Title: The Wild Olive
Author: King, Basil, 1859-1928
Language: English
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[Illustration: "There are a hundred men beating the mountain to find you"]



The Wild Olive

A Novel

By the author of
The Inner Shrine


Illustrated by
Lucius Hitchcock

New York
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers



Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers



Copyright, 1910, by Harper & Brothers
All Rights Reserved


Published May, 1910
Printed in the United States of America



Part I

Ford



I



Finding himself in the level wood-road, whose open aisle drew a long,
straight streak across the sky, still luminous with the late-lingering
Adirondack twilight, the tall young fugitive, hatless, coatless, and
barefooted, paused a minute for reflection. As he paused, he listened; but
all distinctiveness of sound was lost in the play of the wind, up hill and
down dale, through chasm and over crag, in those uncounted leagues of
forest. It was only a summer wind, soft and from the south; but its murmur
had the sweep of the eternal breath, while, when it waxed in power, it
rose like the swell of some great cosmic organ. Through the pines and in
the underbrush it whispered and crackled and crashed, with a variety of
effect strangely bewildering to the young man's city-nurtured senses.
There were minutes when he felt that not only the four country constables
whom he had escaped were about to burst upon him, but that weird armies of
gnomes were ready to trample him down.

Out of the confusion of wood-noises, in which his unpractised ear could
distinguish nothing, he waited for a repetition of the shots which a few
hours ago had been the protest of his guards; but, none coming, he sped on
again. He weighed the danger of running in the open against the
opportunities for speed, and decided in favor of the latter. Hitherto, in
accordance with a woodcraft invented to meet the emergency, and entirely
his own, he had avoided anything in the nature of a road or a pathway, in
order to take advantage of the tracklessness which formed his obvious
protection; but now he judged the moment come for putting actual space
between his pursuers and himself. How near, or how far behind him, they
might be he could not guess. If he had covered ground, they would have
covered it too, since they were men born to the mountains, while he had
been bred in towns. His hope lay in the possibility that in this
wilderness he might be lost to their ken, as a mote is lost in the
air--though he built something on the chance that, in sympathy with the
feeling in his favor pervading the simpler population of the region, they
had given negative connivance to his escape. These thoughts, far from
stimulating a false confidence, urged him to greater speed.

And yet, even as he fled, he had a consciousness of abandoning
something--perhaps of deserting something--which brought a strain of
regret into this minute of desperate excitement. Without having had time
to count the cost or reckon the result, he felt he was giving up the
fight. He, or his counsel for him, had contested the ground with all the
resourceful ingenuity known to the American legal practitioner. He was
told that, in spite of the seeming finality of what had happened that
morning, there were still loopholes through which the defence might be
carried on. In the space of a few hours Fate had offered him the choice
between two courses, neither of them fertile in promises of success. The
one was long and tedious, with a possibility of ultimate justification;
the other short and speedy, with the accepted imputation of guilt. He had
chosen the latter--instinctively and on the spur of the moment; and while
he might have repeated at leisure the decision he had made in haste, he
knew even now that he was leaving the ways and means of proving his
innocence behind him. The perception came, not as the result of a process
of thought, but as a regretful, scarcely detected sensation.

He had dashed at first into the broken country, hilly rather than
mountainous, which from the shores of Lake Champlain gradually gathers
strength, as it rolls inland, to toss up the crests of the Adirondacks.
Here, burying himself in the woods, he skirted the unkempt farms, whose
cottage lights, just beginning to burn, served him as signals to keep
farther off. When forced to cross one of the sterile fields, he crawled
low, blotting himself out among the bowlders. At times a patch of tall,
tasselled Indian corn, interlaced with wandering pumpkin vines, gave him
cover, till he regained the shelter of the vast Appalachian mother-forest
which, after climbing Cumberlands, Alleghanies, Catskills, and
Adirondacks, here clambers down, in long reaches of ash and maple, juniper
and pine, toward the lowlands of the north.

As far as he had yet been able to formulate a plan of flight, it was to
seek his safety among the hills. The necessity of the instant was driving
him toward the open country and the lake, but he hoped to double soon upon
his tracks, finding his way back to the lumber camps, whose friendly
spiriting from bunk-house to bunk-house would baffle pursuit. Once he had
gained even a few hours' security, he would be able to some extent to pick
and choose his way.

He steered himself by the peak of Graytop, black against the last
coral-tinted glow of the sunset, as a sailor steers by a star. There was
further assurance that he was not losing himself or wandering in a circle,
when from some chance outlook he ventured to glance backward and saw the
pinnacle of Windy Mountain or the dome of the Pilot straight behind him.
There lay the natural retreats of the lynx, the bear, and the outlaw like
himself; and, as he fled farther from them, it was with the same frenzied
instinct to return that the driven stag must feel toward the bed of fern
from which he has been roused. But, for the minute, there was one
imperative necessity--to go on--to go on anywhere, anyhow, so long as it
took him far enough from the spot where masked men had loosed the
handcuffs from his wrists and stray shots had come ringing after him. In
his path there were lakelets, which he swam, and streams, which he forded.
Over the low hills he scrambled through an undergrowth so dense that even
the snake or the squirrel might have avoided it, to find some easier way.
Now and then, as he dragged himself up the more barren ascents, the loose
soil gave way beneath his steps in miniature avalanches of stone and sand,
over which he crept, clinging to tufts of grass or lightly rooted
saplings, to rise at last with hands scratched and feet bleeding. Then, on
again!--frantically, as the hare runs and as the crow flies, without
swerving--on, with the sole aim of gaining time and covering distance!

He was not a native of the mountains. Though in the two years spent among
them he had come to acknowledge their charm, it was only as a man learns
to love an alien mistress, whose alternating moods of savagery and
softness hold him with a spell of which he is half afraid. More than any
one suspected or he could have explained, his reckless life had been the
rebellion of his man-trained, urban instinct against the domination of
this supreme earth-force, to which he was of no more value than a falling
leaf or a dissolving cloud. Even now, as he flung himself on the forest's
protection, it was not with the solace of the son returning to the mother;
it was rather as a man might take refuge from a lion in a mammoth cavern,
where the darkness only conceals dangers.

After the struggle with crude nature the smooth, grass-carpeted
wagon-track brought him more than a physical sense of comfort. It not only
made his flight swift and easy, but it had been marked out by man, for
man's purposes and to meet man's need. It was the result of a human
intelligence; it led to a human goal. It was possible that it might lead
even him into touch with human sympathies With the thought, he became
conscious all at once that he was famished and fatigued. Up to the present
he had been as little aware of a body as a spirit on its way between two
worlds. It had ached and sweated and bled; but he had not noticed it. The
electric fluid could not have seemed more tireless or iron more insensate.
But now, when the hardship was somewhat relaxed, he was forced back on the
perception that he was faint and hungry His speed slackened; his shoulders
sagged; the long second wind, which had lasted so well, began to shorten.
For the first time it occurred to him to wonder how long his strength
would hold out.

It was then that he noticed a deflection of the wood-road toward the
north, and down over the brow of the plateau on which for a mile or two
its evenness had been sustained. It was a new sign that it was tending
toward some habitation. Half an hour ago he would have taken this to mean
that he must dash into the forest again; but half an hour ago he had not
been hungry. He did not say to himself that he would venture to any man's
door and ask for bread. So far as he knew, he would never venture to any
man's door again; nevertheless, he kept on, down-hill, and down-hill
nearer and nearer the lake, and farther and farther from the mountain and
the lairs of safety.

Suddenly, at a turning, when he was not expecting it, the wood-road
emerged into a rough clearing. Once more he stopped to reflect and take
his bearings. It had grown so dark that there was little danger in doing
so; though, as he peered into the gloom, his nerves were still taut with
the expectation of shot or capture from behind. Straining his eyes, he
made out a few acres that had been cleared for their timber, after which
Nature had been allowed to take her own way again, in unruly growths of
saplings, tangles of wild vines, and clumps of magenta fireweed.

Without quite knowing why he did so, he crept down the slope, feeling his
way among the stumps, and stooping low, lest his white shirt, wet and
clinging limply to his body, might betray him to some keen-eyed marksman.
Presently one of the old root-hedges, common to the countryside, barred
his path--a queer, twisted line of long, gray tentacles that had once
sucked sustenance from the soil, but now reached up idly into a barren
element, where the wild grape was covering their grotesque nakedness with
masses of kindly beauty. Below him he saw lights shining clearly like the
planets, or faintly like the mere star-dust of the sky, while between the
two degrees of brightness he knew there must lie the bosom of the lake. He
had come to the little fringe of towns that clings to the borders of
Champlain, here with the Adirondacks behind him, and there with the
mountains of Vermont, but keeping close to the great, safe waterway, as
though distrusting the ruggedness of both.

It was a moment at which to renew his alarm in this proximity to human
dwellings. Like the tiger that has ventured beyond the edge of the jungle,
he must slink back at the sight of fire. He turned himself slowly, looking
up the heights from which he had come down, as they rolled behind him,
mysterious and hostile, in the growing darkness. Even the sky, from which
it seemed impossible for the daylight ever to depart, now had an angry red
glare in it.

He took a step or two toward the forest, and paused again, still staring
upward. Where was he going? Where _could_ he go? The question presented
itself with an odd pertinence that drew his set, beardless lips into a
kind of smile. When he had first made his rush outward the one thing that
seemed to him essential was to be free; but now he was forced to ask
himself: For what purpose? Of what use was it to be as free as wind if he
was to be as homeless? It was not merely that he was homeless for the
moment; that was nothing; the overwhelming reflection was that he, Norrie
Ford, could never have a home at all--that there was scarcely a spot
within the borders of civilized mankind where the law would not hunt him
out.

This view of his situation was so apparent and yet so new that it held him
stock-still, gazing into space. He was free--but free only to crawl back
into the jungle and lie down in it, like a wild beast.

"But I'm not a wild beast," he protested, inwardly. "I'm a man--with
human rights. By God, I'll never let them go!"

He wheeled round again, toward the lower lands and the lake. The lights
glowed more brightly as the darkness deepened, each lamp shining from some
little nest, where men and women were busied with the small tasks and
interests that made life. This was liberty! This was what he had a claim
upon! All his instincts were civilized, domestic. He would not go back to
the forest, to herd with wild nature, when he had a right to lie down
among his kind. He had slept in the open hundreds of times; but it had
been from choice. There had been pleasure then, in waking to the smell of
balsam and opening his eyes upon the stars. But to do the same thing from
compulsion, because men had closed up their ranks and ejected him from
their midst, was an outrage he would not accept. In the darkness his head
went up, while his eyes burned with a fire more intense than that of any
of the mild beacons from the towns below, as he strode back to the old
root-hedge and leaped it.

He felt the imprudence, not to say the uselessness, of the movement, as he
made it; and yet he kept on, finding himself in a field in which cows and
horses were startled from their munching by his footstep. It was another
degree nearer to the organized life in which he was entitled to a place.
Shielded by a shrubbery of sleeping goldenrod, he stole down the slope,
making his way to the lane along which the beasts went out to pasture and
came home. Following the trail, he passed a meadow, a potato-field, and a
patch of Indian corn, till the scent of flowers told him he was coming on
a garden. A minute later, low, velvety domes of clipped yew rose in the
foreground, and he knew himself to be in touch with the civilization that
clung, like a hardy vine, to the coves and promontories of the lake, while
its tendrils withered as soon as they were flung up toward the mountains.
Only a few steps more, and, between the yews, he saw the light streaming
from the open doors and windows of a house.

It was such a house as, during the two years he had spent up in the high
timber-lands, he had caught sight of only on the rare occasions when he
came within the precincts of a town--a house whose outward aspect, even at
night, suggested something of taste, means, and social position for its
occupants. Slipping nearer still, he saw curtains fluttering in the breeze
of the August evening, and Virginia creeper dropping in heavily massed
garlands from the roof of a columned veranda. A French window was open to
the floor, and within, he could see vaguely, people were seated.

The scene was simple enough, but to the fugitive it had a kind of
sacredness. It was like a glimpse into the heaven he has lost caught by a
fallen angel. For the moment he forgot his hunger and weakness, in this
feast for the heart and eyes. It was with something of the pleasure of
recognizing long-absent faces that he traced the line of a sofa against
the wall, and stated to himself that there was a row of prints hanging
above it. There had been no such details as these to note in his cell, nor
yet in the courtroom which for months had constituted his only change of
outlook Insensibly to himself, he crept nearer, drawn by the sheer spell
of gazing.

Finding a gate leading into the garden, he opened it softly, leaving it
so, in order to secure his retreat. From the shelter of one of the
rounded yew-trees he could make his observations more at ease. He
perceived now that the house stood on a terrace, and turned the garden
front, its more secluded aspect, in his direction. The high hedges, common
in these lakeside villages, screened it from the road; while the open
French window threw a shaft of brightness down the yew-tree walk, casting
the rest of the garden into gloom.

To Norrie Ford, peeping furtively from behind one of the domes of clipped
foliage, there was exasperation in the fact that his new position gave him
no glimpse of the people in the room. His hunger to see them became for
the minute more insistent than that for food. They represented that human
society from which he had waked one morning to find himself cut off, as a
rock is cut off by seismic convulsion from the mainland of which it has
formed a part. It was in a sort of effort to span the gulf separating him
from his own past that he peered now into this room, whose inmates were
only passing the hours between the evening meal and bedtime. That people
could sit tranquilly reading books or playing games filled him with a kind
of wonder.

When he considered it safe he slipped along to what he hoped would prove a
better point of view, but, finding it no more advantageous, he darted to
still another. The light lured him as it might lure an insect of the
night, till presently he stood on the very steps of the terrace. He knew
the danger of his situation, but he could not bring himself to turn and
steal away till he had fixed the picture of that cheerful interior firmly
on his memory. The risk was great, but the glimpse of life was worth it.

With powers of observation quickened by his plight, he noted that the
home was just such a one as that from which he had sprung--one where old
engravings hung on the walls, while books filled the shelves, and papers
and periodicals strewed the tables. The furnishings spoke of comfort and a
modest dignity. Obliquely in his line of vision he could see two children,
seated at a table and poring over a picture-book The boy, a manly urchin,
might have been fourteen, the girl a year or two younger. Her curls fell
over the hand and arm supporting her cheek, so that Ford could only guess
at the blue eyes concealed behind them. Now and then the boy turned a page
before she was ready, whereupon followed pretty cries of protestation. It
was perhaps this mimic quarrel that called forth a remark from some one
sitting within the shadow.

"Evie dear, it's time to go to bed. Billy, I don't believe they let you
stay up as late as this at home."

"Oh yes, they do," came Billy's answer, given with sturdy assurance. "I
often stay up till nine."

"Well, it's half past now; so you'd both better come and say good-night."

With one foot resting on the turf and the other raised to the first step
of the terrace, as he stood with folded arms, Ford watched the little
scene, in which the children closed their book, pushed back their chairs,
and crossed the room to say good-night to the two who were seated in the
shadow. The boy came first, with hands thrust into his trousers pockets in
a kind of grave nonchalance. The little girl fluttered along behind, but
broke her journey across the room by stepping into the opening of the long
window and looking out into the night. Ford stood breathless and
motionless, expecting her to see him and cry out. But she turned away and
danced again into the shadow, after which he saw her no more. The silence
that fell within the room told him that the elders were left alone.

Stealthily, like a thief, Ford crept up the steps and over the turf of the
terrace. The rising of the wind at that minute drowned all sound of his
movements, so that he was tempted right on to the veranda, where a coarse
matting deadened his tread. He dared not hold himself upright on this
dangerous ground, but, crouching low, he was blotted from sight, while he
himself could see what passed within. He would only, he said, look once
more into kindly human faces and steal away as he came.

He could perceive now that the lady who had spoken was an invalid
reclining in a long chair, lightly covered with a rug. A fragile, dainty
little creature, her laces, trinkets, and rings revealed her as one
clinging to the elegancies of another phase of life, though Fate had sent
her to live, and perhaps to die, here on the edge of the wilderness. He
made the same observation with regard to the man who sat with his back to
the window. He was in informal evening dress--a circumstance that, in this
land of more or less primitive simplicity, spoke of a sense of exile. He
was slight and middle-aged, and though his face was hidden, Ford received
the impression of having seen him already, but from another point of view.
His habit of using a magnifying-glass as, with some difficulty, he read a
newspaper in the light of a green-shaded lamp, seemed to Ford especially
familiar, though more pressing thoughts kept him from trying to remember
where and when he had seen some one do the same thing within the recent
past.

As he crouched by the window watching them, it came into his mind that
they were just the sort of people of whom he had least need to be afraid.
The sordid tragedy up in the mountains had probably interested them
little, and in any case they could not as yet have heard of his escape. If
he broke in on them and demanded food, they would give it to him as to
some common desperado, and be glad to let him go. If there was any one to
inspire terror, it was he, with his height, and youth, and wildness of
aspect. He was thinking out the most natural method of playing some small
comedy of violence, when suddenly the man threw down the paper with a
sigh. On the instant the lady spoke, as though she had been awaiting her
cue.

"I don't see why you should feel so about it," she said, making an effort
to control a cough. "You must have foreseen something of this sort when
you took up the law."

The answer reached Ford's ears only as a murmur, but he guessed its import
from the response.

"True," she returned, when he had spoken, "to foresee possibilities is one
thing, and to meet them is another; but the anticipation does something to
nerve one for the necessity when it comes."

Again there was a murmur in which Ford could distinguish nothing, but
again her reply told him what it meant.

"The right and the wrong, as I understand it," she went on, "is something
with which you have nothing to do. Your part is to administer the law, not
to judge of how it works."

Once more Ford was unable to catch what was said in reply, but once more
the lady's speech enlightened him.

"That's the worst of it? Possibly; but it's also the best of it; for since
it relieves you of responsibility it's foolish for you to feel remorse."

What was the motive of these remarks? Ford found himself possessed of a
strange curiosity to know. He pressed as closely as he dared to the open
door, but for the moment nothing more was said. In the silence that
followed he began again to wonder how he could best make his demand for
food, when a sound from behind startled him. It was the sound which, among
all others, caused him the wildest alarm--that of a human footstep. His
next movement came from the same blind impulse that sends a hunted fox to
take refuge in a church--eager only for the instant's safety. He had
sprung to his feet, cleared the threshold, and leaped into the room,
before the reflection came to him that, if he was caught, he must at least
be caught game. Wheeling round toward the window-door through which he had
entered, he stood defiantly, awaiting his pursuers, and heedless of the
astonished eyes fixed upon him. It was not till some seconds had gone by,
and he realized that he was not followed, that he glanced about the room.
When he did so it was to ignore the woman, in order to concentrate all his
gaze on the little, iron-gray man who, still seated, stared at him, with
lips parted. In his own turn, Norrie Ford was dumb and wide-eyed in
amazement It was a long minute before either spoke.

"You?"

"You?"

The monosyllable came simultaneously from each. The little woman got to
her feet in alarm. There was inquiry as well as terror in her
face--inquiry to which her husband felt prompted to respond.

"This is the man," he said, in a voice of forced calmness,
"whom--whom--we've been talking about."

"Not the man--you--?"

"Yes," he nodded, "the man I--I--sentenced to death--this morning."



II



"Evie!"

Mrs. Wayne went to the door, but on Ford's assurance that her child had
nothing to fear from him, she paused with her hand on the knob to look in
curiosity at this wild young man, whose doom lent him a kind of
fascination. Again, for a minute, all three were silent in the excess of
their surprise. Wayne himself sat rigid, gazing up at the new-comer with
strained eyes blurred with partial blindness. Though slightly built and
delicate, he was not physically timid; and as the seconds went by he was
able to form an idea as to what had happened. He himself, in view of the
tumultuous sympathy displayed by hunters and lumber-jacks with the man who
passed for their boon companion, had advised Ford's removal from the
pretty toy prison of the county-town to the stronger one at Plattsville.
It was clear that the prisoner had been helped to escape, either before
the change had been effected or while it was taking place. There was
nothing surprising in that; the astonishing thing was that the fugitive
should have found his way to this house above all others. Mrs. Wayne
seemed to think so too, for it was she who spoke first, in a tone which
she tried to make peremptory, in spite of its tremor of fear.

"What did you come here for?"

Ford looked at her for the first time--in a blankness not without a dull
element of pleasure. It was at least two or three years since he had seen
anything so dainty--not, in fact, since his own mother died. At all times
his mind worked slowly, so that he found nothing to reply till she
repeated her question with a show of increased severity.

"I came here for protection," he said then.

His hesitation and bewildered air imparted assurance to his still
astonished hosts.

"Isn't it an odd place in which to look for that?" Wayne asked, in an
excitement, he strove to subdue.

The question was the stimulus Ford needed in order to get his wits into
play.

"No," he replied, slowly; "I've a right to protection from the man who
sentenced me to death for a crime of which he knows me innocent."

Wayne concealed a start by smoothing the newspaper over his crossed knees,
but he was unable to keep a shade of thickness out of his voice as he
answered:

"You had a fair trial. You were found guilty. You have had the benefit of
all the resources allowed by the law. You have no right to say I know you
to be innocent."

Wholly spent, Ford dropped into a chair from which one of the children had
risen. With his arm hanging limply over the back he sat staring haggardly
at the judge, as though finding nothing to say.

"I have a right to read any man's mind," he muttered, after a long pause,
"when it's as transparent as yours. No one had any doubt as to your
convictions--after your charge."

"That has nothing to do with it. If I charged in your favor, it was
because I wanted you to have the benefit of every possible plea. When
those pleas were found insufficient by a jury of your peers--"

Ford emitted a sound that might have been a laugh, had there been mirth in
it.

"A jury of my peers! A lot of thick-headed country tradesmen, prejudiced
against me from the start because I'd sometimes kicked up a row in their
town! They weren't my peers any more than they were yours!"

"The law assumes all men to be equal--"

"Just as it assumes all men to be intelligent--only they're not. The law
is a very fine theory. The chief thing to be, said against it is that five
times out of ten it leaves human nature out of account. I'm condemned to
death, not because I killed a man, but because you lawyers won't admit
that your theory doesn't work."

He began to speak more easily, with the energy born of his desperate
situation and his sense of wrong. He sat up straighter; the air of
dejection with which he had sunk to the chair slipped from him; his gray
eyes, of the kind called "honest," shot out glances of protest. The elder
man found himself once more struggling against the wave of sympathy which
at times in the court-room had been almost too strong for him. He was
forced to intrench himself mentally within the system he served before
bracing himself to reply.

"I can't keep you from having your opinion--"

"Nor can I save you from having yours. Look at me, judge!" He was bolt
upright now, throwing his arms wide with a gesture in which there was more
appeal than indignation "Look at me! I'm a strong, healthy-bodied,
healthy-minded fellow of twenty-four; but I'm drenched to the skin, I'm
half naked, I'm nearly dead with hunger, I'm an outlaw for life--and
you're responsible for it all."

It was Wayne's turn for protest, and though he winced, he spoke sharply.

"I had my duty to perform--"

"Good God, man, don't sit there and call that thing your duty! You're
something more than a wheel in a machine. You were a human being before
you were a judge. With your convictions you should have come down from the
bench and washed your hands of the whole affair. The very action would
have given me a chance--"

"You mustn't speak like that to my husband," Mrs. Wayne broke in,
indignantly, from the doorway. "If you only knew what he has suffered on
your account--"

"Is it anything like what I've suffered on his?"

"I dare say it's worse. He has scarcely slept or eaten since he knew he
would have to pass that dreadful sen--"

"Come! come!" Wayne exclaimed, in the impatient tone of a man who puts an
end to a useless discussion. "We can't spend time on this subject any
longer. I'm not on my defence--"

"You _are_ on your defence," Ford declared, instantly. "Even your wife
puts you there. We're not in a courtroom as we were this morning.
Circumstantial evidence means nothing to us in this isolated house, where
you're no longer the judge, as I'm no longer the prisoner. We're just two
naked human beings, stripped of everything but their inborn rights--and I
claim mine."

"Well--what are they?"

"They're simple enough. I claim the right to have something to eat, and to
go my way without being molested--or betrayed. You'll admit I'm not
asking much."

"You may have the food," Mrs. Wayne said, in a tone not without
compassion. "I'll go and get it."

