BOOK II

I

IT was early in the following December before Mrs. Allestree again came face to face with the situation which was so intimately connected, though in such different ways, with the happiness of two members of her family, her son and her nephew. The long months that had intervened, however, had not dulled her remembrance of that vivid scene in Margaret’s bedroom, or lessened the degree of her secret sympathy--which was in exact opposition to her judgment.

It was a long time indeed before she could recur to that scene without a poignant feeling of guilt; her conscience pinched her with self-righteousness; she had found the mote in her sister’s eye without seeing the beam in her own, she had judged without experience. However, after awhile, this sensitiveness was enveloped in a thicker moral coating, and she began again to view the affair with horror. The two little White children were constant spectacles in the parks with their two French nurses and their general air of bewildered desolation; it was perfectly well known that Estelle had raised a terrible outcry for her mother and refused to be comforted, in spite of the conscientious efforts of poor old Mrs. White who, whatever her faults, was sincere in her devotion to the two poor little waifs of wealth.

Mr. White, meanwhile, had created fresh scandal by his open devotion to Lily Osborne, and would probably have been still more outrageous if that astute young woman had not judiciously absented herself from the city at the very moment when society had reached the limit of its endurance; but her disappearance from the surface scarcely arrested White’s downward career; he was plunging deeper and deeper, and there were many rumors of scandals connected with his administration which would lead to his dismissal from the Cabinet. Some secret information from the Navy Department had found its way into the hands of a foreign government, and the way of its passage through White’s careless hands to Lily Osborne’s and from hers to the representative of the foreign power was unfortunately made altogether too plain to be ignored except on the surface of things, to hush scandal.

December found Washington a little aghast; Congress had just re-assembled, Wicklow White had somewhat hastily resigned, almost on the date which, in the previous year, had seen the retirement of Wingfield, and one of the ambassadors had been as hastily recalled, clearing the atmosphere of an international situation with the accustomed scapegoat! That the Cabinet would have to be reorganized was evident, and Berkman’s prophecy of eight months before was apparently on the eve of fulfilment. The very atmosphere, surcharged with excitement, seemed to breathe the name of William Fox; only those who knew the secret of Margaret’s divorce, which had just been granted in Omaha, divined the fatal combination of circumstances.

Fox had been absent for months in his own state, taking part in a campaign of unusual bitterness and importance, and his remarkable powers of organization, his keen policy, his magnetic eloquence, had carried all before him. There had been, in fact, a storm of applause; every newspaper in the country had discussed him as a possible candidate for the Presidency in the following year, his own party with triumphant confidence, and the opposing faction with reluctant admission of his great strength. If anything had delayed his invitation to take a seat in the Cabinet, it was openly hinted to be the jealousy of the Administration and an uncertainty whether such a position would conveniently shelve him or increase his popularity.

To those who knew the whole truth Fox’s position was almost tragic, but the man had returned more than usually brilliant and untiring.

Rose had sailed for Europe in the previous June in charge of an elderly cousin and Aunt Hannah, and no one knew the secret of that parting or the cost of it to Fox; no one indeed even surmised it but old Mrs. Allestree.

The last six months had been trying ones to her and she was meditating upon them, sitting before the open fire in her drawing-room, her tea-table at her elbow, waiting for Robert.

She measured the tea into the old Canton tea-pot, she looked at the lamp under the kettle, and then she turned back to her knitting, working fast without looking at it, counting stitches now and then and making an elaborate pattern with incredible swiftness, her knitting needles flashing in and out as the work slipped from one to the other and back again. The glow of the fire played on her face and showed the soft lines there, the alert bright eyes, the snowy hair on the temples. The clock struck six and she looked up expecting Robert, but instead her parlormaid opened the door to admit Mrs. O’Neal.

“Why, Martha, I’m delighted to see you! It’s such a bitter evening I didn’t expect a call. Sit down and have a cup of my tea.”

“I don’t take much tea now, I hear that it’s bad for the complexion; but you can give me some hot water and lemon, Jane,” replied her visitor, seating herself with a rustle of silks and a rattle of chains which made a distinct sensation in the quiet room.

Mrs. Allestree poured out the hot water and put in the lemon. “I’m eighty-one,” she remarked, with a queer little smile, “and I’ve rather forgotten my complexion.”

“A mistake, my dear Jane,” replied Mrs. O’Neal calmly, taking the steaming cup and slipping back her sables; “I keep young by constant attention to such details; I have my face massaged every day, and even study my bonnets and veils with that point in view.”

Mrs. Allestree cast a covert glance at the vibrating head under the large, flaring bonnet with its cascade of ostrich feathers and said nothing, instead she knitted violently.

“I suppose you’ve heard the news?” Mrs. O’Neal remarked, after she had sipped the hot water with a slightly wry face; “Margaret White has returned.”

Mrs. Allestree dropped a knitting needle. “When?” she exclaimed rather hastily, while she tried to recover the fugitive.

“Yesterday; she’s taken the apartment that she had last spring.” Mrs. O’Neal mentioned one of the more expensive but quiet apartment houses; “have you any idea how much alimony she got?”

“Good heavens, no!” exclaimed Mrs. Allestree; “Gerty wrote me that White was disposed to be very liberal, and he ought to be!”

Mrs. O’Neal nodded. “He’ll marry Lily Osborne, of course, and I shall cut them dead.”

“I should hope so!”

“Well, of course Lily’s footing was slippery enough at the best and this passes endurance. Mrs. Wingfield told me that it is absolutely certain that she got money from Von Groten for some kind of information; Lily has no conscience and she’s only half an American, thank Heaven! Mrs. Wingfield says she saw the check--”

“Martha, that woman will say anything!”

Mrs. O’Neal shrugged her shoulders. “So does everybody! If Margaret had only let her get into society she wouldn’t have been so bitter now that she’s got her chance; I often think that it pays to be polite to these parvenus! I only hope Margaret doesn’t expect me to hold her up until this blows over.”

Mrs. Allestree smiled involuntarily. “I can’t imagine Margaret in the light of a suppliant,” she said quietly.

“A mere _façon de parler_, of course, on my part,” Mrs. O’Neal retorted; “but, Jane, this is all a bad business, it will have to be patched up, but--” she set down her cup and looked earnestly at Mrs. Allestree--“Jane, does she mean to marry your nephew?”

Mrs. Allestree dropped her knitting and held up both hands. “Heaven knows, not I!” she replied; “of course she can’t be in the fashion unless she marries again.”

“But to marry Fox! That will create a perfect _furore_. Did you know he’s been offered the portfolio of State?”

A quiver of excitement passed over Mrs. Allestree’s pale face. “Actually--or only metaphorically, Martha?”

“Actually, to-day--I had it from two Cabinet officers.”

Mrs. Allestree’s hands fell on her knitting, and she sat looking into the fire. What a nightmare of a complication! To marry Margaret would ruin him, yet not to marry her--

“It isn’t generally known yet that he may marry Margaret; if he does--” Mrs. O’Neal held up her hands this time, and her plumes trembled.

“I don’t know anything about it, Martha,” Mrs. Allestree said judiciously.

Martha O’Neal looked at her shrewdly and smiled, but she changed the subject as she gathered up her furs again preparatory to departure. “Lily Osborne is reported to have made twenty thousand at bridge at the Hot Springs,” she observed casually; “I wish I didn’t entertain an awful doubt of her integrity.”

Mrs. Allestree looked up weakly. “You can’t mean she cheats at cards?”

Mrs. O’Neal laughed. “She’d be caught at that, my dear, and ostracized. She only happens to know who to fleece, you can see how rich she grows.”

“I heard; Gerty told me that Senator Turkman had advised her judiciously in placing some money in mining shares and there has been a rise; Lily told her.”

“Humph!” ejaculated Mrs. O’Neal, finally catching the other end of her sable boa; “it’s rather odd, isn’t it, that Senator Turkman didn’t make any money for himself at the same time? He’s terribly embarrassed.”

Mrs. Allestree leaned back in her chair and laughed silently. “Martha,” she said finally, “you’re a sinner and a publican, let me alone! I haven’t heard so much gossip in a year.”

“My dear Jane,” retorted the other woman dryly, “you live under a hill.”

II

IN the midst of these eddying swirls of gossip, little muddy pools in the thin ice on which he trod, William Fox made his way with singular self-absorption. Even the vortex of the political campaign had not succeeded in decentralizing his thoughts, and he could not now lose sight of the impending climax.

The clamor of applause, the proffered Cabinet portfolio, which was not without significance as an effort on the part of the Administration to bind him to its interests and avert his candidacy in the ensuing year, all fell short of their effect. Such brilliant prospects were indeed stultified to his mental vision by the chilling knowledge that he must soon outrage the feelings of his friends and reanimate his enemies. There were moments when the future which lay before him loomed so black and unfriendly that he could not endure the thought, and he found it well nigh impossible to picture himself playing the rôle of lover and husband to the woman who had twice thwarted his life; first by her careless rejection of his love and then by her determined demand upon his honor. He should marry her, but beyond that bald fact his mind refused to go. He had erred and he would resolutely pay the cost and it would be heavy. He realized that, realized the probable collapse of his career, the long years of building up which must follow, the impossibility of living down the scandal of such a marriage under such circumstances.

He knew that Margaret was in town, but he had not yet gone to see her; it seemed impossible that he should go. Yet the plain actualities of the case could not be denied. He was aware, however, of a feeling of keen thankfulness that the House, under pressure of some special business, was sitting late, and that the organization of committees and the hundred other calls involved him in such a round of duty that he could well excuse delay.

Yet when the House rose one day at five o’clock, and he had time to go to see Margaret, he went instead on foot to Allestree’s studio. He had seen but little of his cousin in the past few months; perhaps because he was haunted with a secret dread that Rose would finally marry Allestree, and he hated the thought, with all a lover’s selfishness.

The snow was falling fast and the streets were sheeted in white when he and Sandy approached the old house on the corner, and he noticed that the windows of Lerwick’s curiosity-shop were coated thick with frost. A bright light in the upper window assured him that the painter was still at work, and stamping the snow from his feet he ascended the narrow stair to the studio.

Allestree, in his shirt sleeves, was engaged in putting away some old canvases and cleaning up his workshop, and was somewhat startled by the unexpected entrance of Sandy and his master.

“I hardly thought to find you here so late,” Fox remarked as he greeted him, “but I saw the light and came up.”

“I was house cleaning,” Allestree explained; “I can’t trust the janitor in here until I put things in shape. Besides, mother is away and there’s no hurry about going home.”

Fox expressed surprise at his aunt’s absence at this season, and Allestree explained further that she had gone to Orange to visit a younger sister who was ill there; a fact which the nephew of both had forgotten.

