book I had laid on the seat. It was a treatise of Von Hartmann’s in

German.

“‘I had judged that you were a physician,’ he said, ‘a student, perhaps, from a German university?’

“‘I am.’

“He paused for an instant, and then spoke in absent-minded reiteration, ‘So you don’t go on to London?’

“‘No,’ I returned, impatiently. ‘Can I do anything for you?’

“He handed me the book, regarding me resolutely as he did so.

“‘Are you a sensible man?’

“I bowed.

“‘And a philosopher?’

“‘In amateur fashion.’

“With feverish energy he went on more quickly, ‘You have in your possession,’ he said, ‘something for which I would give my whole fortune.’ He laid two half-sovereigns and some odd silver in the palm of his hand. ‘This is all I possess,’ he continued, ‘but I would give it gladly.’

“I looked at him curiously.

“‘You mean the morphine?’ I demanded.

“He nodded. ‘I don’t ask you to give it to me, I only ask—’

“I interrupted him. ‘Are you in pain?’

“He laughed softly, and I really believe he felt a tinge of amusement. ‘It is a question of expediency,’ he explained. If you happen to be a moralist—’ He broke off.

“‘What of it?’ I inquired.

“He settled himself in his corner, resting his head against the cushions.

“‘You get out at Leicester,’ he said, recklessly. ‘I go on to London, where Providence, represented by Scotland Yard, is awaiting me.’

“I started. ‘For what?’

“‘They call it murder, I believe,’ he returned; but what they call it matters very little. I call it divine justice—that also matters very little. The point is—I shall arrive, they will be there before me. That is settled. Every station along the road is watched.’

“I glanced out of the window.

“‘But you came from Glasgow,’ I suggested.

“‘Worse luck! I waited in the dressing-room until the train started. I hoped to have the compartment alone, but—’ He leaned forward and lowered the window-shade. ‘If you don’t object,’ he said, apologetically; ‘I find the glare trying. It is a question for a moralist,’ he repeated. ‘Indeed, I may call myself a question for a moralist,’ and he smiled again with that ugly humour. ‘To begin with the beginning, the question is bred in the bone and it’s out in the blood.’ He nodded at my look of surprise. ‘You are an American,’ he continued, ‘so am I. I was born in Washington some thirty years ago. My father was a politician, whose honour was held to be unimpeachable—which was a mistake. His name doesn’t matter, but he became very wealthy through judicious speculations in votes and other things. My mother has always suffered from an incipient hysteria, which developed shortly before my birth.’ He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and knocked the ashes from his cigar with a flick of his finger. ‘The motive for this is not far to seek,’ he said, with a glance at my travelling-bag. He had the coolest bravado I have ever met. ‘As a child,’ he went on, ‘I gave great promise. Indeed, we moved to England that I might be educated at Oxford. My father considered the ecclesiastical atmosphere to be beneficial. But while at college I got into trouble with a woman, and I left. My father died, his fortune burst like a bubble, and my mother moved to the country. I was put into a banking office, but I got into more trouble with women, this time two of them. One was a variety actress, and I married her. I didn’t want to do it. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help it, and I did it. A month later I left her. I changed my name and went to Belfast where I resolved to become an honest man. It was a tough job, but I laboured and I succeeded for a time. The variety actress began looking for me, but I escaped her, and have escaped her so far. That was eight years ago. And several years after reaching Belfast I met another woman. She was different. I fell ill of fever in Ireland, and she nursed me. She was a good woman, with a broad Irish face, strong hands, and motherly shoulders. I was weak and she was strong, and I fell in love with her. I tried to tell her about the variety actress, but somehow I couldn’t, and I married her.’ He shot the stump of his cigar through the opposite window and lighted another, this time drawing the match from his pocket. ‘She is an honest woman,’ he said, ‘as honest as the day. She believes in me. It would kill her to know about the variety actress and all the others. There is one child, a girl, a freckle-faced mite just like her mother, and another is coming.’

“‘She knows nothing of this affair?’

“‘Not a blamed thing. She is the kind of woman who is good because she can’t help herself. She enjoys it. I never did. My mother is different too. She would die if other people knew of this; my wife would die if she knew of it herself. Well, I got tired, and I wanted money, so I left her and went to Dublin. I changed my name and got a clerkship in a shipping-office. My wife thinks I went to America to get work, and if she never hears of me she’ll probably think no worse. I did intend going to America, but somehow I didn’t. I got in with a man who signed somebody’s name to a cheque and got me to present it. Then we quarrelled about the money; the man threw the job on me, and the affair came out. But before they arrested me, I ran him down and shot him. I was ridding the world of a damned traitor.’

“He raised the shade with a nervous hand; but the sun flashed into his eyes, and he lowered it.

“‘I suppose I’d hang for it,’ he said. ‘There isn’t much doubt of that. If I waited, I’d hang for it, but I am not going to wait. I am going to die.’

“‘And how?’

“‘Before this train reaches London,’ he replied. ‘I am a dead man. There are two ways. I might say three, except that a pitch from the carriage might mean only a broken leg. But there is this—’ He drew a vial from his pocket and held it to the light. It contained an ounce or so of carbolic acid.

“‘One of the most corrosive of irritants,’ I observed.

“‘And there is—your package.’

“My first impulse was to force the vial from him. He was a slight man, and I could have overcome him with but little exertion. But the exertion I did not make. I should as soon have thought, when my rational humour reasserted itself, of knocking a man down and robbing him of his watch. The acid was as exclusively his property as the clothes he wore, and equally his life was his own. Had he declared his intention to hurl himself from the window, I might not have made way for him, but I should certainly not have obstructed his passage.

“But the morphine was mine, and that I should assist him was another matter, so I said:

“‘The package belongs to me.’

“‘And you will not exchange?’

“‘Certainly not.’

“He answered, almost angrily:

“‘Why not be reasonable? You admit that I am in a mess of it?’

“‘Readily.’

“‘You also admit that my life is morally my own?’

“‘Equally.’

“‘That its continuance could in no wise prove to be of benefit to society?’

“‘I do.’

“‘That for all connected with me it is better that I should die unknown and under an assumed name?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Then you admit also that the best I can do is to kill myself before reaching London?’

“‘Perhaps.’

“‘So you will leave me the morphine when you get off at Leicester?’

“‘No.’

“He struck the window-sill impatiently with the palm of his hand.

“‘And why not?’

“I hesitated an instant.

“‘Because, upon the whole, I do not care to be the instrument of your self-destruction.’

“‘Don’t be a fool!’ he retorted. ‘Speak honestly, and say that because of a little moral shrinking on your part, you prefer to leave a human being to a death of agony. I don’t like physical pain. I am like a woman about it, but it is better than hanging, or life-imprisonment, or any jury finding.’

“I became exhortatory.

“‘Why not face it like a man and take your chances? Who knows—’

“‘I have had my chances,’ he returned. ‘I have squandered more chances than most men ever lay eyes on, and I don’t care. If I had the opportunity, I’d squander them again. It is the only thing chances are made for.’

“‘What, a scoundrel you are!’ I exclaimed.

“‘Well, I don’t know,’ he answered; ‘there have been worse men. I never said a harsh word to a woman, and I never hit a man when he was down—’

“I blushed. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to hit you,’ I responded.

“He took no notice.

“‘I like my wife,’ he said. ‘She is a good woman, and I’d do a good deal to keep her and the children from knowing the truth. Perhaps I’d kill myself even if I didn’t want to. I don’t know, but I am tired—damned tired.’

“‘And yet you deserted her.’

“‘I did. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help it. If I were free to go back to her to-morrow, unless I was ill and wanted nursing, I’d see that she had grown shapeless, and that her hands were coarse.’ He stretched out his own, which were singularly white and delicate. ‘I believe I’d leave her in a week,’ he said.

“Then with an eager movement he pointed to my bag.

“‘That is the ending of the difficulty,’ he added. ‘Otherwise I swear that before the train gets to London, I will swallow this stuff and die like a rat.’

“‘I admit your right to die in any manner you choose; but I don’t see that it is my place to assist you. It is an ugly job.”

“‘So am I,’ he retorted, grimly. ‘At any rate, if you leave the train with that package in your bag it will be cowardice—sheer cowardice. And for the sake of your cowardice you will damn me to this.’ He touched the vial.

“‘It won’t be pleasant,’ I said, and we were silent.

“I knew that the man had spoken the truth. I was accustomed to lies, and had learned to detect them. I knew, also, that the world would be well rid of him and his kind. Why I should preserve him for death upon the gallows I did not see. The majesty of the law would be in no way ruffled by his premature departure; and if I could trust that part of his story, the lives of innocent women and children would, in the other case, suffer considerably. And, even if I and my unopened bag alighted at Leicester, I was sure that he would never reach London alive. He was a desperate man, this I read in his set face, his dazed eyes, his nervous hands. He was a poor devil, and I was sorry for him. Why, then, should I contribute, by my refusal to comply with his request, an additional hour of agony to his existence? Could I, with my pretence of philosophic freedom, alight at my station, leaving him to swallow the acid and die like a rat in a cage before the journey was over? I remembered that I had once seen a guinea-pig die from the effects of carbolic acid, and the remembrance sickened me.

“As I sat there listening to the noise of the slackening train, which was nearing Leicester, I thought of a hundred things. I thought of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. I thought of the dying guinea-pig. I thought of the broad-faced Irish wife and the two children.

“Then ‘Leicester’ flashed before me, and the train stopped. I rose, gathered my coat and rug, and lifted the volume of Von Hartmann from the seat. The man remained motionless in the corner of the compartment, but his eyes followed me.

“I stooped, opened my bag, and laid the chemist’s package on the seat. Then I stepped out, closing the door after me.”

As the speaker finished, he reached forward, selected an almond from the stand of nuts, fitted it carefully between the crackers, and cracked it slowly.

