letter I thought you would have something tangible to suggest. Something

beside these brutalities."

"I offer you freedom and you call me names!" The tiny mouth pursed with rage. "But wait a moment, I'm afraid you can't go now. They're back from the movies. Isn't that the elevator?"

The blood receded from Alexis's face. Yes, surely that was Claire's voice approaching the door. Would to God he had never come!

A key clicked in the lock and Claire stood upon the threshold. Behind her Dr. Elliott turned white as he saw Alexis. Placing a mechanical arm about Claire, he piloted her in. She fell into a chair beside the door.

"Alexis!" Tears streamed from her eyes. Her voice was feeble.

He sprang forward with a cry of pity and bent over her. "I'm sorry I frightened you, Claire."

"I'm so silly," she murmured. "Only last night I dreamed that you had returned again!"

"Poor child!" His face contracted in a spasm of pain.

"I--I want to tell you how happy I am over your success! I heard you at the Philharmonic yesterday and--and it was glorious!"

"You are always so generous," he felt broken with shame.

"Generous! You call it that?" she retorted scornfully. Drawing her cape about her carefully, she preceded them into the living room. "Come in, Robert, I want you to meet my--my husband," she added, with a pathetic assumption of ease.

A grim expression on his face, the young doctor broke his silence.

"I can only stay a few minutes. I ought to go back to the hospital," he said gruffly. But if Claire needed him, he would not fail her.

Mme. Petrovskey smiled, as she caught his belligerent eye. "Do stay, we will have a nice little chat."

"I hear you have been to the movies," said Alexis, after they had settled themselves more or less stiffly about the room. Why in hell didn't the man get out?

"Dr. Elliott is very good to me," broke in Claire naïvely.

Alexis cursed inwardly. Did she expect him to thank the man for taking her off his hands?

"It is Mrs. Petrovskey who has been good," retorted Elliott more gently.

"I shouldn't place the guilt entirely upon her shoulders!" laughed Mme. Petrovskey with a kittenish air. "I have often feared that Dr. Elliott in his kindness of heart, must be neglecting his work. I assure you he and Claire have been inseparable all winter."

Dr. Elliott glared. "I'm afraid you are exaggerating. But Mrs. Petrovskey's occasional company has proved a great boon to a lonely chap like myself."

"Occasional!" exclaimed Mme. Petrovskey. "I should hardly call it that, dear Dr. Elliott!"

"It has seemed so to me."

"Ah, the young are so impetuous!" She raised innocent eyes to the ceiling. "They are never contented with less than all."

"You choose to be playful," said the doctor, with a guarded little smile.

Alexis admired the man's restraint. He, himself, fidgeted uneasily. Did his mother have no decency at all?

"Aren't we getting rather serious?" he demanded. What a ghastly scene! Why couldn't the fellow go home? Perhaps he was in love with Claire, after all?

"It's a serious subject." Mme. Petrovskey was still sprightly. "Repressed desires are almost as serious as unrepressed."

The doctor laughed. "Ah, now you are getting on familiar ground. When it comes to Freud, or his fellow Paul Prys," his eye gleamed dangerously, "I can argue with the best of you."

Mme. Petrovskey nodded gayly. "Do you follow the new method of free expression?"

"I believe that one's desires, if decent, should be gratified." He fixed his eyes upon Claire's face with an expression at once baffling and affectionate.

Mme. Petrovskey bridled. "There are so many standards of decency, aren't there? And that of a young doctor might be considered lax by an old fogy like myself."

Alexis shot her a tortured glance. "Since when have you become so interested in Psycho-Analysis? This is getting too high-brow for Claire and me, isn't it, Claire?"

She met his harried gaze with an apologetic smile at once pleading and listless. "I'm afraid I wasn't paying much attention."

Mme. Petrovskey turned towards her punctiliously. Her eyes beneath the smile seemed to strip the girl to the bone, and Claire cowered away as from a limelight. "You had better listen, dear child. For the matter concerns you profoundly."

"Concerns me?" she muttered inexplicably uneasy.

"Yes, indeed," playfully. "We're talking about the doctor's repressed and unrepressed desires."

"What have I to do with them?" Her voice was cold with dawning fear.

"We are trying to discover in which of the two pigeon-holes you belong."

"Ah!" Claire's pale lips parted on a cry. She half rose from her chair. Alexis sprang across the room to her side.