“I’ve intended to go to see Aunt Jane every day,” Fox remarked, seating himself on the end of Allestree’s brass wood-box and looking at the general disorder with an absent eye, “but I’ve been busy and--” he laughed bitterly--“she has let me know pretty plainly that she doesn’t approve of me.”

“A sure sign of her devotion,” retorted Allestree dryly; “she is always taking sides when her affections are involved. I’ve often thought you were more after her own heart than I, William.”

“God help her, I hope not!” Fox exclaimed with such abrupt passion that his cousin stared.

“I heard this morning that you had been offered the State Department,” he said quietly; “are congratulations in order?”

The other man laughed with great bitterness. “My dear Robert,” he replied, “I’ve been offered the moon, but being merely mundane I can’t pull it down.”

“Well, I’m not sure that the Cabinet is even desirable for you! I’ve known it to quietly swallow up more than one bit of Presidential timber,” Allestree observed, turning his attention to the canvases he was tying together with unsteady fingers.

“Desirable or not, I have refused it,” Fox said curtly.

There was a pause; Allestree put away some boxes and collected his scattered brushes. Fox, looking about the studio with a moody glance, observed that a curtain was drawn before the little tea-table where Rose had made tea, and the chair in which she had posed was gone. He was not at a loss to understand these signs, and he recalled the whole little scene, with its air of domesticity, their gayety, the tender beauty of her drooping profile as she bent over her tea-cups, he even remembered how the light from the alcohol lamp glowed softly on her face and caught the golden tints in her hair. He stifled a groan. The whole covetous passion of his soul had surged up at the thought, and he was to see her married at last to this good, harmless, slow cousin who was so worthy of her because of his clean unspotted life and his honest love! He glanced keenly at Allestree and saw the haggard trouble of his face, the lines on his brow and about his mouth, with almost a pang of joy. There was no assurance of happiness here, only a kindred trouble. The hard element of his personal feeling melted a little, and he turned to the painter with renewed friendliness. “You have heard of the Temples?” he said guardedly; “is the old man out of his troubles, and has Rose returned?”

Allestree shook his head, avoiding his eye. “The judge is still in the quagmire; he was miserably imposed upon and I fancy there is nothing left but his salary. He has been making gigantic efforts to save that old house; you know it’s mortgaged, and he seems ill and worn, though he goes regularly to court.”

“Who holds the mortgage?” Fox asked absently.

Allestree named a large trust company, and began an eager search behind his easels, apparently excluding Rose from his reply. But Fox was not done. “And his daughter?” he said, in a low voice, caressing Sandy who had laid his head upon his knee as a gentle reminder that it was time to go.

“She is still in Paris; she wrote my mother that she was succeeding very well with her lessons and hoped for the best.” Allestree’s voice betrayed his extreme reluctance to produce even these hard facts.

Fox rose abruptly and going to the window thrust aside the curtain and looked out. The storm had increased and the street light opposite shone behind a dazzling whirl of snow-flakes which were swept before the wind and hurled themselves against the pane in a wild rush of blinding white.

Fox turned away and began to walk to and fro, his hands plunged into his pockets and his head sunk on his breast. Allestree glancing at him once or twice was shocked by the drawn grayness of his face, the absolute despair in his dark, deep-set eyes. At last he looked up with a bitter smile. “Good God!” he exclaimed abruptly, “if I were only coward enough to shoot myself!”

“A very unprofitable move,” remarked his cousin coldly, “and it leaves the blame to others.”

Fox nodded. “Precisely,” he said, “and to a woman. But, my dear Allestree, if you want to create a hell for a man, find one who loves a young lovely untried girl with all his soul, and then force him to marry another woman!”

His cousin bit his lip, the color rushing over his face. “No easy matter, I fancy,” he said; “you couldn’t make the man do it; he’d back out at last!”

Fox gave him a strange look; he had never intended to make such an admission to Allestree, it had been wrung from him by the stress of his own feeling and now he would not recall it. “You think so? You think it cannot be done? The shooting would be preferable,” he added grimly, “but, unhappily, a man’s honor lives after him.”

His cousin turned sharply and held out his hand; the gesture was involuntary. “Upon my soul, William, I’m sorry for you!” he exclaimed, with much feeling.

Fox took his hand and wrung it. “You’ll make her happy, Allestree!” he exclaimed with profound emotion; “she’ll marry you.”

Allestree smiled sadly. “She’s refused me,” he said, with a tone of finality which carried conviction if not relief.

Fox turned away with a smothered groan, and groping for his hat and coat went out without another word.

At that moment the tumult of his heart repudiated every other claim and demanded happiness with an unscrupulous passion which excelled Margaret’s own.

III

IT was the following evening that Margaret rose restlessly and looked out of the window of her little hotel drawing-room. She knew that the House had risen at five, she had telephoned twice to ascertain that fact, and her note of the morning should have brought Fox straight from the Capitol.

It was now almost six o’clock, the streets were lighted and thronged with people, some hurrying home from office or shopping, others still on those endless social rounds which had once been the orbit of Margaret’s life. She thought of that existence now, its brilliance, its flattery, its hollowness, with a shudder. Between the two periods of her life there was a chasm. It had been only a few months, but those months had been years in her emotional existence, and her stormy soul struggling through the depths of it had worn away the body which with her seemed but the beautiful ephemeral garment of a wild spirit. When it was over, the divorce with its hideous publicity, its sordid details, its piercing accusations, and freedom had come to her with almost blinding reality, she had declared that she should rebuild her life, forget all, be happy--happy!

She had expected at once some message from Fox, some sign of sympathy, but when none came she interpreted his silence by her own heart; he was loth, she thought, to show too much joy at once. They could wait! How sweet it was to think that once again they had their lives before them; they were still young, the world had potent possibilities of happiness for them. The sheer joy of the thought drove the blood to her heart; she could not breathe sometimes but lay panting, her head thrown back on her pillows and her arms flung wide and helpless, until Gerty came and with trembling hand administered restoratives and threw up the windows. They called them heart attacks but it did not matter, nothing mattered now; she would begin all over again. Her old life had slipped from her, as though its shackles, having been stricken off, had left no scar. She had been in Washington a week, but she had not asked to see her children; she could not, the thought of them sent a shiver through her; they were the visible and actual links which bound her to the past, the past which her soul loathed.

She had waited eagerly for Fox, aware that he was in the city before her arrival, and when he did not come she still attributed his absence to a reluctance to be too soon to claim her. That he loved her she never doubted, and her heart trembled at the thought of that meeting which must come at last, with all its sweetness, its fulfilment, after her long waiting. That morning she had written him and now she watched the clock, carelessly aware that Gerty English was also watching it, and that the girl seemed disconcerted and awkward with her work over Margaret’s letters and books.

But to Margaret everything outside of that one absorbing fact was of little moment; what Gerty thought of no consequence at all, for while she had made only half a confidante of the girl, turning to her in uncontrollable moments and then relapsing again into reserve, she was actually indifferent to the nature and extent of Gerty’s knowledge; the little secretary seemed to her as unimportant as any other parasite upon the lives of the more fortunate.

Margaret went openly to the window therefore, and drew aside the curtains to watch the long brilliantly lighted street, where the snow lay yet in white drifts between the muddy slush of traffic, and she returned openly to the fire to look at the clock on the mantel. At first the delay had been almost sweet, she liked to dwell upon the thought of seeing him, of being happy again, but at last it grew irksome and she paced nervously to and fro, her hands clasped behind her head, scarcely vouchsafing an answer to Gerty’s occasional questions.

Time passed; it was nearly half past six before her maid came in to announce a visitor and Margaret turned, hiding herself a little in the shadow of the curtain that she might see him first when he entered.

As the door finally opened to admit Fox, Gerty English rose rather hastily and retreated to one of the other rooms, with her arms full of books and papers, and he found himself face to face at last with Margaret.

There was an eloquent silence; he was painfully aware of the change in her, that the delicate hollows in her cheeks were sharpened while her eyes seemed larger and more brilliant, and there was a wistfulness, a soft tremulous happiness and expectation in her expression which touched him to the heart. She had never looked so young, so fragile and so gentle since those old days when as half child, half woman, he had loved her. That dead love lying between them now made an impassable barrier, she could as little rekindle it as she could reclaim a fallen star. Some dim, half interpreted perception of this chilled her heart and stayed the passionate greeting on her lips; she stood a moment looking at him, terribly aware of the calmness of his bearing, his pallor, his dark troubled eye which neither kindled nor blenched at the sight of her, but met hers with a studied gentleness which expressed neither joy nor reluctance. A keen pang of dread tore her heart, but the next instant joy, wild, almost childish joy at the sight of him, welled up and swept away her doubts.

“Oh, William!” she exclaimed with trembling lips, holding out both hands, “at last, at last! It has been eons since we met!”

“And you look ill,” he replied kindly, “Margaret, I hoped to see you well again. How is this?”

Her eyes sought his face, eager, feverish, questioning; her heart trembled, was this all?--this stilted, quiet, commonplace greeting? She checked the cry of reproach which rose to her white lips, and smiled--a wan and pallid smile. “I’m quite well,” she replied with sudden calm; “you forget the months have been long and troubled ones; I suppose I grow old!”

“I never saw you look younger, more as you used to look ten years ago,” he exclaimed involuntarily.

“Do I?” there was a tremulous note of eagerness in her voice, and a faint blush passed over her face, but she evaded his hand, which he had stretched out again to clasp hers, and went quietly to a shaded corner where neither lamplight nor firelight fell too sharply on her. “Sit down, William, and tell me about yourself.”

He obeyed her mechanically, unconscious that his manner had betrayed anything, but aware of a sudden indefinable change in her, a restraint and repression. “There is nothing to tell,” he said, with some impatience; “the old story--primaries, conventions, a stormy campaign and finally, as you know, my re-election is assured, if I care for it!” he added, a hard new note of indifference in his voice.

She heard it and leaned forward a little on her cushions, trying to read his face, studying every fine and classic outline of the strong head, the brow, the deep-set brilliant eye, the thin-lipped sensitive mouth, the clean shaven, strong jaw and chin. It was his face; how often she had dreamed about it and dreamed of it as turned to her with the glow of love and joy on it, but how pale it was, how hard, how resolute!

“I knew the campaign was hotly contested, but I never doubted your success,” she said simply; “you know I always believed in you.”

He turned sharply and looked at her. “What is the matter, Margaret? You are not yourself.”

She smiled. “No,” she admitted, looking at him with an enigmatical expression, “no, I am not myself; the old Margaret is dead--and buried! Not even Mrs. Wingfield would know me; I burnt up my last red hat yesterday, William.”