The young woman in the white dress started up with a shudder.

“What a horrible story!” she exclaimed; “for it is a story, after all, and not a fact.”

“A point, rather,” suggested the Englishman; “but is that all?”

“All of the point,” returned the alienist. “The next day I saw in the _Times_ that a man, supposed to be James Morganson, who was wanted for murder, was found dead in a first-class smoking-compartment of the Midland Railway. Coroner’s verdict, ‘Death resulting from an overdose of opium, taken with suicidal intent.’”

The journalist dropped a lump of sugar in his cup and watched it attentively.

“I don’t think I could have done it,” he said. “I might have left him with his carbolic. But I couldn’t have deliberately given him his death-potion.”

“But as long as he was going to die,” responded the girl in black, “it was better to let him die painlessly.”

The Englishman smiled. “Can a woman ever consider the ethical side of a question when the sympathetic one is visible?” he asked.

The alienist cracked another almond. “I was sincere,” he said. “Of that there is no doubt. I thought I did right. The question is—did I do right?”

“It would have been wiser,” began the lawyer, argumentatively, “since you were the stronger, to take the vial from him and leave him to the care of the law.”

“But the wife and children,” replied the girl in black. “And hanging is so horrible!”

“So is murder,” responded the lawyer, dryly.

The young woman on the Captain’s right laid her napkin on the table and rose. “I don’t know what was right,” she said, “but I do know that in your place I should have felt like a murderer.”

The alienist smiled half cynically. “So I did,” he answered; “but there is such a thing, my dear young lady, as a conscientious murderer.”

THE DIFFERENCE

Outside, in the autumn rain, the leaves were falling.

For twenty years, every autumn since her marriage, Margaret Fleming had watched the leaves from this window; and always it had seemed to her that they were a part of her life which she held precious. As they fell she had known that they carried away something she could never recover—youth, beauty, pleasure, or only memories that she wanted to keep. Something gracious, desirable and fleeting; but never until this afternoon had she felt that the wind was sweeping away the illusion of happiness by which she lived. Beyond the panes, against which the rain was beating in gray sheets, she looked out on the naked outlines of the city: bleak houses, drenched grass in squares, and boughs of trees where a few brown or yellow leaves were clinging.

On the hearth rug the letter lay where it had fallen a few minutes—or was it a few hours ago? The flames from the wood fire cast a glow on the white pages; and she imagined that the ugly words leaped out to sting her like scorpions as she moved by them. Not for worlds, she told herself, would she stoop and touch them again. Yet what need had she to touch them when each slanting black line was etched in her memory with acid? Never, though she lived a hundred years, could she forget the way the letters fell on the white paper!

Once, twice, three times, she walked from window to door and back again from door to window. The wood fire burned cheerfully with a whispering sound. As the lights and shadows stirred over the familiar objects she had once loved, her gaze followed them hungrily. She had called this upstairs library George’s room, and she realized now that every piece of furniture, every book it contained, had been chosen to please him. He liked the golden brown of the walls, the warm colours in the Persian rugs, the soft depth of the cushioned chairs. He liked, too, the flamboyant red lilies beneath the little Chippendale mirror.

After twenty years of happiness, of comradeship, of mutual dependence, after all that marriage could mean to two equal spirits, was there nothing left except ashes? Could twenty years of happiness be destroyed in an afternoon, in an hour? Stopping abruptly, with a jerk which ran like a spasm through her slender figure, she gazed with hard searching eyes over the red lilies into the mirror. The grave beauty of her face, a beauty less of flesh than of spirit, floated there in the shadows like a flower in a pond.

“I am younger than he is by a year,” she thought, “and yet he can begin over again to love, while a new love for me would be desecration.”

There was the sound of his step on the stair. An instant later his hand fell on the door, and he entered the room.

Stooping swiftly, she picked up the letter from the rug and hid it in her bosom. Then turning toward him, she received his kiss with a smile. “I didn’t wait lunch for you,” she said.

“I got it at the club.” After kissing her cheek, he moved to the fire and stood warming his hands. “Beastly day. No chance of golf, so I’ve arranged to see that man from Washington. You won’t get out, I suppose?”

She shook her head. “No, I sha’n’t get out.”

Did he know, she wondered, that this woman had written to her? Did he suspect that the letter lay now in her bosom? He had brought the smell of rain, the taste of dampness, with him into the room; and this air of the outer world enveloped him while he stood there, genial, robust, superbly vital, clothed in his sanguine temperament as in the healthy red and white of his flesh. Still boyish at forty-five, he had that look of perennial innocence which some men carry untarnished through the most enlightening experiences. Even his moustache and his sharply jutting chin could not disguise the softness that hovered always about his mouth, where she noticed now, with her piercing scrutiny, the muscles were growing lax. Strange that she had never seen this until she discovered that George loved another woman! The thought dashed into her mind that she knew him in reality no better than if she had lived with a stranger for twenty years. Yet, until a few hours ago, she would have said, had any one asked her, that their marriage was as perfect as any mating between a man and a woman could be in this imperfect world.

“You’re wise. The wind’s still in the east, and there is no chance, I’m afraid, of a change.” He hesitated an instant, stared approvingly at the red lilies, and remarked abruptly, “Nice colour.”

“You always liked red.” Her mouth lost its softness. “And I was pale even as a girl.”

His genial gaze swept her face. “Oh, well, there’s red and red, you know. Some cheeks look best pale.”

Without replying to his words, she sat looking up at him while her thoughts, escaping her control, flew from the warm room out into the rough autumn weather. It was as if she felt the beating of the rain in her soul, as if she were torn from her security and whirled downward and onward in the violence of the storm. On the surface of her life nothing had changed. The fire still burned; the lights and shadows still flickered over the Persian rugs; her husband still stood there, looking down on her through the cloudless blue of his eyes. But the real Margaret, the vital part of her, was hidden far away in that deep place where the seeds of mysterious impulses and formless desires lie buried. She knew that there were secrets within herself which she had never acknowledged in her own thoughts; that there were unexpressed longings which had never taken shape even in her imagination. Somewhere beneath the civilization of the ages there was the skeleton of the savage.

The letter in her bosom scorched her as if it were fire. “That was why you used to call me magnolia blossom,” she said in a colourless voice, and knew it was only the superficial self that was speaking.

His face softened; yet so perfectly had the note of sentiment come to be understood rather than expressed in their lives that she could feel his embarrassment. The glow lingered in his eyes, but he answered only, “Yes, you were always like that.”

An irrepressible laugh broke from her. Oh, the irony, the bitterness! “Perhaps you like them pale!” she tossed back mockingly, and wondered if this Rose Morrison who had written to her was coloured like her name?

He looked puzzled but solicitous. “I’m afraid I must be off. If you are not tired, could you manage to go over these galleys this afternoon? I’d like to read the last chapter aloud to you after the corrections are made.” He had written a book on the history of law; and while he drew the roll of proof sheets from his pocket, she remembered, with a pang as sharp as the stab of a knife, all the work of last summer when they had gathered material together. He needed her for his work, she realized, if not for his pleasure. She stood, as she had always done, for the serious things of his life. This book could not have been written without her. Even his success in his profession had been the result of her efforts as well as his own.

“I’m never too tired for that,” she responded, and though she smiled up at him, it was a smile that hurt her with its irony.

“Well, my time’s up,” he said. “By the way. I’ll need my heavier golf things if it is fine to-morrow.” To-morrow was Sunday, and he played golf with a group of men at the Country Club every Sunday morning.

“They are in the cedar closet. I’ll get them out.”

“The medium ones, you know. That English tweed.”

“Yes, I know. I’ll have them ready,” Did Rose Morrison play golf, she wondered.

“I’ll try to get back early to dinner. There was a button loose on the waistcoat I wore last evening. I forgot to mention it this morning.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I left it to the servants, but I’ll look after it myself.” Again this perverse humour seized her. Had he ever asked Rose Morrison to sew on a button?

At the door he turned back. “And I forgot to ask you this morning to order flowers for Morton’s funeral. It is to be Monday.”

The expression on her face felt as stiff as a wax mask, and though she struggled to relax her muscles, they persisted in that smile of inane cheerfulness. “I’ll order them at once, before I begin the galleys,” she answered.

Rising from the couch on which she had thrown herself at his entrance, she began again her restless pacing from door to window. The library was quiet except for the whispering flames. Outside in the rain the leaves were falling thickly, driven hither and thither by the wind which rocked the dappled boughs of the sycamores. In the gloom of the room the red lilies blazed.

The terror, which had clutched her like a living thing, had its fangs in her heart. Terror of loss, of futility. Terror of the past because it tortured her. Terror of the future because it might be empty even of torture. “He is mine, and I will never give him up,” she thought wildly. “I will fight to the end for what is mine.”

There was a sound at the door and Winters, the butler, entered. “Mrs. Chambers, Madam. She was quite sure you would be at home.”

“Yes, I am at home.” She was always at home, even in illness, to Dorothy Chambers. Though they were so different in temperament, they had been friends from girlhood; and much of the gaiety of Margaret’s life had been supplied by Dorothy. Now, as her friend entered, she held out her arms. “You come whenever it rains, dear,” she said. “It is so good of you.” Yet her welcome was hollow, and at the very instant when she returned her friend’s kiss she was wishing that she could send her away. That was one of the worst things about suffering; it made one indifferent and insincere.

Dorothy drew off her gloves, unfastened her furs, and after raising her veil over the tip of her small inquisitive nose, held out her hand with a beseeching gesture.

“I’ve come straight from a committee luncheon. Give me a cigarette.”

Reaching for the Florentine box on the desk, Margaret handed it to her. A minute later, while the thin blue flame shot up between them, she asked herself if Dorothy could look into her face and not see the difference?