For a minute or two there was no sound but that of her cough, as she sped
down a passage. Before speaking, Wayne passed his hand across his brow as
though in an effort to clear his mental vision.

"No; you don't seem to be asking much. But, as a matter of fact, you're
demanding my pledge to my country. I undertook to administer its laws--"

Ford sprang up.

"You've done it," he cried, "and I'm the result! You've administered the
law right up to its hilt, and your duty as a judge is performed. Surely
you're free now to think of yourself as a man and to treat me as one."

"I might do that, and still think you a man dangerous to leave at large."

"But do you?"

"That's my affair. Whatever your opinion of the courts that have judged
your case, I must accept their verdict."

"In your official capacity--yes; but not here, as host to the poor dog who
comes under your roof for shelter. My rights are sacred. Even the wild
Arab--"

He paused abruptly. Over Wayne's shoulder, through the window still open
to the terrace, he saw a figure cross the darkness. Could his pursuers be
waiting outside for their chance to spring on him? A perceptible fraction
of a second went by before he told himself he must have been mistaken.

"Even the wild Arab would think them so," he concluded, his glance
shifting rapidly between the judge and the window open behind him.

"But I'm not a wild Arab," Wayne replied. "My first duty is toward my
country and its organized society."

"I don't think so. Your first duty is toward the man you know you've
sentenced wrongly. Fate has shown you an unusual mercy in giving you a
chance to help him."

"I can be sorry for the sentence and yet feel that I could not have acted
otherwise."

"Then what are you going to do now?"

"What would you expect me to do but hand you back to justice?"

"How?"

There was a suggestion of physical disdain in the tone of the laconic
question, as well as in the look he fixed on the neat, middle-aged man
doing his best to be cool and collected Wayne glanced over his shoulder
toward the telephone on the wall. Norrie Ford understood and spoke
quickly:

"Yes; you could ring up the police at Greenport, but I could strangle you
before you crossed the floor."

"So you could; but would you? If you did, should you be any better off?
Should you be as well off as you are now? As it is, there is a possibility
of a miscarriage of justice, of which one day you may get the benefit.
There would be no such possibility then. You would be tracked down within
forty-eight hours."

"Oh, you needn't argue; I've no intention--" Once more he paused. The same
shadow had flitted across the dark space outside, this time with a
distinct flutter of a white dress. He could only think it was some one
getting help together; and while he went on to finish his sentence in
words, all his subconscious faculties were at work, seeking an escape from
the trap in which he was taken.

"I've no intention of doing violence unless I'm driven to it--"

"But if you are driven to it--?"

"I've a right to defend myself. Organized society, as you call it, has put
me where it has no further claim upon me. I must fight against it
single-handed--and I'll do it. I shall spare neither man nor woman--nor
_woman_"--he raised his voice so as to be heard outside--"who stands in my
way."

He threw back his head and looked defiantly out into the night. As if in
response to this challenge a tall, white figure suddenly emerged from the
darkness and stood plainly before him.

It was a girl, whose movements were curiously quick and silent, as she
beckoned to him, over the head of the judge, who sat with his back toward
her.

"Then all the more reason why society should protect itself against you,"
Wayne began again; but Ford was no longer listening. His attention was
wholly fixed on the girl, who continued to beckon noiselessly, fluttering
for an instant close to the threshold of the room, then withdrawing
suddenly to the very edge of the terrace, waving a white scarf in token
that he should follow her. She had repeated her action again and again,
beckoning with renewed insistence, before he understood and made up his
mind.

"I don't say that I refuse to help you," Wayne was saying. "My sympathy
with you is very sincere. If I can get your sentence commuted--In fact, a
reprieve is almost certain--"

With a dash as lithe and sudden as that which had brought him in, Ford was
out on the terrace, following the white dress and the waving scarf which
were already disappearing down the yew-tree walk. The girl's flight over
grass and gravel was like nothing so much as that of a bird skimming
through the air. Ford's own steps crunched loudly on the stillness of the
night, so that if any one lay in ambush he knew he could not escape. He
was prepared to hear shots come ringing from any quarter, but he ran on
with the indifference of a soldier grown used to battle, intent on keeping
up with the shadow fleeing before him.

He followed her through the garden gate he himself had left open, and down
the lane leading to the pasture. At the point where he had entered it from
the right, she turned to the left, keeping away from the mountains and
parallel with the lake. There was no moon, but the night was clear; and no
sound but that of the shrill, sustained chorus of insect life.

Beyond the pasture the lane became nothing but a path, zigzagging up a
hillside between patches of Indian corn. The girl sped over it so lightly
that Ford would have found it hard to keep her in sight if from time to
time she had not paused and waited. When he came near enough to see the
outlines of her form she flew on again, less like a living woman than a
mountain wraith.

From the top of the hill he could see the dull gleam of the lake with its
girdle of lamp-lit towns. Here the woodland began again; not the main body
of the forest, but one of its long arms, thrust down over hill and valley,
twisting its way in among villages and farm lands. That which had been a
path now become a trail, along which the girl flitted with the ease of
habit and familiarity.

In the concentration of his effort to keep the moving white spot in view
Ford lost count of time. Similarly he had little notion of the distance
they were covering. He guessed that they had been ten or fifteen minutes
on the way, and that they might have gone a mile, when, after waiting for
him to come almost near enough to speak to her, she began moving in a
direction at an acute angle to that by which they had come. At the same
time he perceived that they were on the side of a low wooded mountain and
that they were beating their way round it.

All at once they emerged on a tiny clearing--a grassy ledge on the slope.
Through the starlight he could see the hillside break away steeply into a
vaporous gorge, while above him the mountain raised a black dome amid the
serried points of the sky-line. The dryad-like creature beckoned him
forward with her scarf, until suddenly she stopped with the decisive pause
of one who has reached her goal. Coming up with her, he saw her unlock the
door of a small cabin, which had hitherto not detached itself from the
surrounding darkness.

"Go in," she whispered. "Don't strike a light. There are biscuits
somewhere, in a box. Grope for them. There's a couch in a corner."

Without allowing him to speak, she forced him gently over the threshold
and closed the door upon him. Standing inside in the darkness, he heard
the grating of her key in the lock, and the rustle of her skirts as she
sped away.



III



From the heavy sleep of fatigue Ford woke with the twittering of birds
that announces the dawn. His first thought before opening his eyes, that
he was still in his cell, was dispelled by the silky touch of the Sorrento
rugs on which he lay. He fingered them again and again in a kind of
wonder, while his still half-slumbering senses struggled for the memory of
what had happened, and the realization of where he was. When at last he
was able to reconstruct the events of the preceding night, he raised
himself on his elbow and peered about him in the dim morning twilight.

The object he discerned most readily was an easel, giving him the secret
of his refuge. On the wooden walls of the cabin, which was fairly
spacious, water-color sketches were pinned at intervals, while on the
mantelpiece above a bricked fireplace one or two stood framed. Over the
mantelpiece a pair of snow-shoes were crossed as decorations, between
which hung a view of the city of Quebec. On a lay-figure in a corner was
thrown carelessly the sort of blanket coat worn by Canadians during winter
sports. Paints and palettes were arranged on a table by the wall, and on a
desk in the middle of the room were writing materials and books. More
books stood in a small suspended bookcase. Beside a comfortable
reading-chair one or two magazines lay on the floor. His gaze travelled
last to the large apron, or pinafore, on a peg fastened in a door
immediately beside his couch. The door suggested an inner room, and he got
up promptly to explore it. It proved to be cramped and dark, lighted only
from the larger apartment, which in its turn had but the one high north
window of the ordinary studio. The small room was little more than a shed
or "lean-to", serving the purposes of kitchen and storeroom combined. The
arrangements of the whole cabin showed that some one had built it with a
view to passing in seclusion a few days at a time without forsaking the
simpler amenities of civilized life; and it was clear that that "some one"
was a woman. What interested Ford chiefly for the moment was the discovery
of a sealed glass jar of water, from which he was able to slake his twenty
hours' thirst.

Returning to the room in which he had slept, he drew back the green silk
curtain covering the north light in order to take his bearings. As he had
guessed on the previous night, the slope on which the cabin was perched
broke steeply down into a wooded gorge, beyond which the lower hills
rolled in decreasing magnitude to the shore of Champlain, visible from
this point of view in glimpses, less as an inland sea than like a chain of
lakelets. Sunrise over Vermont flooded the waters with tints of rose and
saffron, but made of the Green Mountains a long, gigantic mass of
purple-black twisting its jagged outline toward the north into the Hog's
Back and the Camel's Hump with a kind of monstrous grace. To the east, in
New York, the Adirondacks, with the sunlight full upon them, shot up
jade-colored peaks into the electric blue--the scarred pyramid of Graytop
standing forth dark, detached, and alone, like a battered veteran
sentinel.

In an access of conscious hatred of this vast panoramic beauty which had
become the background of his tragedy, Ford pulled the curtain into place
again and turned once more to the interior of the room. It began to seem
more strange to him the more it grew familiar. Why was he here? How long
was he to stay? How was he to get away again? Had this girl caught him
like a rat in a trap, or did she mean well by him? If, as he supposed, she
was Wayne's daughter, she would probably not be slow in carrying out her
father's plan of handing him back to justice--and yet his mind refused to
connect the wraith of the night before with either police work or
betrayal. Her appearance had been so dim and fleeting that he could have
fancied her the dryad of a dream, had it not been for his surroundings.

He began to examine them once more, inspecting the water-colors on the
wall one by one, in search of some clew to her personality. The first
sketch was of a nun in a convent garden--the background vaguely French,
and yet with a difference. The next was of a trapper, or voyageur, pushing
a canoe into the waters of a wild northern lake. The next was a group of
wigwams with squaws and children in the foreground. Then came more nuns;
then more voyageurs with their canoes; then more Indians and wigwams It
occurred to Ford that the nuns might have been painted from life, the
voyageurs and Indians from imagination He turned to the two framed
drawings on the chimney-piece Both represented winter scenes. In the one a
sturdy voyageur was conveying his wife and small personal belongings
across the frozen snow on a sled drawn by a team of dogs. In the other a
woman, apparently the same woman as in the preceding sketch, had fallen in
the midst of a blinding storm, while a tall man of European
aspect--decidedly not the voyageur--was standing beside her with a baby in
his arms. These were clearly fancy pictures, and, so it seemed to Ford,
the work of one who was trying to recapture some almost forgotten memory.
In any case he was too deeply engrossed by his own situation to dwell on
them further.

He wheeled round again toward the centre of the room, impatiently casting
about him for something to eat. The tin box, from which he had devoured
all the biscuits, lay empty on the floor, but he picked it up and ate
hungrily the few crumbs sticking in its corners. He ransacked the small
dark room in the hope of finding more, but vainly. As far as he could see,
the cabin had never been used for the purpose it was meant to serve, nor
ever occupied for more than a few hours at a time. It had probably been
built in a caprice that had passed with its completion. He guessed
something from the fact that there was no visible attempt to sketch the
scene before the door, though the site had evidently been chosen for its
beauty.

He had nothing by which to measure time, but he knew that precious hours
which he might have utilized for escape were passing. He began to chafe at
the delay. With the impulse of youth to be active, he longed to be out,
where he could at least use his feet. His clothes had dried upon him; in
spite of his hunger he was refreshed by his night's sleep; he was
convinced that, once in the open, he could elude capture. He pulled back
the curtain again in order to reconnoitre. It was well to be as familiar
as possible with the immediate lay of the land, so as to avail himself of
any advantages it might offer.

The colors of sunrise had disappeared, and he judged that it must be
seven or eight o'clock. Between the rifts of the lower hills the lake was
flashing silver, while where Vermont had been nothing but a mass of
shadow, blue-green mountains were emerging in a triple row, from which the
last veils of vapor were being dragged up into the firmament On the left,
the Adirondacks were receding into translucent dimness, in a lilac haze of
heat.

With an effort to get back the woodcraft suddenly inspired by his first
dash for freedom, he ran his eye over the landscape, noting the points
with which he was familiar. To the west, in a niche between Graytop and
the double peak of Windy Mountain, he could place the county-town; to the
north, beyond the pretty headlands and the shining coves, the prison of
Plattsville was waiting to receive him. Farther to the north was Canada;
and to the south the great waterway led toward the populous mazes of New
York.

With an impatience bordering on nervousness he realized that these general
facts did not help him. He must avoid the prison and the county-town, of
course; while both New York and Canada offered him ultimate chances. But
his most pressing dangers lurked in the immediate foreground; and there he
could see nothing but an unsuggestive slope of ash and pine. The rapidity
of instinct by which last night he had known exactly what to do gave place
this morning to his slower and more characteristic mental processes.

He was still gazing outward in perplexity, when, through the trees beyond
the grassy ledge, he caught the flicker of something white. He pressed
closer to the pane for a better view, and a few seconds later a girl, whom
he recognized as the nymph of last night, came out of the forest,
followed by a fawn-colored collie. She walked smoothly and swiftly,
carrying a large basket with her right hand, while with her left she
motioned him away from the window. He stepped back, leaping to the door as
she unlocked it, in order to relieve her of her burden.

"You mustn't do that," she said, speaking quickly. "You mustn't look out
of the window or come to the door. There are a hundred men beating the
mountain to find you."

She closed the door and locked it on the inside. While Ford lifted her
basket to the desk in the centre of the room she drew the green curtain
hastily, covering the window. Her movements were so rapid that he could
catch no glimpse of her face, though he had time to note again the curious
silence that marked her acts. The dog emitted a low growl.

"You must go in here," she said, decisively, throwing open the door of the
inner room. "You mustn't speak or look out unless I tell you. I'll bring
you your breakfast presently. Lie down, Micmac."

The gesture by which she forced him across the threshold was compelling
rather than commanding. Before he realized that he had obeyed her, he was
standing alone in the darkness, with the sound of a low voice of liquid
quality echoing in his ears. Of her face he had got only the hint of dark
eyes flashing with an eager, non-Caucasian brightness--eyes that drew
their fire from a source alien to that of any Aryan race.

But he brushed that impression away as foolish. Her words had the
unmistakable note of cultivation, while a glance at her person showed her
to be a lady. He could see, too, that her dress, though simple, was
according to the standard of means and fashion. She was no Pocahontas;
and yet the thought of Pocahontas came to him. Certainly there was in her
tones, as well as in her movements, something akin to this vast aboriginal
nature around him, out of which she seemed to spring as the human element
in its beauty.

He was still thinking of this when the door opened and she came in again,
carrying a plate piled high with cold meat and bread-and-butter.

"I'm sorry it's only this," she smiled, as she placed it before him; "but
I had to take what I could get--and what wouldn't be missed. I'll try to
do better in future."

He noted the matter-of-fact tone in which she uttered the concluding
words, as though they were to have plenty of time together; but for the
moment he was too fiercely hungry to speak. For a few seconds she stood
off, watching him eat, after which she withdrew, with the light swiftness
that characterized all her motions.

He had nearly finished his meal when she returned again.

"I've brought you these," she said, not without a touch of shyness,
against which she struggled by making her tone as commonplace as possible.
"I shall bring you more things by degrees."

On a chair beside that on which he was sitting she laid a pair of
slippers, a pair of socks, a shirt, a collar, and a tie.

He jumped up hastily, less in surprise than in confusion.

"I can't take anything of Judge Wayne's--" he began to stammer; but she
interrupted him.

"I understand your feelings about that," she said, simply. "They're not
Judge Wayne's; they were my father's. I have plenty more."

In his relief at finding she was not Wayne's daughter he spoke awkwardly.

"Your father? Is he--dead?"

"Yes; he's dead. You needn't be afraid to take the things. He would have
liked to help a man--in your position."

"In my position? Then you know--who I am?"

"Yes; you're Norrie Ford. I saw that as soon as I chanced on the terrace
last night."

"And you're not afraid of me?"

"I am--a little," she admitted; "but that doesn't matter."

"You needn't be--" he began to explain, but she checked him again.

"We mustn't talk now. I must shut the door and leave you in the dark all
day. Men will be passing by, and they mustn't hear you. I shall be
painting in the studio, so that they won't suspect anything, if you keep
still."

Allowing him no opportunity to speak again, she closed the door, leaving
him once more in darkness. Sitting in the constraint she imposed upon him,
he could hear her moving in the outer room, where, owing to the lightness
of the wooden partition, it was not difficult to guess what she was doing
at any given moment. He knew when she opened the outer door and moved the
easel toward the entrance. He knew when she took down the apron from its
peg and pinned it on. He knew when she drew up a chair and pretended to
set to work. In the hour or two of silence that ensued he was sure that,
whatever she might be doing with her brush, she was keeping eye and ear
alert in his defence.

Who was she? What interest had she in his fate? What power had raised her
up to help him? Even yet he had scarcely seen her face; but he had
received an impression of intelligence. He was sure she was no more than a
girl--certainly not twenty--and yet she acted with the decision of
maturity. At the same time there was about her that suggestion of a wild
origin--that something not wholly tamed to the dictates of civilized
life--which persisted in his imagination, even if he could not verify it
in fact.

Twice in the course of the morning he heard voices. Men spoke to her
through the open doorway, and she replied. Once he distinguished her
words.

"Oh no," she called out to some one at a distance. "I'm not afraid. He
won't do me any harm. I've got Micmac with me. I often stay here all day,
but I shall go home early. Thanks," she added, in response to some further
hint. "I'd rather not have any one here. I never can paint unless I'm
quite alone."

Her tone was light, and Ford fancied that as she spoke she smiled at the
passers-by who had thought it right to warn her against himself; but when,
a few minutes later, she pushed open the door softly, the gravity that
seemed more natural to her had returned.

"Several parties of men have gone by," she whispered. "They have no
suspicion. They won't have, if you keep still. They think you have slipped
away from here, and have gone back toward the lumber camps. This is your
lunch," she continued, hastily, placing more food before him. "It will
have to be your dinner, too. It will be safer for me not to come into this
room again to-day. You must not go out into the studio till you're sure
it's dark. No noise. No light. I've put an extra rug on the couch in case
you're chilly in the night."

She spoke breathlessly, in whispers, and, having finished, slipped away.

"You're awfully good," he whispered back. "Won't you tell me your name?"

"Hush!" she warned him, as she closed the door.

He stood still in the darkness, leaving his food untasted, listening to
the soft rustle of her movements beyond the wall. Except that he heard no
more voices, the afternoon passed like the morning. At the end of what
seemed to him interminable hours he knew by acute attention that she hung
her apron on its peg, put on her hat, and took up her basket, while Micmac
rose and shook himself. Presently she closed the door of the cabin and
locked it on the outside. He fancied he could almost hear her step as she
sped over the grass and into the forest. Only then did the tension of his
nerves relax, as, dropping to his chair in the darkness, he began to eat.



IV



The two or three days that followed were much like the first. Each morning
she came early, bringing him food, and such articles of clothing as she
thought he could wear. By degrees she provided him with a complete change
of raiment, and though the fit was tolerable, they laughed together at the
transformation produced in him. It was the first time he had seen her
smile, and even in the obscurity of the inner room where she still kept
him secluded he noted the vividness with which her habitually grave
features lighted up. Micmac, too, became friendly, inferring with the
instinct of his race that Ford was an object to be guarded.

"No one would know you now," the girl declared, surveying him with
satisfaction.

"Were these things all your father's?" he asked, with a new attempt to
penetrate the mystery of her personality.

"Yes," she returned, absently, continuing her inspection of him. "They
were sent to me, and I kept them. I never knew why I did; but I suppose it
was--for this."

"He must have been a tall man?" Ford hazarded, again.

"Yes, he must have been," she returned, unwarily. Then, feeling that the
admission required some explanation, she added, with a touch of
embarrassment, "I never saw him--not that I can remember."

"Then he died a long time ago?"

Her reply came reluctantly, after some delay:

"Not so very long--about four years ago now."

"And yet you hadn't seen him since you were a child?"

"There were reasons. We mustn't talk. Some one may pass and hear us."

He could see that her hurry in finishing the small tasks she had come in
to perform for him arose not so much from precaution as from a desire to
escape from this particular subject.

"I suppose you could tell me his name?" he persisted.

Her hands moved deftly, producing order among the things he had left in
confusion, but she remained silent. It was a silence in which he
recognized an element of protest though he ignored it.

"You could tell me his name?" he asked, again.

"His name," she said, at last, "wouldn't convey anything to you. It
wouldn't do you any good to know it."

"It would gratify my curiosity. I should think you might do as much as
that for me."

"I'm doing a great deal for you as it is. I don't think you should ask for
more."

Her tone was one of reproach rather than of annoyance, and he was left
with a sense of having committed an indiscretion. The consciousness
brought with it the perception that in a measure he was growing used to
his position. He was beginning to take it for granted that this girl
should come and minister to his wants. She herself did it so simply, so
much as a matter of course, that the circumstance lost much of its
strangeness. Now and then he could detect some confusion in her manner as
she served him, but he could see too that she surmounted it, in view of
the fact that for him the situation was one of life and death. She was
clearly not indifferent to elementary social usages; she only saw that the
case was one in which they did not obtain. In his long, unoccupied hours
of darkness it distracted his thoughts from his own peril to speculate
about her; and when she appeared his questions were the more blunt because
of the small opportunity she allowed for asking them.

"Won't they miss you at home?" he inquired, on the next occasion when she
entered his cell.

She paused with a look of surprise.

"At home? Where do you mean?"

"Why--where you live; where your mother lives."

"My mother died a few months after I was born."

"Oh! But even so, you live somewhere, don't you?"

"I do; but they don't miss me there, if that's what you want to know."

"I was only afraid," he said, apologetically, "that you were giving me too
much of your time."

"I've nothing else to do with it. I shall be only too glad if I can help
you to escape."

"Why? Why should you care about me?"

"I don't," she said, simply; "at least, I don't know that I do."

"Oh, then you're helping me just--on general principles?"

"Quite so."

"Well," he smiled, "mayn't I ask why, again?"

"Because I don't like the law."

"You mean that you don't like the law as a whole?--or--or this law in
particular?"

"I don't like any law. I don't like anything about it. But," she added,
resorting to her usual method of escape, "we mustn't talk any more now.
Some men passed here this morning, and they may be coming back. They've
given up looking for you; they are convinced you're up in the lumber
camps, but all the same we must be careful still."

He had no further speech with her that day, and the next she remained at
the cabin little more than an hour.

"It's just as well for me not to excite curiosity," she explained to him
before leaving; "and you needn't be uneasy now. They've stopped the hunt
altogether. They say there's not a spot within a radius of ten miles of
Greenport that they haven't searched. It would never occur to any one that
you could be here. Every one knows me; and so the thought that I could be
helping you would be the last in their minds."

"And have you no remorse at betraying their confidence?"

She shook her head. "Most of them," she declared, "are very well pleased
to think you've got away; and even if they weren't I should never feel
remorse for helping any one to evade the law."

"You seem to have a great objection to the law."

"Well, haven't you?"

"Yes; but in my case it's comprehensible."

"So it is in mine--if you only knew."

"Perhaps," he said, looking at her steadily, "this is as good a time as
any to assure you that the law has done me wrong."

He waited for her to say something; but as she stroked Micmac's head in
silence, he continued.

"I never committed the crime of which they found me guilty."

He waited again for some intimation of her confidence.

"Their string of circumstantial evidence was plausible enough, I admit.
The only weak point about it was that it wasn't true."

Even through the obscurity of his refuge he could feel the suspension of
expression in her bearing, and could imagine it bringing a kind of eclipse
over her eyes.

"He was very cruel to you--your uncle?--wasn't he?" she asked, at last.

"He was very cantankerous; but that wouldn't be a reason for shooting him
in his sleep--whatever I may have said when in a rage."

"I should think it might be."

He started. If it were not for the necessity of making no noise he would
have laughed.

"Are you so bloodthirsty--?" he began.

"Oh no, I'm not; but I should think it is what a man would do. My father
wouldn't have submitted to it. I know he killed one man; and he may have
killed two or three."

Ford whistled under his breath.

"So that," he said, after a pause, "your objection to the law
is--hereditary."

"My objection to the law is because it is unjust. The world is full of
injustice," she added, indignantly, "and the laws men live by create it."

