'm going to Rector's and hell!"

All this has been light enough toward the end but the lightness is not far from a very real desperation, all the same.

"Meaning by which?" Oliver queries uneasily.

"Meaning by which that some of my address for the next two-three weeks will be care of Mrs. Rose Severance, 4th floor, the Nineveh, Riverside Drive, New York—you know the place, I showed it to you once from a bus-top when we were talking the mysterious lady over. And that I don't think Mr. Theodore Billett will graduate cum laude from Columbia Law School. In fact, I think it very possible that Mr. Billett will join Mr. Oliver Crowe, the celebrated unpublished novelist on a pilgrimage to Paris for to cure their broken hearts and go to the devil like gentlemen. Eh, Ollie?"

"Well, that's all right for me," says Oliver combatively. "And I always imagined we'd find each other in hell. I'm not trying to be inhospitable with my own pet red-hot gridiron, but all the same—"

"Now, Crowe, for Pete's sake, it's five o'clock in the morning and I'm catching the 7.12—"

And Oliver is too sleepy to argue the point. Besides he knows quite well that any arguments he can use will only drive Ted, in his present state of mind, a good deal farther and faster along the road he has so dramatically picked out for himself. So, between trying to think of some means of putting either sense or the fear of God into Elinor Piper, whatever Ted may say about it, and wondering how the latter would take a suggestion to come over to Melgrove for a while instead of starting an immoral existence with that beautiful but possessive friend of Louise's, he drops off to sleep.



XXXIII

Oliver had depended on Ted's noisy habits in dressing and packing to wake him and give them a chance to talk before Ted left—but when he woke it was to hear a respectful servantly voice saying "Ten o'clock, sir!" and his first look around the room showed him that Ted's bed was empty and Ted's things were gone. There was a scribbled note propped up against the mirror, though.

"Dear Ollie:

"So long—and thanks for both good advice and sympathy. The latter helped if the former didn't. Drop me a message at 252A as soon as you decide on this French proposition. I'm serious about it. TED."

By the time he had read this through, Oliver began to feel rather genuinely alarmed.

He could not believe that the whole affair between Ted and Elinor Piper had gone so utterly wrong as the note implied—he had had a whimsical superstition that it must succeed because he was playing property man to it after his own appearance as Romeo had failed—but he knew Ted and the two years' fight against the struggling nervous restlessness and discontent with everything that didn't have either speed or danger in it that the latter, like so many in his position, had had to make. His mouth tightened—no girl on earth, even Nancy, could realize exactly what that meant—the battle to recover steadiness and temperance and sanity in a temperament that was in spite of its poised externals most brilliantly sensitive, most leapingly responsive to all strong stimuli—a temperament moreover that the war and the armistice between them had turned wholly toward the stimuli of fever—and Ted had made it with neither bravado nor bluster and without any particular sense of doing very much—and now this girl was going to smash it and him together as if she were doing nothing more important than playing with jackstones.

He remembered a crowd of them talking over suicide one snowy night up in Coblenz—young talk enough but Ted had been the only one who really meant it—he had got quite vehement on picking up your proper cue for exit when you knew that your part was through or you were tired of the part. He remembered cafe hangers-on in Paris—college men—men who could talk or write or teach or do any one of a dozen things—but men who had crumbled with intention or without it under the strain of the war and the snatches of easy living to excess, and now had about them in everything they said or wore a faint air of mildew; men who stayed in Paris on small useless jobs while their linen and their language verged more and more toward the soiled second-hand—who were always meaning to go home but never went. If Ted went to Paris—with his present mind. Why Ted was his best friend, Oliver realized with a little queer shock in his mind—it was something they had never just happened to say that way. And therefore. Far be it from Oliver to be rude to the daughter of his hostess, but some things were going to be explained to Miss Elinor Piper if they had to be explained by a public spanking in the middle of the Jacobean front hall.

But then there was breakfast, at which few girls appeared, and Elinor was not one of the few. And then Peter insisted on going for a swim before lunch—and then lunch with Elinor at the other end of the table and Juliet Bellamy talking like a mechanical piano into Oliver's ear so that he had to crane his neck to see Elinor at all. What he saw, however, reassured him a little—for he had always thought Elinor one of the calmest young persons in the world, and calm young persons do not generally keep adding spoonfuls of salt abstractedly to their clam-broth till the mixture tastes like the bottom of the sea.

But even at that it was not till just before tea-time that Oliver managed to cut her away from the vociferous rest of the house-party that seemed bent on surrounding them both with the noise and publicity of a private Coney Island. Peter has expressed a fond desire to motor over to a little tea-room he knows where you can dance and the others had received the suggestion with frantic applause. Oliver was just starting downstairs after changing his shoes, cursing house-party manners in general and Juliet Bellamy in particular all over his mind when Elinor's voice came up to him from below.