Small, plain, vivacious, with hair of ashen gold, thin intelligent features, and a smile of mocking brilliance, Dorothy was the kind of woman whom men admire without loving and women love without admiring. As a girl she had been a social success without possessing a single one of the qualities upon which social success is supposed to depend.

Sinking back in her chair, she blew several rings of smoke from her lips and watched them float slowly upward.

“We have decided to give a bridge party. There’s simply no other way to raise money. Will you take a table?”

Margaret nodded. “Of course.” Suffering outside of herself made no difference to her. Her throbbing wound was the only reality.

“Janet is going to lend us her house.” A new note had come into Dorothy’s voice. “I haven’t seen her since last spring. She had on a new hat, and was looking awfully well. You know Herbert has come back.”

Margaret started. At last her wandering attention was fixed on her visitor. “Herbert? And she let him?” There was deep disgust in her tone.

Dorothy paused to inhale placidly before she answered. “Well, what else could she do? He tried to make her get a divorce, and she wouldn’t.”

A flush stained Margaret’s delicate features. “I never understood why she didn’t. He made no secret of what he wanted. He showed her plainly that he loved the other woman.”

Dorothy’s only reply was a shrug; but after a moment, in which she smoked with a luxurious air, she commented briefly, “But man’s love isn’t one of the eternal verities.”

“Well, indifference is, and he proved that he was indifferent to Janet. Yet she has let him come back to her. I can’t see what she is to get out of it.”

Dorothy laughed cynically. “Oh, she enjoys immensely the attitude of forgiveness, and at last he has permitted her to forgive him. There is a spiritual vanity as well as a physical one, you know, and Janet’s weakness is spiritual.”

“But to live with a man who doesn’t love her? To remember every minute of the day and night that it is another woman he loves?”

“And every time that she remembers it she has the luxury of forgiving again.” Keenness flickered like a blade in Dorothy’s gray eyes. “You are very lovely, Margaret,” she said abruptly. “The years seem only to leave you rarer and finer, but you know nothing about life.”

A smile quivered and died on Margaret’s lips. “I might retort that you know nothing about love.”

With an impatient birdlike gesture Dorothy tossed her burned-out cigarette into the fire. “Whose love?” she inquired as she opened the Florentine box, “Herbert’s or yours?”

“It’s all the same, isn’t it?”

By the flame of the match she had struck Dorothy’s expression appeared almost malign. “There, my dear, is where you are wrong,” she replied. “When a man and a woman talk of love they speak two different languages. They can never understand each other because women love with their imagination and men with their senses. To you love is a thing in itself, a kind of abstract power like religion; to Herbert it is simply the way he feels.”

“But if he loves the other woman, he doesn’t love Janet; and yet he wants to return to her.” Leaning back in her chair, Dorothy surveyed her with a look which was at once sympathetic and mocking. Her gaze swept the pure grave features; the shining dusk of the hair; the narrow nose with its slight arch in the middle; the straight red lips with their resolute pressure; the skin so like a fading rose-leaf. Yes, there was beauty in Margaret’s face if one were only artist or saint enough to perceive it.

“There is so much more in marriage than either love or indifference,” she remarked casually. “There is, for instance, comfort.”

“Comfort?” repeated Margaret scornfully. She rose, in her clinging draperies of chiff on, to place a fresh log on the fire. “If he really loves the other woman, Janet ought to give him up,” she said.

At this Dorothy turned on her. “Would you, if it were George?” she demanded.

For an instant, while she stood there in front of the fire, it seemed to Margaret that the room whirled before her gaze like the changing colours in a kaleidoscope. Then a gray cloud fell over the brightness, and out of this cloud there emerged only the blaze of the red lilies. A pain struck her in the breast, and she remembered the letter she had hidden there.

“Yes,” she answered presently. “I should do it if it were George.”

A minute afterward she became conscious that while she spoke, a miracle occurred within her soul.

The tumult of sorrow, of anger, of bitterness, of despair, was drifting farther and farther away. Even the terror, which was worse than any tumult, had vanished. In that instant of renunciation she had reached some spiritual haven. What she had found, she understood presently, was the knowledge that there is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.

“I should do it if it were George,” she said again, very slowly.

“Well, I think you would be very foolish.” Dorothy had risen and was lowering her veil. “For when George ceases to be desirable for sentimental reasons, he will still have his value as a good provider.” Her mocking laugh grated on Margaret’s ears. “Now, I must run away. I only looked in for an instant. I’ve a tea on hand, and I must go home and dress.”

When she had gone, Margaret stood for a minute, thinking deeply. For a minute only, but in that space of time her decision was made. Crossing to the desk, she telephoned for the flowers. Then she left the library and went into the cedar closet at the end of the hall. When she had found the golf clothes George wanted, she looked over them carefully and hung them in his dressing room. Her next task was to lay out his dinner clothes and to sew the loose button on the waistcoat he had worn last evening. She did these things deliberately, automatically, repeating as if it were a forumla, “I must forget nothing”; and when at last she had finished, she stood upright, with a sigh of relief, as if a burden had rolled from her shoulders. Now that she had attended to the details of existence, she would have time for the problem of living.

Slipping out of her gray dress, she changed into a walking suit of blue homespun. Then, searching among the shoes in her closet, she selected a pair of heavy boots she had worn in Maine last summer. As she put on a close little hat and tied a veil of blue chiffon over her face, she reflected, with bitter mirth, that only in novels could one hide one’s identity behind a veil.

In the hall downstairs she met Winters, who stared at her discreetly but disapprovingly.

“Shall I order the car, madam?”

She shook her head, reading his thoughts as plainly as if he had uttered them. “No, it has stopped raining. I want to walk.”

The door closed sharply on her life of happiness, and she passed out into the rain-soaked world where the mist caught her like damp smoke. So this was what it meant to be deserted, to be alone on the earth! The smell of rain, the smell that George had brought with him into the warm room upstairs, oppressed her as if it were the odour of melancholy.

As the chill pierced her coat, she drew her furs closely about her neck, and walked briskly in the direction of the street car. The address on the letter she carried was burned into her memory not in numbers, but in the thought that it was a villa George owned in an unfashionable suburb named Locust Park. Though she had never been there, she knew that, with the uncertain trolley service she must expect, it would take at least two hours to make the trip and return. Half an hour for Rose Morrison; and even then it would be night, and Winters at least would be anxious, before she reached home. Well, that was the best she could do.

The street car came, and she got in and found a seat behind a man who had been shooting and carried a string of partridges. All the other seats were filled with the usual afternoon crowd for the suburbs—women holding bundles or baskets and workmen returning from the factories. A sense of isolation like spiritual darkness descended upon her; and she closed her eyes and tried to bring back the serenity she had felt in the thought of relinquishment. But she could remember only a phrase of Dorothy’s which floated like a wisp of thistledown through her thoughts, “Spiritual vanity. With some women it is stronger than physical vanity.” Was that her weakness, vanity, not of the body, but of the spirit?

Thoughts blew in and out of her mind like dead leaves, now whirling, now drifting, now stirring faintly in her consciousness with a moaning sound. Twenty years. Nothing but that. Love and nothing else in her whole life.... The summer of their engagement. A rose garden in bloom. The way he looked. The smell of roses. Or was it only the smell of dead leaves rotting to earth?... All the long, long years of their marriage. Little things that one never forgot. The way he laughed. The way he smiled. The look of his hair when it was damp on his forehead. The smell of cigars in his clothes. The three lumps of sugar in his coffee. The sleepy look in his face when he stood ready to put out the lights while she went up the stairs. Oh, the little things that tore at one’s heart!

The street car stopped with a jerk, and she got out and walked through the drenched grass in the direction one of the women had pointed out to her.

“The Laurels? That low yellow house at the end of this lane, farther on where the piles of dead leaves are. You can’t see the house now, the lane turns, but it’s just a stone’s throw farther on.”

Thanking her, Margaret walked on steadily toward the turn in the lane. Outside of the city the wind blew stronger, and the coloured leaves, bronze, yellow, crimson, lay in a thick carpet over the muddy road. In the west a thin line of gold shone beneath a range of heavy, smoke-coloured clouds. From the trees rain still dripped slowly; and between the road and the line of gold in the west there stretched the desolate autumn landscape.

“Oh, the little things!” her heart cried in despair. “The little things that make happiness!”

Entering the sagging gate of The Laurels, she passed among mounds of sodden leaves which reminded her of graves, and followed the neglected walk between rows of leafless shrubs which must have looked gay in summer. The house was one of many cheap suburban villas (George had bought it, she remembered, at an auction) and she surmised that, until this newest tenant came, it must have stood long unoccupied. The whole place wore, she reflected as she rang the loosened bell, a furtive and insecure appearance.

After the third ring the door was hurriedly opened by a dishevelled maid, who replied that her mistress was not at home.

“Then I shall wait,” said Margaret firmly. “Tell your mistress, when she comes in, that Mrs. Fleming is waiting to see her.” With a step as resolute as her words, she entered the house and crossed the hall to the living room where a bright coal fire was burning.

The room was empty, but a canary in a gilded cage at the window broke into song as she entered. On a table stood a tray containing the remains of tea; and beside it there was a half-burned cigarette in a bronze Turkish bowl. A book—she saw instantly that it was a volume of the newest plays—lay face downward beneath a pair of eyeglasses, and a rug, which had fallen from the couch, was in a crumpled pile on the floor.

“So she isn’t out,” Margaret reflected; and turning at a sound, she confronted Rose Morrison.

For an instant it seemed to the older woman that beauty like a lamp blinded her eyes. Then, as the cloud passed, she realized that it was only a blaze, that it was the loveliness of dead leaves when they are burning.

“So you came?” said Rose Morrison, while she gazed at her with the clear and competent eyes of youth. Her voice, though it was low and clear, had no softness; it rang like a bell. Yes, she had youth, she had her flamboyant loveliness; but stronger than youth and loveliness, it seemed to Margaret, surveying her over the reserves and discriminations of the centuries, was the security of one who had never doubted her own judgment. Her power lay where power usually lies in an infallible self-esteem.