"And your aim is to defeat them?"

"I can't talk any more now," she said, reverting to an explanatory tone of
voice. "I must go. I've arranged everything for you for the day. If you
are very quiet you can sit in the studio and read; but you mustn't look
out at the window, or even draw back the curtain. If you hear a step
outside, you must creep in here and shut the door. And you needn't be
impatient; because I'm going to spend the day working out a plan for your
escape."

But when she appeared next morning she declined to give details of the
plan she had in mind. She preferred to work it out alone, she said, and
give him the outlines only when she had settled them. It chanced to be a
day of drenching summer rain, and Ford, with a renewed effort to get some
clew to her identity, expressed his surprise that she should have been
allowed to venture out.

"Oh, no one worries about what I do," she said, indifferently "I go about
as I choose."

"So much the better for me," he laughed. "That's how you came to be
wandering on old Wayne's terrace, just in the nick of time. What stumps me
is the promptness with which you thought of stowing me away."

"It wasn't promptness, exactly. As a matter of fact, I had worked the
whole thing out beforehand."

His eyebrows went up incredulously. "For me?"

"No, not for you; for anybody. Ever since my guardian allowed me to build
the studio--last year--I've imagined how easy it would be for some--some
hunted person to stay hidden here, almost indefinitely. I've tried to
fancy it, when I've had nothing better to do."

"You don't seem to have had anything better to do very often," he
observed, glancing about the cabin.

"If you mean that I haven't painted much, that's quite true. I thought I
couldn't do without a studio--till I got one. But when I've come here, I'm
afraid it's generally been to--to indulge in day-dreams."

"Day-dreams of helping prisoners to escape. It wouldn't be every girl's
fancy, but it's not for me to complain of that."

"My father would have wanted me to do it," she declared, as if in
self-justification. "A woman once helped him to get out of prison."

"Good for her! Who was she?"

Having asked the question lightly, in a boyish impulse to talk, he was
surprised to see her show signs of embarrassment.

"She was my mother," she said, after an interval in which she seemed to be
making up her mind to give the information.

In the manifest difficulty she had in speaking, Ford sprang to her aid.

"That's like the old story of Gilbert à Becket--Thomas à Becket's father,
you know."

The historical reference was received in silence, as she bent over the
small task she had in hand.

"He married the woman who helped him out of prison," Ford went on, for her
enlightenment.

She raised her head and faced him.

"It wasn't like the story of Gilbert à Becket," she said, quietly.

It took some seconds of Ford's slow thinking to puzzle out the meaning of
this. Even then he might have pondered in vain had it not been for the
flush that gradually over-spread her features, and brought what he called
the wild glint into her eyes. When he understood, he reddened in his own
turn, making matters worse.

"I beg your pardon," he stammered. "I never thought--"

"You needn't beg my pardon," she interrupted, speaking with a catch in her
breath. "I wanted you to know.... You've asked me so many questions that
it seemed as if I was ashamed of my father and mother when I didn't
answer.... I'm not ashamed of them.... I'd rather you knew.... Every one
does--who knows me."

Half unconsciously he glanced up at the framed sketches on the
chimney-piece. Her eyes followed him, and she spoke instantly:

"You're quite right. I meant that--for them."

They were standing in the studio, into which she had allowed him to come
from the stifling darkness of the inner room, on the ground that the rain
protected them against intrusion from outside. During their conversation
she had been placing the easel and arranging the work which formed her
pretext for being there, while Micmac, stretched on the floor, with his
head between his paws, kept a half-sleepy eye on both of them.

"Your father was a Canadian, then?" he ventured to ask, as she seated
herself with a palette in her hand.

"He was a Virginian. My mother was the wife of a French-Canadian voyageur.
I believe she had a strain of Indian blood. The voyageurs and their
families generally have."

Having recovered her self-possession, she made her statements in the
matter-of-fact tone she used to hide embarrassment flicking a little color
into the sketch before her as she spoke. Ford seated himself at a
distance, gazing at her with a kind of fascination. Here, then, was the
clew to that something untamed which persisted through all the effects of
training and education, as a wild flavor will last in a carefully
cultivated fruit. His curiosity about her was so intense that,
notwithstanding the difficulty with which she stated her facts, it
overcame his prompting to spare her.

"And yet," he said, after a long pause, in which he seemed to be
assimilating the information she had given him--"and yet I don't see how
that explains _you_."

"I suppose it doesn't--not any more than your situation explains you."

"My situation explains me perfectly, because I'm the victim of a wrong."

"Well, so am I--in another way. I'm made to suffer because I'm the
daughter of my parents."

"That's a rotten shame," he exclaimed, in boyish sympathy "It isn't your
fault."

"Of course it isn't," she smiled, wistfully. "And yet I'd rather suffer
with the parents I have than be happy with any others."

"I suppose that's natural," he admitted, doubtfully.

"I wish I knew more about them," she went on, continuing to give light
touches to the work before her, and now and then leaning back to get the
effect. "I never understood why my father was in prison in Canada."

"Perhaps it was when he killed the man," Ford suggested.

"No; that was in Virginia--at least, the first one. His people didn't like
it. That was the reason for his leaving home. He hated a settled life; and
so he wandered away into the northwest of Canada. It was in the days when
they first began to build the railways there--when there were almost no
people except the trappers and the voyageurs. I was born on the very
shores of Hudson Bay."

"But you didn't stay there?"

"No. I was only a very little child--not old enough to remember--when my
father sent me down to Quebec, to the Ursuline nuns. He never saw me
again. I lived with them till four years ago. I'm eighteen now."

"Why didn't he send you to his people? Hadn't he sisters?--or anything
like that."

"He tried to, but they wouldn't have anything to do with me."

It was clearly a relief to her to talk about herself. He guessed that she
rarely had an opportunity of opening her heart to any one. Not till this
morning had he seen her in the full light of day; and, though but an
immature judge, he fancied her features had settled themselves into lines
of reserve and pride from which in happier circumstances they might have
been free. Her way of twisting her dark hair--which waved over the brows
from a central parting--into the simplest kind of knot gave her an air of
sedateness beyond her years. But what he noticed in her particularly was
her eyes--not so much because they were wild, dark eyes, with the peculiar
fleeing expression of startled forest things, as because of the pleading,
apologetic look that comes into the eyes of forest things when they stand
at bay. It was when--for seconds only--the pupils shone with a jet-like
blaze that he caught what he called the non-Aryan effect; but that glow
died out quickly, leaving something of the fugitive appeal which Hawthorne
saw in the eyes of Beatrice Cenci.

"He offered his sisters a great deal of money," she sighed, "but they
wouldn't take me."

"Oh? So he had money?"

"He was one of the first Americans to make money in the Canadian
northwest; but that was after my mother died. She died in the snow, on a
journey--like that sketch above the fireplace. I've been told that it
changed my father's life. He had been what they call wild before that--but
he wasn't so any more. He grew very hard-working and serious. He was one
of the pioneers of that country--one of the very first to see its
possibilities. That was how he made his money; and when he died he left it
to me. I believe it's a good deal."

"Didn't you hate being in the convent?" he asked, suddenly "I should."

"N-no; not exactly. I wasn't unhappy. The Sisters were kind to me. Some of
them spoiled me. It wasn't until after my father died, and I began to
realize--who I was, that I grew restless. I felt I should never be happy
until I was among people of my own kind."

"And how did you get there?"

She smiled faintly to herself before answering.

"I never did. There are no people of my kind."

Embarrassed by the stress she seemed inclined to lay on this circumstance,
he grasped at the first thought that might divert her from it.

"So you live with a guardian! How do you like that?"

"I should like it well enough if he did--that is, if his wife did. You
see," she tried to explain, "she's very sweet and gentle, and all that,
but she's devoted to the proprieties of life, and I seem to represent to
her--its improprieties. I know it's a trial to her to keep me, and so, in
a way, it's a trial to me to stay."

"Why do you stay, then?"

"For one reason, because I can't help myself. I have to do what the law
tells me."

"I see. The law again!"

"Yes; the law again. But I've other reasons besides that."

"Such as--?"

"Well, I'm very fond of their little girl, for one thing. She's the
greatest darling in the world, and the only creature, except my dog, that
loves me."

"What's her name?"

The question drove her to painting with closer attention to her work. Ford
followed something of the progress of her thought by watching the just
perceptible contraction of her brows into a little frown, and the setting
of her lips into a curve of determination. They were handsome lips, mobile
and sensitive--lips that might easily have been disdainful had not the
inner spirit softened them with a tremor--or it might have been a
light--of gentleness.

"It isn't worth while to tell you that," she said, after long reflection.
"It will be safer for you in the end not to know any of our names at all."

"Still--if I escape--I should like to know them."

"If you escape, you may be able to find out."

"Oh, well," he said, with assumed indifference, "since you don't want to
tell me--"

Going on with her painting, she allowed the subject to drop; but to him
the opportunity for conversation was too rare a thing to neglect. Not only
was his youthful impulse toward social self-expression normally strong,
but his pleasure in talking to a lady--a girl--was undeniable. Sometimes
in his moments of solitary meditation he said to himself that she was "not
his type of girl"; but the fact that he had been deprived of feminine
society for nearly three years made him ready to fall in love with any
one. If he did not precisely fall in love with this girl, it was only
because the situation precluded sentiment; and yet it was pleasant to sit
and watch her paint, and even torment her with his questions.

"So the little girl is one reason for your staying here. What's another?"

She betrayed her own taste for social communion by the readiness with
which she answered him--

"I don't know that I ought to tell you that; and yet I might as well. It's
just this: they're not very well off--so I can help. Naturally I like
that."

"You can help by footing the bills. That's all very fine if you enjoy it,
but everybody wouldn't."

"They would if they were in my position," she insisted. "When you can help
in any way it gives you a sense of being of use to some one. I'd rather
that people needed me, even if they didn't want me, than that they
shouldn't need me at all."

"They need your money," he declared, with a young man's outspokenness.
"That's what."

"But that's something, isn't it? When you've no place in the world you're
glad enough to get one, even if you have to buy it. My guardian and his
wife mayn't care much to have me, but it's some satisfaction to know that
they'd get along much worse if I weren't here."

"So should I," he laughed. "What I'm to do when I'm turned adrift without
you, Heaven only knows. It's curious--the effect imprisonment has on you.
It takes away your self-reliance. It gives you a helpless feeling, like a
baby. You want to be free--and yet you're almost afraid of the open air."

He was so much at home with her now that, sitting carelessly astride of
his chair, with his arms folded on the back, he felt a fraternal element
in their mutual relation. She bent more closely over her work, and spoke
without looking up.

"Oh, you'll get along all right. You're that sort."

"That's easy to say."

"You may find it easy to do." Her next words, uttered while she continued
to flick color into her sketch, caused him to jump with astonishment. "I'd
go to the Argentine."

"Why not say the moon?"

"For one reason, because the moon is inaccessible."

"So is the Argentine--for me."

"Oh no, it isn't. Other people have reached it."

"Yes: but they weren't in my fix."

"Some of them were probably in worse."

There was a pause, during which she seemed absorbed in her work, while
Ford sat meditatively whistling under his breath.

"What put the Argentine into your head?" he asked, at last.

"Because I happen to know a good deal about it. Everybody says it's the
country of new opportunities. I know people who've lived there. The little
girl I was speaking of just now--whom I'm so fond of--was born there. Her
father is dead since then, and her mother is married again."

He continued to meditate, emitting the same tuneless, abstracted sound,
just above his breath.

"I know the name of an American firm out there," she went on. "It's
Stephens and Jarrott. It's a very good firm to work for. I've often heard
that. And Mr. Jarrott has helped ever so many--stranded people."

"I should be just his sort, then."

His laugh, as he sprang to his feet, seemed to dismiss an impossible
subject; and yet as he lay on his couch that evening in the lampless
darkness the name of Stephens and Jarrott obtruded itself into his visions
of this girl, who stood between him and peril because she "disliked the
law," He wondered how far it was dislike, and how far jealous pain. In
her eagerness to buy the domestic place she had not inherited she reminded
him of something he had read--or heard--of the wild olive being grafted
into the olive of the orchard. Well, that would come in the natural course
of events. Some fine fellow, worthy to be her mate, would see to it. He
was not without a pleasant belief that in happier circumstances he himself
might have had the qualifications for the task. He wondered again what her
name was. He ran through the catalogue of the names he himself would have
chosen for a heroine--Gladys, Ethel, Mildred Millicent!--none of them
seemed to suit her. He tried again. Margaret, Beatrice, Lucy, Joan! Joan
possibly--or he said to himself, in the last inconsequential thoughts as
he fell asleep, it might be--the Wild Olive.



V



As the days passed, one much like another, and the retreat seemed more and
more secure, it was natural that Ford's thoughts should dwell less on his
own danger and more on the girl who filled his immediate horizon. The care
with which she foresaw his wants, the ingenuity with which she met them,
the dignity and simplicity with which she carried herself through
incidents that to a less delicate tact must have been difficult, would
have excited his admiration in any case, even if the namelessness which
helped to make her an impersonal element in the episode had not stirred
his imagination. He was obliged to remind himself often that she was "not
his type of girl," in order to confine his heart within the limits which
the situation imposed.

It worried him, therefore, it even hurt him, that in spite of all the
openings he had given her, she had never offered him a sign of her belief
in his innocence. For this reason he took the first occasion when she was
seated at her easel, with the dog lying at her feet, to lay his case
before her.

He told her of his overindulged boyhood, as the only child of a wealthy
New York merchant. He outlined his profitless years at the university,
where a too free use of money had hindered work. He narrated the disasters
that had left him at the age of two-and-twenty to begin life for
himself--his father's bankruptcy, followed by the death of both his
parents within the year. He had been eager to start in at the foot of the
ladder and work his way upward, when the proposal was made which proved
fatal.

Old Chris Ford, his great-uncle, known throughout the Adirondack region as
"the lumber king," had offered to take him, train him to the lumber
business, and make him his heir. An eccentric, childless widower, commonly
believed to have broken his wife's heart by sheer bitterness of tongue,
old Chris Ford was hated, feared, and flattered by the relatives and
time-servers who hoped ultimately to profit by his favor. Norrie Ford
neither flattered nor feared his powerful kinsman, but he hated him with
the best. His own instincts were city born and bred. He was conscious,
too, of that aptitude with which the typical New-Yorker is supposed to
come into being--the capacity to make money. He would have preferred to
make it on his own ground and in his own way; and had it not been for the
counsels of those who wished him well, he would have replied to his
great-uncle's offer with a courteous "No." Wiser heads than his pointed
out the folly of such a course as that; and so, reluctantly, he entered on
his apprenticeship.

In the two years that followed he could not see what purpose he served
other than that of a mark for the old man's poisoned wit. He was taught
nothing, and paid nothing, and given nothing to do. He slept under his
great-uncle's roof and ate at his table, but the sharp tongue made the bed
hard to lie on and the bread difficult to swallow down. Idleness
reawakened the propensity to vicious habits which he thought he had
outlived, while the rough society of the lumber camps, in which he sought
to relieve the tedium of time, extended him the welcome which Falstaff
and his comrades gave Prince Hal.

The revolt of his self-respect was on the eve of bringing this phase of
his existence to an end when the low farce turned into tragedy. Old Chris
Ford was found dead in his bed--shot in his sleep. On the premises there
had been but three persons, one of whom must have committed the
crime--Norrie Ford, and Jacob and Amalia Gramm. Jacob and Amalia Gramm had
been the old man's servants for thirty years. Their faithfulness put them
beyond suspicion. The possibility of their guilt, having been considered,
was dismissed with few formalities. The conviction of Norrie Ford became
easy after that--the more respectable people of the neighborhood being
agreed that from the evidence presented no other deduction could be drawn.
The very fact that the old man, by his provocation of the lad, so
thoroughly deserved his fate made the manner in which he met with it the
clearer. Even Norrie Ford's friends, the hunters and the lumbermen,
admitted as much as that, though they were determined that he should never
suffer for so meritorious an act as long as they could give him a fighting
chance for freedom.

The girl listened to Ford's narrative with some degree of interest, though
it contained nothing new to her. She could not have lived at Greenport
during the period of his trial without being familiar with it all. But
when he came to explanations in his own defence she followed listlessly.
Though she leaned back in her chair, and courteously stopped painting,
while he talked so earnestly, the light in her eyes faded to a lustreless
gleam, like that of the black pearl. His perception that her thoughts were
wandering gave him a queer sensation of speaking into a medium in which
his voice could not carry, cutting short his arguments, and bringing him
to his conclusion more hurriedly than he had intended.

"I wanted you to know I didn't do it," he finished, in a tone which begged
for some expression of her belief, "because you've done so much to help
me."

"Oh, but I should have helped you just the same, whether you had done it
or not."

"But I suppose it makes some difference to you," he cried, impatiently,
"to know that I didn't."

"I suppose it would," she admitted, slowly, "if I thought much about it."

"Well, won't you think?" he pleaded---"just to oblige me."

"Perhaps I will, when you're gone; but at present I have to give my mind
to getting you away. It was to talk about that that I came this morning."

Had she wanted to slip out of giving an opinion on the subject of his
guilt, she could not have found a better exit. The means of his ultimate
escape engrossed him even more than the theme of his innocence. When she
spoke again all his faculties were concentrated into one keen point of
attention.

"I think the time has come for you to--go."

If her voice trembled on the last word, he did not notice it. The pose of
his body, the lines of his face, the glint of his gray eyes, were alive
with interrogation.

"Go?" he asked, just audibly. "When?"

"To-morrow."

"How?"

"I'll tell you that then."

"Why can't you tell me now?"

"I could if I was sure you wouldn't raise objections, but I know you
will."

"Then there are objections to be raised?"

"There are objections to everything. There's no plan of escape that won't
expose you to a good many risks. I'd rather you didn't see them in
advance."

"But isn't it well to be prepared beforehand?"

"You'll have plenty of time for preparation--after you've started. If that
seems mysterious to you now, you'll know what I mean by it when I come
to-morrow. I shall be here in the afternoon at six."

With this information Ford was obliged to be content, spending a sleepless
night and an impatient day, waiting for the time appointed.

She came punctually. For the first time she was not followed by her dog.
The only change in her appearance he could see was a short skirt of rough
material instead of her usual linen or muslin.

"Are we going through the woods?" he asked.

"Not far. I shall take you by the trail that led to this spot before I
built the cabin and made the path." As she spoke she surveyed him. "You'll
do," she smiled at last. "In those flannels, and with your beard, no one
would know you for the Norrie Ford of three weeks ago."

It was easy for him to ascribe the glow in her eyes and the quiver in her
voice to the excitement of the moment; for he could see that she had the
spirit of adventure. Perhaps it was to conceal some embarrassment under
his regard that she spoke again, hurriedly.

"We've no time to lose. You needn't take anything from here. We'd better
start."

He followed her over the threshold, and as she turned to lock the cabin
he had time to throw a glance of farewell over the familiar hills, now
transmuted into a haze of amethyst under the westering sun. A second later
he heard her quick "Come on!" as she struck into the barely perceptible
path that led upward, around the shoulder of the mountain.

It was a stiff bit of climbing, but she sped along with the dryad-like
ease she had displayed on the night when she led him to the cabin. Beneath
the primeval growth of ash and pine there was an underbrush so dense that
no one but a creature gifted with the inherited instinct of the woods
could have found the invisible, sinuous line alone possible to the feet.
But it was there, and she traced it--never pausing never speaking, and
only looking back from time to time to assure herself that he was in
sight, until they reached the top of the dome-shaped hill.

They came out suddenly on a rocky terrace, beneath which, a mile below,
Champlain was spread out in great part of its length, from the dim bluff
of Crown Point to the far-away, cloud-like mountains of Canada.

"You can sit down a minute here," she said, as he came up.

They found seats among the low scattered bowlders, but neither spoke. It
was a moment at which to understand the jewelled imagery of the Seer of
the Apocalypse. Jasper, jacinth, chalcedony, emerald, chrysoprasus, were
suggested by the still bosom of the lake, towered round by
light-reflecting mountains. The triple tier of the Vermont shore was
bottle-green at its base, indigo in the middle height, while its summit
was a pale undulation of evanescent blue against the jade and topaz of the
twilight.

"The steamer _Empress of Erin_," the girl said, with what seemed like
abruptness, "will sail from Montreal on the twenty-eighth, and from Quebec
on the twenty-ninth. From Rimouski, at the mouth of the river St.
Lawrence, she will sail on the thirtieth, to touch nowhere else till she
reaches Ireland. You will take her at Rimouski."

There was a silence, during which he tried to absorb this startling
information.

"And from here to Rimouski?" he asked, at last.

"From here to Rimouski," she replied, with a gesture toward the lake,
"your way is there."

There was another silence, while his eyes travelled the long,
rainbow-colored lake, up to the faint line of mountains where it faded
into a mist of bluish-green and gold.

"I see the way," he said then, "but I don't see the means of taking it."

"You'll find that in good time. In the mean while you'd better take this."
From her jacket she drew a paper, which she passed to him. "That's your
ticket. You'll see," she laughed, apologetically, "that I've taken for you
what they call a suite, and I've done it for this reason. They're keeping
a lookout for you on every tramp ship from New York, on every cattle-ship
from Boston, and on every grain-ship from Montreal; but they're not
looking for you in the most expensive cabins of the most expensive liners.
They know you've no money; and if you get out of the country at all, they
expect it will be as a stoker or a stow-away They'll never think you're
driving in cabs and staying at the best hotels."

"But I shan't be," he said, simply.

"Oh yes, you will. You'll need money, of course; and I've brought it.
You'll need a good deal; so I've brought plenty."

She drew out a pocketbook and held it toward him. He looked at it,
reddening, but made no attempt to take it.

"I can't--I can't--go as far as that," he stammered, hoarsely.

"You mean," she returned, quickly, "that you hesitate to take money from a
woman. I thought you might. But it isn't from a woman; it's from a man.
It's from my father. He would have liked to do it. He would have wanted me
to do it. They keep putting it in the bank for me--just to spend--but I
never need it. What can I do with money in a place like Greenport? Here,
take it," she urged, thrusting it into his hands. "You know very well it
isn't a matter of choice, but of life or death."

With her own fingers she clasped his upon it, drawing back and coloring at
her boldness. For the first time in their weeks of intercourse she saw in
him a touch of emotion The phlegmatism by which he had hitherto concealed
his inward suffering seemed suddenly to desert him. He looked at her with
lips quivering, while his eyes filled. His weakness only nerved her to be
stronger, sending her for refuge back into the commonplace.

"They'll expect you at Rimouski, because your luggage will already have
gone on board at Montreal. Yes," she continued, in reply to his
astonishment, "I've forwarded all the trunks and boxes that came to me
from my father. I told my guardian I was sending them to be stored--and I
am, for you'll store them for me in London when you've done with them.
Here are the keys."

He made no attempt to refuse them, and she hurried on.

"I sent the trunks for two reasons; first, because there might be things
in them you could use till you get something better; and then I wanted to
prevent suspicion arising from your sailing without luggage. Every little
thing of that sort counts. The trunks have 'H.S.' painted in white letters
on them; so that you'll have no difficulty in knowing them at sight. I've
put a name with the same initials on the ticket. You'd better use it till
you feel it safe to take your own again."

"What name?" he asked, with eager curiosity, beginning to take the ticket
out of its envelope.

"Never mind now," she said, quickly. "It's just a name--any name. You can
look at it afterward. We'd better go on."

She made as though she would move, but he detained her.

"Wait a minute. So your name begins with S!"

"Like a good many others," she smiled.

"Then tell me what it is. Don't let me go away without knowing it. You
can't think what it means to me."

"I should think you'd see what it means to me."

"I don't. What harm can it do you?"

"If you don't see, I'm afraid I can't explain. To be nameless is--- how
shall I say it?--a sort of protection to me. In helping you, and taking
care of you, I've done what almost any really nice girl would have shrunk
from. There are plenty of people who would say is was wrong. And in a
way--a way I could never make you understand, unless you understand
already--it's a relief to me that you don't know who I am. And even that
isn't everything."

"Well--what else?"