"No, really, Petey. No, I know it's rude of me but honestly I am tired and if I'm going to feel like anything but limp tulle this evening. No, I'm perfectly all right, I just want to rest for a little while and I promise I'll be positively incandescent at dinner. No, Juliet dear, I wouldn't keep you or anybody else away from Peter's nefarious projects for the world—"

That was quite enough for Oliver—he tiptoed back and hid in his own closet—wondering mildly how he was going to explain his presence there if a search party opened the door. He heard a chorus of voices calling him from below, first warningly, then impatiently—heard Peter bounce up the stairs and yell "Ollie! Ollie, you slacker!" into his own room—and then finally the last motor slurred away and he was able to creep out of his shell.

He met Elinor on the stairs—looking encouragingly droopy, he thought.

"Why Ollie, what's the matter? The pack was howling for you all over the house—they've all gone over to the Sharley—look, I'll get you a car—" She went down a couple of steps toward the telephone.

Oliver immediately and without much difficulty put on his best expression of blight.

"Sorry, El—must have dropped off to sleep," he said unblushingly. "Lay down on my bed to sort of think some things over—and that's what happens of course. But don't bother—"

"It's no trouble. I could take you over myself but I was so sort of fagged out—that's why I didn't go with them," she added—a little uncertainly he noticed.

"And—oh it's just being silly and tired I suppose, but all of them together—"

"I know," said Oliver and hoped his voice had sounded appropriately bitter. "No reflections on you or Peter, El, you both understand and you've both been too nice for words—but some of the others sometimes—"

"Oh I'm sorry," said Elinor contritely, and Oliver felt somewhat as if he were swindling her out of sympathy she probably needed for herself by deliberately calling attention to his own cut finger. But it had to be done—there wasn't any sense in both of them, he and Ted, walking crippled when one of them might be able to doctor the other up by just giving up a little pride. He went on.

"So I thought—I'd just stay around here with a book or something—get some tea from your mother, later, if she were here—"

"Why, I can do that much for you, Ollie, anyway. Let's have it now."

"But look here, if you were going to do anything—" knowing that after that she could hardly say so, even if she were.

"Oh no. And besides, with both of us here and both of us blue it would be silly if we went and were melancholy at each other from opposite sides of the house." She tried to be enthusiastic. "And there's strawberry jam and muffins somewhere—the kind that Peter makes himself such a pig about—"

"Well, Elinor, you certainly are a friend—"

A little later, in a quiet corner of the porch with the tea-steam floating pleasantly from the silver nose of its pot and a decorous scarlet and yellow still-life of muffins and jam between them, Oliver felt that so far things had slid along as well as could be expected. Elinor's manners in the first place and her genuine liking for him in the second had come to his help as he knew they would—she was too concerned now with trying to comfort him in small unobtrusive ways to be on her guard herself about her own troubles. All he had to do, he knew, was to sit there and look ostentatiously brokenhearted to have the conversation move in just the directions he wished and that, though it made him feel shameless was not exactly difficult—all he required was a single thought of the last three weeks to make his acting sour perfection itself. "Greater love hath no man than this," he thought with a grotesque humor—he wondered if any of the celebrated story-book patterns of friendship from Damon and Jonathan on would have found things quite so easy if they had had to take not their lives but most of their most secret and painful inwards and put them down on a tea-table like a new species of currant bun under the eyes of a friendly acquaintance to help their real friends.

"I can't tell you how awfully decent it was of you and Peter," he began finally after regarding a buttered muffin for several minutes as if it were part of the funeral decorations for dead young love. "Asking me out here, just now. Oh I'll write you a charming bread-and-butter letter of course—but I wanted to tell you really—" He stopped and let the sentence hang with malice aforethought. Elinor's move. Trust Elinor. And the trust was justified for she answered as he wanted her to, and at once.

"Why Ollie, as if it was anything—when we've all of us more or less grown up together, haven't we—and you and Peter—" She stopped—oh what was the use of being tactful! "I suppose it sounds—put on—and—sentimental and all that—saying it," she laughed nervously, "but we—all of us—Peter and myself—we're so really sorry—if you'll believe us—only it was hard to know if you wanted to have us say so—how awfully sorry we were. And then asking you out here with this howling mob doesn't seem much like it, does it? but Peter was going to be here—and Ted—and I knew what friends you'd been in college—I thought maybe—but I just didn't want you to think it was because we didn't care—"

"I know—and—and—thanks—and I do appreciate, Elinor." Oliver noticed with some slight terror that his own voice seemed to be getting a little out of control. But what she had just said took away his last doubt as to whether she was really the kind of person Ted ought to marry—and in spite of feeling as if he were trapping her into a surgical operation she knew nothing about, he kept on.

"It gets pretty bad, sometimes," he said simply and waited. Last night—if things came out right later—will have been just what Elinor needed most, he decided privately. She had always struck him as being a little too aloof to be quite human—but she was changing under his eyes to a very human variety of worried young girl.

"Well, isn't there something we can really do?" she said diffidently, then changing,

"Oh I mean it—if you don't think it's only—probing—asking that?" as she changed again.

"Not a thing I'm afraid, Elinor, though I really do thank you." He hated his voice—it sounded so brave. "It's just finished, that's all. Can't kick very well. Oh no," as she started to speak, "it doesn't hurt to talk about, really. Helps, more. And Peter and Ted help too—especially Ted."