“I came to talk it over with you,” began Margaret quietly; and though she tried to make her voice insolent, the deep instinct of good manners was greater than her effort. “You tell me that my husband loves you.”

The glow, the flame, in Rose Morrison’s face made Margaret think again of leaves burning. There was no embarrassment, there was no evasion even, in the girl’s look. Candid and unashamed, she appeared to glory in this infatuation, which Margaret regarded as worse than sinful, since it was vulgar.

“Oh, I am so glad that you did,” Rose Morrison’s sincerity was disarming. “I hated to hurt you. You can never know what it cost me to write that letter; but I felt that I owed it to you to tell you the truth. I believe that we always owe people the truth.”

“And did George feel this way also?”

“George?” The flame mounted until it enveloped her. “Oh, he doesn’t know. I tried to spare him. He would rather do anything than hurt you, and I thought it would be so much better if we could talk it over and find a solution just between ourselves. I knew if you cared for George, you would feel as I do about sparing him.”

About sparing him! As if she had done anything for the last twenty years, Margaret reflected, except think out new and different ways of sparing George!

“I don’t know,” she answered, as she sat down in obedience to the other’s persuasive gesture. “I shall have to think a minute. You see this has been—well, rather—sudden.”

“I know, I know.” The girl looked as if she did. “May I give you a cup of tea? You must be chilled.”

“No, thank you. I am quite comfortable.”

“Not even a cigarette? Oh, I wonder what you Victorian women did for a solace when you weren’t allowed even a cigarette!”

You Victorian women! In spite of her tragic mood, a smile hovered on Margaret’s lips. So that was how this girl classified her. Yet Rose Morrison had fallen in love with a Victorian man.

“Then I may?” said the younger woman with her full-throated laugh. From her bright red hair, which was brushed straight back from her forehead, to her splendid figure, where her hips swung free like a boy’s, she was a picture of barbaric beauty. There was a glittering hardness about her, as if she had been washed in some indestructible glaze; but it was the glaze of youth, not of experience. She reminded Margaret of a gilded statue she had seen once in a museum; and the girl’s eyes, like the eyes of the statue, were gleaming, remote and impassive—eyes that had never looked on reality. The dress she wore was made of some strange “art cloth,” dyed in brilliant hues, fashioned like a kimono, and girdled at the hips with what Margaret mistook for a queer piece of rope. Nothing, not even her crude and confident youth, revealed Rose Morrison to her visitor so completely as this end of rope.

“You are an artist?” she asked, for she was sure of her ground. Only an artist, she decided, could be at once so arrogant with destiny and so ignorant of life.

“How did you know? Has George spoken of me?”

Margaret shook her head. “Oh, I knew without any one’s telling me.”

“I have a studio in Greenwich Village, but George and I met last summer at Ogunquit. I go there every summer to paint.”

“I didn’t know.” How easily, how possessively, this other woman spoke her husband’s name.

“It began at once.” To Margaret, with her inherited delicacy and reticence, there was something repellent in this barbaric simplicity of emotion.

“But you must have known that he was married,” she observed coldly.

“Yes, I knew, but I could see, of course, that you did not understand him.”

“And you think that you do?” If it were not tragic, how amusing it would be to think of her simple George as a problem!

“Oh, I realize that it appears very sudden to you; but in the emotions time counts for so little. Just living with a person for twenty years doesn’t enable one to understand him, do you think?”

“I suppose not. But do you really imagine,” she asked in what struck her as a singularly impersonal tone for so intimate a question, “that George is complex?”

The flame, which was revealed now as the illumination of some secret happiness, flooded Rose Morrison’s features. As she leaned forward, with clasped hands, Margaret noticed that the girl was careless about those feminine details by which George declared so often that he judged a woman. Her hair was carelessly arranged; her finger nails needed attention; and beneath the kimonolike garment, a frayed place showed at the back of her stocking. Even her red morocco slippers were run down at the heels; and it seemed to Margaret that this physical negligence had extended to the girl’s habit of thought.

“He is so big, so strong and silent, that it would take an artist to understand him,” answered Rose Morrison passionately. Was this really, Margaret wondered, the way George appeared to the romantic vision?

“Yes, he is not a great talker,” she admitted. “Perhaps if he talked more, you might find him less difficult.” Then before the other could reply, she inquired sharply, “Did George tell you that he was misunderstood?”

“How you misjudge him!” The girl had flown to his defense; and though Margaret had been, as she would have said “a devoted wife,” she felt that all this vehemence was wasted. After all, George, with his easy, prosaic temperament, was only made uncomfortable by vehemence. “He never speaks of you except in the most beautiful way,” Rose Morrison was insisting “He realizes perfectly what you have been to him, and he would rather suffer in silence all his life than make you unhappy.”

“Then what is all this about?” Though she felt that it was unfair, Margaret could not help putting the question.

Actually there were tears in Rose Morrison’s eyes. “I could not bear to see his life ruined,” she answered. “I hated to write to you; but how else could I make you realize that you were standing in the way of his happiness? If it were just myself, I could have borne it in silence. I would never have hurt you just for my own sake; but, the subterfuge, the dishonesty, is spoiling his life. He does not say so, but, oh, I see it every day because I love him!” As she bent over, the firelight caught her hair, and it blazed out triumphantly like the red lilies in Margaret’s library.

“What is it that you want me to do?” asked Margaret in her dispassionate voice.

“I felt that we owed you the truth,” responded the girl, “and I hoped that you would take what I wrote you in the right spirit.”

“You are sure that my husband loves you?”

“Shall I show you his letters?” The girl smiled as she answered, and her full red lips reminded Margaret suddenly of raw flesh. Was raw flesh, after all, what men wanted?

“No!” The single word was spoken indignantly.

“I thought perhaps they would make you see what it means,” explained Rose Morrison simply. “Oh, I wish I could do this without causing you pain!”

“Pain doesn’t matter. I can stand pain.”

“Well, I’m glad you aren’t resentful. After all, why should we be enemies? George’s happiness means more than anything else to us both.”

“And you are sure you know best what is for George’s happiness?”

“I know that subterfuge and lies and dishonesty cannot bring happiness.” Rose Morrison flung out her arms with a superb gesture. “Oh, I realize that it is a big thing, a great thing, I am asking of you. But in your place, if I stood in his way, I should so gladly sacrifice myself for his sake I should give him his freedom. I should acknowledge his right to happiness, to self-development.”

A bitter laugh broke from Margaret’s lips. What a jumble of sounds these catchwords of the new freedom made! What was this self-development which could develop only through the sacrifice of others? How would these immature theories survive the compromises and concessions and adjustments which made marriage permanent?

“I cannot feel that our marriage has interfered with his development,” she rejoined presently.

“You may be right,” Rose Morrison conceded the point. “But to-day he needs new inspiration, new opportunities. He needs the companionship of a modern mind.”

“Yes, he has kept young at my cost,” thought the older woman. “I have helped by a thousand little sacrifices, by a thousand little cares and worries, to preserve this unnatural youth which is destroying me. I have taken over the burden of details in order that he might be free for the larger interests of life. If he is young to-day, it is at the cost of my youth.”

For the second time that day, as she sat there in silence, with her eyes on the blooming face of Rose Morrison, a wave of peace, the peace of one who has been shipwrecked and then swept far off into some serene haven, enveloped her. Something to hold by, that at least she had found. The law of sacrifice, the ideal of self-surrender, which she had learned in the past. For twenty years she had given freely, abundantly, of her best; and to-day she could still prove to him that she was not beggared. She could still give the supreme gift of her happiness. “How he must love you!” she exclaimed. “How he must love you to have hurt me so much for your sake! Nothing but a great love could make him so cruel.”

“He does love me,” answered Rose Morrison, and her voice was like the song of a bird.

“He must.” Margaret’s eyes were burning, but no tears came. Her lips felt cracked with the effort she made to keep them from trembling. “I think if he had done this thing with any other motive than a great love, I should hate him until I died.” Then she rose and held out her hand. “I shall not stand in your way,” she added.

Joy flashed into the girl’s eyes. “You are very noble,” she answered. “I am sorry if I have hurt you. I am sorry, too, that I called you old-fashioned.”

Margaret laughed. “Oh, I am old-fashioned. I am so old-fashioned that I should have died rather than ruin the happiness of another woman.” The joy faded from Rose Morrison’s face. “It was not I,” she answered. “It was life. We cannot stand in the way of life.”

“Life to-day, God yesterday, what does it matter? It is a generation that has grasped everything except personal responsibility.” Oh, if one could only keep the humour! A thought struck her, and she asked abruptly, “When your turn comes, if it ever does, will you give way as I do?”

“That will be understood. We shall not hold each other back.”

“But you are young. You will tire first. Then he must give way?” Why, in twenty years George would be sixty-five and Rose Morrison still a young woman!

Calm, resolute, uncompromising. Rose Morrison held open the door. “Whatever happens, he would never wish to hold me back.”

Then Margaret passed out, the door closed behind her, and she stood breathing deep draughts of the chill, invigorating air. Well, that was over.

The lawn, with its grave-like mounds of leaves, looked as mournful as a cemetery. Beyond the bare shrubs the road glimmered; the wind still blew in gusts, now rising, now dying away with a plaintive sound; in the west the thread of gold had faded to a pale greenish light. Veiled in the monotonous fall of the leaves, it seemed to Margaret that the desolate evening awaited her.

“How he must love her,” she thought, not resentfully, but with tragic resignation. “How he must love her to have sacrificed me as he has done.”