"This is too much!" he exclaimed. "Why do you torture the child?"

"Because Mme. Petrovskey wants me to confess that I love Claire!" Dr. Elliott's tones rang clear.

They all looked at him in amazement. A calm exultation in his eyes, he faced them squarely.

"Can you deny it?" A smile of triumph played about the older woman's mouth.

"I can. But I will not!"

Claire hid her face in shaking hands. "Oh, Robert," she sobbed, "please don't."

He approached and stood over her with quiet strength.

"Why should I deny the most beautiful thing in my life? That would be to lower it to the level of Mme. Petrovskey's insinuations."

The latter started up from her chair with a cry of suppressed fury. The baby-blue orbs flashed hell-fire.

"You--you----!" she commenced. Then turned to Alexis with a resumption of her habitual sweetness. "What did I tell you? Was I not right?"

"Keep quiet," he commanded. "You have made trouble enough for one evening!" He turned to Dr. Elliott. "So you are in love with my wife?"

The other man looked down upon him from his greater height. "I have done you no wrong, Petrovskey."

Claire raised a white and streaming face.

"Oh Alexis, you do believe him, don't you?"

He patted her trembling hand, with absent-minded kindliness. "Don't worry, child. Of course I believe him."

Robert Elliott grasped him by the shoulder. "You are a real man, Petrovskey. I didn't know you had it in you!" he exclaimed naïvely.

Alexis' smile was a trifle awry. "You are wrong, Elliott. If I were a real man, all this would never have occurred."

His mother interposed herself between them almost savagely.

"All this magnanimity looks very pretty. But what proof have you that they are not lying? I, for one, don't believe in this blessed innocence. Many a divorce has been granted on less substantial grounds than these!"

Claire stumbled to her feet, and stood swaying against the table.

"You are a wicked woman! How dare you lie about me and Dr. Elliott? I shall not stay under the same roof with you for another night!" She moved blindly forward towards the corridor. Alexis pursued her.

"Where are you going? What are you going to do?"

She turned upon him like a hounded creature. "Let me alone, I am going to pack," she cried at bay. "I am going to pack," she repeated wildly. She stumbled down the corridor towards her room.

Mme. Petrovskey reseated herself. "Running away is hardly the action of an innocent woman!" she remarked.

"Be silent!" exclaimed Elliott sternly. But he was too late for Claire had heard.

"Oh!" With a gasping cry she faced them. Then crashed forward like a felled tree.

"You have killed her!" Alexis ran down the corridor, and knelt beside the small, prostrate figure. He was about to lift it in his arms when the doctor interfered.

"Put her down on her back. Here, let me do it." He shifted Claire expertly. "Don't you know that a fainting patient must never be lifted? It sometimes kills them, especially in her condition."

"In her condition?" Alexis looked up from rubbing Claire's hands. "What do you mean? Is her heart affected?"

Squatting upon his haunches the doctor uncorked his brandy flask. As he leaned over to pour the liquid between Claire's teeth, he looked Alexis squarely in the eyes.

"Your wife is pregnant," he said shortly. "It is time you knew it."

An ashy pallor overspread Alexis' face. His heart leaped sickeningly. Then tolled against his ribs like a knell. It tolled so raspingly--it tolled so loudly that all the world--that Anne herself must hear it.

"Why didn't you let me know?" he demanded softly. Was he never to cease paying for the feeble nightmare which had made Claire his? "Why was I not told?" he repeated with the same irate quiet.

Robert Elliott looked at him with grudging compassion. So the fellow could feel after all? Well, it was time he did! A throb of hatred seared him. "She did not wish to have you know. It was a matter of pride. She had no use for your pity, she only wanted you----" he hesitated over the word, "your love."

Before the suffering in the man's eyes, Alexis lowered his own. They fell upon the pinched features of the swooning girl.

"She is coming to," he whispered, between dry lips.

Like folded pansies, the dark eyes slowly unfurled. Into their shadowed depths Alexis plunged his agony and his shame. "Claire, what have I done to you?" he groaned.

The pansies opened wide. Terror crept into their wounded depths. The pale lips twisted.

"You have told him?" She looked up at Robert Elliott reproachfully.

He nodded. "Yes." His voice died into a hoarse murmur.

"How dared you when I'd forbidden it?" she cried weakly. Great tears slid down the hollow cheeks. She suddenly burst into uncontrollable, frenzied sobs that shook the feeble body.