"When this little episode is over"--her voice trembled, and it was not
without some blinking of the eyes that she was able to begin again--"when
this little episode is over, it will be better for us both--for you as
well as for me--to know as little about it as possible. The danger isn't
past by any means; but it's a kind of danger in which ignorance can be
made to look a good deal like innocence. I shan't know anything about you
after you've gone, and you know nothing whatever about me."

"That's what I complain of. Suppose I pull the thing off, and make a
success of myself somewhere else, how should I communicate with you
again?"

"Why should you communicate with me at all?"

"To pay you back your money, for one thing--"

"Oh, that doesn't matter."

"Perhaps it doesn't from your point of view; but it does from mine. But it
wouldn't be my only reason in any case."

Something in his voice and in his eyes warned her to rise and interrupt
him.

"I'm afraid we haven't time to talk about it now," she said, hurriedly.
"We really must be going on."

"I'm not going to talk about it now," he declared, rising in his turn. "I
said it would be a reason for my wanting to communicate with you again. I
shall want to tell you something then; though perhaps by that time you
won't want to hear it."

"Hadn't we better wait and see?"

"That's what I shall have to do; but how can I come back to you at all if
I don't know who you are?"

"I shall have to leave that to your ingenuity," she laughed, with an
attempt to treat the matter lightly. "In the mean time we must hurry on.
It's absolutely necessary that you should set out by sunset."

She glided into the invisible trail running down the lakeside slope of the
mountain, so that he was obliged to follow her. As they had climbed up,
so they descended--the girl steadily and silently in advance. The region
was dotted with farms; but she kept to the shelter of the woodland, and
before he expected it they found themselves at the water's edge. A canoe
drawn up in a cove gave him the first clear hint of her intentions.

It was a pretty little cove, enclosed by two tiny headlands, forming a
miniature landlocked bay, hidden from view of the lake beyond. Trees
leaned over it and into it, while the canoe rested on a yard-long beach of
sand.

"I see," he remarked, after she had allowed him to take his own
observations. "You want me to go over to Burlington and catch a train to
Montreal."

She shook her head, smiling, as he thought, rather tremulously.

"I'm afraid I've planned a much longer journey for you. Come and see the
preparations I've made." They stepped to the side of the canoe, so as to
look down into it. "That," she pursued, pointing to a small suit-case
forward of the middle thwart, "will enable you to look like an ordinary
traveller after you've landed. And that," she added, indicating a package
in the stern, "contains nothing more nor less than sandwiches. Those are
bottles of mineral water. The small objects are a corkscrew, a glass, a
railway timetable a cheap compass, and a cheaper watch. In addition you'll
find a map of the lake, which you can consult tomorrow morning, after
you've paddled all night through the part with which you're most
familiar."

"Where am I going?" he asked, huskily, avoiding her eyes. The nonchalance
of her tone had not deceived him, and he thought it well not to let their
glances meet.

"You'll keep to the middle of the lake and go on steadily. You'll have
all Champlain to yourself to-night, and in daylight there's no reason why
you shouldn't pass for an ordinary sportsman. All the same, you had better
rest by day, and go on again in the evening. You'll find lots of little
secluded coves where you can pull up the canoe and be quite undisturbed.
I'd do that, if I were you."

He nodded to show that he understood her.

"When you look at the map," she went on, "you'll find that I've traced a
route for you, after you get above Plattsville. You'll see that it will
take you past the little French-Canadian village of Deux Etoiles. You
can't mistake it, because there's a lighthouse, with a revolving light, on
a rock, just off the shore. You'll be in Canada then. You'd better time
yourself to go by about nightfall."

He nodded his agreement with her again, and she continued.

"About a mile above the lighthouse, and close in by the eastern shore,
just where the lake becomes very narrow, there are two little islands
lying close together. You'll take them as a landmark, because immediately
opposite them, on the mainland, there's a stretch of forest running for a
good many miles. There you can land finally. You must drag the canoe right
up into the wood, and hide it as well as you can. It's my own canoe, so
that it can lie there till it drops to pieces. Is all that quite clear to
you?"

Once more he nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Again the sight of his
emotion braced her to make her tone more matter-of-fact than ever.

"Now, then," she went on, "if you consult the map you'll see that an old
wood-road runs through the forest, and comes out at the station of Saint
Jean du Clou Noir. There you can get a train to Quebec.... The road begins
nearly opposite the two little islands I spoke of.... I don't think
you'll have any difficulty in finding it.... It's about seven miles to the
station.... You could walk that easily enough through the night.... I've
marked a very good train on the time-table--a train that stops at Saint
Jean du Clou Noir at seven thirty-five ..."

A choking sensation warned her to stop, but she retained the power to
smile. The sun had set, and the slow northern night was beginning to close
in. Across the lake the mountains of Vermont were receding into deep
purple uniformity, while over the crimson of the west a veil of filmy
black was falling, as though dropped in mid-flight by the angel of the
dark. Here and there through the dead-turquoise green of the sky one could
detect the pale glimmer of a star.

"You must go now," she whispered. He began to move the canoe into the
water.

"I haven't thanked you," he began, unsteadily, holding the canoe by the
bow, "because you wouldn't let me. As a matter of fact, I don't know how
to do it--adequately. But if I live at all, my life will belong to you.
That's all I can say. My life will be a thing for you to dispose of. If
you ever have need of it--"

"I shan't have," she said, hastily, "but I'll remember what you say."

"Thanks; that's all I ask. For the present I can only hope for the chance
of making my promise good."

She said nothing in reply, and after a minute's silence he entered the
canoe. She steadied it herself to allow him to step in. It was not till he
had done so and had knelt down with the paddle in his hand that, moved by
a sudden impulse she leaned to him and kissed him. Then, releasing the
light craft, she allowed it to glide out like a swan on the tiny bay. In
three strokes of the paddle it had passed between the low, enclosing
headlands and was out of sight. When she summoned up strength to creep to
an eminence commanding the lake, it was already little more than a speck,
moving rapidly northward, over the opal-tinted waters.



VI



On finding himself alone, and relatively free, Ford's first sensation was
one of insecurity. Having lived for more than a year under orders and
observation, he had lost for the moment some of his natural confidence in
his own initiative. Though he struck resolutely up the lake he was aware
of an inner bewilderment, bordering on physical discomfort, at being his
own master. For the first half-hour he paddled mechanically, his
consciousness benumbed by the overwhelming strangeness. As far as he was
able to formulate his thought at all he felt himself to be in process of a
new birth, into a new phase of existence. In the darkening of the sky
above him and of the lake around there came upon him something of the
mental obscurity that might mark the passage of a transmigrating soul.
After the subdued excitement of the past weeks, and especially of the past
hour, the very regularity of his movements now lulled him into a passivity
only quickened by vague fears. The noiseless leaping forward of the canoe
beneath him heightened his sense of breaking with the past and hastening
onward into another life. In that life he would be a new creature, free to
be a law unto himself.

A new creature! A law unto himself! The ideas were subconscious, and yet
he found the words framing themselves on his lips. He repeated them
mentally with some satisfaction as a cluster of lights on his left told
him he was passing Greenport. Other lights, on a hill, above the town and
away from it, were probably those of Judge Wayne's villa. He looked at
them curiously, with an odd sense of detachment, of remoteness, as from
things belonging to a time with which he had nothing more to do. That was
over and done with.

It was not until a steamer crossed his bows, not more than a hundred yards
in front of him, that he began to appreciate his safety. Under the
protection of the dark, and in the wide loneliness of the waters, he was
as lost to human sight as a bird in the upper air. The steamer--zigzagging
down the lake, touching at little ports now on the west bank and now on
the east--had shot out unexpectedly from behind a point, her double row of
lights casting a halo in which his canoe must have been visible on the
waves; and yet she had passed by and taken no note of him. For a second
such good-fortune had seemed to his nervous imagination beyond the range
of hope. He stopped paddling he almost stopped breathing, allowing the
canoe to rock gently on the tide. The steamer puffed and pulsated, beating
her way directly athwart his course. The throbbing of her engines seemed
scarcely louder than that of his own heart. He could see people moving on
the deck, who in their turn must have been able to see him. And yet the
boat went on, ignoring him, in tacit acknowledgment of his right to the
lake, of his right to the world.

His sigh of relief became almost a laugh as he began again to paddle
forward. The incident was like a first victory, an assurance of victories
to come. The sense of insecurity with whith he had started out gave place,
minute by minute, to the confidence in himself which was part of his
normal state of mind. Other small happenings confirmed his self-reliance.
Once a pleasure party in a rowboat passed so near him that he could hear
the splash of their oars and the sound of their voices. There was
something almost miraculous to him in being so close to the commonplace of
human fellowship. He had the feeling of pleasant inward recognition that
comes from hearing one's mother-tongue in a foreign land. He stopped
paddling again, just to catch meaningless fragments of their talk, until
they floated away into silence and darkness. He would have been sorry to
have them pass out of ear-shot, were it not for his satisfaction in being
able to go his way unheeded.

On another occasion he found himself within speaking distance of one of
the numerous small lakeside hotels. Lights flared from open doors and
windows, while from the veranda, the garden, and the little pier came
peals of laughter, or screams and shouts of young people at rough play.
Now and then he could catch the tones of some youth's teasing, and the
shrill, pretended irritation of a girl's retort. The noisy cheerfulness of
it all reached his ears with the reminiscent tenderness of music heard in
childhood. It represented the kind of life he himself had loved. Before
the waking nightmare of his troubles began he had been of the unexacting
type of American lad who counts it a "good time" to sit in summer evenings
on "porches" or "stoops" or "piazzas," joking with "the boys," flirting
with "the girls," and chattering on all subjects from the silly to the
serious, from the local to the sublime. He was of the friendly,
neighborly, noisy, demonstrative spirit characteristic of his age and
class. He could have entered into this circle of strangers--strangers for
the most part, in all probability, to one another--and in ten minutes'
time been one of them. Their screams, their twang, their slang, their
gossip, their jolly banter, and their gay ineptitude would have been to
him like a welcome home. But he was Norrie Ford, known by name and
misfortune to every one of them. The boys and girls on the pier, the
elderly women in the rocking-chairs, even the waitresses who, in
high-heeled shoes and elaborate coiffures, ministered disdainfully to the
guests in the bare-floored dining-room, had discussed his life, his trial,
his sentence, his escape, and formed their opinions upon him. Were it
possible for them to know now that he was lurking out there in the dark,
watching their silhouettes and listening to their voices, there would be
such a hue and cry as the lake had not heard since the Indians sighted
Champlain on its banks.

It was this reflection that first of all stirred the current of his deep,
slow resentment. During the fifteen months since his arrest he had been
either too busy, or too anxious, or too sorely puzzled at finding himself
in so odd a position, to have leisure for positive anger. At the worst of
times he had never lost the belief that the world, or that portion of the
world which concerned itself with him, would come to recognize the fact
that it was making a mistake. He had taken his imprisonment and his trial
more or less as exciting adventures. Even the words of his sentence lost
most of their awfulness in his inner conviction that they were empty
sounds. Of the confused happenings on the night of his escape his clearest
memory was that he had been hungry, while he thought of the weeks spent in
the cabin as a "picnic." Just as good spirits had seldom failed him, so
patience had rarely deserted him. Such ups and downs of emotion as he had
experienced resulted in the long run in an increase of optimism. In the
back of his slow mind he kept the expectation, almost the intention, of
giving his anger play--some time; but only when his rights should have
been restored to him.

But he felt it coming on him now, before he was prepared for it. It was
taking him unawares, and without due cause, roused by the chance
perception that he was cut off from rightful, natural companionship.
Nothing as yet had brought home to him the meaning of his situation like
the talk and laughter of these lads and girls, who suddenly became to him
what Lazarus in Abraham's bosom was to Dives in his torment.

A few dips of the paddle took him out of sight and sound of the hotel; but
the dull, indignant passion remained in his heart, finding outward vent in
the violence with which he sent the canoe bounding northward beneath the
starlight. For the moment it was a blind, objectless passion, directed
against nothing and no one in particular. He was not skilled in the
analysis of feeling, or in tracing effect to cause. For an hour or two his
wrath was the rage of the infuriated animal roaring out its pain,
regardless of the hand that has inflicted it. Other rowing-parties came
within hearing distance, but he paid them no attention; lake steamers hove
in sight, but he had learned how to avoid them; little towns, dotted at
intervals of a few miles apart, lit up the banks with the lights of homes,
but their shining domesticity seemed to mock him. The birth of a new
creature was a painful process; and yet, through all his confused
sensations and obscure elemental suffering, he kept the conviction that a
new creature was somehow claiming its right to live.

Peace of mind came to him gradually, as the little towns put out their
lights, and the lake steamers laid up in tiny ports, and the
rowing-parties went home to bed. In the smooth, dark level of the lake and
in the stars there was a soothing quality to which he responded before he
was aware of doing so. The spacious solitude of the summer night brought
with it a large calmness of outlook, in which his spirit took a measure of
comfort. There was a certain bodily pleasure, too, in the regular monotony
of paddling, while his mental faculties were kept alert by the necessity
of finding points by which to steer, and fixing his attention upon them.
So, by degrees, his limited reasoning powers found themselves at work,
fumbling, with the helplessness of a man whose strong points are physical
activity and concentration of purpose, for some light on the wild course
on which he was embarked.

Perhaps his first reflection that had the nature of a conclusion or a
deduction was on the subject of "old Wayne." Up to the present he had
regarded him with special ill will, owing to the fact that Wayne, while
inclining to a belief of his innocence, had nevertheless lent himself to
the full working of the law. It came to Ford now in the light of a
discovery that, after all, it was not Wayne's fault. Wayne was in the grip
of forces that deprived him to a large extent of the power of voluntary
action. He could scarcely be blamed if he fulfilled the duties he was
appointed to perform The real responsibility was elsewhere. With whom did
it lie? For a primitive mind like Ford's the question was not an easy one
to answer.

For a time he was inclined to call to account the lawyers who had pleaded
for the State. Had it not been for their arguments he would have been
acquitted. With an ingenuity he had never supposed to exist they had
analyzed his career--especially the two years of it spent with Uncle
Chris--and showed how it led up to the crime as to an inevitable
consequence. They seemed familiar with everything he had ever done, while
they were able to prove beyond cavil that certain of his acts were
inspired by sinister motives which he himself knew to have sprung from
dissipation at the worst. It was astonishing how plausible their story
was; and he admitted that if anybody else had been accused, he himself
would probably have been convinced by it. Certainly, then, the lawyers
must have been to blame--that is, unless they were only carrying out what
others had hired them to do.

That qualifying phrase started a new train of thought. Mechanically, dip
by dip, swaying gently with each stroke as to a kind of rhythm, he drove
the canoe onward, while he pondered it. It was easy to meditate out here,
on the wide, empty lake, for no sound broke the midnight stillness but the
soft swish of the paddle and the skimming of the broad keel along the
water. It was not by any orderly system of analysis, or synthesis, or
syllogism, that Ford, as the hours went by, came at last to his final
conclusion; and yet he reached it with conviction. By a process of
elimination he absolved judge, jury, legal profession, and local public
from the greater condemnation. Each had contributed to the error that made
him an outlaw, but no one contributor was the whole of the great force
responsible. That force, which had set its component parts to work, and
plied them till the worst they could do was done, was the body which they
called Organized Society. To Ford, Organized Society was a new expression.
He could not remember ever to have heard it till it was used in court.
There it had been on everybody's lips. Far more than old Chris Ford
himself it was made to figure as the injured party. Though there was
little sympathy for the victim in his own person, Organized Society seemed
to have received in his death a blow that called for the utmost avenging.
Organized Society was plaintiff in the case, as well as police, jury,
judge, and public. The single human creature who could not apparently gain
footing within its fold was Norrie Ford himself. Organized Society had
cast him out.

He had been told that before, and yet the actual fact had never come home
to him till now. In prison, in court, in the cabin in the woods, there had
always been some human hand within reach of his own, some human tie, even
though it was a chain. However ignoble, there had been a place for him.
But out here on the great vacant lake there was an isolation that gave
reality to his expulsion. The last man left on earth would not feel more
utterly alone.

For the first time since the night of his escape there came back to him
that vague feeling of deserting something he might have defended, that
almost physical sensation of regret at not having stood his ground and
fought till he fell. He began to understand now what it meant. Dip,
splash, dip, splash, his paddle stirred the dimly shining water, breaking
into tiny whirlpools the tremulous reflection of the stars. Not for an
instant did he relax his stroke, though the regret took more definitive
shape behind him. Convicted and sentenced, he was still part of the life
of men, just as a man whom others are trying to hurl from a tower is _on_
the tower till he has fallen. He himself had not fallen; he had jumped
off, while there was still a chance of keeping his foothold.

It required an hour or two of outward rhythmic movement and confused
inward feeling to get him ready for his next mental step. He had jumped
off the tower; true; but he was alive and well, with no bones broken. What
should he do now? Should he try to tear the tower down? The attempt would
not be so very ludicrous, seeing he should only have to join
those--socialists, anarchists, faddists--already at the work. But he
admired the tower, and preferred to see is stand. If he did anything at
all, it would be to try to creep back into it.

The reflection gave still another turn to his thoughts. He was passing
Burlington by this time--the electric lamps throwing broad bands of light
along the deserted, up-hill streets, between the sleeping houses. It was
the first city he had seen since leaving New York to begin his useless
career in the mountains. The sight moved him with an odd curiosity, not
free from a homesick longing for normal, simple ways of life. He kept the
canoe at a standstill, looking hungrily up the empty thoroughfares, as a
poor ghost may gaze at familiar scenes while those it has loved are
dreaming. By-and-by the city seemed to stir in its sleep. Along the
waterside he could hear the clatter of some belated or too early wayfarer;
a weird, intermittent creaking told him that the milk-cart of provincial
towns was on its beat; from a distant freight-train came the long,
melancholy wail that locomotives give at night; and then drowsily, but
with the promptness of one conscientious in his duty, a cock crew. Ford
knew that somewhere, unseen as yet by him, the dawn was coming, and--again
like a wandering ghost--sped on.

But he had been looking on the tower which the children of men had
builded, and had recognized his desire to clamber up into it again. He was
not without the perception that a more fiery temperament than his
own--perhaps a nobler one--would have cursed the race that had done him
wrong, and sought to injure it or shun it. Misty recollections of
proud-hearted men who had taken this stand came back to him.

"I suppose I ought to do the same," he muttered to himself humbly; "but
what would be the use when I couldn't keep it up?"

Understanding himself thus well, his purpose became clearer. Like the ant
or the beaver that has seen its fabric destroyed, he must set patiently to
work to reconstruct it. He suspected a poor-spirited element in this sort
of courage; but his instinct forced him within his limitations. By dint of
keeping there and toiling there he felt sure of his ability to get back to
the top of the tower in such a way that no one would think he lacked the
right to be on it.

But he himself would know it. He shrank from that fact with the repugnance
of an honest nature for what is not straightforward; but the matter was
past helping. He should be obliged to play the impostor everywhere and
with every one. He would mingle with men, shake their hands, share their
friendships, eat their bread, and accept their favors--and deceive them
under their very noses. Life would become one long trick, one daily feat
of skill. Any possible success he could win would lack stability, would
lack reality, because there would be neither truth nor fact behind it.

From the argument that he was innocent he got little comfort. He had
forfeited his right to make use of that fact any longer. Had he stayed
where he was he could have shouted it out till they gagged him in the
death-chair. Now he must be dumb on the subject forevermore. In his
disappearance there was an acceptation of guilt which he must remain
powerless to explain away.

Many minutes of dull pain passed in dwelling on that point. He could work
neither back from it nor forward. His mind could only dwell on it with an
aching admission of its justice, while he searched the sky for the dawn.

In spite of the crowing of the cock he saw no sign of it--unless it was
that the mountains on the New York shore detached themselves more
distinctly from the sky of which they had seemed to form a part. On the
Vermont side there was nothing but a heaped-up darkness, night piled on
night, till the eye reached the upper heavens and the stars.

He paddled on, steadily, rhythmically, having no sense of hunger or
fatigue, while he groped for the clew that was to guide him when he
stepped on land. He felt the need of a moral programme, of some pillar of
cloud and fire that would show him a way he should be justified in taking.
He expressed it to himself by a kind of aspiration which he kept
repeating, sometimes half aloud:

"O Lord, O Holy One! I want to be a man!"

Suddenly he struck the water with so violent a dash that the canoe swerved
and headed landward.

"By God!" he muttered, under his breath, "I've got it.... It isn't my
fault.... It's theirs.... They've put me in this fix.... They've brought
this dodging, and shifting, and squirming upon me.... The subterfuge isn't
mine; it's theirs.... They've taken the responsibility from me.... When
they strip me of rights they strip me of duties.... They've forced me
where right and wrong don't exist for me any more.... They've pitched me
out of their Organized Society, and I've had to go.... Now I'm free ...
and I shall profit by my freedom."

In the excitement of these discoveries he smote the waters again. He
remembered having said something of the sort on the night of his interview
with Wayne; but he had not till now grasped its significance. It was the
emancipation of his conscience. Whatever difficulties he might encounter
from outside, he should be hampered by no scruples from within. He had
been relieved of them; they had been taken from him. Since none had a duty
toward him, he had no duty toward any. If it suited his purposes to juggle
with men, the blame must rest upon themselves. He could but do his best
with the maimed existence they had left to him. Self-respect would entail
observance of the common laws of truth and honesty, but beyond this he
need never allow consideration for another to come before consideration
for himself. He was absolved from the necessity in advance. In the region
in which he should pass his inner life there would be no occupant but
himself. From the world where men and women had ties of love and pity and
mutual regard they had cast him out, forcing him into a spiritual limbo
where none of these things obtained. It was only lawful that he should
make use of such advantages as his lot allowed him.

There was exaltation in the way in which he grasped this creed as his rule
of life; and looking up suddenly, he saw the dawn. It had taken him
unawares, stealing like a gray mist of light over the tops of the Vermont
hills, lifting their ridges faintly out of night, like the ghosts of so
many Titans. Among the Adirondacks one high peak caught the first glimmer
of advancing day, while all the lower range remained a gigantic silhouette
beneath the perceptibly paling stars. Over Canada the veil was still down,
but he fancied he could detect a thinner texture to the darkness.

Then, as he passed a wooded headland, came a sleepy twitter, from some
little pink and yellow bill barely withdrawn from its enfolding wing--to
be followed by another, and another, and another, till both shores were
aquiver with that plaintive chirrup, half threnody for the flying
darkness, half welcome to the sun, like the praise of a choir of children
roused to sing midnight matins, but still dreaming. Ford's dip was softer
now, as though he feared to disturb that vibrant drowsiness; but when,
later, capes and coves began to define themselves through the gray
gloaming, and, later still, a shimmer of saffron appeared above the
eastern summits, he knew it was time to think of a refuge from the
daylight.

The saffron became fire; the fire lit up a heaven of chrysoprase and rose.
Where the lake had been as a metal mirror for the stars, it rippled and
dimpled and gleamed with the tints of mother-of-pearl. He knew the sun
must be on the farther slope of the Green Mountains, because the face they
turned toward him was dense in shadow, like the unilluminated portion of
the moon. On the western shore the Adirondacks were rising out of the bath
of night as dewy fresh as if they had been just created.

But the sun was actually in the sky when he perceived that he no longer
had the lake to himself. From a village nestling in some hidden cove a
rowboat pulled out into the open--a fisherman after the morning's catch.
It was easy enough for Ford to keep at a prudent distance; but the
companionship caused him an uneasiness that was not dispelled before the
first morning steamer came pounding from the northward. He fixed his
attention then on a tiny islet some two or three miles ahead. There were
trees on it, and probably ferns and grass. Reaching it, he found himself
in a portion of the lake forest-banked and little frequented. Pastures and
fields of ripening grain on the most distant slopes of Vermont gave the
nearest token of life. All about him there was solitude and
stillness--with the glorious, bracing beauty of the newly risen day.

Landing with stiffened limbs, he drew up the canoe on a bit of sandy
beach, over which sturdy old bushes, elder and birch, battered by the
north winds, leaned in friendly, concealing protection. He himself would
be able to lie down here, among the tall ferns and the stunted
blueberry-scrub, as secluded and secure as ever he had been in prison.