He watched her narrowly—changing color like that must mean a good deal with Elinor.

Then "Why Ted?" she said, almost as if she were talking to herself and then started to try and make him see that that didn't matter—a spectacle to which he remained gratifiedly blind. He addressed his next remarks at the dish of jam so that she wouldn't be able to catch his eye.

"Oh, I'm not slamming Peter's sympathetic soul, El, you know I'm not—but Ted and I just happened to go through such a lot of the war and after it together—and then Ted saw a good deal more of Nancy. Peter's delightful. And kind. But he does assume that because lots of people get engaged and disengaged again all over the lot these days as if they were cutting for bridge-partners there isn't anything particularly serious in things like that. Nothing to really make you make faces and bust, that is. Well, ours happened to be one of the other kind—that's the difference. And Peter, well, Peter isn't exactly the soul of constancy when it comes to such matters—"

"Peter—oh Peter—if you knew the millions of girls that Peter's kept pictures of—"

"Well, I've heard all about the last hundred thousand or so, I think. But there's perfect safety in thousands. It's when you start being so stalwart and sure and manly about one—"

Oliver spread out his hands. Elinor's color—the way it fluctuated at least—was most encouraging. So was the fact that she had tried to butter her last muffin with the handle of her knife. "But I don't see how if a girl really cared about a man she could let anything—" she said and then stopped with a burning flush. And now Oliver knew that he had to be very careful. He looked over his tools and decided that infantile bitterness was best.

"Girls are girls," he said shortly, stabbing a muffin. "They tell you they do and then they tell you they don't—that's them."

"Oliver Crowe, I never heard such a nasty, childish seventeen-year-old idea from you in my whole life!" Oh what would calm Mrs. Piper say if she could see Elinor, eyes cloudy with anger, leaning across the tea-wagon and emphasizing her points by waves of a jammy knife as she defends constancy and romance! "They do not! When a girl cares for a man—and she knows he cares for her—she doesn't care about anything else, she—"

"That's what Nancy said," remarked Oliver placidly out of his muffin. "And then—"

"Well, you know I'm sorry for you—you know I'm just as sorry for you as I can be," went on Elinor excitedly. "But all the same, my dear Ollie, you have no right in the least to say that just because one girl has broken her engagement with you, all girls are the same. I know dozens of girls—" "So do I," from Oliver, quietly. "Dozens. And they're just the same."

"They aren't. And I haven't the slightest wish to suggest that it was your fault, Oliver—but no girl as sweet and friendly and darling as Nancy Ellicott, the little I knew of her that is, but other girls can tell, and she certainly thought you were the person that made all the stars come out in the sky and twinkle, would go and break her engagement entirely of her own accord—you must have—"

And now Oliver looked at her with a good deal of sorrowful pity—she had delivered herself so completely into his hands.

"I never said it was her fault, Elinor," he said gently, keeping the laughter back by a superb effort of will. "It was mine, I am sure," and then he added most sorrowfully, "All mine."

"Well!"

For a moment he forgot that he was there playing checkers with himself and Elinor for Ted.

"You've never been through it, have you?" he said rather fiercely. "You can't have—you couldn't talk like that if you had. When you've put everything you've got in mind or body or soul completely in one person's hands and then, just because of a silly misunderstanding we neither of us meant—they drop it—and you drop with it and the next thing you know you're nothing but a mess and all you can wonder is if even the littlest part of you will ever feel whole again—" He realized that he was very nearly shouting, and then, suddenly, that if he kept on this way the game was over and lost. He must think about Ted, not Nancy. Ted, Ted. Mr. Theodore Billett, Jr.

"She'd forgiven me such a lot," he ended rather lamely. "I thought she'd keep on."

But his outburst had only made Elinor feel the sorrier for him—he felt like a burglar as he saw the kindness in her eyes.

"I don't imagine she ever had such an awful lot to forgive, Ollie," she said gently.

Then the lie he had been leading up to all the way came at last, magnificently hesitant.

"She had, Elinor. I was in France you know."

He was afraid when he had said it—it sounded so much like a title out of a movie—but he looked steadily at her and saw all the color go out of her face and then return to it burningly.

"Well, that wasn't anything to be—forgiven about exactly—was it?" she said unsteadily.

He spoke carefully, in broken sentences, only the knowledge that this was the only way he could think of to help things nerving his mind. "It wasn't being in France, Elinor. It was—the adjuncts. I don't suppose I was any worse than most of my outfit—but that didn't make it any easier when I had to tell her I hadn't been any better. I felt," his voice rose, his literary trick of mind had come to his rescue now and made him know just how he would have felt if it had really happened, "I felt as if I were in hell. Really. But I had to tell her. And when she'd forgiven me that—and said that it was all right—that it didn't make any real difference now—I thought she was about the finest person in the world—for telling me such nice lies. And after that—I was so sure that it was all right—that because of her knowing and still being able to care—it would last—oh well—"

He stopped, waiting for Elinor but Elinor for a person so voluble a little while ago seemed curiously unwilling to speak.