Fear gripped Alexis as he watched her writhe in a vain effort to control herself.

"Don't, dear Claire," he cried, touching with clumsy fingers a lock of hair which clung against the drenched cheek.

"I wanted to spare you this," she gasped, raising drowned eyes to his.

A flood of shame swept over Alexis, together with an unbearable, wrenching pity. Pity for the suffering he had inflicted. Shame for the unheeded seed sowed so wantonly and without love. Despair that his heart should be empty of all save compassion. Futile, shameful anger against Claire that it was she, the unloved, and not Anne, who was to mother his first-born. Face drawn and gray, he bent over Claire in an agony of contrition.

"Don't, Claire, don't. You will hurt yourself!" He looked up at the doctor, who had risen and was trying to appear unconscious of a scene which was literally tearing at his very marrow. "Hadn't we better carry her into her room and put her to bed, Elliott?"

The power of speech had deserted Elliott. He nodded. They were about to gather her up in their arms, but Claire pushed them away, almost with violence.

"No, I will not stop here another night, with Aunt. I couldn't bear it!"

Alexis shot a desperate look at the other man, who shook his head gravely. "She had better be humored," he said decisively.

Claire's sobs grew fainter. She looked up at Dr. Elliott gratefully.

Alexis forced himself to a bitter decision. "How would you like to go to my apartment in Gramercy Park?" he asked with dreadful reluctance.

Surprise choked back Claire's sobs. "Do you mean it? Wouldn't I be awfully in your way?"

"Of course not. There is a day-bed in the studio where I can sleep. I have often used it."

That was true enough. A burning mist clouded his eyes. He turned away to conceal it. With what memories of Anne was the alcove not hallowed?

Eyes upon his averted face, Claire's lips quivered. "Have you given up your house in Long Island?"

He avoided her glance with a sense of pity. "I still have it until the first of April. However, I always sleep in town on concert days, and very often at other times. But you needn't worry about being a nuisance, for I am leaving on tour the day after to-morrow."

"Ah, yes, I had forgotten." Claire's voice sounded dreary. "There was something in the paper about it. If you will help me up, I think I'll go and dress."

Their arms beneath hers, she struggled to her feet.

"Do you feel able to dress?" asked Elliott as she swayed a little. "Why do you hurry?"

"Yes, oh yes," she pushed the hair back from her damp brow. "I must go at once."

She walked slowly towards her bedroom. The clumsy gait, the fragile, swollen body struck Alexis for the first time. Filled with compassion and a sick sort of repulsion of which he was fiercely ashamed, he turned to Dr. Elliott.

"Will you please see that Claire has a nurse? A nice, cheerful one. I don't want her to be lonely. There is a cleaning woman who comes in by the day who will cook for them until we can procure some one better."

"I'll telephone for one." Elliott shot a glance charged with meaning after the tragic figure retreating up the hall. "For God's sake be kind to her, Petrovskey!" He whispered huskily, as Claire's door closed behind her.

Alexis passed a hand over his trembling mouth. "I'll try to, God knows! But you ought to have married her, Elliott. You could have made her happy!" he replied with aching humility.

They walked slowly back to the living room.

Elliott slipped into the ante-room to telephone. As he waited for his number there was a stoic, Indian savagery about his face. Wild, unbidden thoughts rose like green scum to the clear surface of his mind. If Claire's child should die, all might yet be well. The last link between her and Alexis sundered, she might possibly be induced to give him up forever. But if--it lived----! With a knowing leer, temptation nudged his elbow, puffing its vile breath into his clean nostrils. He shook the beast off angrily and responded to the operator's voice when it came with detached calm.

Meanwhile, Alexis had flung himself into a chair beside the living-room table, burying his face upon its surface. For him the radiant dream was over. He had awakened to the same grim and joyless world which had once before tried to slay him.

Mme. Petrovskey had come out from her room at the sound of their return. She approached Alexis stealthily. Her bulk cast a bloated shadow on the wall. It crouched over him like a beast of prey. "So you have let yourself be conquered by a nobody, an unloved waif? Fie, you are weak! You are allowing yourself to be dragged into a mediocrity more loathsome than death. That is not for you. You are a genius. Spread your wings, fly away before you lose all capacity to soar. Fly away! Your bird of paradise awaits you. Do such as you mate with the sparrows?"

His mother's words, or his own subconscious mind? What matter? It voiced his weeping soul.