Being hungry and thirsty, he ate and drank, consulting his map the while
and fixing approximately his whereabouts. He looked at his little watch
and wound it up, and fingered the pages of the railway guide he found
beside it.

The acts brought up the image of the girl who had furnished him with these
useful accessories to flight. For lack of another name he called her the
Wild Olive--remembering her yearning, not wholly unlike his own, to be
grafted back into the good olive-tree of Organized Society. With some
shame he perceived that he had scarcely thought of her through the night.
It was astounding to recollect that not twelve hours ago she had kissed
him and sent him on his journey. To him the gulf between then and now was
so wide and blank that it might have been twelve weeks, or twelve months,
or twelve years. It had been the night of the birth of a new creature, of
the transmigration of a soul; it had no measurement in time, and threw all
that preceded it into the mists of prenatal ages.

These thoughts passed through his mind as he made a pillow for himself
with his white flannel jacket, and twisted the ferns above it into a
shelter from the flies. Having done this, he stood still and pondered.

"Have I really become a new creature?" he asked himself.

There was much in the outward conditions to encourage the fancy, while his
inner consciousness found it easy to be credulous. Nothing was left of
Norrie Ford but the mere flesh and bones--the least stable part of
personality. Norrie Ford was gone--not dead, but gone--blasted,
annihilated stamped out of existence, by the act of Organized Society. In
its place the night of transition had called up some one else.

"But who? ... Who am I? ... What am I?"

Above all, a name seemed required to give him entity. It was a repetition
of his feeling about the Wild Olive--the girl in the cabin in the woods.
Suddenly he remembered that, if he had found a name for her, she had also
found one for him--and that it was written on the steamer ticket in his
pocket. He drew it out, and read:

"Herbert Strange."

He repeated it at first in dull surprise, and then with disapproval. It
was not the kind of name he would have chosen. It was odd, noticeable--a
name people would remember He would have preferred something commonplace
such as might be found for a column or two in any city directory. She had
probably got it from a novel--or made it up. Girls did such things. It was
a pity, but there was no help for it now. As Herbert Strange he must go on
board the steamer, and so he should be called until--

But he was too tired to fix a date for the resumption of his own name or
the taking of another. Flinging himself on his couch of moss and trailing
ground-spruce, with the ferns closing over him, and the pines over them,
he was soon asleep.



Part II

Strange



VII



Dressed in overalls that had once been white, he was superintending the
stacking of wool in a long, brick-walled, iron-roofed shed in Buenos Aires
when the thought came to him how easy it had all been. He paused for a
minute in his work of inspection--standing by an open window, where a
whiff of fresh air from off the mud-brown Rio de la Plata relieved the
heavy, greasy smell of the piles of unwashed wool--just to review again
the past eighteen months. Below him stretched the noisy docks, with their
row of electric cranes, as regular as a line of street lamps, loading or
unloading a mile of steamers lying broadside on, and flying all flags but
the Stars and Stripes. Wines, silk, machinery, textiles were coming out;
wheat, cattle, hides, and beef were pouring in. In the confusion of
tongues that reached him he could, on occasions, catch the tones of
Spaniard, Frenchman, Swede, and Italian, together with all the varieties
of English speech from Highland Scotch to Cockney; but none of the
intonations of his native land. The comparative rarity of anything
American in his city of refuge, while it added to his sense of exile,
heightened his feeling of security. It was still another of the happy
circumstances that had helped him.

The strain under which he had lived during this year and a half had
undoubtedly been great; but he could see now that it had been inward
strain--the mental strain of unceasing apprehension, the spiritual strain
of the new creature in casting off the old husk, and adapting itself not
merely to new surroundings, but to a new life. This had been severe. He
was not a rover, and still less an adventurer, in any of the senses
attached to that word. His instincts were for the settled, the
well-ordered, and the practical. He would have been content with any
humdrum existence that permitted his peaceable, commercially gifted soul
to develop in its natural environment. The process, therefore, by which
Norrie Ford became Herbert Strange, even in his own thoughts, had been one
of inner travail, though the outward conditions could not have been more
favorable. Now that he had reached a point where his more obvious
anxieties were passing away, and the hope of safety was becoming a
reality, he could look back and see how relatively easy everything had
been.

He had leisure for reflection because it was the hour for the men's midday
meal and siesta. He could see them grouped together--some thirty-odd--at
the far end of the shed--sturdy little Italians, black-eyed, smiling,
thrifty, dirty, and contented to a degree that made them incomprehensible
to the ambitious, upward-toiling American set over them. They sat, or
lounged, on piles of wood, or on the floor, some chattering, most of them
asleep. He had begun like them. He had stacked wool under orders till he
had made himself capable of being in command. He had been beneath the
ladder; and though his foot was only on the lowest rung of it even now, he
was satisfied to have made this first step upward.

He could not be said to have taken it to his own surprise, since he had
prepared himself for it, and for other such steps to follow it, knowing
that they must become feasible in time. He had been given to understand
that what the Argentine, in common with some other countries, needed most
was neither men nor capital, but intelligence. Men were pouring in from
every corner of the globe; capital was keen in looking for its
opportunity; but for intelligence the demand was always greater than the
supply.

The first intimation of such a need had come to him on the _Empress of
Erin_, in mid-Atlantic, by a chance opportunity of the voyage. It was on
one of the first days of liberty when he had ventured to mix freely with
his fellow-passengers. Up to the present he had followed the rule of
conduct adopted at the little Canadian station of Saint Jean du Clou Noir.
He went into public when necessary, but no oftener. He did then what other
people did, in the way to attract the least attention. The season favored
him, for amid the throngs of early autumn travellers, moving from country
back to town, or from seaside resorts to the mountains he passed
unnoticed. At Quebec he was one of the crowd of tourists come to see the
picturesque old town. At Rimouski he was lost among the trainful of people
from the Canadian maritime provinces taking the Atlantic steamer at a
convenient port. He lived through each minute in expectation of the law's
tap on his shoulder; but he acquired the habit of nonchalance. On
shipboard it was a relief to be able to shut himself up in his cabin--his
suite!--feigning sickness, but really allowing his taut nerves to relax,
as he watched first the outlines of the Laurentides, and then the shores
of Anticosti, and lastly the iron-black coast of Labrador, follow each
other below the horizon. Two or three appearances at table gave him
confidence that he had nothing to fear. By degrees he allowed himself to
walk up and down the deck, where it was a queer sensation to feel that the
long row of eyes must of necessity be fixed upon him. The mere fact that
he was wearing another man's clothes--clothes he had found in the cabin
trunk that had come on board for him--produced a shyness scarcely
mitigated by the knowledge that he was far from looking grotesque.

Little by little he plucked up courage to enter the smoking-room where the
tacit, matter-of-course welcome of his own sex seemed to him like
extraordinary affability. An occasional word from a neighbor, or an
invitation to "take a hand at poker," or to "have a cocktail," was like an
assurance to a man who fancies himself dead that he really is alive. He
joined in no conversations and met no advances, but from the possibilities
of doing so he would go back to his cabin smiling.

The nearest approach to pleasure he allowed himself was to sit in a corner
and listen to the talk of his fellow-men. It was sometimes amusing, but
oftener stupid; it turned largely on food, with irrelevant interludes on
business. It never went beyond the range of topics possible to the
American or Canadian merchants, professional men, politicians, and
saloon-keepers, who form the rank and file of smoking-room society on any
Atlantic liner; but the Delphic worshipper never listened to Apollo's
oracle with a more rapt devotion than Ford to this intercommunion of
souls.

It was in this way that he chanced one day to hear a man speaking of the
Argentine. The remarks were casual, choppy, and without importance, but
the speaker evidently knew the ground. Ford had already noticed him,
because they occupied adjoining steamer-chairs--a tall, sallow Englishman
of the ineffectual type, with sagging shoulders, a drooping mustache, and
furtive eyes. Ford had scarcely thought of the Argentine since the girl in
the cabin had mentioned it--- now ten or twelve days ago; but the
necessity of having an objective point, and one sufficiently distant
turned his mind again in that direction.

"Did I hear you speaking yesterday of Buenos Aires?" he ventured to ask,
on the next occasion when he found himself seated beside his neighbor on
deck.

The Englishman drew his brier-root pipe from his mouth, glanced sidewise
from the magazine he was reading, and jerked his head in assent.

"What kind of place did it seem to you?"

"Jolly rotten."

Pondering this reply, Ford might have lost courage to speak again had he
not caught the eye of the Englishman's wife as she leaned forward and
peeped at him across her husband's brier-root. There was something in her
starry glance--an invitation, or an incitement--that impelled him to
continue.

"I've been told it's the land of new opportunities."

The Englishman grunted without looking up. "I didn't see many."

"May I ask if you saw any?"

"None fit for a white man."

"My husband means none fit for a--gentleman. I liked the place."

From the woman's steely smile and bitter-sweet tones Ford got hints of
masculine inefficiency and feminine contempt which he had no wish to
follow up. He knew from fragments of talk overheard in the smoking-room
that they had tried Mexico, California, and Saskatchewan in addition to
South America. From the impatience with which she shook the foot just
visible beneath the steamer-rug, while all the rest of her bearing feigned
repose, he guessed her humiliation at returning empty to the land she had
left with an Anglo-Saxon's pioneering hope, beside a husband who could do
nothing but curse luck. To get over the awkward minute he spoke hurriedly.

"I've heard of a very good house out there--Stephens and Jarrott. Do you
happen to know anything about them?"

"Wool," the Englishman grunted again. "Wool and wheat. Beastly brutes."

"They were horribly impertinent to my husband," the woman spoke up, with a
kind of feverish eagerness to have her say. "They actually asked him if
there was anything he could do. Fancy!"

"Oh, I know people of that sort put a lot of superfluous questions to
you," Ford said. But the lady hurried on.

"As to questions, there are probably fewer asked you in Argentine than
anywhere else in the world. It's one of the standing jokes of the place,
both in Buenos Aires and out in the Camp. Of course, the old Spanish
families are all right; but when it comes to foreigners a social catechism
wouldn't do. That's one of the reasons the place didn't agree with us. We
wanted people to know who we'd been before we got there; but that branch
of knowledge isn't cultivated."

"More beastly Johnnies in the Argentine passin' under names not their
own," said the man, moved to speak, at last, "than in all the rest of the
world put together. Heard a story at the Jockey Club--lot of beastly
native bounders in the Jockey Club--heard a story at the Jockey Club of a
little Irish Johnny who'd been cheatin' at cards. Three other asses
kicked him out. Beggar turned at the door and got in his lick of revenge.
'Say boys, d'yez know why they call me Mickey Flanagan out here? Because
it's me na-ame.' Beggar 'd got 'em all there."

Ford nerved himself to laugh, but made an excuse for rising.

"Oh, there's lots of cleverness among them," the lady observed, before he
had time to get away. "In fact, it's one of the troubles with the
country--for people like us. There's too much competition in brains. My
husband hit the right nail on the head when he said there was no chance
for any beastly Johnny out there, unless he could use his bloomin'
mind--and for us that was out of the question."

Ford never spoke to them again, but he meditated on their words, finding
himself at the end of twenty-four hours in possession of a new light.
"I've got to use my bloomin' mind." The words seemed to offer him the clew
to life. It was the answer to the question, "What should I do _there_?"
which positively asked itself, whenever he thought of seeking a refuge in
this country or in that. It came as a discovery that within himself was
the power that would enable him to make the best of any country, and the
country to make the best of him.

He could hardly have explained how his decision to try Argentina had
become fixed. Until he saw whether or not he should get successfully
ashore at Liverpool there was a paralysis of all mental effort; but once
on the train for London his plans appeared before him already formed. The
country where few questions were asked and the past had no importance was
clearly the place for him. Within a fortnight he was a second-class
passenger on board the Royal Mail Steam Packet _Parana_, bound for Buenos
Aires--thus fulfilling, almost unexpectedly to himself, the suggestion
made by the girl in the Adirondack cabin, whose star, as he began to
believe, must rule his fate.

He thought of her now and then, but always with the same curious sense of
remoteness--or unreality, as of a figure seen in a dream. Were it not for
the substantial tokens of her actuality he possessed she would have seemed
to him like the heroine of a play. He would have reproached himself for
disloyalty if the intensity of each minute as he had to meet it had not
been an excuse for him. The time would come when the pressure of the
instant would be less great, and he should be able to get back the emotion
with which he left her. Perhaps if she had been "his type of girl," her
image would not have faded so quickly.

There was but one thing for which he was not grateful to her. She had
fixed the name of Herbert Strange upon him in such a way that he was
unable to shake it off. His own first name was the unobjectionable
monosyllable John--though he had always been known by his less familiar
middle name, Norrie--and as John Ford he could have faced the world with a
certain amount of bluff. He meant to begin the attempt immediately on
reaching London, but the difficulty of appearing in a hotel under one name
while everything he brought with him bore another was patent to him at
once. Similarly, he could not receive the correspondence incidental to his
outfit and his passage under the name of Ford in a house where he was
known as Strange. Having applied for his passage as Strange, he knew it
would create comment if he asked to be put down in the books as Ford. Do
what he would he was obliged to appear on the printed list of second-cabin
passengers as Herbert Strange, and he had made at least one acquaintance
who would expect to call him so after they reached land.

This was a little, clean-shaven man, in the neighborhood of sixty, always
dressed at sea as he probably dressed on shore. He wore nothing but black,
with a white shirt and a ready-made black bow-tie. He might have been a
butler, an elderly valet, or a member of some discreet religious order in
street costume. Ford had heard a flippant young Frenchman speak of him as
an "ancien curé, qui a fait quelque bêtise"; and indeed there was about
him that stamp of the ecclesiastic which is sometimes ineffaceable.

"I call myself Durand," he said to Ford, using the conveniently ambiguous
French idiom, "je m'appelle Durand."

"Et je m'appelle Strange, I call myself Strange," Ford had replied,
claiming the name for the first time without hesitation, but feeling the
irrevocable nature of the words as soon as he had uttered them.

Out of the crowd of second-rate Europeans of all races who made up the
second cabin, the man who called himself Strange had selected the man who
called himself Durand by some obscure instinct of affinity. "He looks like
an old chap who could give one information," was Strange's own way of
putting it, not caring to confess that he was feeling after a bit of
sympathy. But the give and take of information became the basis of their
friendship, and imparted the first real stimulus to the young man's
awkward efforts to use his mind.

Monsieur Durand had been thirty years in the Argentine, observing the
place and the people, native and foreign, with the impartial shrewdness
only possible to one who sought little for himself. It was a pleasure to
share the fruits of his experience with one so eager to learn, for young
men were not in the habit of showing him deference. He could tell Mr.
Strange many things that would be to his advantage--what to do--what to
avoid--what sort of place to live in--what he ought to pay--and what sort
of company to keep.

Yes, he knew the firm of Stephens and Jarrott--an excellent house. There
was no Mr. Stephens now, only a Mr. Jarrott. Mr. Stephens had belonged to
the great days of American enterprise in the southern hemisphere, to the
time of Wheelwright, and Halsey, and Hale. The Civil War had put an end to
that. Mr. Jarrott had come later--a good man, not generally understood. He
had suffered a great loss a few years ago in the death of his
brother-in-law and partner, Mr. Colfax. Mrs. Colfax, a pretty little
woman, who hadn't old age in her blood either--one could see that--had
gone back to the United States with her child--but a child!--blond as an
angel--altogether darling--_tout à fait mignonne_. Monsieur Durand thought
he remembered hearing that Mrs. Colfax had married again, but he couldn't
say for certain. What would you? One heard so many things. He knew less of
the family since the last boy died--the boy to whom he gave lessons in
Spanish and French. Death hadn't spared the household--taking the three
sons one after another and leaving father and mother alone. It was a
thousand pities Mrs. Colfax had taken the little girl away. They loved her
as if she had been their own--especially after the boys died. An excellent
house! Mr. Strange couldn't do better than seek an entry there--it is I
who tell you so--_c'est moi qui vous le dis_.

All this was said in very good English, with occasional lapses into
French, in a soft, benevolent voice, with slow benedictory movements of
the hands, more and more suggestive of an ecclesiastic _en civile_--or
under a cloud. Strange stole an occasional glance into the delicate,
clear-cut face, where the thin lips were compressed into permanent lines
of pain, and the sunken brown eyes looked out from under scholarly brows
with the kind of hopeful anguish a penitent soul might feel in the midst
of purifying flames. He remembered again that the flippant young Frenchman
had said, "Un ancien curé, qui a fait quelque bêtise." Was it possible
that some tragic sin lay under this gentle life? And was the
four-funnelled, twin-screwed _Parana_ but a ghostly ship bearing a cargo
of haunted souls into their earthly purgatory?

"But listen, monsieur," the old man began next day. But listen! There
would be difficulties. Stephens and Jarrott employed only picked men, men
with some experience--except for the mere manual labor such as the
Italians could perform. Wouldn't it be well for Mr. Strange to qualify
himself a little before risking a refusal? Ah, but how? Monsieur Durand
would explain. There was first the question of Spanish. No one could get
along in the Argentine without a working knowledge of that tongue.
Monsieur Durand himself gave lessons in it--and in French--but in the
English and American colonies of Buenos Aires exclusively. There were
reasons why he did not care to teach among Catholics, though he himself
was a fervent one, and he hoped--repentant. He pronounced the last word
with some emphasis, as though to call Strange's attention to it. If his
young friend would give him the pleasure of taking a few lessons, they
could begin even now. It would while away the time on the voyage. He had
his own method of teaching, a method based on the Berlitz system, but not
borrowed from it, and, he ventured to say, possessing its own good
points. For example: _el tabaco--la pipa--los cigarillos. Que es esto?
Esto es la pipa_. Very simple. In a few weeks' time the pupil is carrying
on conversations.

It would be an incalculable advantage to Mr. Strange if he could enter on
his Argentine life with some command of the vernacular. It might even be
well to defer his search for permanent employment until he could have that
accomplishment to his credit. If he possessed a little money--even a very
little--Oh, he did? Then so much the better. He need not live on it
entirely, but it would be something to fall back on while getting the
rudiments of his education. In the mean time he could learn a little about
wool if he picked up jobs--Oh, very humble ones!--they were always to be
had by the young and able-bodied--at the Mercado Central, one of the great
wool-markets of the world. He could earn a few pesetas, acquire practical
experience, and fit himself out in Spanish, all at the same time.

And he could live with relative economy. Monsieur Durand could explain
that too. In fact, he might get board and lodging in the same house as
himself, with Mrs. Wilson who conducted a modest home for "gentlemen
only." Mrs. Wilson was a Protestant--what they called a Methodist, he
believed--but her house was clean, with a few flowers in the patio, very
different from the frightful conventillos in which the poor were obliged
to herd. If Mr. Strange thought it odd that he, Monsieur Durand, should be
living beneath a Protestant roof--well, there were reasons which were
difficult to explain.

Later on, perhaps, Mr. Strange might take a season on some great sheep
estancia out in the Camp, where there were thousands of herds that were
thousands strong. Monsieur Durand could help him in that too. He could
introduce him to wealthy proprietors whose sons he had taught. It would be
a hard life, but it need not be for long. He would live in a mud hut,
dirty, isolated, with no companionship but that of the Italian laborers
and their womenkind. But the outdoor existence would do him good; the air
over the pampas was like wine; and the food would not be as bad as he
might expect. There would be an abundance of excellent meat, chiefly
mutton, it was true, which when cooked _à_ la guacho--_carne concuero_,
they called it in the Camp--roasted in the skin so as to keep all the
juices in the meat--! A gesture of the hands, accompanied by a succulent
inspiration between the teeth, gave Strange to understand that there was
one mitigation at least to life on an Argentine estancia.

To come into actual contact with the sheep, to know Oxfords, Cheviots,
Leicesters, and Black-faced Downs, to assist at the feedings and washings
and doctorings and shearings, to follow the crossings and recrossings and
crossings again, that bred new varieties as if they were roses, to trace
the processes by which the Argentine pampas supply novel resources to the
European manufacturer, and the European manufacturer turns out the smart
young man of London or New York, with his air of wearing "the very
latest"--all this would not only give Strange a pleasing sense of being at
the root of things, but form a sort of apprenticeship to his trade.

       *       *       *       *       *

The men had not yet finished their hour of siesta, but Strange himself was
at work. Ten minutes were sufficient for his own snack, and he never
needed rest. Moreover, he was still too new to his position to do other
than glory in the fact that he was a free being, doing a man's work, and
earning a man's wage. Out in the Camp he had been too desolate to feel
that, but here in Buenos Aires, at the very moment when the great city was
waking to the knowledge of her queenship in the southern world--when the
commercial hordes of the north were sweeping down in thousands of ships
across the equator to outdo each other in her markets, it was an inspiring
thing merely to be alive and busy. He was as proud of Stephens and
Jarrott's long brick shed, where the sun beat pitilessly on the corrugated
iron roof, and the smell of wool nearly sickened him, as if it had been a
Rothschild's counting-house. His position there was just above the lowest;
but his enthusiasm was independent of trivial things like that. How could
he lounge about, taking siestas, when work was such a pleasure in itself?
The shed of which he had the oversight was a model of its kind, not so
much because his ambition designed to make it so, as because his ardor
could make it nothing else.

The roar of dock traffic through the open windows drowned everything but
the loudest sounds, so that busily working, he heard nothing, and paid no
attention, when some one stopped behind him. He had turned accidentally,
humming to himself in the sheer joy of his task, when the presence of the
stranger caused him to blush furiously beneath his tan. He drew himself
up, like a soldier to attention. He had never seen the head of the firm
that employed him, but he had heard a young Englishman describe him as
"looking like a wooden man just coming into life," so that he was enabled
to recognize him now. He did look something like a wooden man, in that the
long, lean face, of the tone of parchment, was marked by the few, deep,
almost perpendicular folds that give all the expression there is to a
Swiss or German medieval statue of a saint or warrior in painted oak. One
could see it was a face that rarely smiled, though there was plenty of
life in the deep-set, gray-blue eyes, together with a force of cautious,
reserved, and possibly timid, sympathy. Of the middle height and slender,
with hair just turning from iron-gray to gray, immaculate in white duck,
and wearing a dignified Panama, he stood looking at Strange--who, tall and
stalwart in his greasy overalls, held his head high in conscious pride in
his position in the shed--as Capital might look at Labor. It seemed a long
time before Mr Jarrott spoke--the natural harshness of his voice softened
by his quiet manner.

"You're in charge of this gang?"

"Yes, sir."

There was an embarrassed pause. As though not knowing what to say next,
Mr. Jarrott's gaze travelled down the length of the shed to where the
Italians, rubbing their sleepy eyes, were preparing for work again.

"You're an American, I believe?"

"Yes, sir."

"How old are you?"

"Not quite twenty-six."

"What's your name?"

"Herbert Strange!"

"Ah? One of the Stranges of Virginia?"

"No, sir."

There was another long pause, during which the older man's eyes wandered
once more over the shed and the piles of wool, coming back again to
Strange.

"You should pick up a little Spanish."

"I've been studying it. Hablo Español, pero no muy bien."

Mr. Jarrott looked at him for a minute in surprise.

"So much the better--tanto mejor," he said, after a brief pause, and
passed on.



VIII



He was again thinking how easy it had been, as he stood, more than three
years later, on the bluffs of Rosario, watching the sacks of wheat glide
down the long chute--full seventy feet--into the hold of the _Walmer
Castle_. The sturdy little Italians who carried the bags from the
warehouse in long single file might have been those he had superintended
in the wool-shed in Buenos Aires in the early stages of his rise. But he
was not superintending these. He superintended the superintendents of
those who superintended them. Tired with his long day in the office, he
had come out toward the end of the afternoon not only to get a breath of
the fresh air off the Parana, but to muse, as he often did, over the odd
spectacle of the neglected, half-forgotten Spanish settlement, that had
slumbered for two hundred years, waking to the sense of its destiny as a
factor of importance in the modern world. Wheat had created Chicago and
Winnipeg Adam-like from the ground; but it was rejuvenating Rosario de
Santa Fé Faust-like, with its golden elixir. It interested the man who
called himself Herbert Strange--resident manager of Stephens and Jarrott's
great wheat business in this outlet of the great wheat provinces--to watch
the impulse by which Decrepitude rose and shook itself into Youth. As yet
the process had scarcely advanced beyond the early stages of surprise.
The dome of the seventeenth-century Renaissance cathedral accustomed for
five or six generations to look down on low, one-storied Spanish dwellings
surrounding patios almost Moorish in their privacy, seemed to lift itself
in some astonishment over warehouses and flour-mills; while the mingling
of its sweet old bells with the creaking of cranes and the shrieks of
steam was like that chorus of the centuries in which there can be no
blending of the tones.