"Lord knows why I'm telling you this—except that we started arguing and you're nice enough to listen. It's not tea-table conversation, or it wouldn't have been ten years ago—and if I've shocked you, I'm sorry. But after that, as I said—I didn't think there was anything that could separate us—really I didn't—and then just one little time when we didn't quite understand each other and—over. Sorry to spoil your illusions, Elinor, but that's the way people do."

"But how could she?" and this time there was nothing but pure hurt questioning in Elinor's voice and the words seemed to hurt her as if she were talking needles. "Why Ollie—she couldn't possibly—if she really cared—"

All he wondered was which of them would break first.

"She could," he said steadily, in spite of the fact that everything in his mind kept saying "No. No. No." "Any girl could—easily. Even you, Elinor—if you'll excuse my being rude—"

For a moment he thought that his carefully plotted scenario was going to break up into melodrama with the reticent, composed and sympathetic Elinor's suddenly rising and slapping his face. Then he heard her say in a voice of utter anger,

"How can you say anything like that, how can you? You are being the most hateful person that ever lived. Why if I really cared for anyone—if I ever really cared—" and then she began to cry most steadily and whole-heartedly into her napkin and Oliver in spite of all the generous plaudits he was receiving from various parts of his mind for having carried delicate business successfully to a most dramatic conclusion, wondered what in the name of Hymen his cue was now. Some remnants of diplomacy however kept him from doing anything particularly obtrusive and, after he had received an official explanation of nervous headache with official detachment, the end of tea found them being quite cheerful together. Neither alluded directly to what both thought about most but in spite of that each seemed inwardly convinced of being completely if cryptically understood by the other and when the noise of the first returning motor brought a friendly plotter's "You talk to them—they mustn't see me this way," from Elinor and a casual remark from Oliver that he felt sure he would have to run into town for dinner—family had forwarded a letter from an editor this morning—so if she wanted anything done—they seemed to comprehend each other very thoroughly.

He babbled with the returning jazzers for a quarter of an hour or so, tactfully circumvented Peter into offering him the loan of a car since he had to go into New York, and intimated that he would drop back and in at the Rackstraws' dance as soon as possible, after many apologies for daring to leave at all. Then he went slowly upstairs, humming loudly as he did so. Elinor met him outside his door.

"Ollie—as long as you're going in—I wonder if you'd mind—" Her tone was elaborately careless but her eyes were dancing as she gave him a letter, firmly addressed but unstamped.

"No, glad to—" And then he grinned. "You'll be at the Rackstraws'."

"Yes, Ollie."

"Well—we'll be back by ten thirty or try to. Maybe earlier," he said at her back and she turned and smiled once at him. Then he went into his room.

"Mr. Theodore Billett," said the address on the letter, "252A Madison Ave., N. Y. C.," and down in the lower corner, "Kindness of Mr. Oliver Crowe."

He thought he might very well ask for the latter phrase on Ted's and Elinor's wedding invitations. He passed a hand over his forehead—that had been harder than walking a tight-rope with your head in a sack—but the chasm had been crossed and nothing was left now but the fireworks on the other side. How easy it was to tinker other people's love-affairs for them—for oneself the difficulties were somehow a little harder to manage, he thought. And then he began considering how long it would take from Southampton to New York in the two-seater and just where Ted would most likely be.



XXXIV

A long-distance telephone conversation about six o'clock in the afternoon between two voices usually so even and composed that the little pulse of excitement beating through both as they speak now seems perilous, unnatural. One is Mr. Severance's thin cool speech and the other—most curious, that—seems by every obsequious without being servile, trained and impassive turn and phrase to be that of that treasure among household treasures, Elizabeth.

"My instructions were that I was to call you, sir, whenever I was next given an evening out."

"Yes, Elizabeth. Well?"

"I have been given an evening out tonight, sir."

"Yes."

"Mrs. Severance has told me that I am on no account to return till tomorrow morning, sir."

"Yes. Go on."

"There are the materials of a small but quite sufficient meal for two persons in the refrigerator, sir. Mrs. Severance is dining out, sir—she said." "Yes. Any further information?"

"Mrs. Severance received a telephone call this morning, sir, before she went out. It was after that that she told me I was to have the evening."

"You did not happen to—overhear—the conversation, did you, Elizabeth?"

"Oh no, sir. Mrs. Severance spoke very low. The only words that I could catch were 'You' at the beginning and 'Please come' near the end. The words 'please come' were rather—affectionately—spoken if I might make so bold, sir."

"You have done very well, Elizabeth."

"Thank you, sir."

"There is nothing else?"

"No, sir. Should you wish me to 'phone you again before tomorrow morning, sir?"

"No, Elizabeth."

"Thank you, sir. Good-by, sir."

"Good-by, Elizabeth."



XXXV

The rest of the party has scattered to the gardens or the porch—Oliver has wandered into the library alone to wait for Peter who is bringing around the two-seater himself. It is a big dim room with books all the way up to the ceiling and a comfortable leather lounge upon which he sinks, picks up a magazine from a little table beside it and starts ruffling the pages idly. The chirrup of a telephone bell that seems to come out of the wall beside him makes him jump.