This idea, she found as she walked on presently in the direction of the street car, had taken complete possession of her point of view. Through its crystal lucidity she was able to attain some sympathy with her husband’s suffering. What agony of mind he must have endured in these past months, these months when they had worked so quietly side by side on his book! What days of gnawing remorse! What nights of devastating anguish! How this newer love must have rent his heart asunder before he could stoop to the baseness of such a betrayal! Tears, which had not come for her own pain, stung her eyelids. She knew that he must have fought it hour by hour, day by day, night by night. Conventional as he was, how violent this emotion must have been to have conquered him so completely. “Terrible as an army with banners,” she repeated softly, while a pang of jealousy shot through her heart. Was there in George, she asked now, profounder depths of feeling than she had ever reached; was there some secret garden of romance where she had never entered? Was George larger, wilder, more adventurous in imagination, than she had dreamed? Had the perfect lover lain hidden in his nature, awaiting only the call of youth?

The street car returned almost empty; and she found restfulness in the monotonous jolting, as if it were swinging her into some world beyond space and time, where mental pain yielded to the sense of physical discomfort. After the agony of mind, the aching of body was strangely soothing.

Here and there, the lights of a house flashed among the trees, and she thought, with an impersonal interest, of the neglected villa, surrounded by mounds of rotting leaves, where that girl waited alone for happiness. Other standards. This was how the newer generation appeared to Margaret—other standards, other morals. Facing life stripped bare of every safeguard, of every restraining tradition, with only the courage of ignorance, of defiant inexperience, to protect one. That girl was not wilfully cruel. She was simply greedy for emotion; she was gasping at the pretense of happiness like all the rest of her undisciplined generation. She was caught by life because she had never learned to give up, to do without, to stand alone.

Her corner had come, and she stepped with a sensation of relief on the wet pavement. The rain was dripping steadily in a monotonous drizzle. While she walked the few blocks to her door, she forced herself by an effort of will to go on, step by step, not to drop down in the street and lose consciousness.

The tinkle of the bell and the sight of Winters’s face restored her to her senses.

“Shall I bring you tea, madam?”

“No, it is too late.”

Going upstairs to her bedroom, she took off her wet clothes and slipped into her prettiest tea gown, a trailing thing of blue satin and chiffon. While she ran the comb through her damp hair and touched her pale lips with colour, she reflected that even renunciation was easier when one looked desirable. “But it is like painting the cheeks of the dead,” she thought, as she turned away from the mirror and walked with a dragging step to the library. Never, she realized suddenly, had she loved George so much as in this hour when she had discovered him only to lose him.

As she entered, George hurried to meet her with an anxious air. “I didn’t hear you come in, Margaret. I have been very uneasy. Has anything happened?”

By artificial light he looked younger even than he had seemed in the afternoon; and this boyishness of aspect struck her as strangely pathetic. It was all a part, she told herself, of that fulfilment which had come too late, of that perilous second blooming, not of youth, but of Indian Summer. The longing to spare him, to save him from the suffering she had endured, pervaded her heart.

“Yes, something has happened,” she answered gently. “I have been to see Rose Morrison.”

As she spoke the name, she turned away from him, and walking with unsteady steps across the room, stood looking down into the fire. The knowledge of all that she must see when she turned, of the humiliation, the anguish, the remorse in his eyes, oppressed her heart with a passion of shame and pity. How could she turn and look on his wounded soul which she had stripped bare?

“Rose Morrison?” he repeated in an expressionless voice. “What do you know of Rose Morrison?”

At his question she turned quickly, and faced not anguish, not humiliation, but emptiness. There was nothing in his look except the blankness of complete surprise. For an instant the shock made her dizzy; and in the midst of the dizziness there flashed through her mind the memory of an evening in her childhood, when she had run bravely into a dark room where they told her an ogre was hiding, and had found that it was empty.

“She wrote to me.” Her legs gave way as she replied, and, sinking into the nearest chair, she sat gazing up at him with an immobile face.

A frown gathered his eyebrows, and a purplish flush (he flushed so easily of late) mounted slowly to the smooth line of his hair. She watched the quiver that ran through his under lip (strange that she had not noticed how it had thickened) while his teeth pressed it sharply. Everything about him was acutely vivid to her, as if she were looking at him closely for the first time. She saw the furrow between his eyebrows, the bloodshot stain on one eyeball, the folds of flesh beneath his jutting chin, the crease in his black tie, the place where his shirt gave a little because it had grown too tight—all these insignificant details would exist indelibly in her brain.

“She wrote to you?” His voice sounded strained and husky, and he coughed abruptly as if he were trying to hide his embarrassment. “What the devil! But you don’t know her.”

“I saw her this afternoon. She told me everything.”

“Everything?” Never had she imagined that he could appear so helpless, so lacking in the support of any conventional theory. A hysterical laugh broke from her, a laugh as utterly beyond her control as a spasm, and at the sound he flushed as if she had struck him. While she sat there she realized that she had no part or place in the scene before her. Never could she speak the words that she longed to utter. Never could she make him understand the real self behind the marionette at which he was looking. She longed with all her heart to say: “There were possibilities in me that you never suspected. I also am capable of a great love. In my heart I also am a creature of romance, of adventure. If you had only known it, you might have found in marriage all that you have sought elsewhere....” This was what she longed to cry out, but instead she said merely,

“She told me of your love. She asked me to give you up.”

“She asked you to give me up?” His mouth fell open as he finished, and while he stared at her he forgot to shut it. It occurred to her that he had lost the power of inventing a phrase, that he could only echo the ones she had spoken. How like a foolish boy he looked as he stood there, in front of the sinking fire, trying to hide behind that hollow echo!

“She said that I stood in your way.” The phrase sounded so grotesque as she uttered it that she found herself laughing again. She had not wished to speak these ugly things. Her heart was filled with noble words, with beautiful sentiments, but she could not make her lips pronounce them in spite of all the efforts she made. And she recalled suddenly the princess in the fairy tale who, when she opened her mouth, found that toads and lizards escaped from it instead of pearls and rubies.

At first he did not reply, and it seemed to her that only mechanical force could jerk his jaw back into place and close the eyelids over his vacant blue eyes. When at last he made a sound it was only the empty echo again, “stood in my way!”

“She is desperately in earnest.” Justice wrung this admission from her. “She feels that this subterfuge is unfair to us all. Your happiness, she thinks, is what we should consider first, and she is convinced that I should be sacrificed to your future. She was perfectly frank. She suppressed nothing.”

For the first time George Fleming uttered an original sound. “O Lord!” he exclaimed devoutly.

“I told her that I did not wish to stand in your way,” resumed Margaret, as if the exclamation had not interrupted the flow of her thoughts. “I told her I would give you up.”

Suddenly, without warning, he exploded. “What, in the name of heaven, has it got to do with you?” he demanded.

“To do with me?” It was her turn to echo. “But isn’t that girl—” she corrected herself painfully—“isn’t she living in your house at this minute?”

He cast about helplessly for an argument. When at last he discovered one, he advanced it with a sheepish air, as if he recognized its weakness. “Well, nobody else would take it, would they?”

“She says that you love her.”

He shifted his ground nervously. “I can’t help what she says, can I?”

“She offered to show me your letters.”

“Compliments, nothing more.”

“But you must love her, or you couldn’t—you wouldn’t—” A burning flush scorched Margaret’s body.

“I never said that I....” Even with her he had always treated the word love as if it were a dangerous explosive, and he avoided touching it now, “that I cared for her in that way.”

“Then you do in another way?”

He glanced about like a trapped animal. “I am not a fool, am I? Why, I am old enough to be her father! Besides, I am not the only one anyway. She was living with a man when I met her, and he wasn’t the first. She isn’t bad, you know. It’s a kind of philosophy with her. She calls it self....”

“I know.” Margaret cut the phrase short. “I have heard what she calls it.” So it was all wasted! Nothing that she could do could lift the situation above the level of the commonplace, the merely vulgar. She was defrauded not only of happiness, but even of the opportunity to be generous. Her sacrifice was as futile as that girl’s passion. “But she is in love with you now,” she said.

“I suppose she is.” His tone had grown stubborn. “But how long would it last? In six months she would be leaving me for somebody else. Of course, I won’t see her again,” he added, with the manner of one who is conceding a reasonable point. Then, after a pause in which she made no response, his stubbornness changed into resentment. “Anybody would think that you are angry because I am not in love with her!” he exclaimed. “Anybody would think—but I don’t understand women!”

“Then you will not—you do not mean to leave me?” she asked; and her manner was as impersonal, she was aware, as if Winters had just given her notice.

“Leave you?” He glanced appreciatively round the room. “Where on earth could I go?”

For an instant Margaret looked at him in silence. Then she insisted coldly, “To her, perhaps. She thinks that you are in love with her.”

“Well, I suppose I’ve been a fool,” he confessed, after a struggle, “but you are making too much of it.”

Yes, she was making too much of it; she realized this more poignantly than he would ever be able to do. She felt like an actress who has endowed a comic part with the gesture of high tragedy. It was not, she saw clearly now, that she had misunderstood George, but that she had overplayed life.

“We met last summer at Ogunquit.” She became aware presently that he was still making excuses and explanations about nothing. “You couldn’t go about much, you know, and we went swimming and played golf together. I liked her, and I could see that she liked me. When we came away I thought we’d break it off, but somehow we didn’t. I saw her several times in New York. Then she came here unexpectedly, and I offered her that old villa nobody would rent. You don’t understand such things, Margaret. It hadn’t any more to do with you than—than—” He hesitated, fished in the stagnant waters of his mind, and flung out abruptly, “than golf has. It was just a sort of—well, sort of—recreation.”

Recreation! The memory of Rose Morrison’s extravagant passion smote her sharply. How glorified the incident had appeared in the girl’s imagination, how cheap and tawdry it was in reality. A continual compromise with the second best, an inevitable surrender to the average, was this the history of all romantic emotion? For an instant, such is the perversity of fate, it seemed to the wife that she and this strange girl were united by some secret bond which George could not share—by the bond of woman’s immemorial disillusionment.