Strange felt himself so much a part of the rejuvenescence that the
incongruity gave him no mental nor æsthetic shock. If in his present
position he took a less naïve pride than in that of three years ago, he
was conscious none the less of a deep satisfaction in having his part,
however humble, in the exercise of the world's energies. It gave him a
sense of oneness with the great primal forces--with the river flowing
beneath him, two hundred miles to the Atlantic, with the wheat fields
stretching behind him to the confines of Brazil and the foothills of the
Andes--to be a moving element in this galvanizing of new life into the
dormant town, in this finding of new riches in the waiting earth. There
was, too, a kind of companionship in the steamers moored to the red buoys
in the river, waiting their turns to come up to the insufficient quays and
be loaded. They bore such names as _Devonshire_, _Ben Nevis_, and
_Princess of Wales_. They would go back to the countries where the speech
was English, and the ideals something like his own. They would go back,
above all, to the north, to the north that he yearned for with a yearning
to which time brought no mitigation, to the north which was coming to mean
for him what heaven means to a soul outside the scope of redemption.

It was only on occasions that this sentiment got possession of him
strongly. He was generally able to keep it down. Hard work, assisted by
his natural faculty for singleness of purpose and concentration of
attention, kept him from lifting the eyes of his heart toward the
unattainable. Moreover, he had developed an enthusiasm, genuine in its
way, for the land of his adoption. The elemental hugeness of its
characteristics--its rivers fifty to a hundred miles in width, its farms a
hundred thousand acres in extent, its sheep herds and cattle herds
thousands to the count--were of the kind to appeal to an ardent, strenuous
nature. There was an exhilarating sense of discovery in coming thus early
to one of the world's richest sources of supply at a minute when it was
only beginning to be tapped. Out in the Camp there was an impression of
fecundity, of earth and animal alike, that seem to relegate poverty and
its kindred ills to a past that would never return; while down in the Port
the growth of the city went on like the bursting of some magic, monstrous
flower. It was impossible not to share in some degree the pride of the
braggart Argentine.

It was difficult, too, not to love a country in which the way had been
made so smooth for him. While he knew that he brought to his work those
qualities most highly prized by men of business, he was astonished
nevertheless at the rapidity with which he climbed. Men of long experience
in the country had been more than once passed over, while he got the
promotion for which they had waited ten and fifteen years. He admired the
way in which for the most part they concealed their chagrin, but now and
then some one would give it utterance.

"Hello, grafter!" a little man had said to him, on the day when his
present appointment had become known among his colleagues.

The speaker was coming down the stairs of the head office in the Avenida
de Mayo as Strange was going up. His name was Green, and though he had
been twenty years in Argentine, he haled from Boston. Short and stout,
with gray hair, a gray complexion, a gray mustache, and wearing gray
flannels, with a gray felt hat, he produced a general impression of
neutrality. Strange would have gone on his way unheeding had not the
snarling tone arrested him. He had ignored this sort of insult more than
once; but he thought the time had come for ending it. He turned on an
upper step, looking down on the ashy-faced little man, to whom he had once
been subordinate and who was now subordinate to him.

"Hello--what?" he asked, with an air of quiet curiosity.

"I said, Hello, grafter," Green repeated, with bravado.

"Why?"

"I guess you know that as well as I do."

"I don't. What is it? Out with it. Fire away."

His tranquil air of strength had its effect in overawing the little man,
though the latter stood firm and began to explain.

"A grafter is a fellow with an underground pull for getting hold of what
belongs to some one else. At least that's what I understand by it--"

"It's very much what I understand by it, too. But have I ever got hold of
anything of yours?"

"Yes, confound you! You've taken my job--the job I've waited for ever
since 1885."

"Did waiting for it make it yours? If so, you would have come by it more
easily than I did. I worked for it."

"Worked for it? Haven't I worked for it, too? Haven't I been in this
office for going on seventeen years? Haven't I done what they've paid me
for--?"

"I dare say. But I've done twice what they've paid me for. That's the
secret of my pull, and I don't mind giving it away. You mayn't like
it--some fellows don't; but you'll admit it it's a pull you could have
had, as well as I. Look here, Green," he continued, in the same quiet
tone, "I'm sorry for you. If I were in your place, I dare say I should
feel as you do. But if I _were_ in your place, I'll be hanged if I
shouldn't make myself fit to get out of it. You're not fit--and that's the
only reason why you aren't going as resident manager to Rosario. You're
labelled with the year '1885,' as if you were a bottle of champagne--and
you've forgotten that champagne is a wine that gets out of date. You're a
good chap--quite as good as your position--but you're not better than your
position--and when you are you won't be left in it any longer."

In speaking in this way the man who had been Norrie Ford was consciously
doing violence to himself. His natural tendency was to be on friendly
terms with those around him, and he had no prompting stronger than the
liking to be liked. In normal conditions he was always glad to do a
kindness; and when he hurt any one's feelings he hurt his own still more.
Even now, though he felt justified in giving little Green to understand
his intoleration of impertinence, he was obliged to fortify himself by
appealing to his creed that he owed no consideration to any one. Little
Green was protected by a whole world organized in his defence; Norrie Ford
had been ruined by that world, while Herbert Strange had been born outside
it. With a temperament like that of a quiet mastiff, he was forced to turn
himself into something like a wolf.

In spite of the fact that little Green's account of the brief meeting on
the stairs presented it in the light of the castigation he had
administered to "that confounded upstart from nobody knows where," Strange
noticed that it made the clerks in the office, most of whom had been his
superiors as Green had been, less inclined to bark at his heels. He got
respect from them, even if he could not win popularity--and from
popularity, in any case, he had been shut out from the first. No man can
be popular who works harder than anybody else, shuns companionship, and
takes his rare amusements alone. He had been obliged to do all three,
knowing in advance that it would create for him a reputation of an "ugly
brute" in quarters whence he would have been glad to get good-will.

Finding the lack of popularity a safeguard not only against prying
curiosity, but against inadvertent self-betrayal, it was with some
misgiving that he saw his hermit-like seclusion threatened, as he rose
higher in the business and consequently in the social--scale. In the
English-speaking colony of Buenos Aires the one advance is likely to bring
about the other--especially in the case of a good-looking young man,
evidently bound to make his mark, and apparently of respectable
antecedents. The first menace of danger had come from Mr. Jarrott himself,
who had unexpectedly invited his intelligent employee to lunch with him at
a club, in order to talk over a commission with which Strange was to be
intrusted. On this occasion he was able to stammer his way out of the
invitation; but when later, Mr. Skinner, the second partner, made a like
proposal, he was caught without an excuse, being obliged, with some
confusion, to eat his meal in a fashionable restaurant in the Calle
Florida. Oddly enough, both his refusal on the one occasion and his
acceptance on the other obtained him credit with his elders and superiors,
as a modest young fellow, too shy to seize an honor, and embarrassed when
it was thrust upon him.

To Strange both occurrences were so alarming that he put himself into a
daily attitude of defence, fearing similar attack from Mr. Martin, the
third member of the firm. He, however, made no sign; and the bomb was
thrown by his wife. It came in the shape of a card informing Mr. Strange
that on a certain evening, a few weeks hence, Mrs. Martin would be at
home, at her residence in Hurlingham. It was briefly indicated that there
would be dancing, and he was requested to answer if he pleased. The
general information being engraved, his particular name was written in a
free bold hand, which he took to be that of one of the daughters of the
family.

Though he did his best to keep his head, there was everything in that bit
of pasteboard to throw him into a state of something like excitement. Not
only were the doors of the world Norrie Ford had known being thrown open
to Herbert Strange, but the one was being moved by the same thrill--the
thrill of the feminine--that had been so powerful with the other. He was
growing more susceptible to it in proportion as it seemed forbidden--just
as a man in a desert island may dream of the delights of wine.

He had looked at the Misses Martin, but had never supposed they could
fling a glance at him. He had seen them at the public gathering-places--in
their box at the opera, in the grand stand at the Jockey Club, in their
carriage at Palermo or in the Florida. They were handsome girls--blonde
and dashing--whose New York air was in pleasant contrast to the graceful
indolence or stolid repose of the dark-eyed ladies of the Argentine, too
heavily bejewelled and too consciously dressed according to the Paris
mode. Strange said of the Misses Martin, as he had said of Wild Olive,
that they were "not his type of girl"--but they were girls--they were
American girls--they were bright, lively girls, representing the very
poetry and romance of the world that had turned him out.

It was a foregone conclusion that he should decline their invitation, and
he did so; but the mere occasion for doing it gave his mind an impetus in
the direction in which he had been able hitherto to check it. He began
again to think of the feminine, to dream of it, to long for it. For the
time being it was the feminine in the abstract--without features or
personality. As far as it took form at all it was with the dainty,
nestling seductiveness that belonged to what he called his "type"--a charm
that had nothing in common with the forest grace of the Wild Olive or the
dash of the Misses Martin.

Now and then he caught glimpses of it, but it was generally out of reach.
Soft eyes, of the velvety kind that smote him most deliciously, would lift
their light upon him through the casement of some old Spanish residence,
or from the daily procession of carriages moving slowly along the palm
avenue at Palermo or in the Florida. When this happened he would have a
day or two of acting foolishly, in the manner of the Bonarense bucks. He
would stand for hours of his leisure time--if he could get away from the
office at the minute of the fashionable promenade--on the pavement of the
Florida, or under a palm-tree in the park, waiting for a particular
carriage to drive round again and again and again, while he returned the
sweet gaze which the manners of the country allow an unknown lady to
bestow, as a rose is allowed to shed its beauty. This being done, he
would go away, and realize that he had been making himself ridiculous.

Once the incarnation of his dreams came so near him that it was actually
within his grasp. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil dangled its
fruit right before his eyes in the person of Mademoiselle Hortense, who
sang at the Café Florian, while the clients, of whom he was sometimes one,
smoked and partook of refreshments. She was just the little round, soft,
dimpling, downy bundle of youth and love he so often saw in his mind's
eye, and so rarely in reality, and he was ready to fall in love with any
one. The mutual acquaintance was formed, as a matter of course, over the
piece of gold he threw into the tambourine, from which, as she passed from
table to table, she was able to measure her hearer's appreciation of art.
Those were the days in which he first began to be able to dress well, and
to have a little money to throw away. For ten days or a fortnight he threw
it away in considerable sums, being either in love or in a condition like
it. He respected Mademoiselle Hortense, and had sympathy with her in her
trials. She was desperately sick of her roving life as he was of Mrs.
Wilson's boarding-house. She was as eager to marry and settle down as he
to have a home. The subject was not exactly broached between them, but
they certainly talked round it. The decisive moment came on the night when
her troupe was to sail for Montevideo. In the most delicate way in the
world she gave him to understand that she would remain even at the
eleventh hour if he were to say the word. She might be on the deck, she
might be in her berth, and it still would not be too late. He left her at
nine, and she was to sail at eleven. During the two intervening hours he
paced the town, a prey to hopes, fears, temptations, distresses. To do him
justice, it was her broken heart he thought of, not his own. To him she
was only one of many possibilities; to her, he was the chance of a
lifetime. She might never, he said to himself, "fall into the clutches of
so decent a chap again." It was a wild wrestle between common sense and
folly--so wild that he was relieved to hear a clock strike eleven, and to
know she must have sailed.

The incident sobered him by showing him how near and how easily he could
come to a certain form of madness. After that he worked harder than ever,
and in the course of time got his appointment at Rosario. It was a great
"rise," not only in position and salary, but also in expectations. Mr.
Martin had been resident manager at Rosario before he was taken into
partnership--so who could tell what might happen next?

The first intimation of the change was conveyed by Mr. Jarrott in a manner
characteristically casual. Strange, being about to leave the private
office one day, after a consultation on some matter of secondary import,
was already half-way to the door, while Mr. Jarrott himself was stooping
to replace a book in the revolving bookcase that stood beside his chair.

"By-the-way," he said, without looking up, "Jenkins is going to represent
the house in New York. We think you had better take his place at Rosario."

Strange drew himself up to attention. He knew the old man liked his
subordinates to receive momentous orders as if they came in the routine of
the day.

"Very well, sir," he said, quietly, betraying no sign of his excitement
within. Raising himself, Mr. Jarrott looked about uneasily, as if trying
to find something else to say, while Strange began again to move toward
the door.

"And Mrs. Jarrott--"

Strange stopped so still that the senior partner paused with that air of
gentlemanly awkwardness--something like an Englishman's--which he took on
when he had firmly made up his mind.

"Mrs. Jarrott," he continued, "begs me to say she hopes you will--a--come
and lunch with us on Sunday next."

There was a long pause, during which the young man searched wildly for
some formula that would soften his point-blank refusal.

"Mrs. Jarrott is awfully kind," he began at last to stammer, "but if she
would excuse me--"

"She will expect you on Sunday at half-past twelve."

The words were uttered with that barely perceptible emphasis which, as the
whole house knew, implied that all had been said.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the end the luncheon was no formidable affair. Except for his fear,
lest it should be the thin edge of the wedge of that American social life
which it would be perilous for him to enter, he would have enjoyed this
peep into a comfortable home, after his long exile from anything of the
sort. In building his house at Palermo, Mr. Jarrott had kept, in the
outlines at least, to the old Spanish style of architecture, as being most
suited to the history and climate of the country, though the wealthy
Argentines themselves preferred to have their residences look--like their
dresses, jewels, and carriages--as if they had come from Paris. The
interior patio was spacious, shaded with vines, and gay with flowers,
while birds, caged or free, were singing everywhere. The rooms
surrounding it were airy and cool, and adapted to American standards of
comfort. In the dining-room mahogany, damask, crystal, and silver gave
Strange an odd feeling of having been wafted back to the days and usages
of the boyhood of Norrie Ford.

As the only guest he found himself seated on Mrs. Jarrott's right, and
opposite Miss Queenie Jarrott, the sister of the head of the house. The
host, as his manner was, spoke little. Miss Jarrott, too, only looked at
Strange across the table, smiling at him with her large, thin,
upward-curving smile, comic in spite of itself, and with a certain pathos,
since she meant it to be charged with sentiment. Over the party at table,
over the elderly men-servants who waited on them, over the room, over the
patio, there was--except for the singing of the birds--the hush that
belongs to a household that never hears the noise or the laughter of
youth.

Mrs. Jarrott took the brunt of the conversation on herself She was a
beautiful woman, faded now with the pallor that comes to northern people
after a long residence in the sub-tropical south, and languid from the
same cause. Her handsome hazel eyes looked as if they had been used to
weeping, though they conserved a brightness that imparted animation to her
face. A white frill round her throat gave the only relief to her plain
black dress, but she wore many handsome rings, after the Argentine fashion
as well as a brooch and earrings of black pearls.

She began by asking her guest if it was true, as Mr. Jarrott had informed
her, that he was not one of the Stranges of Virginia. She thought he must
be. It would be so odd if he wasn't. There _were_ Stranges in Virginia,
and had been for a great many generations. In fact, her own family, the
Colfaxes, had almost intermarried with them. When she said almost, she
meant that they had intermarried with the same families--the Yorkes, the
Endsleighs and the Poles. If Mr. Strange did belong to the Virginia
Stranges, she was sure they could find relatives in common. Oh, he didn't?
Well, it seemed really as if he must. If Mr. Strange came from New York,
he probably knew the Wrenns. Her own mother was a Wrenn. She had been Miss
Wrenn before she was Mrs. Colfax. He thought he had heard of them? Oh,
probably. They were well-known people--at least they had been in the old
days--though New York was so very much changed. She rarely went back there
now, the voyage was so long, but when she did she was quite bewildered.
Her own family used to be so conservative, keeping to a little circle of
relatives and friends that rarely went north of Boston or south of
Philadelphia; but now when she made them a visit she found them surrounded
by a lot of people who had never been heard of before. She thought it a
pity that in a country where there were so few distinctions, those which
existed shouldn't be observed.

It was a relief to Strange when the sweet, languorous monologue,
punctuated from time to time by a response from himself, or an
interjectory remark from one of the others, came to an end, and they
proceeded to the patio for coffee.

It was served in a corner shaded by flowering vines, and presided over by
a huge green and gray parrot in a cage. The host and hostess being denied
this form of refreshment took advantage of the moment to stroll arm in arm
around the court, leaving Miss Jarrott in tête-à-tête with Strange. He
noticed that as this lady led the way her figure was as lithe as a young
girl's and her walk singularly graceful. "No one is ever old with a
carriage like yours," Miss Jarrott had been told, and she believed it. She
dressed and talked according to her figure, and, had it not been for
features too heavily accentuated in nose and chin, she might have produced
an impression of eternal spring-tide. As it was, the comic papers would
have found her cruelly easy to caricature, had she been a statesman. The
parrot screamed at her approach, croaking out an air, slightly off the
key:

    "Up and down the ba-by goes,
    Turning out its lit-tle ..."

Tempted to lapse into prose, it proceeded to cry:

"Wa-al, Polly, how are you to-day? Wa-al, pretty well for an old gal,"
after which there was a minute of inarticulate grumbling. When coffee was
poured, and the young man's cigarette alight, Miss Jarrott seized the
opportunity which her sister-in-law's soft murmur at the table had not
allowed her.

"It's really funny you should be Mr. Strange, because I've known a young
lady of the same name. That is, I haven't known her exactly, but I've
known about her."

Not to show his irritation at the renewal of the subject, Strange presumed
she was one of the Stranges of Virginia, with right and title to be so
called.

"She is and she isn't," Miss Jarrot replied. "I know you'll think it funny
to hear me speak so; but I can't explain I'm like that. I can't always
explain. I say lots and lots of things that people just have to interpret
for themselves It's funny I should be like that, isn't it? I wonder why?
Can you tell me why? And this Miss Strange--I never knew her really--not
really--but I feel as if I had. I always feel that way about friends of
friends of mine. I feel as if they were my friends, too. I'd go through
fire and water for them. Of course that's just an expression but you know
what I mean, now don't you?"

Having been assured on that point, she continued:

"I'm afraid you'll find us a very quiet household, Mr. Strange, but we're
in mourning. That is, Mrs. Jarrott is in mourning; and when those dear to
me are in mourning I always feel that I'm in mourning, too. I'm like that.
I never can tell why it is, but--I'm like that. My sister-in-law has just
lost her sister-in-law. Of course that's no relation to me, is it? And yet
I feel as if it was. I've always called Mrs. Colfax my sister-in-law, and
I've taught her little girl to call me Aunt Queenie. They lived here once.
Mr. Colfax was Mrs. Jarrott's brother and Mr. Jarrott's partner. The
little girl was born here. It was a great loss to my brother when Mr.
Colfax died. Mrs. Colfax went back to New York and married again. That was
a blow, too; so we haven't been on the same friendly terms of late years.
But now I hope it will be different. I'm like that. I always hope. It's
funny, isn't it? No matter what happens, I always think there's a silver
lining to the cloud. Now, why should I be like that? Why shouldn't I
despair, like other people?"

Strange ventured the suggestion that she had been born with a joyous
temperament.

"Wa-al, pretty well for an old gal!" screamed the parrot ending in a
croaking laugh.

"I'm sure I don't know," Miss Jarrott mused. "Everybody is different,
don't you think? And yet it sometimes seems to me that no one can be so
different as I am. I always hope and hope; and you see, in this case I've
been justified. We're going to have our little girl again. She's coming to
make us a long, long visit. Her name is Evelyn; and once we get her here
we hope she'll stay. Who knows? There may be something to keep her here.
You never can tell about that. She's an orphan, with no one in the world
but a stepfather, and he's blind. So who has a better right to her? I
always think that people who have a right to other people should have
them, don't you? Besides, he's going to Wiesbaden, to a great oculist
there, so that Evelyn will come to us as her natural protectors. She's
nearly eighteen now, and she wasn't eight when she left us. Oh yes, of
course we've seen her since then--when we've gone to New York--but that
hasn't been often. She will have changed; she'll have her hair up, and be
wearing her dresses long; but I shall know her. Oh, you couldn't deceive
me. I never forget a face. I'm like that. No, nor names either. I should
remember you, Mr. Strange, if I met you fifty years from now. I noticed
you when you first began to work for Stephens and Jarrott. So did my
sister-in-law, but I noticed you first. We've often spoken of you,
especially after we knew your name was Strange. It seemed to us so
strange. That's a pun, isn't it? I often make them. We both thought you
were like what Henry--that's Mr. Jarrott's oldest son--might have grown
to, if he had been spared to us. We've had a great deal of sorrow--Oh, a
great deal! It's weaned my sister-in-law away from the world altogether.
She's like that. My brother, too--he isn't the same man. So when Evelyn
comes we hope we shall see you often, Mr. Strange. You must begin to look
on this house as your second home. Indeed, you must. It'll please my
brother. I've never heard him speak of any young man as he's spoken of
you. I think he sees the likeness to Henry. That'll be next year when
Evelyn comes. No, I'm sorry to say it isn't to be this year. She can't
leave her stepfather till he goes to Wiesbaden. Then she'll be free. Some
one else is going to Wiesbaden with him. And isn't it funny, it's the same
Miss Strange--the lady we were speaking of just now."

It was already some months since those words had been spoken, so that he
had ceased to dwell on them; but at first they haunted him like a snatch
of an air that passes through the mental hearing, and yet eludes the
attempt to bring it to the lips. Even if he had had the synthetic
imagination that easily puts two and two together, he had not the leisure,
in the excitement of his removal to Rosario and the undertaking of his
duties there, to follow up a set of clews that were scarcely more palpable
than odors. Nevertheless the words came back to him from time to time, and
always with the same odd suggestion of a meaning special--perhaps
fatal--to himself. They came back to him at this minute, as he stood
watching the loading of the _Walmer Castle_ and breathing the fresh air
off the Parana. But if they threatened danger, it was a danger that
disappeared the instant he turned and faced it--leaving nothing behind but
the evanescent memory of a memory, such as will sometimes remain from a
dream about a dream.



IX



Another year had passed before he learned what Miss Jarrott's words were
to mean to him. Knowledge came then as a flash of revelation in which he
saw himself and his limitations clearly defined. His success at Rosario
had been such that he had begun to think himself master of Fate; but Fate
in half an hour laughingly showed herself mistress of him.

He had been called to Buenos Aires on an errand of piety and affection--to
bury Monsieur Durand. The poor old unfrocked priest had been gathered to
his rest, taking his secret with him--penitent, reconciled to the Church,
and fortified with the Last Sacraments. Strange slipped a crucifix between
the wax-like fingers, and followed--the only mourner--to the Recoleta
Cemetery.

Having ordered a cross to mark the grave, he remained in town a day or two
longer to attend to a small matter which for some time past he had at
heart and on his conscience. It was now three or four years since he had
set aside the sum lent him by the girl for whom he had still no other name
than that of the Wild Olive. He had invested it, and reinvested it, till
it had become a fund of some importance. Putting it now into the safest
American securities, he placed them in the hands of a firm of English
solicitors in Buenos Aires, with directions not only to invest the
interest from time to time, but--in the event of his death--to follow
certain sealed instructions with which also he intrusted them. From the
few hints he was able to give them in this way he had little doubt but
that her identity could be discovered, and the loan returned.

In taking these steps he could not but see that what would be feasible in
case of his death must be equally feasible now; but he had two reasons for
not attempting it. The first was definite and prudential. He was unwilling
to risk anything that could connect him ever so indirectly with the life
of Norrie Ford. Secondly, he was conscious of a vague shrinking from the
payment of this debt otherwise than face to face. Apart from
considerations of safety, he was unwilling to resort to the commonplace
channels of business as long as there was a possibility of taking another
way.