Then he remembers—that must be Mr. Piper's office through the closed door there. He remembers, as well, Peter joking with his father once about his never getting away from business even in the country and pointing at the half dozen telephones on top of the big flat desk with a derisive gesture while detailing to Oliver the fondness that Sargent Piper has for secretive private wires and the absurd precautions he takes to keep them intensely private. "Why he went and had all his special numbers here changed once just because I found out one of them by mistake and called him up on it for a joke—the cryptic old person!" Peter had said with mocking affection.

The telephone chirrups again and Oliver gets up and goes toward the door of the office with a vague idea of answering it since there seem to be no servants about. Then he remembers something else—Peter's telling him that nothing irritates his father more than having anyone else answer one of his private wires—and stops with his hand on the door that has swung inward an inch or so already under his casual pressure. It doesn't matter anyhow—there—somebody has answered it—Mr. Piper probably, as there is another door to the office and both of them are generally kept locked. Mr. Piper like all great business men has his petty idiosyncrasies.

Oliver is just starting to turn away when a whisper of sound that seems oddly like "Mrs. Severance" comes to his ear by some trick of acoustics through the door. He hesitates—and stays where he is, wondering all the time why he is doing anything so silly and unguest-like—and also what on earth he could say if Mr. Piper suddenly flung open the door. But Ted has told him a good deal at various times of the more mysterious aspects of Mrs. Severance, and her name jumping out at him this way from the middle of Mr. Piper's private office makes it rather hard to act like a copybook gentleman—especially with his last conversation with Ted still plain in his mind.

The voices are too low for him to hear anything distinctly but again one of the speakers says "Mrs. Severance"—of that he is entirely sure. The receiver clicks back and Oliver regains the lounge in three long soft strides, thanking his carelessness that he is still wearing rubber-soled sport-shoes. He is very much absorbed in an article on "Fishing for Tuna" when Peter comes in.

"Well, Oliver, everything ready for you. Awfully sorry you have to rush in this way—"

"Yes, nuisance all right, but it's my one best editor and that may mean something real—terribly cheeky thing for me to do, Pete—bumming your car like this—"

"Oh rats, you know you're welcome—and anyhow I'm lending it to you because you'll have to bring it back, and that means you'll come back yourself—"

"Well look, Pete, please make all the excuses you can for me to your mother. And I'll run back here and change and then go over to the Rackstraws', as soon as I can—Elinor told you about Ted?"

"Yes. Sounds sort of simple to me asking him back tonight for that beach picnic tomorrow when he absolutely had to leave this morning—but I never could keep all Elinor's social arrangements straight. Certainly hope he can get off."

"So do I," says Oliver non-committally and then the door of Mr. Piper's office opens and Mr. Piper comes out looking as well-brushed and courteous as usual but with a face that seems as if it had been touched all over lightly with a grey painful stain.

"Hello, Father? Anything up from Secret Headquarters?"

"No, boy," and Oliver is surprised at the effort with which Mr. Piper smiles. "Winthrop called up a few minutes ago about those Hungarian bonds but it wasn't anything important—" and again Oliver is very much surprised indeed, though he does not show it.

"Is your mother here, Peter?"

"Upstairs dressing, I think, Father."

Mr. Piper hesitates.

"Well, you might tell her—it's nothing of consequence but I must go in to town for a few hours—I shall have them give me a sandwich or so now and catch the 7.03, I think."

"But look, Father, Oliver has to go in too, for dinner—he's taking the two-seater now. Why don't you let him take you too—that would save time—" "Perfectly delighted to, Mr. Piper, of course, and—"

Mr. Piper looks full at Oliver—a little strangely, Oliver thinks.

"That would be—" Mr. Piper begins, and then seems to change his mind for no apparent reason. "No, I think the train would be better, I do not wish to get in too early, though I thank you, Oliver," he says with an old-fashioned bob of his head. "And now I must really—a little food perhaps"—and he escapes before either Oliver or Peter has time to argue the question. Oliver turns to Peter.

"Look here, Pete, if I'm—"

"You're not. Oh I'd think it'd be a lot more sensible of Father to let you take him in, but you never can tell about Father. Something must be up, though, in spite of what he says—he's supposed to be on a vacation and I haven't seen him look the way he does tonight since some of the tight squeezes in the war."



XXXVI

It all started by having too much Mrs. Winters at a time, Nancy decided later. Mrs. Winters went down with comparative painlessness in homeopathic doses but Mrs. Winters day in and day out was too much like being forcibly fed with thick raspberry syrup. And then there had been walking up the Avenue from the Library alone the evening before—and remembering walks with Oliver—and coming across that copy of the "Shropshire Lad" in Mrs. Winters' bookcase and thinking just how Oliver's voice had sounded when he read it aloud to her—a process of some difficulty, she recalled, because he had tried to read with an arm around her. And then all the next day as she tried to work nothing but Oliver, Oliver, running through her mind softshoed like a light and tireless runner, crumbling all proper dignity and good resolutions away from her, little hard pebble by little hard pebble, till she had finally given up altogether, called up Vanamee and Company on the telephone and asked, with her heart in her mouth, if Mr. Oliver Crowe were there. The reply that came seemed unreal somehow—she had been so sure he would be and every nerve in her body had been so strung to wonder at what she was going to say or do when he finally answered, that the news that he had left three weeks before brought her down to earth as suddenly as if she had been tripped. All she could think of was that it must be because of her that Oliver had left the company—and illogically picture a starving Oliver painfully wandering the streets of New York and gazing at the food displayed in restaurant windows with lost and hopeless eyes.