He answered her smile involuntarily, but his eyes remained grave, almost stern. He turned abruptly, holding out his hand. “Margaret,” he said, “I came--of course you know it--to ask you to be my wife.”

She drew a long breath and was silent, her eyes on his face; she was wonderfully calm.

“It seems to me that the sooner it is over the better for both of us,” he went on hurriedly; “there will, of course, be some talk; we must face it together.”

Without answering him she bent over and picked up a half sheet of the morning newspaper from the floor, and after glancing at it, held it out to him. “There is an article there about you,” she said in a low voice; “it says you have refused the State Department; is that true?”

He put the paper aside with a little impatience. “Of course it’s true,” he said; “I refused it three days ago.”

She was again silent for an instant while she folded the paper into plaits. “Why did you refuse it?” she asked.

Fox moved sharply and turned his face away, looking at the fire. “That does not concern us, Margaret,” he said gravely; “our marriage is the only question now; I--”

She interrupted him. “Tell me,” she insisted, “it’s my right to know; this had something to do with me, with the prospect of--of your marrying Wicklow’s divorced wife, I know it! Tell me the truth.”

“Of what avail?” he retorted with evident reluctance, his cheek red.

“I have a right to know,” she reiterated.

He smiled bitterly. “The situation is quite clear, isn’t it? I can’t take White’s place in the Cabinet and White’s wife; it would be monstrous.”

She leaned back in her chair, shading her face with her thin hand which trembled slightly, she tried to speak, but her dry lips refused to move. His manner, no less than his words, had ruthlessly torn away the last shreds of her self-deception, and her poor shivering soul shuddered at this revelation of the hardness in him, the eternal note of egoism. How plain it was, how simple, how inexorable! The man’s love had died, and hers had fed itself upon a chimera, a phantasm of her imagination, a dream of the past! Her hand trembled so that she let it fall in her lap and averted her face.

Something of the anguish she felt reached him; he perceived her thought without knowing that he had laid bare his heart to her, and he felt a pang of remorse for his words, though she had wrung them from him with a woman’s besotted madness, a woman’s wild determination to probe her own agony to the core.

“It is of no consequence to me, Margaret,” he said kindly; “I shall give it all up and go away with you; we must build it up from the beginning again. Only it is best to have it over.”

She smiled faintly, looking into the fire which had fallen from the andirons and lay in red coals on the broad hearth. “Tell me,” she said abruptly, turning her full gaze on him, “I have been away and I do not know--where is Rose Temple? Is she still in Paris?”

There was a striking change in his face as though his features, made of potter’s clay, had suddenly fixed themselves into the shape of a mask, stern and unchanging in its finality. “Yes, she’s in Paris,” he replied, with strong reluctance to speak of her; “I know nothing else. You can ask Allestree.”

“Ah, then I suppose it will end happily at last,” Margaret said softly; “she will marry Allestree; I always thought so.”

Fox rose abruptly and walked to the fire, standing a moment looking down at its fallen embers, his back toward her. She could not see his face, but in the covetous agony of her soul she needed no sight, she knew! A gray shadow passed over her own features, her eyes closed, she shivered from head to foot.

After a moment of terrible silence he turned. “When can we be married, Margaret?” he demanded, with passionate haste; “it must be soon, it cannot be too soon!”

She rose, looking slighter and more frail than ever. “No, it cannot be too soon; I will decide, I have no preparations to make,” she added, with a little, mocking smile; “I’m sorry, William, I’ll be but a sober bride; you should have married a young girl and had a grand wedding with a flourish of trumpets.”

“Which I hate,” he said bluntly, “as you know.”

“As I know?” she laughed a little wildly; “I have known very little! You must go now; I--I’m not very strong yet, and the excitement--”

“Has been too much,” he said kindly, “I’ll come again to-morrow--you can tell me then; it can’t be too soon.”

“What an ardent lover!” she said, her lips trembling, “I’m proud of you, William, you do famously, I--I--” she broke off and suddenly laying her thin white hands lightly on his shoulders she kissed his cheek, turned, evaded his touch, and bursting into uncontrollable weeping ran from the room.

IV

MARGARET, leaning a little on Gertrude English, stopped her with a slight pressure on her arm, and shading her eyes with her free hand stood gazing down the long vista of the sunlit avenue. A final recognition of the contrast between realities and the dreams which had changed and warped her life came upon her with a shock which made familiar objects seem strange and distorted. A shudder of anguish shook her slight frame and stole the blood from her lip; stripped at last of all illusions, facing the immutable laws of life, she felt as though she had been thrust out into the streets homeless, and naked, and ashamed; a wrecked soul to wander henceforth up and down on the face of the earth and find no place. How strange, how different from yesterday! The tremulous love, the hope half justified, the unscrupulous, unflinching desire for happiness--where were they? Gone, shrivelled, dead! And she was not dreaming, she was wide awake, this was life, life with its inexorable bonds, its laws, its justice, its cruel requitals, all else had been a dream! Happiness--what was it? A phantom of some man’s imagination, the flaming sword of the angel at the Garden of Eden.

Before her lay the busy, beautiful thoroughfare, alive with carriages and motor-cars, with gay people, children, old women and perambulators. The sun had already swept away all but a few vestiges of snow; it was one of those spring days which come to us in December. At her very feet were some pansies blooming hardily. Away at the north, between long rows of houses, across the intervening circle, she saw the street ascending the hill, caught the white outlines of the high buildings on the heights, the deep blue of the sky.

Yesterday and to-day, oh, God!

She walked on, unconscious of the curious glances which followed her slight, elegant figure, her small pinched face under the great hat with its toppling plumes; unaware, too, that women leaned forward in passing carriages, looked eagerly and sank back into the friendly shelter, glad to escape the necessity of recognition until some one should decide upon the proper course,--rehabilitation or oblivion.

Gerty, shrewd and watchful, saw and made mental notes. She decided swiftly who should be struck off the list when Margaret’s star rose again; no court chamberlain ever drew lines tighter than she at that moment because, in her pity and her affection, she resented every slight with bitter zeal.

Margaret, meanwhile, walked on, regaining her self control with an effort, her large, melancholy eyes gazing dreamily ahead of her. “Gerty,” she said at last, “do you suppose any one is ever really happy?”

“Oh, mercy, yes!” retorted that matter-of-fact young woman, in great astonishment, “I am often! There are so many nice things in the world, Margaret, and when one has money--” Miss English drew a long breath; it expressed her thought.

Margaret smiled bitterly. “Is that the sum total, Gerty? Is there nothing else?”

“Oh, yes, of course, but not to have to pinch and work and reason, just to be vulgarly downright rich once! I shouldn’t ask much else,” said Gerty ecstatically.

“You have no imagination, Gerty,” Margaret replied, “that’s been my curse, I’ve imagined myself into a fool’s paradise! As for money--I’ve had it all my life, it never gave me anything I wanted.”

“Oh, Margaret!” Miss English almost sobbed, “think of all you’ve had, of all you’ve got, of all you’re going to have!” she added incoherently.

“Of all I’m going to have?” Margaret repeated, with a strange smile; “my dear Gerty, the prospect is certainly blinding. Thank you!”

Gerty stared. She did not understand, and she dared not press the question; she could not but perceive the cold agony in Margaret’s eye.

Their walk had brought them to a little triangle between the streets, and as they crossed above it, a child’s voice cried out after them with a shrill little note of joy. “Oh, mamma, there’s mamma!”

Gerty felt the hand on her arm tighten, and the shiver which ran through the figure at her side was almost as perceptible. They both turned and looking across the grass-plot saw two French nurses, a child in a carriage and Estelle running toward them, her small face flushing with eagerness, her pale hair streaming in the breeze. She came swiftly, reached them and, with the first unchecked impulse of her life, flung her arms around her mother. “Mamma, mamma!” she cried, “I’ve wanted you so much!”

Margaret looked at her strangely for a moment, then her lips twitched and tears came into her eyes, as she stooped down and clasped the child close. For the first time the instinct of maternity spoke; she had seen, too, a strange vague likeness to herself in the small, upturned face, one of those fleeting glimpses that come in a look. “Did you really want me, Estelle?” she asked gently, submitting to the child’s wild joy with a new surprised tenderness.

“Oh, mamma, you’re coming home?” Estelle sobbed, clinging to her; “you’re coming back to us? Oh, where have you been, mamma?”

Margaret kissed her and rose, putting her off a little; she saw that people were looking at them, and a slow dull flush rose to her forehead. “Yes, I’m coming,” she said with an effort; “I’ll--I’ll come to-morrow, Estelle, and ask Grandmother White to let me take you for a while. You must be good, child; don’t cry, mamma can’t bear it!”

“Come now, mamma!” Estelle wailed, holding her dress with desperate fingers and calling to her little brother who still clung to his nurse, staring as if he saw a stranger.

The two French women were huddled together, not sure of their instructions and obviously alarmed. Margaret looked over at them and gently detached Estelle’s fingers from her draperies. “I’ll come to-morrow,” she said more firmly; “now run and play.”

But the child caught at her skirts again, still sobbing; she had felt her mother’s arms about her, and half the dread and fear of desertion which had hung over her, half the talk of the nurses which had frightened her, was swept away; she had a mother. “Oh, mamma,” she sobbed, “take me with you--I won’t make any noise!”

Margaret bent and kissed her again, her strange, wild look almost frightening poor Gerty who stood completely discomfited and at a loss, her honest blue eyes full of tears. “There, there!” the mother whispered, “I’m glad you love me, Estelle, I’m coming, coming soon. Oh, Gerty, go home with her!” she added suddenly, “take her away--I--I can’t bear it!”

Gerty obeyed with a pale face. She bent down and whispered to Estelle, kissed and cajoled and threatened until the child let go her mother’s skirt and began to cling to the girl whom she really knew far more intimately, for the good-hearted little secretary had spent many an hour in that gloomy, magnificent nursery. Gerty’s hands shook but she held the child, told her about some lovely things she was going to bring her, a doll, a fairy-book, a toy which ran about the floor of its own accord.

In the midst of it Margaret turned and fled; she had not dared to go to the little boy, although, quite unacquainted with his mother, he was merely staring in a dull, infantile way, his finger in his mouth, ready, no doubt, to raise a sympathetic wail if his sister’s grief warranted a chorus.

The mother, whose rights in the children had been settled by the courts at six months in the year if she desired it, went on blindly along the sunny avenue which seemed now to mock her with its gayety. She turned sharply away from a crowded circle into another street, hardly conscious where she went, but bent upon escape, oblivion, silence.

The child’s cry had touched her chilled and starving heart; she saw her life revealed; she had thrust away the ties of nature, the demands of natural love and duty in her mad pursuit of happiness; she had lost all and gained nothing.