“I wouldn’t have had you hurt for worlds, Margaret,” said George, bending over her. The old gentle voice, the old possessive and complacent look in his sleepy blue eyes, recalled her wandering senses. “If I could only make you see that there wasn’t anything in it.”

She gazed up at him wearily. The excitement of discovery, the exaltation, the anguish, had ebbed away, leaving only gray emptiness. She had lost more than love, more than happiness, for she had lost her belief in life.

“If there had been anything in it, I might be able to understand,” she replied.

He surveyed her with gloomy severity. “Hang it all! You act as if you wanted me to be in love with her.” Then his face cleared as if by magic. “You’re tired out, Margaret and you’re nervous. There’s Winters now. You must try to eat a good dinner.”

Anxious, caressing, impatient to have the discussion end and dinner begin, he stooped and lifted her in his arms. For an instant she lay there without moving, and in that instant her gaze passed from his face to the red lilies and the uncurtained window beyond.

Outside the leaves were falling.

JORDAN’S END

At the fork of the road there was the dead tree where buzzards were roosting, and through its boughs I saw the last flare of the sunset. On either side the November woods were flung in broken masses against the sky. When I stopped they appeared to move closer and surround me with vague, glimmering shapes. It seemed to me that I had been driving for hours; yet the ancient negro who brought the message had told me to follow the Old Stage Road till I came to Buzzard’s Tree at the fork. “F’om dar on hit’s moughty nigh ter Marse Jur’dn’s place,” the old man had assured me, adding tremulously, “en young Miss she sez you mus’ come jes’ ez quick ez you kin.” I was young then (that was more than thirty years ago), and I was just beginning the practice of medicine in one of the more remote counties of Virginia.

My mare stopped, and leaning out, I gazed down each winding road, where it branched off, under half bared boughs, into the autumnal haze of the distance. In a little while the red would fade from the sky, and the chill night would find me still hesitating between those dubious ways which seemed to stretch into an immense solitude. While I waited uncertainly there was a stir in the boughs overhead, and a buzzard’s feather floated down and settled slowly on the robe over my knees. In the effort to drive off depression, I laughed aloud and addressed my mare in a jocular tone:

“We’ll choose the most God-forsaken of the two, and see where it leads us.”

To my surprise the words brought an answer from the trees at my back. “If you’re goin’ to Isham’s store, keep on the Old Stage Road,” piped a voice from the underbrush.

Turning quickly, I saw the dwarfed figure of a very old man, with a hunched back, who was dragging a load of pine knots out of the woods. Though he was so stooped that his head reached scarcely higher than my wheel, he appeared to possess unusual vigour for one of his age and infirmities. He was dressed in a rough overcoat of some wood brown shade, beneath which I could see his overalls of blue jeans. Under a thatch of grizzled hair his shrewd little eyes twinkled cunningly, and his bristly chin jutted so far forward that it barely escaped the descending curve of his nose. I remember thinking that he could not be far from a hundred; his skin was so wrinkled and weather-beaten that, at a distance, I had mistaken him for a negro.

I bowed politely. “Thank you, but I am going to Jordan’s End,” I replied.

He cackled softly. “Then you take the bad road. Thar’s Jur’dn’s turnout.” He pointed to the sunken trail, deep in mud, on the right. “An’ if you ain’t objectin’ to a little comp’ny, I’d be obleeged if you’d give me a lift. I’m bound thar on my own o’ count, an’ it’s a long ways to tote these here lightwood knots.”

While I drew back my robe and made room for him, I watched him heave the load of resinous pine into the buggy, and then scramble with agility to his place at my side.

“My name is Peterkin,” he remarked by way of introduction. “They call me Father Peterkin along o’ the gran’child’en.” He was a garrulous soul, I suspected, and would not be averse to imparting the information I wanted.

“There’s not much travel this way,” I began, as we turned out of the cleared space into the deep tunnel of the trees. Immediately the twilight enveloped us, though now and then the dusky glow in the sky was still visible. The air was sharp with the tang of autumn; with the effluvium of rotting leaves, the drift of wood smoke, the ripe flavour of crushed apples.

“Thar’s nary a stranger, thoughten he was a doctor, been to Jur’dn’s End as fur back as I kin recollect. Ain’t you the new doctor?”

“Yes, I am the doctor.” I glanced down at the gnomelike shape in the wood brown overcoat. “Is it much farther?”

“Naw, suh, we’re all but thar jest as soon as we come out of Whitten woods.”

“If the road is so little travelled, how do you happen to be going there?”

Without turning his head, the old man wagged his crescent shaped profile. “Oh, I live on the place. My son Tony works a slice of the farm on shares, and I manage to lend a hand at the harvest or corn shuckin’, and, now-and-agen, with the cider. The old gentleman used to run the place that away afore he went deranged, an’ now that the young one is laid up, thar ain’t nobody to look arter the farm but Miss Judith. Them old ladies don’t count. Thar’s three of ’em, but they’re all addle-brained an’ look as if the buzzards had picked ’em. I reckon that comes from bein’ shut up with crazy folks in that thar old tumbledown house. The roof ain’t been patched fur so long that the shingles have most rotted away, an’ thar’s times, Tony says, when you kin skearcely hear yo’ years fur the rumpus the wrens an’ rats are makin’ overhead.”

“What is the trouble with them—the Jordans, I mean?”

“Jest run to seed, suh, I reckon.”

“Is there no man of the family left?”

For a minute Father Peterkin made no reply. Then he shifted the bundle of pine knots, and responded warily. “Young Alan, he’s still livin’ on the old place, but I hear he’s been took now, an’ is goin’ the way of all the rest of ’em. ’Tis a hard trial for Miss Judith, po’ young thing, an’ with a boy nine year old that’s the very spit an’ image of his pa. Wall, wall, I kin recollect away back yonder when old Mr. Timothy Jur’dn was the proudest man anywhar aroun’ in these parts; but arter the War things sorter begun to go down hill with him, and he was obleeged to draw in his horns.”

“Is he still living?”

The old man shook his head. “Mebbe he is, an’ mebbe he ain’t. Nobody knows but the Jur’dn’s, an’ they ain’t tellin’ fur the axin’.”

“I suppose it was this Miss Judith who sent for me?”

“’T would most likely be she, suh. She was one of the Yardlys that lived over yonder at Yardly’s Field; an’ when young Mr. Alan begun to take notice of her, ’twas the first time sence way back that one of the Jur’dn’s had gone courtin’ outside the family. That’s the reason the blood went bad like it did, I reckon. Thar’s a sayin’ down aroun’ here that Jur’dn an’ Jur’dn won’t mix.” The name was invariably called Jurdin by all classes; but I had already discovered that names are rarely pronounced as they are spelled in Virginia.

“Have they been married long?”

“Ten year or so, suh. I remember as well as if ’twas yestiddy the day young Alan brought her home as a bride, an’ thar warn’t a soul besides the three daft old ladies to welcome her. They drove over in my son Tony’s old buggy, though ’twas spick an’ span then. I was goin’ to the house on an arrant, an’ I was standin’ right down thar at the ice pond when they come by. She hadn’t been much in these parts, an’ none of us had ever seed her afore. When she looked up at young Alan her face was pink all over and her eyes war shinin’ bright as the moon. Then the front do’ opened an’ them old ladies, as black as crows, flocked out on the po’ch. Thar never was anybody as peart-lookin’ as Miss Judith was when she come here; but soon arterwards she begun to peak an’ pine, though she never lost her sperits an’ went mopin’ roun’ like all the other women folks at Jur’dn’s End. They married sudden, an’ folks do say she didn’t know nothin’ about the family, an’ young Alan didn’t know much mo’ than she did. The old ladies had kep’ the secret away from him, sorter believin’ that what you don’t know cyarn’ hurt you. Anyways they never let it leak out tell arter his chile was born. Thar ain’t never been but that one, an’ old Aunt Jerusly declars he was born with a caul over his face, so mebbe things will be all right fur him in the long run.”

“But who are the old ladies? Are their husbands living?”

When Father Peterkin answered the question he had dropped his voice to a hoarse murmur. “Deranged. All gone deranged,” he replied.

I shivered, for a chill depression seemed to emanate from the November woods. As we drove on, I remembered grim tales of enchanted forests filled with evil faces and whispering voices. The scents of wood earth and rotting leaves invaded my brain like a magic spell. On either side the forest was as still as death. Not a leaf quivered, not a bird moved, not a small wild creature stirred in the underbrush. Only the glossy leaves and the scarlet berries of the holly appeared alive amid the bare interlacing branches of the trees. I began to long for an autumn clearing and the red light of the afterglow.

“Are they living or dead?” I asked presently.

“I’ve hearn strange tattle,” answered the old man nervously, “but nobody kin tell. Folks do say as young Alan’s pa is shut up in a padded place, and that his gran’pa died thar arter thirty years. His uncles went crazy too, an’ the daftness is beginnin’ to crop out in the women. Up tell now it has been mostly the men. One time I remember old Mr. Peter Jur’dn tryin’ to burn down the place in the dead of the night. Thar’s the end of the wood, suh. If you’ll jest let me down here. I’ll be gittin’ along home across the old-field, an’ thanky too.”

At last the woods ended abruptly on the edge of an abandoned field which was thickly sown with scrub pine and broomsedge. The glow in the sky had faded now to a thin yellow-green, and a melancholy twilight pervaded the landscape. In this twilight I looked over the few sheep huddled together on the ragged lawn, and saw the old brick house crumbling beneath its rank growth of ivy. As I drew nearer I had the feeling that the surrounding desolation brooded there like some sinister influence.