Then she shook herself—what nonsense—he must be at Melgrove. She couldn't call him up at Melgrove, though, he mightn't be there when she 'phoned and then his family would answer and what his family must think of her now, when they'd been so perfectly lovely when she and Oliver were first engaged—she shivered a little—no, that wouldn't do. And letters never really said things—it mustn't be letters—besides, she thought, humbly, it would be so awful to have Oliver send letters back unopened. Two weeks of pure Mrs. Winters had chastened Nancy to an unusual degree.

For all that though, it was not until Mrs. Winters had left her alone for the evening after offering her an invitation to attend a little discussion group that met Wednesday evenings and read literary papers at each other, an invitation which Nancy somewhat stubbornly declined, that she finally made up her mind. Then she sighed and went to the telephone again.

"Mr. Oliver Crowe? He is away on a visit just at present but we expect him back tomorrow afternoon." Margaret is pretending for her own satisfaction over the wire that the Crowes have a maid. "Who is calling, please?"

Rather shakily, "A f-friend."

Briskly. "I understand. Well, he will be back tomorrow. Is that all that you wished to inquire? No message?"

"Good-by then," and again Nancy thinks that things simply will not be dramatic no matter how hard she tries.

She decides to take a small walk however—small because she simply must get to bed before Mrs. Winters comes back and starts talking at her improvingly. The walk seems to take her directly to the nearest Subway—and so to the Pennsylvania Station, where, after she has acquired a timetable of trains to Melgrove, she seems to be a good deal happier than she has been for some time. At least as she is going up the cake-colored stairs to the Arcade again she cannot help taking the last one with an irrepressible skip.



XXXVII

Oliver had quite a little time to think things over as the two-seater purred along smooth roads toward New York. The longer he thought them over, the less amiable some few of the things appeared. He formed and rejected a dozen more or less incredible hypotheses as to what possible connection there could be between Mrs. Severance and Sargent Piper—none of them seemed to fit entirely and yet there must be something perfectly simple, perfectly easy to explain—only what on earth could it be?

He went looking through his mind for any scraps that might possibly piece together—of course he hadn't known Peter since College without finding out that in spite of their extreme politeness toward each other, Peter's mother and father really didn't get on. Club-stories came to him that he had tried to get away from—the kind of stories that were told about any prominent man, he supposed—a little leering paragraph in "Town Gossip"—a dozen words dropped with the easy assuredness of tone that meant the speakers were alluding to something that everyone knew by people who hadn't realized that he was Peter's friend. A caustically frank discussion of Mrs. Severance with Ted in one of Ted's bitter moods—a discussion that had given Oliver a bad half-hour later with Louise.

But things like that didn't happen—people whose houses you stayed at—people your sister brought home over the week-end—the fathers of your own friends. And then Oliver winced as he remembered the afternoon when all the New Haven evening papers had screamed with headlines over the Witterly divorce suit—and Bob Witterly's leaving College because he couldn't stand it—that had been people you knew all right—and everyone had always had such a good time at the Witterlys' too.

It was all perfectly incredible of course—but he would have to find Ted just as soon as possible, no matter where he had to go to find him—and as the little reel of the speedometer began to hitch toward the left and into higher figures, Oliver felt very relieved indeed that he had the two-seater and that Mr. Piper wasn't coming into town till the 7.03.

He got into New York to find he hadn't made as good time as he'd thought—a couple of traffic blocks had kept him back for valuable minutes—though of course the minutes couldn't be valuable exactly when it was all bosh about his having to get in so quickly after all. He went first to 252A Madison Avenue, hoping most heartily that Ted would be there on the fifth floor with his eyeshade over his eyes and large law-books crowding his desk, but the door was locked and knockings brought no response except a peevish voice from the other side of the narrow hall requesting any gentleman that was a gentleman to shut up for Gawd's sake. The Yale Club next—there was just a chance that Ted might be there—

Oliver went through the Yale Club a good deal more thoroughly than most pages, from the lobby to the upstairs dining-room. He even invaded the library to the suspicious annoyance of some old uncle who was pretending to read a book held upside down in his lap in order to camouflage his pre-prandial nap. No Ted—though half-a-dozen acquaintances who insisted on saying hello and taking up time. Back to the street and a slight dispute with a policeman as regarded the place where Oliver had parked his car. He looked at his watch just before poking the self-starter—Mr. Piper's train must be halfway to New York by now. He set his lips and turned down 44th Street toward the Avenue.