She put up a shaking hand and drew down her veil; her lips were dry and parched, it was difficult to breathe, she had to relax her pace. Another corner brought her to an abrupt and horrified pause. She came face to face with Mrs. O’Neal at a moment when she felt that she could least abide the sight of any one. But with the shock of recognition her scattered senses recovered themselves, her nerves vibrated again, she summoned back her will.

“Margaret!” exclaimed the old lady, pausing, with her skirts gathered up and her foot on her carriage-step, just the shadow of surprised restraint in her manner, the indefinable change that greets the altered social scale; “I’m--I’m delighted to see you! And how are you, my dear?”

“Well,” Margaret replied, with an odd little laugh, for her quick ear had caught the note; “don’t I look so?”

The bird of paradise on Mrs. O’Neal’s hat trembled. “No,” she said flatly, “you don’t; you need building up, you should go to the country for awhile. I’m due at bridge now or I should make you get in and drive with me.”

“Thank you, I couldn’t,” Margaret replied, with forced calm; “I wish you luck at cards instead.”

Mrs. O’Neal glanced at her coachman, stiff and expressionless upon the box, then she leaned over and put a gentle hand on the younger woman’s arm. “My dear, I congratulate you,” she murmured, “you’re lucky to be free; I was so shocked to read this morning that Mr. White had married Lily Osborne yesterday.”

Margaret suppressed her start of surprise. “Has he?” she said, “I forgot to read the paper, and Gerty misses everything except the ninety-eight cent bargains.”

“Yesterday--in New York!” said Mrs. O’Neal tragically; “I hope you’ve got the children.”

Margaret quietly withdrew her arm. “Thanks, yes,” she said; “I’m afraid you’ll be late for your bridge.”

* * * * *

As she walked on, her heart sank. Lily Osborne--of course she had known it would be so! But if anything happened to her and Mrs. White died--poor Estelle!

The cry of the child pursued her. Until now she had thought only of herself, of her own misery, but the touch, the voice of the little girl had reached her very soul; after lying dormant and unknown all those years it was awakening, awakening to a reality so dreadful that it was appalled, without hope, desolate. And shame, the shame of a woman’s heart swept over her and shook her being to its depths. The humiliation which comes upon a woman when she knows, by some overwhelming perception, that her love is not fully returned; she felt as if she had stripped her soul naked and left it lying in the dust at Fox’s feet.

She walked on; agony winged her feet and she could not be still; she avoided the places which she knew, and turned down strange streets and byways. She had no thought of time. It grew late, the short winter day drew to its close; still she walked on. While her strength endured she went on,--it seemed as if pursuing fate drove her. She was not physically strong, yet she was walking beyond the endurance of most women.

As the twilight gathered and the lights began to start up here and there, she turned, with a dim realization of her unfamiliar surroundings and her sudden complete exhaustion. It was St. Thomas’ Day, four days to Christmas; she had no recognition of it, but, looking up, her eye caught the lighted vestibule of a church, and she saw some women going in to vespers; an impulse made her follow them. The heavy doors swung easily inward, and conscious only of the shelter, the chance for rest, a moment to collect her thoughts, she passed in.

The service was nearly concluded, but she paid no heed to that; moving quietly across the aisle and finding a dark corner, she sat down wearily, and crossing her arms upon the back of the pew in front of her hid her face upon them. Mere physical weariness had brought a dull relief to the gnawing pain at her heart; it clouded her brain too, as weariness sometimes does, and she found the horrible vivid thoughts which had tormented her slipping softly away into a haze of forgetfulness; her mind seemed a mere blur.

The soft organ tones swelling through the dim church harmonized with her mood; she lost herself, lost the agony of those past hours, and rested there, inert, helpless, without power to think. She was scarcely conscious of what passed around her, her throbbing head felt heavy on her slender arms, and she listened, in a vague way, to the music, aware at last of a stillness, then the rustle and stir of people settling themselves back in the long pews. She stirred herself, turning her face upon her arms.

A voice penetrated the stillness, a voice with that vibrant quality of youth and passionate self-confidence.

“‘_The wages of sin is death!_’”

Margaret started and raised her head. Her eyes, blinded by the sudden light in the chancel, flickered a moment and she passed her hand across them; at last she saw quite plainly a young strong face, with a tense eager look, white against the dark finishings of the pulpit; she caught the dazzling white of his surplice, the vivid scarlet of the hood which showed on his shoulders.

“‘_The wages of sin is death!_’” He repeated it, giving out his text in a voice which was resonant with feeling.

Margaret sat back in her corner, gazing at him with fixed, helpless eyes, her very soul dazed under the force of revelation which was coming to her swiftly, overwhelmingly. The revelation of her own life, not of God. As yet she framed no thought of that awful Presence, found no interpretation of the tumult in her own soul, but she knew, at last, that she had sinned. Sinned against herself, her womanhood, her honor, her self-respect, sinned against the man she had married, against the children she had borne, and, at last--oh, God!--against the man she loved.

_The wages of sin is death._

She rose, rose with an effort of will for her knees shook under her, and drawing herself together, summoning all her strength and her pride to hide the agony which was devouring her heart, she drew down her veil and slipped out unnoticed, silent, like a shadow. Once at the door, beyond the ring of that terrible young voice, she paused and steadied herself by laying her hand on a pillar of the portico.

It was now very dark; the electric lights at the corner only made the space where she stood more shadowy and secure; the air was chill, damp, penetrating, and she shivered. A horrible sense of homelessness and misery swept over her; she had cast herself out of a home, she had deserted her children for the love of a man who--oh, God!--who loved her not. She who had dreamed of happiness, lived for it, fought for it, sinned for it, who would have purchased it at the cost of heaven itself, had found at last, not happiness but her own soul.

_The wages of sin is death!_

She wrung her hands in silent agony; was there no escape? She had no belief but, at last, she felt that the very devils believed and trembled. Was not God pursuing her with vengeance? Who else?

V

AT last the tumult of passion subsided and Margaret, still leaning on the pillar of the church portico, looked out with bewildered eyes. Again an overwhelming weakness swept over her and wiped out some of the vivid misery.

She must go home--home! The word brought a dull pang of anguish, she had no right to a home, for she had broken up her own and orphaned her children. She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the thoughts which stormed back, at a word, to assault her poor fagged brain again. Then the soft sweet notes of the recessional came out to her and she knew that in a few moments the dispersing congregation would find her there; summoning all her flagging energies she stepped down into the street and turning westward was suddenly apprised of the fact that she had been in the old church so often visible from the windows of Allestree’s studio. The discovery brought her a feeling of relief; she was near the studio and she could go there and telephone for a cab to take her back to the hotel. Losing herself in the shadows of the darkest side of the poorly lighted street, she hurried toward the old building on the corner and saw, with relief, the light still shining in Allestree’s window as well as in the curiosity-shop below.

She crossed the street and trying the side door found the latch down. In another moment she was toiling wearily up the old stairs, clinging to the balustrade with an absolute need of its support.

To her surprise the studio was empty; she called to Allestree, supposing him to be, perhaps, in his storeroom above, but there was no answer and she sank down in the nearest chair, too weary and helpless to frame her thoughts. An open fire was burning low on the hearth, and a half smoked cigarette lay on the mantel edge. He had evidently gone out for a moment and would soon return. Margaret roused herself and looked about her with a wretched feeling of strangeness and separation from her own life. She seemed suddenly detached, a mere onlooker where once she had been the centre of the stage. There had stood the portrait of her, and there the picture of Rose; both were gone! She even noticed that the little tea-table was pushed away, and divined Allestree’s secret feeling. She knew every detail of the room, the tapestries, the worn Turkey rug, Robert’s old cigarette-case. It was intolerable; she rose, and going to the table, where the telephone stood, saw Allestree’s portfolio and the pen and ink. She would leave a line to explain her visit before she called a cab, and she opened the portfolio to look for a scrap of paper; as she did so her eye fell on the page of a letter written in old Mrs. Allestree’s clear hand; unconsciously she read the lines before her:

“Margaret has broken up Fox’s happiness twice, once when she broke her own engagement to him, and now in separating him from Rose--”

She closed the book sharply, suddenly aware of what she did and deeply shamed by it, but the thought of the personal dishonesty of her heedless act was lost in the sharper pang of realization; she saw at last the light in which her actions had appeared to others. She stood still, her face frozen, and a cry sprang to her lips from the depths of hidden passion, the cry of some mortally wounded wild creature who faces death alone. She knew it, she did not need to be told it, but others knew it too! It was the bitter drop in her cup of gall; the wild anguish which swept away all other realities, even the desire for life, amazed her. For one moment she hated Rose with all the strength of her undisciplined soul, the next a great wave of humiliation submerged her being. She turned, forgetting the telephone, forgetting everything but a desire to escape the meeting with Allestree, groped her way to the door like a blind woman and went down stairs. At the foot she hesitated; a step in the street made her fear to meet Robert at the door, and she turned and plunged into the curiosity-shop. She found herself behind the chintz curtain, in the place which evidently served as a living-room for Daddy Lerwick, and she saw a table spread for supper, while the scent of garlic streamed from a pot on the stove. Hurrying across the room she lifted the curtain and entered the shop.

Daddy Lerwick was leaning on the counter talking to a young girl and passing a necklace back and forth in his fat hands. At the sound of Margaret’s step they both turned and looked at her in surprise, a surprise which gave place on his part to servile courtesy. But Margaret scarcely noticed him; instead she saw the pale, worn face of the girl, the pinched misery of her look as she glanced at the stones in Lerwick’s coarse fingers. Margaret’s eyes following hers, lighted, too, on the jewels; it was a topaz necklace, the mate to the bracelet which she had prized so long ago. The intuition of misery, the sixth sense of the soul which--no longer atrophied with selfishness--had suddenly awakened within her, divined the secret. She read the suspended bargain in Lerwick’s eye, the hopeless anguish in the girl’s. It was only an instant; the thought came to her like the opening of a dungeon door on the glare of midday. Then she drew back to avoid an encounter with two more customers who had entered the shop and who began at once to ask the prices of the objects in the windows. Lerwick went forward to answer them; the girl leaned on the counter, hiding her face in her hands; a shiver of misery passed over her and Margaret saw it. Moved by an impulse, as inexplicable as it was unnatural, she touched the shabby sleeve. “What is the matter?” she asked softly.

The young woman looked up startled, but only for an instant, the next the dull misery of her look closed over her face like a mask, though her lip trembled. “He’s offered me fifteen dollars,” she faltered; “I--I suppose I’ll have to take it.”

Margaret quietly put out her hand. “Will you sell it to me?” she said; “I will give more and you will not have to give your name.”