Forlorn as it appeared at this first approach, I surmised that Jordan’s End must have possessed once charm as well as distinction. The proportions of the Georgian front were impressive, and there was beauty of design in the quaint doorway, and in the steps of rounded stone which were brocaded now with a pattern of emerald moss. But the whole place was badly in need of repair. Looking up, as I stopped, I saw that the eaves were falling away, that crumbled shutters were sagging from loosened hinges, that odd scraps of hemp sacking or oil cloth were stuffed into windows where panes were missing. When I stepped on the floor of the porch, I felt the rotting boards give way under my feet.

After thundering vainly on the door, I descended the steps, and followed the beaten path that led round the west wing of the house. When I had passed an old boxwood tree at the corner, I saw a woman and a boy of nine years or so come out of a shed, which I took to be the smokehouse, and begin to gather chips from the woodpile. The woman carried a basket made of splits on her arm, and while she stooped to fill this, she talked to the child in a soft musical voice. Then, at a sound that I made, she put the basket aside, and rising to her feet, faced me in the pallid light from the sky. Her head was thrown back, and over her dress of some dark calico, a tattered gray shawl clung to her figure. That was thirty years ago; I am not young any longer; I have been in many countries since then, and looked on many women; but her face, with that wan light on it, is the last one I shall forget in my life. Beauty! Why, that woman will be beautiful when she is a skeleton, was the thought that flashed into my mind.

She was very tall, and so thin that her flesh seemed faintly luminous, as if an inward light pierced the transparent substance. It was the beauty, not of earth, but of triumphant spirit. Perfection, I suppose, is the rarest thing we achieve in this world of incessant compromise with inferior forms; yet the woman who stood there in that ruined place appeared to me to have stepped straight out of legend or allegory. The contour of her face was Italian in its pure oval; her hair swept in wings of dusk above her clear forehead; and, from the faintly shadowed hollows beneath her brows, the eyes that looked at me were purple-black, like dark pansies.

“I had given you up,” she began in a low voice, as if she were afraid of being overheard. “You are the doctor?”

“Yes, I am the doctor. I took the wrong road and lost my way. Are you Mrs. Jordan?”

She bowed her head. “Mrs. Alan Jordan. There are three Mrs. Jordans besides myself. My husband’s grandmother and the wives of his two uncles.”

“And it is your husband who is ill?”

“My husband, yes. I wrote a few days ago to Doctor Carstairs.” (Thirty years ago Carstairs, of Baltimore, was the leading alienist in the country.) “He is coming to-morrow morning; but last night my husband was so restless that I sent for you to-day.” Her rich voice, vibrating with suppressed feeling, made me think of stained glass windows and low organ music.

“Before we go in,” I asked, “will you tell me as much as you can?”

Instead of replying to my request, she turned and laid her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Take the chips to Aunt Agatha, Benjamin,” she said, “and tell her that the doctor has come.”

While the child picked up the basket and ran up the sunken steps to the door, she watched him with breathless anxiety. Not until he had disappeared into the hall did she lift her eyes to my face again. Then, without answering my question, she murmured, with a sigh which was like the voice of that autumn evening, “We were once happy here.” She was trying, I realized, to steel her heart against the despair that threatened it.

My gaze swept the obscure horizon, and returned to the mouldering woodpile where we were standing. The yellow-green had faded from the sky, and the only light came from the house where a few scattered lamps were burning. Through the open door I could see the hall, as bare as if the house were empty, and the spiral staircase which crawled to the upper story. A fine old place once, but repulsive now in its abject decay, like some young blood of former days who has grown senile.

“Have you managed to wring a living out of the land?” I asked, because I could think of no words that were less compassionate.

“At first a poor one,” she answered slowly. “We worked hard, harder than any negro in the fields, to keep things together, but we were happy. Then three years ago this illness came, and after that everything went against us. In the beginning it was simply brooding, a kind of melancholy, and we tried to ward it off by pretending that it was not real, that we imagined it. Only of late, when it became so much worse, have we admitted the truth, have we faced the reality—”

This passionate murmur, which had almost the effect of a chant rising out of the loneliness, was addressed, not to me, but to some abstract and implacable power. While she uttered it her composure was like the tranquillity of the dead. She did not lift her hand to hold her shawl, which was slipping unnoticed from her shoulders, and her eyes, so like dark flowers in their softness, did not leave my face.

“If you will tell me all, perhaps I may be able to help you,” I said.

“But you know our story,” she responded. “You must have heard it.”

“Then it is true? Heredity, intermarriage, insanity?”

She did not wince at the bluntness of my speech. “My husband’s grandfather is in an asylum, still living after almost thirty years. His father—my husband’s, I mean—died there a few years ago. Two of his uncles are there. When it began I don’t know, or how far back it reaches. We have never talked of it. We have tried always to forget it- Even now I cannot put the thing into words— My husband’s mother died of a broken heart, but the grandmother and the two others are still living. You will see them when you go into the house. They are old women now, and they feel nothing.”

“And there have been other cases?”

“I do not know. Are not four enough?”

“Do you know if it has assumed always the same form?” I was trying to be as brief as I could.

She flinched, and I saw that her unnatural calm was shaken at last. “The same, I believe. In the beginning there is melancholy, moping. Grandmother calls it, and then—” She flung out her arms with a despairing gesture, and I was reminded again of some tragic figure of legend.

“I know, I know,” I was young, and in spite of my pride, my voice trembled. “Has there been in any case partial recovery, recurring at intervals?”

“In his grandfather’s case, yes. In the others none. With them it has been hopeless from the beginning.”

“And Carstairs is coming?”

“In the morning. I should have waited, but last night—” Her voice broke, and she drew the tattered shawl about her with a shiver. “Last night something happened. Something happened,” she repeated, and could not go on. Then, collecting her strength with an effort which made her tremble like a blade of grass in the wind, she continued more quietly, “To-day he has been better. For the first time he has slept, and I have been able to leave him. Two of the hands from the fields are in the room.” Her tone changed suddenly, and a note of energy passed into it. Some obscure resolution brought a tinge of colour to her pale cheek. “I must know,” she added, “if this is as hopeless as all the others.”

I took a step toward the house. “Carstairs’s opinion is worth as much as that of any man living,” I answered.

“But will he tell me the truth?”

I shook my head. “He will tell you what he thinks. No man’s judgment is infallible.”

Turning away from me, she moved with an energetic step to the house. As I followed her into the hall the threshold creaked under my tread, and I was visited by an apprehension, or, if you prefer, by a superstitious dread of the floor above. Oh, I got over that kind of thing before I was many years older; though in the end I gave up medicine, you know, and turned to literature as a safer outlet for a suppressed imagination.

But the dread was there at that moment, and it was not lessened by the glimpse I caught, at the foot of the spiral staircase, of a scantily furnished room, where three lean black-robed figures, as impassive as the Fates, were grouped in front of a wood fire. They were doing something with their hands. Knitting, crocheting, or plaiting straw?

At the head of the stairs the woman stopped and looked back at me. The light from the kerosene lamp on the wall fell over her, and I was struck afresh not only by the alien splendour of her beauty, but even more by the look of consecration, of impassioned fidelity that illumined her face.

“He is very strong,” she said in a whisper. “Until this trouble came on him he had never had a day’s illness in his life. We hoped that hard work, not having time to brood, might save us; but it has only brought the thing we feared sooner.”

There was a question in her eyes, and I responded in the same subdued tone. “His health, you say, is good?” What else was there for me to ask when I understood everything?

A shudder ran through her frame. “We used to think that a blessing, but now—” She broke off and then added in a lifeless voice, “We keep two field hands in the room day and night, lest one should forget to watch the fire, or fall asleep.”

A sound came from a room at the end of the hall, and, without finishing her sentence, she moved swiftly toward the closed door. The apprehension, the dread, or whatever you choose to call it, was so strong upon me, that I was seized by an impulse to turn and retreat down the spiral staircase. Yes, I know why some men turn cowards in battle.

“I have come back, Alan,” she said in a voice that wrung my heartstrings.

The room was dimly lighted; and for a minute after I entered, I could see nothing clearly except the ruddy glow of the wood fire in front of which two negroes were seated on low wooden stools. They had kindly faces, these men; there was a primitive humanity in their features, which might have been modelled out of the dark earth of the fields.

Looking round the next minute, I saw that a young man was sitting away from the fire, huddled over in a cretonne-covered chair with a high back and deep wings. At our entrance the negroes glanced up with surprise; but the man in the winged chair neither lifted his head nor turned his eyes in our direction. He sat there, lost within the impenetrable wilderness of the insane, as remote from us and from the sound of our voices as if he were the inhabitant of an invisible world. His head was sunk forward; his eyes were staring fixedly at some image we could not see; his fingers, moving restlessly, were plaiting and unplaiting the fringe of a plaid shawl. Distraught as he was, he still possessed the dignity of mere physical perfection. At his full height he must have measured not under six feet three; his hair was the colour of ripe wheat, and his eyes, in spite of their fixed gaze, were as blue as the sky after rain. And this was only the beginning, I realized. With that constitution, that physical frame, he might live to be ninety.

“Alan!” breathed his wife again in her pleading murmur.

If he heard her voice, he gave no sign of it. Only when she crossed the room and bent over his chair, he put out his hand, with a gesture of irritation, and pushed her away, as if she were a veil of smoke which came between him and the object at which he was looking. Then his hand fell back to its old place, and he resumed his mechanical plaiting of the fringe.

The woman lifted her eyes to mine. “His father did that for twenty years,” she said in a whisper that was scarcely more than a sigh of anguish.

When I had made my brief examination, we left the room as we had come, and descended the stairs together. The three old women were still sitting in front of the wood fire. I do not think they had moved since we went upstairs; but, as we reached the hall below, one of them, the youngest, I imagine, rose from her chair, and came out to join us. She was crocheting something soft and small, an infant’s sacque, I perceived as she approached, of pink wool. The ball had rolled from her lap as she stood up, and it trailed after her now, like a woollen rose, on the bare floor. When the skein pulled at her, she turned back and stooped to pick up the ball, which she rewound with caressing fingers. Good God, an infant’s sacque in that house!