Fourth floor Ted had said. The elevator went much too quickly for Oliver—he was standing in front of a most non-committal door-bell before he had arranged the racing tumult of thought in his mind enough to be in any measure sure of just what the devil he was going to say.

Moreover he was oppressed by a familiar and stomachless sensation—the sensation he always had when he tried to high-dive and stood looking gingerly down from a shaky platform at water that seemed a thousand miles away and as flat and hard as a blue steel plate. There wasn't any guide in any Manual of Etiquette he had ever heard of on What to Say When Interrupting a Tete-a-Tete between Your Best Friend and a Dangerous And Beautiful Woman. He wondered idly if Ted would ever speak to him again—Mrs. Severance certainly wouldn't—and he rather imagined that even if Ted and Elinor did get married he would hardly be the welcome guest he had always expected to be there.

Well, that was what you get for trying to pull a Jonathan when the Saul in question was behaving a good deal more like David in the affair with Uriah the Hittite's spouse—and it wasn't safe and Biblical and all done with a couple of thousand years ago but abashingly real and now happening directly under your own astonished eyes. He licked his lips a little nervously—they seemed to be rather dry. No use standing outside the door like a wooden statue of Unwelcome Propriety anyhow—the thing had to be done, that was all—and he pushed the bell-button with all the decision he could force into his finger.

The fact that it was not answered at once helped him a good deal by giving him a certain strength of annoyance. He pushed again.

It was Mrs. Severance who answered it finally—and the moment he saw her face he knew with an immense invisible shock of relief how right he had been, for it was composed as an idol's but under the composure there was emotion, and, the moment she saw him, anger, as strong and steady and impassive as the color of a metal that is only white because it has been possessed to extremity already with all the burning heat that its substance can bear. She was dressed in some stuff that moved with her and was part of her as wholly as if it and her body had been made together out of light and gilded cloud—he had somehow never imagined that she could be as—lustrous—as that—it gave him the sensation that he had only seen her before when she was unlighted like an empty lantern, and that now there was such fire of light in her that the very glass that contained it seemed to be burning of itself. And then he realized that she had given him good-evening with an exquisite politeness, shaken hands and now was obviously waiting, with a little tired look of surprise around her mouth, to find out exactly why he was there at all.

He gathered his wits—it wasn't fair, somehow, for her to be wearing that air of delicate astonishment at an unexpected call at dinner-time when he hadn't been invited—it forced him into being so casually polite.

"Sorry to break in on you like this, Mrs. Severance," he said with a ghastly feeling that after all he might be entirely wrong, and another that it was queer to have to be so formal, in the afternoon tea sense, with his words when his whole mind was boiling with pictures of everything from Ted as a modern Tannhauser in a New York Venusberg to triangular murder. "I hope I'm not—disturbing you?"

"Oh no. No," and he suddenly felt a most complete if unwilling admiration for the utter finish with which she was playing her side of the act.

"Only you see," and this was Oliver doing his best at the ingenuous boy, "Ted Billett, you know—he said he might be having dinner with you this evening—and I've got a very important letter for him—awful nuisance—don't see why it couldn't have gone in the mail by itself—but the man was absolutely insistent on my delivering it by hand." "A letter? Oh yes. And they want an answer right away?" Again Oliver realized grudgingly that whatever Mrs. Severance might be she was certainly not obvious. For "I'm so glad you came then," she was saying with what seemed to be perfect sincerity. "Won't you come in?"

That little pucker that came and went in the white brow meant that she was sure that she could manage him, sure she could carry it off, Oliver imagined—and he was frank enough with himself to admit that he was not at all sure that she couldn't.

"Oh Ted—" he heard her say, very coolly but also with considerable distinctness, as if her voice had to carry, "there's a friend of yours here with a letter for you—"

And then she had brought him inside and was apologizing for having the front room so badly lighted but one had to economize on light-bills, didn't one, even for a small apartment, and besides didn't it give one a little more the real feeling of evening? And Oliver was considering why, when if as he pressed the bell, he had felt so much like a modern St. George and wholly as if he were doing something rather fine and perilous, he should feel quite so much like a gauche seventeen-year-old now. He thought that he would not enjoy playing chess with Mrs. Severance. She was one of those people who smiled inoffensively at the end of a game and then said they thought it would really be a little evener if they gave you both knights.

Ted reassured him though. Ted, stumbling out of the dining-room, with a mixture of would-be unconcern, compound embarrassment and complete though suppressed fury at Oliver on his face. It was hardly either just or moral, Oliver reflected, that Mrs. Severance should be the only one of them to seem completely at her ease.

"Hello, Ollie," in the tone of "And if you'd only get the hell out as quickly as possible." "Mrs. Severance—" a stumble over that. "You've got a letter for me?"