The girl’s cheek crimsoned; she hesitated and gathered the necklace into her hands; the gesture was pathetic, it bespoke the actual pang of parting with an old keepsake.

Margaret saw it. “Come, come with me,” she said and led her back through the door to the studio entrance; she no longer feared to meet Allestree; a new impulse stirred her heart.

Under the light there she opened her purse and hastily counted her money, she had a little over a hundred dollars in small bills. Hurriedly thrusting a dollar or two back into her pocketbook, she pressed the remainder into her companion’s hands, saying at the same time: “Keep your necklace, I do not want it; I only wished to help you save it.”

The young stranger looked at her in dull amazement, stunned by the incomprehensible sympathy and generosity when she had long since ceased to look for either. She drew a long shuddering breath. “Oh, I can’t take so much!” she gasped out, “you--you must keep the necklace!”

Margaret regarded her sadly. “Child,” she replied, “I’m more unhappy than you are; I do not want either the money or the necklace; keep them both!”

“Do you really mean it?” the girl whispered, her eyes fastened on the face opposite in absolute wonder and doubt; “you really mean to give me all this--and you want nothing?”

Margaret smiled with stiff lips. “Nothing!”

The pinched, childlike features of the stranger quivered; it seemed as if the frozen sensibilities were melting under this touch of common humanity. Suddenly she burst into an agony of tears, slipping down upon the stairs, her slender shabby figure racked with sobs. “He heard me!” she cried, “there is a God!”

Margaret looked at her strangely. “Do you think so?” she asked vaguely, with parched lips, “do you believe in God?”

“Yes,” the girl cried, clasping her hands, “I prayed--oh, God, how I prayed! It seemed as if He didn’t hear me, no help came and I couldn’t pay; I couldn’t pay, and they didn’t believe me any more because I’d failed--you don’t know, you’ve never failed like that! I thought God didn’t care, that He had forgotten--but now--” she rose from her knees, her face still wet with tears but singularly changed, “I shan’t have to do it!” she cried, “here’s enough to begin all over again, I can go on, I’m saved! He heard! Don’t you believe it? Don’t you see it must be so?” she persisted, unconsciously catching at Margaret’s draperies and her thin toil-worn hand closing on their richness.

“For you, yes,” the older woman replied slowly; “good heavens, I never knew how much money meant before!” she murmured, passing her hand over her eyes again, “and you think--God heard you--_God?_”

“He sent you!” the girl cried, exultantly, wildly happy; “oh, yes, I’m sure of it--oh, God bless you!”

A strange expression passed over Margaret’s face. She leaned back against the wall, pressing her hand to her heart. Then, as the girl still sobbed softly, she touched her shoulder. “Open the door,” she said quietly, “I--I must go, can you help me? I’m a little dizzy.”

The young woman sprang to her and put out her arm eagerly. “Let me help you; oh, I’d do anything for you!”

Margaret smiled, a wan little smile that made her haggard brilliant face weirdly sad. “It is nothing. There, the air from the outside makes me well again, this place is choking!”

The stranger walked with her to the corner, eager to help her, to call a cab, to put her on the cars, but as Margaret’s faintness passed she refused, putting aside her protests with firm dismissal. “No, no, I can go home,” she said bravely; “good-bye, I’m glad I could help you.”

“Oh, let me go with you, let me do something!” the girl appealed to her eagerly.

But Margaret dismissed her and they parted, the young stranger hurrying away down a narrow by-street while her benefactress walked slowly toward the nearest avenue. But she had gone only a few steps when she turned and looked after the shabby figure, which was only a short distance from her. A vivid recollection of that cry that God had heard her prayer, the absolute conviction of it, swept over the stricken woman, and moved by an impulse which she did not pause to question, Margaret ran after the girl through the gathering mist and overtook her, breathless. She turned with a frightened look, full of dread, no doubt, that she must yet give up the miraculously acquired wealth, and she started when Margaret laid a thin, ungloved hand on her arm.

“I wanted to ask you,” she began,--and then changed the sentence swiftly into a command,--“pray for me to-night! You believe there is a God--perhaps He’ll hear you again!”

“Indeed I will!” the girl cried, bewildered; “oh, I wish--”

But the unfinished speech was lost; Margaret had turned and swiftly disappeared again into the folds of the mist; like a shadow the girl saw her vanishing into deeper shadows; something uncanny and marvellous seemed to lurk in the very thought of her beautiful haggard face, the wildness of her smile, and the young woman hurried away, hugging her treasure close, almost persuaded that she had talked face to face with a being from another world.

VI

AVOIDING the crowded thoroughfares, and no longer remembering her physical weariness or that she had walked for hours without food or drink, Margaret hurried on.

She had thought of death, and the means to attain it most swiftly and easily, but as she passed the brilliantly lighted chemist’s window, with its arch hung with bright red Christmas bells, she put away the thought; it was too cheap and sensational and, after all, if there really were a God could she take that swift, shuddering plunge through the blackness of death to meet Him? _The wages of sin is death!_ It thundered in her ears, making God the avenging Deity of the Old Testament, for how little do those who preach sometimes divine the pictures which they frame of Him who was lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, that all men might be saved!

A strange new light began to come into Margaret’s soul, and against it her thoughts took on dark and sharply outlined forms like the shadows thrown on a white screen by the stereopticon; she began to understand. Happiness, after all, was a dream, an imagination, a word; it came not from any visible cause, but lay hidden in every man’s heart like hope imprisoned in Pandora’s box. The secret of it came to her at last,--life moved in an orbit; the past held the future, the future the past, the present was but the connecting link in the inexorable circle, it could not be broken while memory existed, while a reckoning was required. She could no more break the links with her past than she could destroy her immortal soul.

In her heart a new, secret thought, born of the strange girl’s gratitude, moved her out of herself. She remembered Mrs. Allestree’s words, and her love for Fox suddenly purged itself of its passionate agony, its jealousy, its pain. Like a woman in a dream she found her way at last to the hotel and climbed the stairs. Her face bore too terrible signs of anguish, and she shrank from the elevator and the curious stare of the servants. It was the dinner hour and the corridors were deserted. She went quietly to her own room and did not ring for her maid. She noticed that her evening gown had been put out and the fire tended. Gerty was not there, she would scarcely be there before nine o’clock, and Margaret went to her desk and sat down and began to write in feverish haste; if she delayed, if she stopped to think she might never do it and she was determined. She bent to her task, white lipped and haggard, writing page after page to Rose Temple. She poured out her heart; in righting Fox she scarcely thought of herself, except that she should never see him again, that Rose must and should marry him! For abruptly the divine impulse of self-immolation had been born in the midst of the tumult of her soul; a woman’s heart, like a eucalyptus tree, trembles with the remembrance of anguish and the eternal sacrifice of love.

As she finished it the clock struck and she looked up startled; it was eight o’clock; she had been out more than four hours. She sealed her letter, stamped it and rose. For a moment her strength failed her and she stood irresolute, but she was unwilling to trust another hand, and she opened the door and took Rose’s letter down to the post herself, avoiding the elevator again. After she had dropped it in the letter-box in the lower hall, she climbed the long flight wearily to her room. The fearful energy of the last few hours dropped from her like a cloak, the effort was too much and she felt an overpowering weakness, a sinking sensation; she had had such moments before and the doctor had furnished her with some restoratives with a grim injunction to avoid tiring herself. A vision of his grave face flashed across her now and warned her. With the sudden ineffable sinking and yielding, which came over her like a cloud and seemed to drop her slowly, softly into space, was born a keen desire to live; Estelle’s voice pierced her memory like a knife; she seemed to hear that plaintive cry--“Mamma, mamma, come home!”

She made one more supreme effort to reach the medicines and was, indeed, but a few yards from the cabinet which held them when her strength yielded to that awful dark cloud which seemed to be pressing down upon her, pushing her lower and lower into the depths of silence. She slipped like water to the floor, her head upon her outstretched arms, a faint shudder ran through her; she was dimly conscious of sinking down, down into a black, fathomless abyss. Again Estelle’s voice quivered through the clouds and mists and reached her heart; she tried to struggle back, up through vague distances, to answer it, but the mists grew thicker; she heard it once again, no more! The soft, ineffable clouds pressed closer, enfolded her; she sank lower, floated off over the edge of space and lost even thought itself.

VII

FOR three days Fox had been under an almost unbearable strain. Before and after speaking to Margaret of their marriage he had plunged in the same agonizing struggle with himself. What diabolical power had been at work to ruin his life, to frustrate his ambitions? The strong egotism of his nature was aroused in all its absorbing passion. On every hand he saw disaster; he had builded well in all respects but one; in that he had miserably failed, and behold the inevitable result! Like Margaret herself, he saw clearly at last; if he had kept away from her, if he had broken from the spell of her fascination and remained out of reach, this would never have been; he had no one to thank but himself. It is usually so; when we get down to the fundamental principles we have ourselves to blame for the fall of the Tower of Siloam.

As he faced the immediate prospect of marriage with another woman, he realized the strength and hopelessness of his love for Rose. To think of her even in the same moment with Margaret was abhorrent to him; he did poor Margaret scant justice at such times, and the vivid realities of her newspaper celebrity was a scourge to his sensitive pride. For these things he must give up all, he must pay the price. He who crossed his path when this mood was on him was unfortunate,--Fox was not a man to spare. His cruel irony, his poignant wit had never been more feared on the floor of the House than they were in those few days before Christmas.

The day after his decisive interview with Margaret he was late at the Capitol, lingering in his committee-room after the others had left. On his way home he dined at the club and was detained there by some out-of-town friends until nearly eleven o’clock. When he finally left the building he started home on foot, and even stopped at a news-stand to buy some papers and magazines. It was twelve o’clock when he went up to his rooms, and he was startled as he walked down the corridor to see his door open and the vestibule lighted. Sandy came to meet him with the air a dog wears who knows that a friend is waiting for his master.

Allestree was sitting by the table in the study, and as Fox entered he rose with a sober face, “I’ve been waiting for you for an hour,” he said; “I have bad news.”

Fox stopped abruptly, his thoughts leaping instantly to Rose. “Bad news?” he repeated in a strange voice.

Allestree met his eye, perhaps read his thoughts. “Yes, the worst,” he replied; “Margaret is dead.”

“Margaret?” Fox dropped the papers he held, on the table, and looked at him, bewildered; “impossible!”

“I wish it were so,” Allestree said quietly, hurrying on with his disagreeable task; “it seems that she was out to-day for a long time alone; no one apparently knows much about it except the elevator boy and he says she was away from the hotel four hours or more. As nearly as we know she was on foot and in the streets most of that time. I know she was in my studio while I was out;” he colored as he spoke; he had found his mother’s letter on the floor and piecing the facts together had divined much. “She came home alone, went to her rooms and was found there later, unconscious, on the floor.”