Not that he was eager to see her again. He had questioned himself on that
point, and knew she had faded from his memory. Except for a vision of
fugitive dark eyes--eyes of Beatrice Cenci--he could scarcely recall her
features. Events during the last six years had pressed so fast on each
other, life had been so full, so ardent, each minute had been so insistent
that he should give it his whole soul's attention, that the antecedent
past was gone like the passion no effort can recapture. As far as he could
see her face at all, it looked at him out of an abyss of oblivion to which
his mind found it as hard to travel back as a man's imagination to his
infancy.

It was with some shame that he admitted this. She had saved him--in a
sense, she had created him. By her sorcery she had raised up Herbert
Strange out of the ruin of Norrie Ford, and endowed him with young vigor.
He owed her everything. He had told her so. He had vowed his life to her.
It was to be hers to dispose of, even at her caprice. It was what he had
meant in uttering his parting words to her. But, now, that he had the
power in some degree, he was doing nothing to fulfil his promise. He had
even lost the desire to make the promise good.

It was not difficult to find excuses for himself. They were ready-made to
his hand. There was nothing practical that he could do except what he had
done about the money. Life was not over yet; and some day the chance might
come to prove himself as high-souled as he should like to be. If he could
only have been surer that he was inwardly sincere he would not have been
uneasy over his inactivity.

Then, within a few minutes, the thing happened that placed him in a new
attitude, not only toward the Wild Olive, but toward all life.

Business with the head office detained him in Buenos Aires longer than he
had expected. It was business of a few hours at a time, leaving him
leisure for the theatres and the opera, for strollings at Palermo, and for
standing stock-still watching the procession of carriages in the Florida
or the Avenida Sarmiento, in the good Bonarense fashion. He was always
alone, for he had acquired the art--none too easy--of taking pleasure
without sharing it.

So he found himself, one bright afternoon, watching the races from the
lawn of the Hipodromo of the Jockey Club. He was fond of horses, and he
liked a good race. When he went to the Hipodromo it was for the sporting,
not the social, aspect of the affair. Nevertheless, as he strolled about,
he watched for that occasional velvety glance that gave him pleasure, and
amused himself with the types seated around him, or crossing his
path--heavy, swarthy Argentines, looking like Italian laborers grown
rich--their heavy, swarthy wives, come out to display all the jewels that
could be conveniently worn at once--pretty, dark-eyed girls, already with
a fatal tendency to embonpoint, wearing diamonds in their ears and round
their necks as an added glory to costumes fresh from the rue de la
Paix--grave little boys, in gloves and patent-leather boots, seated
without budging by their mammas, sucking the tops of their canes in
imitation of their elder brothers, who wandered about in pairs or groups,
all of the latest cut, eying the ladies but rarely addressing them--tall
Englishmen, who looked taller than they were in contrast to the pudgy race
around them, as the Germans looked lighter and the French more
blond--Italian opera singers, Parisian actresses Spanish dancers,
music-hall soubrettes--diplomats of all nations--clerks out for a
holiday--sailors on shore--tourists come to profit by a spectacle that has
no equal in the southern world, and little of the kind that is more
amusing in the north.

As Strange's glance roamed about in search of a response he not
infrequently received it, for he was a handsome fellow by this time--tall,
well dressed, and well set up, his trim, fair beard emphasizing the
clear-cut regularity of his profile, without concealing the kindliness
that played about the mouth. A little gray on the temples, as well as a
few tiny wrinkles of concentration about the eyes, gave him an air of
maturity beyond his age of thirty-two. The Anglo-Saxon influence in the
Argentine is English--from which cause he had insensibly taken on an
English air, as his speech had acquired something of the English
intonation. He was often told that he might pass for an Englishman
anywhere, and he was glad to think so. It was a reason the less for being
identified as Norrie Ford. It sometimes seemed to him that he could, in
case of necessity, go back to North America, to New York, to Greenport, or
even to the little county town where he had been tried and sentenced to
death, and run no risk of detection.

       *       *       *       *       *

The staring of other men first directed his attention toward her. She was
sitting slightly detached from the party of Americans to whom she clearly
belonged, and in which the Misses Martin formed the merrily noisy centre.
Though dressed in white, that fell softly about her feet, and trained on
the grass sidewise from her chair, her black cuffs, collar and hat
suggested the last days of mourning. Whether or not she was aware of the
gaze of the passers-by it was difficult to guess, for her air of demure
simplicity was proof against penetration. She was one of those dainty
little creatures who seem to see best with the eyes downcast; but when she
lifted her dark lashes, the darker from contrast with the golden hair, to
sweep heaven and earth in a blue glance that belonged less to scrutiny
than to prayer, the effort seemed to create a shyness causing the lids,
dusky as some flowers are, to drop heavily into place again, like curtains
over a masterpiece. It was so that they rose and fell before Strange, her
eyes meeting his in a look that no Argentine beauty could ever have
bestowed, in that it was free from coquetry or intention, and wholly
accidental.

It was in fact this accidental element, with its lack of preparation, that
gave the electric thrill to both. That is to say, in Strange the thrill
was electric; as for her, she gave no sign further than that she opened
her parasol and raised it to shade her face. Having done this she
continued to sit in undisturbed composure, though she probably saw
through her fringing lashes that the tall, good-looking young man still
stood spellbound, not twenty yards away.

Strange, on his part, was aware of the unconventionality of his behavior,
though he was incapable of moving on. He felt the occasion to be one which
justified him in transcending the established rules of courtesy. He was
face to face with the being who met not only all the longings of his
earthly love, but the higher, purer aspirations that accompanied it. It
was not, so he said to himself, a chance meeting; it was one which the
ages had prepared, and led him up to. She was "his type of girl" only in
so far as she distilled the essence of his gross imaginings and gave them
in their exquisite reality. So, too, she was the incarnation of his dreams
only because he had yearned for something mundane of which she was the
celestial, and the true, embodiment. He had that sense of the
insufficiency of his own powers of preconception which comes to a blind
man when he gets his sight and sees a rose.

He was so lost in the wonder of the vision that he had to be awakened as
from a trance when Miss Jarrott, very young and graceful, crossed the lawn
and held out her hand.

"Mr. Strange! I didn't know you were in town. My brother never mentioned
it. He's like that. He never tells. If I didn't guess his thoughts, I
shouldn't know anything. But I always guess people's thoughts. Why do you
suppose it is? I don't know. Do you? When I see people, I can tell what
they're thinking of as well as anything. I'm like that; but I can't tell
how I do it. I saw you from over there, and I knew you were thinking about
Evelyn. Now weren't you? Oh, you can't deceive me. You were thinking of
her just as plain--! Well, now you must come and be introduced."

He felt that he stumbled blindly as he crossed the bit of greensward in
Miss Jarrott's wake; and yet he kept his head sufficiently to know that he
was breaking his rules, contradicting his past, and putting himself in
peril. In being presented to the Misses Martin and their group, he was
actually entering that Organized Society to which Herbert Strange had no
attachments, and in which he could thrust down no roots. By sheer force of
will he might keep a footing there, as a plant that cannot strike into the
soil may cling to a bare rock. All the same the attempt would be
dangerous, and might easily lead to his being swept away.

It was in full consciousness, therefore, of the revolution in his life
that he bowed before the Misses Martin, who received him coldly. He had
not come to their dance, nor "called," nor shown them any of the
civilities they were accustomed to look for from young men. Turning their
attention at once to the other gentlemen about them, they made no effort
to detain him as Miss Jarrott led him to Miss Colfax.

Here the introduction would have been disappointing if the greatness of
the event had not been independent of the details with which it happened.
Strange was not in a condition to notice them, any more than a soul can
heed the formalities with which it is admitted into heaven. Nearly all his
impressions were subconscious--to be brought to the surface and dwelt on
after he went away. It was thus he recorded the facts relating to the gold
tint--the _teint doré_--of her complexion, the curl of her lashes that
seemed to him deep chestnut rather than quite black, as well as the little
tremor about her mouth, which was pensive in repose, and yet smiled with
the unreserved sweetness of an infant. He could not be said to have taken
in any of these points at a glance; but they came to him later, vividly,
enchantingly, in the solitude of his room at the Phoenix Hotel.

What actually passed would have been commonplace in itself had it not been
for what lay behind. Miss Colfax acknowledged the introduction with a
fleeting smile and a quick lifting of the curtains of her eyes. He did not
need that glimpse to know that they were blue, but he got a throb of bliss
from it, as does one from the gleam of a sunlit sea. To her answers to the
questions he asked as to when she had arrived, how she liked the
Argentine, and what she thought of the Hipodromo, he listened less than to
the silvery timbre of her voice. Mere words were as unimportant to those
first minutes of subtle ecstasy as to an old Italian opera. The music was
the thing, and for that he had become one enraptured auditory nerve.

There was no chair for him, so that he was obliged to carry on the
conversation standing. He did not object to this, as it would give him an
excuse for passing on. That he was eager to go, to be alone, to think, to
feel, to suffer, to realize, to trace step by step the minutes of the day
till they had led him to the supreme instant when his eyes had fallen on
her, to take the succeeding seconds one by one and extract the
significance from each, was proof of the power of the spell that had been
cast upon him.

"And isn't it funny, Evie, dear," Miss Jarrott began, just as he was about
to take his leave, "that Mr. Strange's name should be--"

"Yes, I've been thinking about that," Miss Colfax fluted, with that pretty
way she had of speaking with little movement of the lips.

But he was gone. He was gone with those broken sentences ringing in his
ears--casual and yet haunting--meaningless and yet more than
pregnant--creeping through the magic music of the afternoon, as a
death-motive breathes in a love-chant.



X



After a night of little sleep and much thinking he determined to listen to
nothing but the love-chant. He came to this decision, not in the
recklessness of self-will, but after due consideration of his rights. It
was true that, in biblical phrase, necessity was laid upon him. He could
no more shut his ears against that entrancing song than he could shut his
eyes against the daylight. This was not, however, the argument that he
found most cogent, as it was not the impulse from which he meant to act.
If he could make this girl his wife it would be something more than a case
of getting his own way; it would be an instance--probably the highest
instance--of the assertion of himself against a world organized to destroy
him. He could not enter that world and form a part of it; but at least he
could carry off a wife from it, as a lion may leap into a sheepfold and
snatch a lamb.

It was in this light that he viewed the matter when he accepted Miss
Jarrott's invitations--now to lunch, now to dinner, now to a seat in their
box at the opera or in their carriage in the park--during the rest of the
time he remained in town. It became clear to him that the family viewed
with approval the attachment that had sprung up between Miss Colfax and
himself, and were helping it to a happy ending. He even became aware that
they were growing fond of him--making the discovery with a queer
sensation of surprise. It was a thing so new in his experience that he
would have treated the notion as ridiculous had it not been forced upon
him. Women had shown him favors; one lonely old man, now lying in the
Recoleta Cemetery, had yearned over him; but a household had never opened
its heart to him before. And yet there could be no other reading of the
present situation. He began to think that Mr. Jarrott was delaying his
departure for Rosario purposely, to keep him near. It was certain that
into the old man's bearing toward him there had crept something that might
almost be called paternal, so that their business discussions were much
like those between father and son. Mrs. Jarrott advanced as far out of the
circle of her griefs to welcome him as it was possible for her languorous
spirit to emerge. Miss Jarrott, friendly from the first, attached him to
the wheels of her social chariot with an air of affectionate possession.

It required no great amount of perspicuity to see that the three elders
would be glad if Miss Colfax and he were to "make a match of it," and why.
It would be a means--and a means they could approve--of keeping their
little girl among them. As matters stood, she was only a visitor, who
spoke of her flight back to New York as a matter of course.

"I only came," she lisped to Strange, as they sat one day, under the
parrot's chaperonage, in the shady corner of the patio--"I only came
because when dear mamma died there was nothing else for me to do.
Everything happened so unfortunately, do you see? Mamma died, and my
stepfather went blind, and really I had no home. Of course that doesn't
matter so much while I'm in mourning--I mean, not having a home--but I
simply _must_ go back to New York next autumn, in order to 'come out.'"

[Illustration: "Who is Miriam?" was on his lips]

"Aren't you 'out' enough already?"

"Do you see?" she began to explain, with the quaint air of practical
wisdom he adored in her, "I'm not out at all--and I'm nearly nineteen.
Dear mamma fretted over it as it was--and if she knew it hadn't been done
yet--Well something must be managed, but I don't know what. It isn't as if
Miriam could do anything about it, though she's a great deal older than I
am, and has seen a lot of social life at Washington and in England. But
she's out of the question. Dear mamma would never have allowed it. And
she's no relation to me, besides."

The question, "Who is Miriam?" was on his lips, but he checked it in time.
He checked all questions as to her relatives and friends whom he did not
know already. He was purposely making ignorance his bliss as long as
possible, in the hope that before enlightenment could be forced upon him
it would be too late for any one to recede.

"Couldn't they do it for you here?" he asked, when he was sure of what he
meant to say. "I know the Miss Martins--"

"Carrie and Ethel! Oh, well! That isn't quite the same thing. _I_ couldn't
come out in a place like Buenos Aires--or anywhere, except New York."

"But when you've been through it all, you'll come back here, won't you?"

His eyes sought hers, but he saw only the curtains of the lids--those lids
with the curious dusk on them, which reminded him of the petals of certain
pansies.

"That'll--depend," she said, after a minute's hesitation.

"It'll depend--on what?" he persisted, softly.

Before she could answer the parrot interrupted, screaming out a bit of
doggerel in its hoarse staccato.

"Oh, that bird!" the girl cried, springing up. "I do wish some one would
wring its neck."

He got no nearer to his point that day, and perhaps he was not eager to.
The present situation, with its excitements and uncertainties, was too
blissful to bring to a sudden end. Besides, he was obliged to go through
some further rehearsing of the creed adopted in the dawn on Lake Champlain
before his self-justification could be complete. It was not that he was
questioning his right to act; it was only that he needed to strengthen the
chain of arguments by which his action must be supported--against himself.
Within his own heart there was something that pleaded against the breaking
off of this tender sprig of the true olive to graft it on the wild, in
addition to which the attitude of the Jarrott family disconcerted him. It
was one thing to push his rights against a world ready to deny them, but
it was quite another to take advantage of a trusting affection that came
more than half-way to meet him. His mind refused to imagine what they
would do if they could know that behind the origin of Herbert Strange
there lay the history of Norrie Ford. After all, he was not concerned with
them, he asserted inwardly, but with himself. They were intrenched within
a world able to take care of itself; while there was no power whatever to
protect him, once he made a mistake.

So every night, as he sat in his cheerless hotel room, he reviewed his
arguments, testing them one by one, strengthening the weak spots according
to his lights, and weighing the for and against with all the nicety he
could command. On the one side were love, happiness, position, a home,
children probably, and whatever else the normal, healthy nature craves;
on the other, loneliness, abnegation, crucifixion, slow torture, and
slower death. Was it just to himself to choose the latter, simply because
human law had made a mistake and put him outside the human race? The
answer was obvious enough; but while his intelligence made it promptly,
something else within him--some illogical emotion--seemed to lag behind
with its corroboration.

This hesitation of his entire being to respond to the bugle-call of his
need gave to his wooing a certain irregularity--an advance and recession
like that of the tide. At the very instant when the words of declaration
were trembling on his lips this doubt about himself would check him. There
were minutes--moonlit minutes, in the patio, when the birds were hushed,
and the scent of flowers heavy, and the voices of the older ones stole
from some lighted room like a soft, human obligato to the melody of the
night--minutes when he felt that to his "I love you!" hers would come as
surely as the echo to the sound; and yet he shrank from saying it. Their
talk would drift near to it, dally with it, flash about it, play attack
and defence across it, and drift away again, leaving the essential thing
unspoken. The skill with which she fenced with this most fragile of all
topics, never losing her guard, never missing her thrust or parry, and yet
never inflicting anything like a wound, filled him with a sort of rapture.
It united the innocence of a child to the cleverness of a woman of the
world, giving an exquisite piquancy to both. In this young creature, who
could have had no experience of anything of the kind, it was the very
essence of the feminine.

By dint of vigil and meditation he drew the conclusion that his inner
hesitancy sprang from the fact that he was not being honest with himself.
He was shirking knowledge that he ought to face. Up to the present he had
done his duty in that respect, and done it pluckily. He had not balked at
the statement that his rôle in the world was that of an impostor--though
an impostor of the world's own creation. It had been part of the task
forced upon him "to deceive men under their very noses," as he had
expressed it to himself that night on Lake Champlain. Whatever vengeance,
therefore, discovery might call upon him, he could suffer nothing in the
loss of self-respect. He would be always supported by his inner approval.
Remorse would be as alien to him as to Prometheus on the rock.

In the present situation he was less sure of that, and there he put his
finger on his weakness. Seeing shadows flitting in the background he
dodged them, instead of calling them out into daylight. He was counting on
happy chances in dealing with the unforeseen, when all his moves should be
based on the precise information of a general.

Therefore, when, in the corner of the patio, the next opportunity arose
for asking the question, "Who is Miriam?" he brought it out boldly.

"She's a darling." The unexpected reply was accompanied by a sudden
lifting of the lashes for a rapturous look and one of the flashing smiles.

"That's high praise--from you."

"She deserves it--from any one!"

"Why? What for? What has she done to win your enthusiasm when other people
find it so hard?"

"It isn't so hard--only some people go the wrong way to work about it, do
you see?"

She leaned back in her wicker chair, fanning herself slowly, and smiling
at him with that air of mingled innocence and provocation which he found
the most captivating of her charms.

"Do I?" he was tempted to ask.

"Do you? Now, let me think. Really, I never noticed. You'd have to begin
all over again--if you ever did begin--before I could venture an opinion."

This was pretty, but it was not keeping to the point.

"Evidently Miriam knows how to do it, and when I see her I shall ask her."

"I wish you _could_ see her. You'd adore her. She'd be just your style."

"What makes you think that? Is she so beautiful? What is she like?"

"Oh, I couldn't tell you what she's like. You'd have to see her for
yourself. No, I don't think I should call her beautiful, though some
people do. She's awfully attractive anyhow."

"Attractive? In what way?"

"Oh, in a lot of ways. She isn't like anybody else. She's in a class by
herself. In fact, she has to be, poor thing."

"Why should she be poor thing, with so much to her credit in the way of
assets?"

"Do you see?--that's something I can't tell you. There's a sort of mystery
about her. I'm not sure that I understand it very well myself. I only know
that dear mamma didn't feel that she could take her out, in New York,
except among our very most intimate friends, where it didn't matter. And
yet when Lady Bonchurch took her to Washington she got a lot of offers--I
know that for a fact--and in England, too."

"I seem to be getting deeper in," Strange smiled, with the necessary air
of speaking carelessly. "Who is Lady Bonchurch?"

"Don't you know? Why, I thought you knew everything. She was the wife of
the British Ambassador. They took a house at Greenport that year because
they were afraid about Lord Bonchurch's lungs. It didn't do any good,
though. He had to give up his post the next winter, and not long after
that he died. I don't think air is much good for people's lungs, do you? I
know it wasn't any help to dear mamma. We had all those tedious years at
Greenport, and in the end--but that's how we came to know Lady Bonchurch,
and she took a great fancy to Miriam. She said it was a shame a girl like
that shouldn't have a chance, and so it was. Mamma thought she interfered
and I suppose she did. Still, you can't blame her much, when she had no
children of her own, can you?"

"I shouldn't want to blame her if she gave Miriam her chance."

"That's what I've always said. And if Miriam had only wanted to, she could
have been--well, almost anybody. She had offers and offers in Washington,
and in England there was a Sir Somebody-or-other who asked her two or
three times over. He married an actress in the end--and dear mamma thought
Miriam must be crazy not to have taken him while he was to be had. Dear
mamma said it would have been such a good thing for me to have some one
like Miriam--who was under obligations to us, do you see?--in a good
social position abroad."

"But Miriam didn't see it in that way?"

"She didn't see it in any way. She's terribly exasperating in some
respects, although she's such a dear. Poor mamma used to be very tried
about her--and she so ill--and my stepfather going blind--and everything.
If Miriam had only been in a good social position abroad it would have
been a place for me to go--instead of having no home--like this."

There was something so touching in her manner that he found it difficult
not to offer her a home there and then; but the shadows were marching out
into daylight, and he must watch the procession to the end.

"It seems to have been very inconsiderate of Miriam," he said. "But why do
you suppose she acted so?"

"Dear mamma thought she was in love with some one--some one we didn't know
anything about--but I never believed that. In the first place, she didn't
know any one we didn't know anything about--not before she went to
Washington with Lady Bonchurch. And besides, she couldn't be in love with
any one without my knowing it, now could she?"

"I suppose not; unless she made up her mind she wouldn't tell you."

"Oh, I shouldn't want her to tell me. I should see it for myself. She
wouldn't tell me, in any case--not till things had gone so far that--but I
never noticed the least sign of it, do you see? and I've a pretty sharp
eye for that sort of thing at all times. There was just one thing. Dear
mamma used to say that for a while she used to do a good deal of moping in
a little studio she had, up in the hills near our house--but you couldn't
tell anything from that. I've gone and moped there myself when I've felt I
wanted a good cry--and I wasn't in love with any one."

There was a long silence, during which he sat grave, motionless,
reflecting. Now and then he placed his extinguished cigarette to his
lips, with the mechanical motion of a man forgetful of time and place and
circumstance.

"Well, what are you thinking about?" she inquired, when the pause had
lasted long enough. He seemed to wake with a start.

"Oh--I--I don't know. I rather fancy I was thinking about--about this
Miss--after all, you haven't given me any name but Miriam."

"Strange, her name is. The same as yours."

"Oh? You've never told me that."

"Aunt Queenie has, though. But you always seem to shuffle so when it's
mentioned that I've let it alone. I don't blame you, either; for if
there's one thing more tedious than another, it's having people for ever
fussing about your name. There was a girl at our school whose name was
Fidgett--Jessie Fidgett--a nice, quiet girl, as placid as a church--but I
do assure you, it got to be so tiresome--well, you know how it would
be--and so I decided I wouldn't say anything about Miriam's name to you,
nor about yours to her. Goodness knows, there must be lots of Stranges in
the world--just as much as Jarrotts."

"So that--after all--her name was Miriam Strange."

"It was, and is, and always will be--if she goes on like this," Miss
Colfax rejoined, not noticing that he had spoken half-musingly to himself.
"She was a ward of my step-father's till she came of age," she added, in
an explanatory tone. "She's a sort of Canadian--or half a Canadian--or
something--I never could quite make out what. Anyhow, she's a dear. She's
gone now with my stepfather to Wiesbaden, about his eyes--and you can't
think what a relief to me it is. If she hadn't, I might have had to go
myself--and at my age--with all I've got to think about--and my coming
out--Well, you can see how it would be."

She lifted such sweet blue eyes upon him that he would have seen anything
she wanted him to see, if he had not been determined to push his inquiries
until there was nothing left for him to learn.

"Were you fond of him?--your stepfather?"

"Of course--in a way. But everything was so unfortunate I know dear mamma
thought she was acting for the best when she married him; and if he hadn't
begun to go blind almost immediately--But he was very kind to mamma, when
she had to go to the Adirondacks for her health. That was very soon after
she returned to New York from here--when papa died. But she was so lonely
in the Adirondacks--and he was a judge--a Mr. Wayne--with a good
position--and naturally she never dreamed he had anything the matter with
his eyes--it isn't the sort of thing you'd ever think of asking about
beforehand--and so it all happened that way, do you see?"

He did see. He could have wished not to see so clearly. He saw with a
light that dazzled him. Any step would be hazardous now, except one in
retreat; though he was careful to explain to himself that night that it
was retreat for reconnoitre, and not for running away. The mere fact that
the Wild Olive had taken on personality, with a place of some sort in the
world, brought her near to him again; while the knowledge that he bore her
name--possibly her father's name--seemed to make him the creation of her
magic to an even greater degree than he had felt hitherto. He could
perceive, too, that by living out the suggestions she had made to him in
the cabin--the Argentine--Stephens and Jarrott--"the very good firm to
work for"--he had never got beyond her influence, no more than the
oak-tree gets beyond the acorn that has been its seed. The perception of
these things would have been enough to puzzle a mind not easily at home in
the complex, even if the reintroduction of Judge Wayne had not confused
him further.