"Yes. It's important," said Oliver as firmly as he could. He gave it, and, as Ted sat down near a lamp to read it, Oliver saw by one sudden momentary flash that passed over Mrs. Severance's face that she had seen the address and known instantly that the handwriting was not that of a man. And then Oliver began to think that he might have been right when he had thought of the present expedition as something rather perilous—he found that he had moved three steps away from Mrs. Severance without his knowing it, very much as he might have from an unfamiliar piece of furniture near which he was standing and which had instantaneously developed all the electric properties of a coil of live wire. Then he looked at Ted's face—and what he saw there made him want to kick himself for looking—because it is never proper for even the friendliest spectator to see a man's private soul stripped naked as a grass-stalk before his own eyes. It was horribly like watching Ted lose balance on the edge of a cliff that he had been walking unconcernedly and start to fall without crying out or any romantic gestures, with only that look of utter surprise struck into his face and the way his hands clutched as if they would tear some solid hold out of the air. Oliver kept his eyes on him in a frosty suspense while he read the letter all through three times and then folded it and put it carefully away in his breast pocket—and then when he looked at Mrs. Severance Oliver could have shouted aloud with immense improper joy, for he knew by the way Ted's hands moved that they were going back in the car together.

Ted was on his feet and his voice was as grave as if he were apologizing for having insulted Mrs. Severance in public, but under the meaninglessness of his actual words it was wholly firm and controlled.

"I'm awfully sorry—I've got to go right away. You'll think me immensely rude but it's something that's practically life-and-death." "Really?" said Mrs. Severance and Oliver could have clapped his hands at her accent. Now that the battle had ended bloodlessly, he supposed he might be permitted to applaud, internally at least. And "I'm sorry—but this is over," said every note in Ted's voice and "Lost have I? Well then—" every note in hers.

It occurred to Oliver that things were badly arranged—all this—and he was the only audience.

Life seemed sudden lavish in giving him benefit performances of other people's love-affairs—he supposed it was all part of the old and deathless jest.

And then, like a prickling of cold, there passed over him once more that little sense of danger. Mrs. Severance and Ted were both standing looking at each other and neither was saying anything—and Ted looked by his face as if he were walking in his sleep.

"The car's down below, old boy," said Oliver helpfully, and then, a little louder "Peter's car, you know," and whatever cobwebs had been holding Ted for the last instant broke apart. He went over to Mrs. Severance. "Good-by."

"Good-by," and he started making apologies again while she merely looked and Oliver was suddenly fretting like a weary hostess whose callers have stayed hours too long, to have him down in the car and the car pointed again with its nose toward Southampton.

And then he heard, through Ted's last apologia, the whir of a mounting elevator.

The elevator couldn't stop at the fourth floor—it couldn't. But it did, and there was the noise of the gate slung back and "What's that?" said Mrs. Severance sharply, her politeness broken to bits for the first time.

They were all standing near the door, and, with a complete disbelief in all that he was hearing and seeing, Oliver heard Mrs. Severance's voice in his ear, "The kitchen—fire-escape—" saw her push Ted toward him as if she were shifting a piece of cumbrous furniture, and obeyed her orders implicitly because he was too surprised to think of doing anything else.

He hurried himself and the still half-somnambulistic Ted through the dining-room curtains, just in time to catch a last glimpse of Mrs. Severance softly pressing with all her weight and strength against her side of the door of the apartment as a man's quick short footsteps crossed the hall in two strides, and after a second's pause, a key clicked into the lock.



XXXVIII

Mrs. Severance, her whole weight against the door, felt it push at her fiercely without opening, and, even in the midst of her turmoil, smiled. Mr. Severance had never been exactly what one would call an athlete—

She slackened her pressure, little by anxious little. Her hand crept down to the knob, then she jerked it sharply and stood back and Mr. Piper came stumbling into the room, a little too fast for dignity. He had to catch to her to save himself from falling but as soon as he had recovered his balance he jerked his hands away from her as if they had taken hold of something that hurt him and when he stood up she saw that his face was grey all over and that his breath came in little hard sniffs through his nose.

"Sorry, Sargent," she said easily. "I heard your key but that silly old door is sticking again. You didn't hurt yourself, did you?"

For an instant she thought that everything was going to be perfectly simple—his face had changed so, with an intensity of relief almost childish, at the sound of her accustomed voice. Then the greyness came back.

"Do you mind—introducing me—Rose—to the gentleman—you are dining with tonight?" he said with a difficulty of speech as if actual words were not things he was accustomed to using. "I merely—called—to be quite sure."

She managed to look as puzzled as possible.

"The gentleman?"

"Oh yes, the gentleman." He seemed neither to be particularly disgusted nor murderously angry—only so utterly tired in body and spirit that she thought oddly that it seemed almost as if any sudden gesture or movement might crumble him into pieces of fine grey paper at her feet.

"Oh, there isn't any use in pretending, Rose—any more. I have my information."

"Yes? From whom?"

"What on earth does it matter? Elizabeth—since you choose to know."

"Elizabeth," said Mrs. Severance softly. She could not imagine how time, even when successfully played for and gained, could help the situation very much—but that was the only thing she could think of doing, and she did it, therefore, with every trick of deliberation she knew, as if any instant saved before he went into the dining-room might bring salvation.

"Do you know, I was always a little doubtful about Elizabeth. She was a little too beautifully incurious about everything to be quite real—and a little too well satisfied with her place, even on what we paid her. But of course is she has been supplementing her salary with private-detective work for you—"