“Good God, where was Gerty?” Fox exclaimed, with a gesture of horror.

“Margaret had sent her to Mrs. White with Estelle; there was some painful scene in the street with the child--” Allestree stopped an instant and then meeting his cousin’s eye he hurried on--“when Gerty finally got to the hotel and found her it was too late; the doctors say that if help had been at hand she might have been saved. As it was she never regained consciousness. Gerty telephoned to my mother, but she will not be back until to-morrow morning; when I got there Margaret was gone.”

Fox sank into a chair by the table, and propping his head on his hands stared blankly at a sheet of paper before him. “Why was I not told?” he demanded hoarsely.

“Gerty tried to get you, both at the Capitol and here, but we could not find you.”

“I was at the club,” Fox exclaimed and then: “Merciful heaven, Allestree, how terrible, how harrowing! How impossible to realize!”

Allestree looked at him thoughtfully. “Do you think so?” he said, “it has seemed to me for more than a year that I saw death in her face; she had, poor girl, a face of tragedy.”

Fox groaned, covering his own face with his hands. His anger against her of a moment before smote him with horrible reproach. Living, he had ceased to love her, dead, she seemed suddenly to fill his life to the exclusion of all else; she came to him again in the guise of her thoughtless, happy, inconsequent youth which had forged the links between them. He rose and began to walk the floor, his pale face distorted with passion. “My God!” he cried suddenly; “I--Allestree, is it possible that she divined the truth? That she knew me for what I was, a sham, a mockery, a whited sepulchre?”

Knowing him and the unhappy woman, whose love for him had wrecked her life, Allestree knew too much to speak; he was silent.

The storm of his cousin’s passion rose and beat itself against the inevitable refusal of death. Poor Margaret! a few hours ago she had held the power to ruin his career, now she had slipped quietly away from him into the great Silence; the mute appeal of her unhappy love touched his very soul as it had never touched it in life; the impossibility of laying the blame for life’s miseries on the dead came to him with overwhelming force, and she, who a moment before had been guilty, in his thoughts, of embarrassing his future and blighting his life, became suddenly the victim of his vanity, his idle pleasure seeking which she had mistaken for love. He remembered, with sudden horror and self loathing, his coldness, his bitterness toward her, and the manner in which she had received his proposal of marriage. A swift electrifying realization of the scene tore away his selfish absorption; his manner of asking her had been almost an insult to her high spirited pride, to her love, which had humiliated itself by the first confession on that night in the deserted ballroom where she had poured out the wretchedness of her soul. She had come to him wounded, homeless, and he had all but cast her off in his passionate selfishness, his hatred of the loveless marriage which his honor had bound him to make.

If he had only loved her, if he had but dissembled and seemed to love her! Overwhelmed with grief he searched his mind for one reassuring recollection, for one instance which should acquit him of complicity in the tragic agony of her death, but he found none. He had neglected her, denied her, tried to evade that final moment when he must ask her to be his wife, and through all she had borne with him with a sweetness unusual in her stormy nature; she had loved him well enough to make allowances, to forgive, to overlook! And now passing away from him without a word, she had left only her final kiss of forgiveness on his cheek, the wild rush of her tears at their last parting. Henceforth he should never speak to her again, never hear her voice, never know how deeply she had suffered, never ask her forgiveness. The fact that the sequence of events was inevitable, that a woman no sooner seeks a man’s love than she loses it, gave him no relief. In his own eyes he had been little short of a monster of cruelty to a dying woman because, forsooth, he loved another--younger and more beautiful!

Memory, too, tormented him with the thought of Margaret, young, sweet, confiding as she had been when he had first known her and loved her; he thought less of the moment when she broke faith and married White; her fault was less now than his; the error of a beautiful, wilful girl seemed but a little thing before the awful fact of her wrecked life, her tragic death. Through all she had really loved him, that one thing seemed certain; her spirit in all its wild sweet waywardness had held to this one tie, her love for him, and when she had turned to him at last in her wretchedness seeking happiness, asking it, pleading for it like a child, she had received not bread but a stone! He knew now that no living woman could have misunderstood his coldness, his tardiness, his indifference, and in his cousin’s pale and averted face he read an accusing understanding.

He threw himself into a chair again and sat staring gloomily at the floor. “What madness!” he exclaimed at last, with sudden fury; “how dared Gerty neglect her so? She was ill, weak, unprotected!”

“Gerty was no more to blame than others,” Allestree observed quietly.

Fox threw back his head haughtily, and their eyes met. “I was willing to give her my life,” he said bitterly, “I had no more to give!”

Allestree rose. “It is over,” he replied gravely; “we cannot bring her back; come, you will go there, she would wish it, I know,” he added, “and there is no one else!”

The awful finality of those words and the reproach they carried was indisputable. Fox rose with a deep groan and went out with him, without a word, to face the greatest trial of all.

VIII

IN a little _pension_ on the rue Neuve des Petits Champs, Rose Temple had been working patiently at her music for six months and more, studying under one of the great Italian teachers, a man who had trained more than one prima donna and was, therefore, chary of his encouragement. The enthusiasm which she had brought to her task having been gradually dispelled by sharp disappointments, she had struggled on, determined to succeed at last.

The first test of her voice before the maestro and his French critics had been a failure, a failure so complete that she came home to weep her heart out on the faithful shoulder of the elderly cousin who was her chaperon and comforter. The weakness of a voice, beautiful but not yet fully trained, her trepidation at singing before the maestro and his assembled judges, together with the long strain of preparation, had united in her undoing. She came back to the _pension_ without a word of encouragement, feeling at heart that she would never sing a note again.

She sat down, laying her head on the little writing-table, amid a wild confusion of Miss Emily Carter’s pens and papers, and gave way to her despair. “I shall never sing again!” she said, “never--I’m a miserable failure; I haven’t any more voice than a sparrow, and there’s all that money wasted, thrown away!”

Miss Emily eyed her quietly. She had the intense family pride which is nurtured in the State of Virginia; she did not need to be told, she knew that Rose had the loveliest voice in the world. As for these nasty, little, fat, insinuating Frenchmen! She took off her spectacles and smoothed her hair back from her temples; it was done as they did hair forty years ago; it matched her immaculate turn-over lace collar and hair brooch. “You’ll blot my letter, Rose,” she said calmly, with a little drawl that was inimitable; “I don’t see what you’re crying about, it will make your nose red; as for these horrid little Parisians, they know about as much about you as they do about heaven--which isn’t enough to get there!”

In spite of herself Rose laughed feebly. “You’re the most prejudiced person I know, Cousin Emily!”

“Prejudiced?” Miss Carter’s nostrils quivered scornfully, “I wasn’t raised within forty miles of Richmond for nothing, Rose Temple! Don’t you suppose I know a gentleman when I see one? What in the world can you expect from that person if he is a singing master? He wears a solitaire ring on his little finger and a red necktie. I reckon I’ve got eyes if I do wear spectacles.”

“But he’s trained half the great singers of the world, Cousin Emily, and at first he was so kind about my voice--to-day--” Rose winked back the hot tears--“to-day he never said a word!”

“Pig!” ejaculated Miss Carter unmoved.

Rose laughed hysterically. “I shall never sing; I’d better take to washing and ironing for a living!”

“You’d make a fortune,” retorted Miss Carter ironically; “while you were mooning you’d scorch all the shirt bosoms and smash the collars.”

“You’re not a bit encouraging; no one is!” Rose said helplessly, leaning back in her chair; “it makes my heart ache to think of wasting poor father’s money so!”

“And I reckon he’d give the whole of it to keep your little finger from hurting; he thinks you’re a chip of the moon. And how in the world do you know you’ve wasted it yet?” continued her cousin, calmly indignant; “perhaps you didn’t sing well to-day; is that any reason you won’t to-morrow?”

Rose looked at the angular figure opposite, and the color came again slowly to her cheeks and the light to her eyes. “I’m so glad you came, Cousin Emily!” she exclaimed; “without you I should have just given up, they looked so--so indifferent, those men with their eye-glasses and their notebooks and their stare.”

“Stare? I should think so!” replied Miss Carter severely; “I’ll put a Frenchman against anything for staring. I believe myself that Paris is a Sodom and Gomorrah boiled into one, let me tell you! How any nice sweet girl can marry one of them-- Rose, if anything should ever induce me at any time to think of marrying one, clap me into an insane asylum, you hear?”

And Rose, burying her face in her hands, laughed until she cried.

But without Miss Carter and Aunt Hannah her courage would have failed her often in the months which followed. She was put back at the alphabet of music and worked with the beginners. More than one night she secretly cried herself to sleep without daring to tell Cousin Emily of her weakness. Homesickness, too, pinched her and took the color from her cheeks, but she worked bravely on. She had reached Paris in June and she had failed at her trial in September. The months which followed were crowded to the brim, and she tried to shut her heart and her ears to news from home, except that which concerned her father. The judge’s letters were purposely cheerful and optimistic, he said so little about financial difficulties that it seemed like a troubled dream to Rose; she never quite realized all it meant to her future.

At last, after many months, her instructor told her one morning that he should bring some competent judges to hear her again and, if she succeeded at this second test, he should try to give her a great opportunity to win her place in the world as a singer. Rose’s heart thrilled. The great man said little, but at last she perceived that he believed in her in spite of her failure, that her voice had finally won his confidence. A word from him was more than a volume from another; it meant success or failure. The girl, full of her dreams of singing and redeeming all with her voice, trembled all over and turned pale. There was a great excitement at the little _pension_ that night; confident though she was, Miss Carter secretly wiped away a tear, and they both worked late to give some fresh touches to the girl’s white gown which brought it up to date; it was a year old, and not made in Paris! They began to see such differences, to recognize the enchanting creations in the show-windows and out walking on the fashionable women on the boulevards.

However, Cousin Emily had her opinion about its owner’s appearance in that same old white frock, and she stole out and bought a single rose for the young singer to wear the next afternoon. Aunt Hannah helped dress her; it was a great occasion; the little flat looked as though a whirlwind had struck it, and at last the two went out in great trepidation to keep the appointment. Secretly Miss Emily longed to give those Frenchmen a piece of her mind about criticizing the voice of a sweet young girl, but she only retired discreetly to a corner and looked on with a peculiar moisture on her spectacles which required the constant use of her handkerchief.

* * * * *

As Rose ceased singing and the last clear notes of her voice floated into the distances of the great empty concert-hall, the thrill of its sweetness, its purity, its young confident power, seemed to fill the very atmosphere of the place with exquisite music; it could not quite pass away into silence, it remained at last, if not in the ears, in the souls of the listeners, a little group to the right of the stage who had gathered there to hear the wonderful pupil, his youthful prima donna, the great gift which, he believed, the new world had for the old.