“Is it the same thing?” she asked.

“Hush!” responded the younger woman kindly. Turning to me she added, “We cannot talk here,” and opening the door, passed out on the porch. Not until we had reached the lawn, and walked in silence to where my buggy stood beneath an old locust tree, did she speak again.

Then she said only, “You know now?”

“Yes, I know,” I replied, averting my eyes from her face while I gave my directions as briefly as I could. “I will leave an opiate,” I said. “To-morrow, if Carstairs should not come, send for me again. If he does come,” I added, “I will talk to him and see you afterward.”

“Thank you,” she answered gently; and taking the bottle from my hand, she turned away and walked quickly back to the house.

I watched her as long as I could; and then getting into my buggy, I turned my mare’s head toward the woods, and drove by moonlight, past Buzzard’s Tree and over the Old Stage Road, to my home. “I will see Carstairs to-morrow,” was my last thought that night before I slept.

But, after all, I saw Carstairs only for a minute as he was taking the train. Life at its beginning and its end had filled my morning; and when at last I reached the little station, Carstairs had paid his visit, and was waiting on the platform for the approaching express. At first he showed a disposition to question me about the shooting, but as soon as I was able to make my errand clear, his jovial face clouded.

“So you’ve been there?” he said. “They didn’t tell me. An interesting case, if it were not for that poor woman. Incurable, I’m afraid, when you consider the predisposing causes. The race is pretty well deteriorated, I suppose. God! what isolation! I’ve advised her to send him away. There are three others, they tell me, at Staunton.”

The train came; he jumped on it, and was whisked away while I gazed after him. After all, I was none the wiser because of the great reputation of Carstairs.

All that day I heard nothing more from Jordan’s End; and then, early next morning, the same decrepit negro brought me a message.

“Young Miss, she tole me ter ax you ter come along wid me jes’ ez soon ez you kin git ready.”

“I’ll start at once, Uncle, and I’ll take you with me.”

My mare and buggy stood at the door. All I needed to do was to put on my overcoat, pick up my hat, and leave word, for a possible patient, that I should return before noon. I knew the road now, and I told myself, as I set out, that I would make as quick a trip as I could. For two nights I had been haunted by the memory of that man in the armchair, plaiting and unplaiting the fringe of the plaid shawl. And his father had done that, the woman had told me, for twenty years!

It was a brown autumn morning, raw, windless, with an overcast sky and a peculiar illusion of nearness about the distance. A high wind had blown all night, but at dawn it had dropped suddenly, and now there was not so much as a ripple in the broomsedge. Over the fields, when we came out of the woods, the thin trails of blue smoke were as motionless as cobwebs. The lawn surrounding the house looked smaller than it had appeared to me in the twilight, as if the barren fields had drawn closer since my last visit. Under the trees, where the few sheep were browsing, the piles of leaves lay in windrifts along the sunken walk and against the wings of the house.

When I knocked the door was opened immediately by one of the old women, who held a streamer of black cloth or rusty crape in her hands.

“You may go straight upstairs,” she croaked; and, without waiting for an explanation, I entered the hall quickly, and ran up the stairs.

The door of the room was closed, and I opened it noiselessly, and stepped over the threshold. My first sensation, as I entered, was one of cold. Then I saw that the windows were wide open, and that the room seemed to be full of people, though, as I made out presently, there was no one there except Alan Jordan’s wife, her little son, the two old aunts, and an aged crone of a negress. On the bed there was something under a yellowed sheet of fine linen (what the negroes call “a burial sheet,” I suppose), which had been handed down from some more affluent generation.

When I went over, after a minute, and turned down one corner of the covering, I saw that my patient of the other evening was dead. Not a line of pain marred his features, not a thread of gray dimmed the wheaten gold of his hair. So he must have looked, I thought, when she first loved him. He had gone from life, not old, enfeebled and repulsive, but enveloped still in the romantic illusion of their passion.

As I entered, the two old women, who had been fussing about the bed, drew back to make way for me, but the witch of a negress did not pause in the weird chant, an incantation of some sort, which she was mumbling. From the rag carpet in front of the empty fireplace, the boy, with his father’s hair and his mother’s eyes, gazed at me silently, broodingly, as if I were trespassing; and by the open window, with her eyes on the ashen November day, the young wife stood as motionless as a statue. While I looked at her a redbird flew out of the boughs of a cedar, and she followed it with her eyes.

“You sent for me?” I said to her.

She did not turn. She was beyond the reach of my voice, of any voice, I imagine; but one of the palsied old women answered my question.

“He was like this when we found him this morning,” she said. “He had a bad night, and Judith and the two hands were up with him until daybreak. Then he seemed to fall asleep, and Judith sent the hands, turn about, to get their breakfast.”

While she spoke my eyes were on the bottle I had left there. Two nights ago it had been full, and now it stood empty, without a cork, on the mantelpiece. They had not even thrown it away. It was typical of the pervading inertia of the place that the bottle should still be standing there awaiting my visit.

For an instant the shock held me speechless; when at last I found my voice it was to ask mechanically.

“When did it happen?”

The old woman who had spoken took up the story. “Nobody knows. We have not touched him. No one but Judith has gone near him.” Her words trailed off into unintelligible muttering. If she had ever had her wits about her, I dare-say fifty years at Jordan’s End had unsettled them completely.

I turned to the woman at the window. Against the gray sky and the black intersecting branches of the cedar, her head, with its austere perfection, was surrounded by that visionary air of legend. So Antigone might have looked on the day of her sacrifice, I reflected. I had never seen a creature who appeared so withdrawn, so detached, from all human associations. It was as if some spiritual isolation divided her from her kind.

“I can do nothing,” I said.

For the first time she looked at me, and her eyes were unfathomable. “No, you can do nothing,” she answered. “He is safely dead.”

The negress was still crooning on; the other old women were fussing helplessly. It was impossible in their presence, I felt, to put in words the thing I had to say.

“Will you come downstairs with me?” I asked. “Outside of this house?”

Turning quietly, she spoke to the boy. “Run out and play, dear. He would have wished it.” Then, without a glance toward the bed, or the old women gathered about it, she followed me over the threshold, down the stairs, and out on the deserted lawn. The ashen day could not touch her, I saw then. She was either so remote from it, or so completely a part of it, that she was impervious to its sadness. Her white face did not become more pallid as the light struck it; her tragic eyes did not grow deeper; her frail figure under the thin shawl did not shiver in the raw air. She felt nothing, I realized suddenly.

Wrapped in that silence as in a cloak, she walked across the windrifts of leaves to where my mare was waiting. Her step was so slow, so unhurried, that I remember thinking she moved like one who had all eternity before her. Oh, one has strange impressions, you know, at such moments!

In the middle of the lawn, where the trees had been stripped bare in the night, and the leaves were piled in long mounds like double graves, she stopped and looked in my face. The air was so still that the whole place might have been in a trance or asleep. Not a branch moved, not a leaf rustled on the ground, not a sparrow twittered in the ivy; and even the few sheep stood motionless, as if they were under a spell. Farther away, beyond the sea of broomsedge, where no wind stirred, I saw the flat desolation of the landscape. Nothing moved on the earth, but high above, under the leaden clouds, a buzzard was sailing.

I moistened my lips before I spoke. “God knows I want to help you!” At the back of my brain a hideous question was drumming. How had it happened? Could she have killed him? Had that delicate creatine nerved her will to the unspeakable act? It was incredible. It was inconceivable. And yet.....

“The worst is over,” she answered quietly, with that tearless agony which is so much more terrible than any outburst of grief. “Whatever happens, I can never go through the worst again. Once in the beginning he wanted to die. His great fear was that he might live too long, until it was too late to save himself. I made him wait then. I held him back by a promise.”

So she had killed him, I thought. Then she went on steadily, after a minute, and I doubted again.

“Thank God, it was easier for him than he feared it would be,” she murmured.

No, it was not conceivable. He must have bribed one of the negroes. But who had stood by and watched without intercepting? Who had been in the room? Well, either way! “I will do all I can to help you,” I said.

Her gaze did not waver. “There is so little that any one can do now,” she responded, as if she had not understood what I meant. Suddenly, without the warning of a sob, a cry of despair went out of her, as if it were torn from her breast. “He was my life,” she cried, “and I must go on!”

So full of agony was the sound that it seemed to pass like a gust of wind over the broomsedge. I waited until the emptiness had opened and closed over it. Then I asked as quietly as I could: “What will you do now?”

She collected herself with a shudder of pain. “As long as the old people live, I am tied here. I must bear it out to the end. When they die, I shall go away and find work. I am sending my boy to school. Doctor Carstairs will look after him, and he will help me when the time comes. While my boy needs me, there is no release.” While I listened to her, I knew that the question on my lips would never be uttered. I should always remain ignorant of the truth. The thing I feared most, standing there alone with her, was that some accident might solve the mystery before I could escape. My eyes left her face and wandered over the dead leaves at our feet. No, I had nothing to ask her.

“Shall I come again?” That was all.

She shook her head. “Not unless I send for you. If I need you, I will send for you,” she answered; but in my heart I knew that she would never send for me.

I held out my hand, but she did not take it; and I felt that she meant me to understand, by her refusal, that she was beyond all consolation and all companionship. She was nearer to the bleak sky and the deserted fields than she was to her kind.

As she turned away, the shawl slipped from her shoulders to the dead leaves over which she was walking; but she did not stoop to recover it, nor did I make a movement to follow her. Long after she had entered the house I stood there, gazing down on the garment that she had dropped. Then climbing into my buggy, I drove slowly across the field and into the woods.

THE END