In the midst of her song she had forgotten herself, her audience, her first failure, even the world itself, while her young ardent soul poured out its joy and its grief in those splendid notes. Love, that great interpreter of the heart, had unlocked hers to sorrow, she sang with the heart of the sorrowful; she was, first of all, as Allestree felt, an impersonation of youth, and she sang with the soul of youth which hopes forever; she loved, purely, unselfishly, gently, and she sang with the love of the world on her lips, and singing thus was supremely lovely; what matter if the old white dress was a little out of fashion? She was a figure as symbolic of youth with its splendid hopes, its faith, its untried strength, as she was the very personification of beautiful womanhood.

No one spoke, no one applauded, but not an eye was dry.

But to Rose, whose ears were not filled with her own music, the silence which followed it came with a shock of terrible revulsion. She waited a moment in keen suspense, but no one spoke, no one moved; the wave of silence that followed the wave of sound engulfed her hopes, she remembered that first disappointment. Bitter dismay swept over her, she turned away to hide her emotion, but the maestro crossed the stage at that instant and held out his hand; he could not praise her but there was actually a tear in his eye.

Rose looked up, and reading his face burst into tears of joy, her hopes suddenly fulfilled.

Then the party of judges broke out with a round of applause and one little Frenchman, with a polished pink bald head and mustaches, shouted: “Brava!”

In the end they crowded around her and overwhelmed her with compliments; they were eager to invite her to a supper and drink her health in champagne, but the staid Virginia cousin, in the old-fashioned black bonnet and the old black alpaca gown, which outraged Paris without hiding the good heart beneath it, frowned on this hilarity; her deep-seated suspicion of the Parisian in general had not been dissipated by this burst of applause. She insisted that Rose, who was trembling with excitement and the strain of the long hours of training, should go straight back to their little apartment to rest. A decision too full of wisdom for even Rose, eager though she was for the sweet meed of praise, to resist it.

They drove back in a fiacre, a wild extravagance which they ventured in view of the great success and the immediate prospects of a fortune; the cousin felt that they were immediate.

“You all were always talented,” she said to Rose, as they drove down the rue de Rivoli; “your mother could do anything; we always said so. Cousin Sally Carter, too, is going to be an artist, and no one ever made preserves like Cousin Anna’s! I reckon it’s in the family, Rose.”

“Oh, Cousin Emily!” Rose sighed, and hid her face on the alpaca shoulder, “oh, if I can only, only sing so well that there shall be no more terrible trouble for father!”

“Now, don’t you worry about the judge, child,” Cousin Emily replied soothingly; “it will all come out right and, anyway, the best families haven’t money now-a-days!” she added with ineffable disdain, “it’s very vulgar.”

“I think I’d risk having it, though!” Rose said, with a sigh.

She was really in a dream. The softness of spring was in the atmosphere as they drove through the gay streets, and all the trees in the garden of the Tuileries were delicately fringed with green; the voices of children, the sounds of laughter, now and then a snatch of song, reminded them that it was a holiday. Rose thought of home; the Persian lilac must be budding, the tulip trees, of course, were in flower; a pang of homesickness seized her, a longing to see the old house again--ah, there was the sorrow of it, could they keep the old house much longer? With these thoughts came others, deeply perturbed, which she tried to thrust away. She knew of Margaret’s sudden death, but she had heard but little of it, of Fox nothing. Her father’s letters excluded the whole matter; Mrs. Allestree’s were chary in mention of it, and from Robert there was no word on the subject. Gerty English, strangely enough, had not written since Margaret’s death, and Rose could only piece together the dim outlines of a tragedy which touched her to the soul. There had been moments when she had been bitter against poor Margaret, had held her responsible, now she thought of her with pity.

As these things floated before her, in a confused dream of sorrow and regret, she was scarcely conscious of Cousin Emily’s chatter, or of the streets through which they passed, but presently they were set down at their own door and she paid the cabman; Cousin Emily’s French was excellent but it belonged exclusively to the classroom and the phrase-book, and no one in Paris understood it, a fact which bewildered her more than any of her other experiences.

They found the _pension_ disturbed by a fire in an adjoining house, and Aunt Hannah was sitting on top of Rose’s trunk with her bonnet on, waiting to be assured that the flames could not reach her.

“It’s all out, Aunt Hannah,” Rose assured her, laughing; “the concierge says it was out half an hour ago.”

“He don’ know nuthin’ about it, Miss Rose; he ain’t sure dat he’s a liar, an’ I knows he is, bekase I’se caught him at it,” the old woman replied firmly; “de place might be afire sure nuff. It was one ob dem ’lection wires dat set de odder house off, an’ dis place is full ob dem; I don’ tole him ter cut ’em loose, an’ he keep on jabberin’ like a monkey; I ain’t got no manner ob use fo’ dese French people no-ways!”

“Nor has Cousin Emily!” laughed Rose, taking off her hat and tossing it to Aunt Hannah, while she passed her hand over her bright hair with a light, deft touch which seemed to bring every ripple into a lovelier disorder; “the poor concierge is a good soul, and he does make us comfortable here.”

“Mebbe he is, an’ mebbe he ain’t!” said Aunt Hannah grudgingly; “dese men folks allus waits on a pretty girl, honey, but I ’lows he’d cheat yo’ jest de same; I’se got my eye on him sure!”

“I wish you’d take off your bonnet and get my trunk open,” retorted Rose good naturedly; “then we’ll see if we can put the concierge in it--if he misbehaves!”

“My sakes, honey, I done clean forgot ter gib yo’ dis letter; it’s a telegram, I reckon; it come jest befo’ de fire broke out, an’ I’se been settin’ on it ter keep it safe.”

It was a cablegram, and Rose stretched out an eager hand for it, with a thrill of anticipation; it seemed as if her father must be reaching out to her across the seas, that he already knew and rejoiced with her for, surely, all his prejudices would dissolve at the assurance of her success.

She opened it with trembling fingers, a smile on her lips. It fluttered and fell to the floor; it was a cablegram to summon her home, the judge was very ill.

IX

AFTERWARDS Rose never quite knew how she endured the voyage home. Her love for her father was so deep, so tender, they were so bound together by a hundred ties not only of affection but of sympathy and tastes and interests, that the very thought of losing him almost broke her down. It took both Cousin Emily Carter and old black Aunt Hannah to comfort and sustain her during those ten days.

But when she reached Washington Allestree met her at the station with good tidings; the judge was out of danger. He had been very near death and came back slowly from the Valley of the Shadow. However, he had come back and Rose knelt beside his bed and cried her heart out with joy to feel his arm around her. How pale and thin and wasted he looked. He had aged so much; poor Rose, she saw it and forced a smile to disguise it even to herself. But he was unaware of the shock which the sight of him gave her, and he forgot his illness in his eager interest in her account of Paris and her final success. She told him very little of those long months of struggle and depression, of the thousand little pinches and trials that they had been through to keep from asking an extra penny from him.

After Rose came the judge began to mend more rapidly; old Mrs. Allestree said he had only been pining away for the child, but she knew better, being a wise old woman. She knew that the judge had been struggling all the year to stave off the foreclosure of the mortgage on the old house which he and Rose loved so well. She knew, too, that he had almost failed when that mysterious arrangement was made for him by an unknown party; the message came that the mortgage had been taken up, and he could have all the time he wanted and at a lower rate of interest.

This news, so amazing and so unprecedented, had been synchronous with the judge’s breakdown and had, Mrs. Allestree believed, contributed to it. The sudden relief had snapped the strain on his nerves, and he slipped down into a state of coma. However, she did not tell Rose this, nor her suspicions, which were fast becoming certainties, about the mortgage; she only kissed her affectionately and made her sing to her the song which had won such an ovation from the French critics, and which Cousin Emily Carter had described with enthusiasm before she departed to the Tidewater region, where she hoped to cut her own asparagus bed and set out her flowers undisturbed by Parisian manners and customs.

Allestree welcomed Rose with even greater relief than his mother and the judge, but wisdom had taught him to rejoice in silence, and he did so, being careful, however, to send promptly for her portrait which, according to the agreement between Mrs. Allestree and the judge, could not be loaned during Rose’s presence in the house, but only as a consolation in her absence. But the judge sighed deeply when they told him it had been returned to the studio again.

It was during the first days of her father’s convalescence that Rose found Margaret’s letter to her among his papers; not knowing Rose’s address in Paris, Margaret had sent it in the judge’s care and he had overlooked it when he forwarded the letters, as he did, once a week. By a strange accident it had slipped under some pamphlets in the basket on his library table and lay there until Rose, rearranging his papers one morning, came upon it and recognizing the writing broke the seal with some trepidation, for Margaret had never been an intimate correspondent, and Rose divined some serious reason for this long closely written letter. She was alone when she found it, and she went to the open window and stood there reading it.

Margaret, moved by the deep sorrow and passion which had swept over her poor troubled soul in those last days of her life, had poured out her heart. She told Rose all; that she had come between her and Fox; in her wild and covetous jealousy she had thought to wrest happiness from despair; to keep his love she had been willing to lose all, and she had lost! She concealed nothing, the last pitiful words of the letter, a remarkable letter of passion and grief and self-sacrifice, told Rose that she was going to give up her life to her children and try to live down her desertion of them.

Rose read it through to the end, and then covered her face with her hands, trying to shut out the terrifying picture that it had unconsciously drawn of a woman, desolate, shipwrecked, without hope in earth or heaven. The terrors which had possessed Margaret’s soul swept over hers. All that Mrs. Allestree had told her, and that Gerty, poor, voluble, good-hearted Gerty, had enlarged upon, filled out the scene. The lonely walk, the visit to the studio, the unfriended and miserable death; she did not know of those other scenes in the church and the curiosity-shop where Margaret had found her heart, but she did know of a strange girl who had brought a single white lily to lay in Margaret’s dead hand and gone away weeping bitterly.

She had blamed poor Margaret, judged her; Rose felt it at that moment and accused herself of heartlessness; of Fox she dared not think. In the new light which this letter shed on the situation, she began to understand how cruelly he had been placed, and there, too, she had judged!

Poor Rose,--her father had inculcated stern and simple lessons and she had tried, before all things, to be just; but to be judicious and calm and in love at the same time was an impossible combination. She dashed the tears from her eyes, and thrust Margaret’s letter into her pocket and went about her duties with the air of a soldier on guard, but her lip would quiver at intervals and she could not sing a note when the judge asked for one of the old ballads that he had loved as a boy, and Rose had learned, to please him.

It was about this time that she began to wonder if the old house must go, or if her father had been able to meet all the payments due upon it. She dared not ask him, and he said nothing, but she noticed that now that he was able to be moved into the library every day and sometimes into the garden in the warm spring sunshine, that he sat for hours at a time in a brown study with a deep furrow between his brows, and constantly pushing back his hair from his forehead, as he did in moments of perplexity. She was afraid to speak, lest any mention of the trouble which had so beset him would bring back the fever and a relapse, so she had to content herself with hope and waited for some sign on his part.

The old house had never seemed so dear; the mantling vines were full out in new foliage, birds were nested on the southern wall toward the garden, and the old garden-plot itself, so sheltered and secluded by the house and the high brick wall which shut out the street, was just coming into bloom. The roses she had set out the spring before were in bud, and the peonies were blooming. Rose looked about her with a sigh and forgot that she would, perhaps, be one day a great prima donna with the world at her feet. Such things do not always fill a woman’s heart.

Meanwhile the judge had written and despatched a letter with great secrecy, and one morning, after he was wheeled into his library, he told Rose that she might take her sewing into the garden for he expected a gentleman on business and he might be there half an hour. She obeyed him with a stifling sensation of anxiety; she knew it was that mortgage, that terrible mortgage, and his reticence convinced her that he was concealing bad news from her. She took her sewing out to the little arbor in the corner, where the library windows were out of sight, and she tried to sew, but her fingers trembled so that she lost her needle and, having neglected to provide herself with another, she sat and watched the robin on the lawn and wished money grew up like grass out of the well tilled earth and was of as little consequence. Yet, all the while, it was not of herself she thought but of her father, broken in health, old and careworn, facing those inexorable obligations without even her help.

The judge alone in the library watched the clock with an anxious eye, and thought of Rose and all it would mean to her if he could save the property. When he lay near death the one overwhelming horror of his heart had been to leave her at the mercy of the world. The old man glanced about him with the same fond recognition of familiar objects; it is strange how dear these inanimate things, which were here before we came and will be here when we are gone, become so valuable to us. To the judge they had associations. The picture over the mantel had been bought by his grandfather, those books dated still farther back in the family; the clock had belonged to his mother’s great grandfather, the old secretary of polished mahogany, with secret drawers and brass mountings, was an heirloom,--it had held a will which had nearly disrupted the family two generations back. Small matters, but to an old man inexpressibly interesting and sacred. Of the house he did not like to think; that was full of memories of his wife, and he could not now explain the madness which had led him to mortgage it to pay off more pressing claims which had followed his first heavy losses.

X

ROSE had been ten minutes in the garden, and the judge was beginning to fidget in his chair when he heard the front door open and shut and at last steps came toward the library. A moment later William Fox entered the room. As he came into the mellow light from the open window the judge was struck by the change in his strong pale face. The old smile which had come so easily to his lips, and which, at times, had almost the sweetness of a woman’s, was gone; the brow and chin had a new resolution. The man was changed. Judge Temple saw it and held out his hand with a sudden impulse of warmer sympathy than he had felt before. After all, Fox had met it like a man and paid the cost.

On his side, Fox was as strongly affected by the broken appearance of the old man in his invalid chair with his white head and his sunken eyes. “My dear judge,” he said, “I hope you’re feeling better? I was glad to obey your summons, though I’m not sure that I understand the reference in your note.”

The judge looked at him a moment in silence, then drawing a letter from his pocket, opened it and handed it to him. Fox took it with evident reluctance; as he read it he colored a little and folding it hastily, handed it back without a word.

“I did not know until yesterday, sir, to whom I was indebted,” Judge Temple said slowly, his lip trembling slightly from weakness and profound emotion.

Fox stirred uneasily in his chair, his color deepening. “I didn’t intend you to know it at all, judge,” he said, almost with an air of diffidence; “I presume I owe my betrayal to Berkman. However, I want to assure you--since it is known--that you can have all the time you desire; I consider it a good investment!”

The judge’s spectacles grew misty and he took them off hurriedly and wiped them, his thin hands shaking as he did it. “I thank you for your confidence,” he said quietly, when he could speak; “you’ll get it--every cent.”

“I know it. I tell you I consider it a good investment, the best I ever made,” Fox retorted smiling; “I’m not usually so judicious in my ventures.”

The old man tried to force an answering smile but he failed, his head sank on his breast and his hands, lying on the carved arms of his great chair, still trembled. Fox looked at him in some anxiety, half afraid that the excitement and relief had been too much, and bitterly indignant that his secret had been betrayed. It had been a difficult matter for him to take up the mortgage, for he was by no means a rich man, but he had vowed in his heart to save Rose her home, the home that he knew she loved so well, and half the joy of doing it had been to do it without her knowledge; but it seemed impossible to keep a secret which, from its very nature, must be shared with others.

The change in the old face opposite was alarmingly sharp.

“My dear judge, you are too indisposed for business; let me ring for assistance,” Fox exclaimed, with real concern.

But the judge protested. “Sir, I’m better to-day than I have been for a year,” he said, a slight break in his voice; “I see my way clear, I’ll be able to save this property, I--” he broke off and passed his handkerchief over his eyes; there was a moment’s painful silence, then he held out his hand. “God bless you, Fox!” he broke out suddenly, “it was killing me to lose it--”

They shook hands. Fox had risen and his face was colorless. “Don’t tell her, judge,” he said abruptly.

The old man started and was about to speak but, meeting the other’s eye, refrained. Many things came into his mind, among them a memory of Rose’s face at Mrs. O’Neal’s ball. It was a bitter moment; no man was good enough for her, and this man had been too much talked about! Yet the child’s happiness was near his heart.

With a certain reluctance Fox turned at last to go, and as he did so his glance passed through the open window into the garden. “I can reach the gate by this path, can I not?” he asked, moving toward it.

The judge started uneasily, with an involuntary gesture as if to detain him, to keep him back at any cost, but Fox did not see it and the old man sank back in his chair quiescent. His lips moved but he said nothing; after all, had he a right to interfere? Unconsciously the younger man went out of the window and down the two short steps to the gravel path.

The judge watched him disappear behind the Persian lilac with a fascinated eye. Then he took out his handkerchief again, and passing it swiftly across his brow pushed back his scant white hair until it seemed to rise up in active protest. The glare of the May sunshine suddenly hurt his gaze and he shook out his handkerchief and threw it over his head, closing his eyes.

Aunt Hannah, opening the door a moment later, with a pleasant jingle of ice in the mint-julep glass on her tray, peeped in, thought him asleep and cautiously and discreetly closed the door again. “Fo’ de Lord,” she murmured, “ef it ain’t de fust time dat he didn’t kinder sense dat de julep was comin’; I reckon he’s right po’ly!”

* * * * *

Fox turned the corner by the lilac, walking slowly, holding his hat behind his back, his bare head bowed. His face was gloomy with thought, and he almost passed the arbor. At the turn a glint of white caught his eye and he looked up quickly and saw Rose industriously sewing without a needle, her head down over her work and the sunshine filtering through a trellis of vines on her soft bright hair and her white gown.

He came toward her with an exclamation of unrestrained joy, but as their eyes met a wave of mutual feeling swept over their souls and left them mute. Between them seemed to lie the sorrow and the love of that beautiful and unfortunate woman who had separated them. The language of conventionality was no longer possible; Rose tried to speak, but her words died in an inarticulate murmur. The anguish of Margaret’s letter came back to her; it had saved Fox in her eyes; she no longer condemned him, she no longer felt it a duty to avoid him, but she found it impossible to tell him of the change in her heart by any commonplace word of friendship. Her hand had slipped from his eager grasp and lay trembling on her work. It was terrible to betray herself so; her cheek reddened and tears of mortification came into her eyes. But to speak to him of common things at such a moment--how could she? And he made no effort to help her, but only watched her, his soul in his eyes. The marks of suffering on his face touched her, too; the lines had sharpened, the gaze deepened and become more introspective, the shock of primitive passions had really decentralized his life. He smiled at the sight of her, almost the old eager smile, but even that light had died out of his face now, and in the pause she seemed to hear her own heart beating against her breast.

He stood looking at her. “How long must I be silent?” he asked at last.

Rose busied herself in a fruitless attempt to thread an imaginary needle, and her slender fingers shook. It had been in her mind to tell him that Margaret had written her, but as he spoke a sudden intuition of the truth arrested her impulse, a flood of light poured in upon her, illuminating the twilight of her thought. She felt that he must not only never know of Margaret’s confession--she had not meant to tell him that--but not even of her letter. It was impossible to answer him; her lips were tremulous as she looked up and met his grave, compelling gaze. In her look, so full of buoyant and beautiful youth, there was not even the shadow of reproach. Her simplicity, her renewal of confidence in him, were profoundly touching; the bitterness and humiliation of the past months seemed at last sanctified by her forbearance. The secret agony which had torn his heart during the long winter fell away from the present; it belonged at once to the past, sinking into that long vista which leads to oblivion. To-day was beautiful and strong with hope.

Before her youth and purity William Fox experienced a feeling of sudden and complete humility. “Can you forgive me?” he asked, in a low voice.

Margaret’s letter seemed to breathe its message in her ears. “There’s nothing to forgive,” Rose said simply.

“You understand?” there was passionate eagerness in his glance; his love for her was sweeping away the obstacles from his mind, leaping up again to demand its right to exist.

“Yes,” Rose said, with white lips, “I understand, not fully--but--”

“And now?” he was strongly moved; not knowing whose hand had lifted the veil of her misunderstanding and far from divining the truth.

“And now?” the tears gathered in her eyes and fell unheeded; “I cannot but think of her love--her unhappiness!”

“And you still blame me?” Fox stood motionless, his face resuming its stern reserve.

Rose shook her head. “I--I cannot!” she murmured, remembering that confession, and the thought of it sealing her lips.

He started, the color rushing to his temples, the kindling passion of his glance transforming him. “Rose!”

She looked up through her tears, and as suddenly hid her face in her hands. “I am afraid!” she murmured brokenly, “out of--of all this sorrow can there be happiness?”

Fox sat down beside her and gently took her hand. “You mean you cannot trust me?” he asked soberly.

For a moment she did not answer. He looked down at her drooping profile, the lovely arch of her brow, the soft cheek and chin; her eyes no longer met his. “Or is it that you do not love me?” he said quietly.

She raised her head at that, and the dawning sweetness of her glance illumined his soul. “It is because I love you--that I can no longer judge!” she faltered, with trembling lips.

He met her look without a word; language, for the moment, had not significance for them.

Silence, filled with the sweet murmur of summer life, the fragrance of flowers, the audible rustling of the magnolia leaves, seemed to enfold them in a new and beautiful world.

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.