It was not astonishing, therefore, that he was seized with a sudden
longing to get away--a longing for space and solitude, for the pampas and
the rivers, and, above all, for work. In the free air his spirit would
throw off its oppression of discomfort, while in a daily routine of
occupation he often found that difficulties solved themselves.

"If you think that this business of Kent's can get along without me now,"
he said to Mr. Jarrott, in the private office, next morning, "perhaps I
had better be getting back to Rosario."

Not a muscle moved in the old man's long, wooden face, but the gray-blue
eyes threw Strange a curious look.

"Do you want to go?" he asked, after a slight pause.

Strange smiled, with an embarrassment that did not escape observation.

"I've been away longer than I expected--a good deal longer. Things must
want looking after, I suppose. Green can take my place for a while, but--"

"Green is doing very well--better than I thought he could. He seems to
have taken a new start, that man."

"I'm not used to loafing, sir. If there's no particular reason for my
staying on here--"

Mr. Jarrott fitted the tips of his fingers together, and answered slowly.

"There's no particular reason--just now. We've been speaking
of--of--a--certain changes--But it's too soon--"

"Of course, sir, I don't want to urge my private wishes against--"

"Quite so; quite so; I understand that. A--a--private wishes, you say?"

"Yes, sir; entirely private."

The gray-blue eyes rested on him in a gaze meant to be uninquisitive and
non-committal, but which, as a matter of fact, expressed something from
which Strange turned his own glance away.

"Very well; I'd go," the old man said, quietly.

Strange left his cards that afternoon at the house just when he knew Mrs.
Jarrott would be resting and Miss Jarrott driving with Miss Colfax. At
seven he took the night boat up the Plata to the Parana.



XI



"Evie, what do you think made Mr. Strange rush away like that? Your uncle
says he didn't have to--that he might just as well have stayed in town."

"I'm sure I don't know," was Evie's truthful response, as she flitted
about the dining-room table arranging the flowers before luncheon.

"Your uncle thinks you do," Mrs. Jarrott said, leaning languidly back in
an arm-chair. Her tone and manner implied that the matter had nothing to
do with her, though she was willing to speak of it. This was as far as she
could come to showing an interest in anything outside herself since the
boys died. She would not have brought up the subject now if the girl's
pallor during the last few days had not made them uneasy.

"I haven't the least idea," Miss Colfax declared. "I was just as much
surprised as you were, Aunt Helen."

"Your uncle thinks you must have said something to him--"

"I didn't. I didn't say anything to him whatever. Why should I? He's
nothing to me."

"Of course he's nothing to you, if you're engaged to Billy Merrow."

Miss Colfax leaned across the table, taking a longer time than necessary
to give its value to a certain rose.

"I'm not engaged to him now," she said, as if after reflection--"not in
my own mind, that is."

"But you are in his, I suppose."

"Well, I can't help that, can I?"

"Not unless you write and tell him it's all over."

Miss Colfax stood still, a large red flower raised in protestation.

"That would be the cruellest thing I ever heard of," she exclaimed, with
conviction. "I don't see how you can bear to make the suggestion."

"Then what are you going to do about it?"

"I needn't do anything just yet. There's no hurry--till I get back to New
York."

"Do you mean to let him go on thinking--?"

"He'd much rather. Whenever I tell him, it will be too soon for him.
There's no reason why he should know earlier than he wants to."

"But is that honor, dear?"

"How can I tell?" At so unreasonable a question the blue eyes clouded with
threatening tears. "I can't go into all those fine points, Aunt Helen, do
you see? I've just got to do what's right."

Mrs. Jarrot rose with an air of helplessness. She loved her brother's
daughter tenderly enough, but she admitted to herself that she did not
understand young girls. Having borne only sons, she had never been called
upon to struggle with the baffling.

"I hope you're not going to tell any one, Aunt Helen," Evie begged, as
Mrs. Jarrott seemed about to leave the room. "I shouldn't want Uncle
Jarrott to know, or Aunt Queenie, either."

"I shall certainly spare them," Mrs. Jarrott said, with what for her was
asperity. "They would be surprised, to say the least, after the
encouragement you gave Mr. Strange."

"I didn't give it--he took it. I couldn't stop him."

"Did you want to?"

"I thought of it--sometimes--till I gave up being engaged to Billy."

"And having passed that mental crisis, I suppose it didn't matter."

"Well, the mental crisis, as you call it, left me free. I sha'n't have to
reproach myself--"

"No; Mr. Merrow will do that for you."

"Of course he will. I expect him to. It would be very queer if he didn't.
I shall have a dreadful time making him see things my way. And with all
that hanging over me, I should think I might look for a little sympathy
from you, Aunt Helen. Lots of girls wouldn't have said anything about it.
But I told you because I want you to see I'm perfectly straight and
above-board."

Mrs. Jarrott said no more for the moment, but later in the day she
confided to her husband that the girl puzzled her. "She mixes me up so
that I don't know which of us is talking sense." She was not at all sure
that Evie was fretting about Mr. Strange--though she might be. If she
wasn't, then she couldn't be well. That was the only explanation of her
depression and loss of appetite.

"You can bet your life he's thinking of her," Mr. Jarrott said, with the
lapse from colloquial dignity he permitted himself when he got into his
house-jacket. "He's praying to her image as if it was a wooden saint."

With the omission of the word wooden this was much what Strange was doing
at Rosario. Not venturing--in view of all the circumstances--to write to
her, he could only erect a shrine in his heart, and serve it with a
devotion very few saints enjoy. He found, however, that absence from her
did not enable him to form detached and impartial opinions on his
situation, just as work brought no subconsciously reached solution to the
problems he had to face. In these respects he was disappointed in the
results of his unnecessary flight from town.

At the end of two months he was still mentally where he was when he left
Buenos Aires. His intelligence assured him that he had the right of a man
who has no rights to seize and carry off what he can; while that nameless
something else within him refused to ratify the statement. What precise
part of him raised this obstacle he was at a loss to guess. It could not
be his conscience, since he had been free of conscience ever since the
night on Lake Champlain. Still less could it be his heart, seeing that his
heart was crying out for Evie Colfax more fiercely than a lion roars for
food. The paralysis of his judgment had become such that he was fast
approaching the determination to make Love the only arbiter, and let all
the rest go hang!

He was encouraged in this impulse by the thought that between her and
himself there was the mysterious bond of something "meant." He believed
vaguely in a Power, which, with designs as to human destinies, manifests
its intentions by fitful gleams, vouchsafed somewhat erratically. In this
way Evie Colfax, as a beautiful, fairy-like child, had been revealed to
him at the most critical instant of his life. His mind had never hitherto
gone back willingly to recollections of that night; but now he made the
excursion into the past with a certain amount of pleasure. He could see
her still, looking at a picture-book, her face resting on the back of her
hand, and golden ringlets falling over her bare arm. He could see the
boy, too. He remembered that his name was Billy. Billy who? he wondered.
He could hear the sweet, rather fretful voice calling from the shadows:

"Evie dear, it's time to go to bed. Billy, I don't believe they let you
stay up as late as this at home."

How ridiculous it would have been to remember such trivial details all
these years if something hadn't been "meant" by it. There was a hint in
the back of his mind that by the same token something might have been
"meant" about the Wild Olive, too, but he had not an equal temptation to
dwell on it. The Wild Olive, he repeated, had never been "his type of
girl"--not from the very first. It was obviously impossible for a
superintending Power to "mean" things that were out of the question.

He had got no further than this when the news was conveyed to him by Mrs.
Green, whom he met accidentally in the street, that Mr. Skinner, the
second partner, had had a "stroke," and had been ordered to Carlsbad. Mrs.
Skinner, so Mrs. Green's letters from the Port informed her, was to
accompany her husband. Furthermore, Miss Colfax was seizing the
opportunity to travel with them to Southampton, where she would be able to
join friends who would take her to New York. There was even a rumor that
Miss Jarrott was to accompany her niece, but Mrs. Green was unable to
vouch for the truth of it. In any case, she said, there were signs of "a
regular shaking up," such as comes periodically in any great mercantile
establishment; and this time, she ventured to hope, Mr. Green would get
his rights.



XII



The knowledge that it was a juncture at which to execute a daring movement
acted as an opiate on what would otherwise have been, for Strange, a day
of frenzy. While to the outward eye he was going quietly about his work,
he was inwardly calling all his resources to his aid to devise some plan
for outwitting circumstance. After forty-eight hours of tearing at his
heart and hacking at his brain, he could think of nothing more original
than to take the first train down to the Port, ask the girl to be his
wife, and let life work out the consequence. At the end of two days,
however, he was saved from a too deliberate defiance of the
unaccounted-for inner voice, by an official communication from Mr.
Jarrott.

It was in the brief, dry form of his business conversation, giving no hint
that there were emotions behind the stilted phraseology, and an old man's
yearnings. Mr. Skinner was far from well, and would "proceed immediately"
to Carlsbad. Strange would hand over the business at Rosario to Mr.
Green--who would become resident manager, _pro tem_ at any rate--and
present himself in Buenos Aires at the earliest convenient moment. Mr.
Jarrott would be glad to see him as soon as possible after his arrival.

That was all; but as far as the young man was concerned, it saved the
situation. On consulting the steamer-list he saw that the Royal Mail
Steam Packet _Corrientes_ would sail for Southampton in exactly six days'
time. By dint of working all night with Mr. Green, who was happy to lend
himself to anything that would show him the last of his rival, he was able
to take a train to the Port next day. It was half-past six when he arrived
in Buenos Aires. By half-past eight he had washed, changed to an evening
suit, and dined. At nine his cab stopped at the door of the house at
Palermo.

As he followed the elderly man-servant who admitted him, the patio was so
dim that he made his way but slowly. He made his way but slowly, not only
because the patio was dim, but because he was trying to get his crowding
emotions under control before meeting his employer in an interview that
might be fraught with serious results. For once in his life he was
unnerved, tremulous, almost afraid. As he passed the open doors and
windows of unlighted, or dimly lighted, rooms he knew she might be in any
one of the shadowy recesses. It would have been a relief to hear her at
the piano, or in conversation, and to know her attention was diverted.
None the less, he peered about for a glimpse of her, and strained his
hearing for a sound of her voice. But all was still and silent, except for
the muffled footfall of the servant leading him to the library at the far
end of the court.

If she had not moved out unexpectedly from behind a pillar, a little
fluttering figure in a white frock, he could have kept his self-control.
If he had not come upon her in this sudden way, when she believed him in
Rosario, she, too, would not have been caught at a disadvantage. As it
was, he stood still, as if awe-struck. She gave a little cry, as if
frightened. It is certain that his movement of the arms was an automatic
process, not dictated by any order of the brain; and the same may be said
for the impulse which threw her on his breast. If, after that, the rest
was not silence, it was little more. What he uttered and she replied was
scarcely audible to either, though it was understood by both. It was all
over so quickly that the man-servant had barely thrown open the library
door, and announced "Mr. Strange," when Strange himself was on the
threshold.

It was a moment at which to summon all his wits together to attend to
business; but he was astonished at the coolness and lightness of heart
with which he did it. After those brief, sudden vows exchanged, it was as
easy to dismiss Evie Colfax momentarily from his mind as it is to forget
money troubles on inheriting a fortune. Nevertheless as he got himself
ready to deal with practical, and probably quite commercial, topics, he
was fully conscious of the rapture of her love, while he was scarcely less
aware of a comfort closely akin to joy in feeling that the burden of
decision had been lifted from him. Since Fate had taken the matter into
her own hands, she could be charged with the full responsibility.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Jarrott, who was smoking a cigar and sipping his after-dinner coffee,
was in evening dress, but wore his house-jacket--a circumstance of which
Strange did not know the significance, though he felt its effect. The old
man's welcome was not unlike that of a shy father trying to break the
shackles of reserve with a home-coming son. He pushed Strange gently into
the most comfortable arm-chair beside which he drew up a small table for
the cigar-box, the ash-tray, and the matches. He rang for another cup,
and brought the coffee with his own hands. Strange remembered how often,
after a hard day's work, he had been made uncomfortable by just such
awkward, affectionate attentions from poor old Monsieur Durand.

"I didn't expect you so soon," Mr. Jarrott began, when they were both
seated, "but you've done well to come. I'm afraid we're in for a regular
upset all round."

"I hope it isn't going to make things harder for you, sir," Strange
ventured, in the tone of personal concern which his kindly treatment
seemed to warrant him in taking.

"It won't if I can get the right men into the right places. That'll be the
tough part of the business. The wool department will suffer by Mr.
Skinner's absence--he's very ill, in my opinion--and there's only one man
who can take his place." Strange felt his heart throbbing and the color
rising to his face. He did not covet the position, for he disliked the
wool department; but it was undeniably a "rise," and right along the line
of highest promotion. "That's Jenkins," Mr. Jarrott finished, quietly.

Strange said nothing. After all, he was relieved. Mr. Jarrott did not go
on at once, but when he did speak Strange fell back into the depths of his
arm-chair, in an attitude suggestive of physical collapse.

"And if Jenkins came back here," the old man pursued, "you'd have to take
his place in New York."

Strange concealed his agitation by puffing out successive rings of smoke.
If he had not long ago considered what he would say should this proposal
ever be made to him, he would have been even more overcome than he
actually was. He had meant to oppose the offer with a point-blank refusal,
but what had happened within the last quarter of an hour had so modified
this judgment that he could only sit, turning things rapidly over in his
mind, till more was said.

"There's no harm in--a--telling you," Mr. Jarrott went on again, with that
hesitancy Strange had begun to associate with important announcements,
"that--a--Jenkins will be--a--taken into partnership. You won't--a--be
taken into partnership--a--yet. But you will have a good salary in New
York. I can--a--promise you that much."

It was because he was unnerved that tears smarted in the young man's eyes
at the implications in these sentences. He took his time before
responding, the courtesies of the occasion being served as well by silence
as by speech.

"I won't try to thank you for all your kindness, sir," he said, with a
visible effort, "until I've told you something--something that, very
likely, you won't approve of. I've asked Miss Colfax to marry me, and
she's consented."

The old man's brows shot up incredulously.

"That's odd," he said, "because not half an hour ago she told my wife
there was nothing whatever between you--that you hadn't even written to
her since you went away. Mrs. Jarrott only left this room as you rang the
door-bell."

"But it was after I rang the door-bell," Strange stammered "that
I--I--asked her."

"Quick work," was the old man's only comment, but the muscles of his lips
relaxed slowly, as if rusty from disuse, into one of his rare smiles.

With the assurance of this reception, Strange could afford to sit silent
till Mr. Jarrott made some further sign.

"By the terms of her father's will," he explained some minutes later, "I'm
her guardian and trustee. She can't marry without my consent till she
comes of age. I don't say that in this instance I should--a--withhold my
consent; but I should feel constrained to--a--give it with conditions."

"If it's anything I can fulfil, sir--"

"No; it wouldn't concern you so much as her. She's very young--and in
heart she's younger than her age. She knows nothing about men--she can't
know--and I dare say you're the first young fellow who ever said anything
to her about--well, you understand what I mean. Mind you, we've no
objections to you whatever. You are your own credentials; and we take them
at their face value. You tell me you're an orphan, with no near relations,
so that there couldn't be any complications on that score. Besides that,
you're--a likely chap; and I don't mind saying that--a--my ladies--Mrs.
Jarrott and my sister--have taken rather a fancy to you. It can't do you
any--a--harm to know as much as that."

Strange murmurred his appreciation, and the old man went on.

"No; you're all right. But, as I said before, she's very young, and if we
married her to you out of hand we feel that we shouldn't be giving her a
fair show. We think she ought to have a little more chance to look round
her, so to speak. In fact, she isn't what ladies call 'out.' She's
scarcely ever seen a man, except through a window. Consequently, we think
we must send her back to New York, for a winter at any rate, and trot the
procession before her. My sister is to undertake it, and they're to sail
next week. That won't make so much difference to you now, as it would if
you weren't soon going to follow them."

Strange nodded. He felt himself being wafted to New York, whether he would
or no.

"Now all I have to say is this: if, when she's regularly started, she
sees some other young fellow she likes better than you, you're to give her
up without making a fuss."

"Of course. Naturally, she would have to be free to do as she chose in the
long run. I'm not afraid of losing her--"

"That'll be your own lookout. You'll be on the spot, and will have as good
a chance as anybody else. You'll have a better chance; for you'll only
have to keep what you've won, while any one else would have to start in at
the beginning. But it's understood that there--a--can be no talk of a
wedding just yet. She must have next winter to reconsider her promise to
you, if she wants to."

Strange having admitted the justice of this, the old man rose, and held
out his hand.

"We'll keep the matter between ourselves--in the family, I mean--for the
time being," he said, with another slowly breaking smile; "but the ladies
will want to wish you luck. You must come into the drawing-room and see
them."

They were half-way to the door when Mr. Jarrott paused.

"And, of course, you'll go to New York? I didn't think it necessary to ask
you if you cared to make the change."

With the question straight before him, Strange knew that an answer must be
given. He understood now how it is that there are men and women who find
it worth their while to thrust their heads into lions' mouths.

"Yes, sir, of course," he answered, quietly; and they went on to join the
ladies.



Part III

Miriam



XIII



On a day when Evie Colfax was nearing Southampton, and Herbert Strange
sailing northward from the Rio de la Plata, up the coast of Brazil, Miriam
Strange, in New York, was standing in the embrasure of a large bay-window
of a fifth-floor apartment, in that section of Fifty-ninth Street that
skirts the southern limit of Central Park. Her conversation with the man
beside her turned on subjects which both knew to be only preliminary to
the business that had brought him in. He inquired about her voyage home
from Germany, and expressed his sympathy with "poor Wayne" on the
hopelessness and finality of the Wiesbaden oculist's report. Taking a
lighter tone, he said, with a gesture toward the vast expanse of autumn
color on which they were looking down:

"You didn't see anything finer than that in Europe. Come now!"

"No, I didn't--not in its own way. As long as I can look at this I'm
almost reconciled to living in a town."

As her eyes roamed over the sea of splendor that stretched from their very
feet, a vision of October gorgeousness against the sky, he was able to
steal a glance at her. His immediate observation was to the effect that
the suggestion of wildness--or, more correctly, of a wild origin--was as
noticeable in her now, a woman of twenty-seven, as it was when he first
knew her, a girl of nineteen. That she should have brought it with her
from a childhood passed amid lakes and rivers and hills was natural
enough--just as it was natural that her voice should have that liquid
cadence which belongs to people of the forest, though it is rarely caught
by human speech elsewhere; but that she should have conserved these
qualities through the training of a woman of the world was more
remarkable. But there it was, that something woodland-born which London
and New York had neither submerged nor swept away. It was difficult to say
in what it consisted, since it eluded the effort to say, "It is this or
that." It resisted analysis, as it defied description. Though it might
have been in the look, or in the manner, it conveyed itself to the
observer's apprehension, otherwise than by the eye or ear, as if it
appealed to some extra sense. People who had not Charles Conquest's
closeness of perception spoke of her as "odd," while those who had heard
the little there was to learn about her, said to each other, "Well, what
could you expect?" Young men, as a rule, fought shy of her, not so much
from indifference as from a sense of an indefinable barrier between her
and themselves so that it was the older men who sought her out. There was
always some fear on Conquest's part lest the world should so assimilate
her that her distinctiveness--which was more like an influence that
radiated than a characteristic that could be seen--would desert her; and
it was with conscious satisfaction that he noted now, after an absence of
some months, that it was still there.

He noted, too, the sure lines of her profile--a profile becoming clearer
cut as she grew older--features wrought with delicacy and yet imbued with
strength, suggestive of carved ivory. Delicacy imbued with strength was
betokened, too, by the tall slenderness of her figure, whose silence and
suppleness of movement came--in Conquest's imagination at least--from her
far-off forest ancestry.

"I couldn't live anywhere else but here--if it must be in New York," she
said, turning from the window. "I couldn't do without the sense of woods,
and space, and sky. I can stand at this window and imagine all sorts of
things--that the park really does run into the Catskills, as it seems to
do--that the Catskills run into the Adirondacks--and that the Adirondacks
take me up to the Laurentides with which my earliest recollections begin."

"I think you're something like Shelley's Venice," he smiled, "a sort of
'daughter of the earth and ocean.' You never seem to me to belong in just
the ordinary category--"

She had been afraid of something like this from the minute he was
announced, and so hastened to cling to the impersonal.

"Then, the apartment is so convenient. Being all on one floor, it is so
much easier for Mr. Wayne to get about it than if he had stairs to climb.
I didn't tell you that I've had Mrs. Wayne's room done over for Evie. It's
so much larger and lighter than her old one--"

He cleared his throat uneasily.

"I remember your saying something of the kind before you went away in the
spring. It's one of the things I came in to talk about to-day?"

"Indeed?" His change of tone alarmed her. He had taken on the air of a man
about to break unpleasant news. "Won't you sit down? I'll ring for tea.
We're not in very good order yet, but the servants can give us that much."

She spoke for the purpose of hiding her uneasiness, just as she felt that
she should be more sure of herself while handling the teacups than if she
were sitting idle.

"I've had a letter from Mr. Jarrott," he said, making himself comfortable,
while she moved the tea-table in front of her. "He wrote to me, partly as
Stephens and Jarrott's legal adviser, and partly as a friend."

He allowed that information time to sink in before continuing.

"He tells me Miss Jarrott is on her way home, with Evie."

"Yes; Evie herself wrote me that. I got the letter at Cherbourg."

"Then she probably told you about the house."

"The house? What house?"

"The house they've asked me to take for the winter--for Miss Jarrott and
her."

The tea-things came, giving her the relief of occupation. She said nothing
for the moment, and her attention seemed concentrated on the rapid, silent
movements of her own hands among the silver and porcelain. Once she looked
up, but her glance fell as she saw his small, keen, gray-green eyes
scanning her obliquely.

"So I'm not to have her?" she said, at last.

"It's only for this winter--"

"Oh, I know. But what's for this winter will be for every winter!"

"And she won't be far away. I've taken the Grant's house in Seventy-second
Street. They asked for a house in which they could do some entertaining.
You see, they want to give her a good time--"

"I quite understand all that. Evie has to 'come out.' I've not the least
doubt that they're managing it in the best way possible. Yes, I see that.
If I feel a little--well, I won't say hurt--but a little--sorry--it's
because I've almost brought Evie up. And I suppose I'm the person she's
most fond of--as far as she's fond of any one."

"I presume she's fond of my nephew, Billy Merrow."

"I hope so. Billy rather teased her into that engagement, you know. She's
too young to be deeply in love--unless it was with one romantic. And Billy
isn't that. I'm not sure that there isn't trouble ahead for him."

"Then I shall let him worry through it himself. I've got other things to
think about."

When she had given him his tea and begun to sip her own, she looked up
with that particular bright smile which in women means the bracing of the
courage.

"It'll be all right," she said, with forced conviction. "I know it will.
It's foolish in me to think I shall miss her, when she will be so near.
It's only because she and Mr. Wayne are all I've got--"

"They needn't be," he interposed, draining his cup, and setting it down,
like a man preparing for action.

She knew her own words had exposed her to this, and was vexed with herself
for speaking in a dangerous situation without due foresight. For a minute
she could think of nothing to say that would ward off his thrust. She sat
looking at him rather helplessly, unconsciously appealing to him with her
eyes to let the subject drop.

If he meant to go on with it, he took his time--flecking a few crumbs from
his white waistcoat and from his fingertips. In the action he showed
himself for what he was--a man so neat as just to escape being dapper.
There was nothing large about him, in either mind or body; while, on the
contrary, there was much that was keen and able. The incisiveness of the
face would have been too sharp had it not been saved by the high-bred
effect of a Roman nose and a handsome mouth and chin. The fair mustache,
faded now rather than gray, softened the cynicism of the lips without
concealing it. It was the face of a man accustomed to "see through" other
men--to "see through" life--compelling its favors from the world rather
than asking them. The detailed exactness and unobtrusive costliness of
everything about him, from the pearl in his tie to the polish on his
boots, were indicative of a will rigorously demanding "the best," and
taking it. The refusal of it now in the person of the only woman whom he
had ever wanted as a wife left him puzzled, slightly exasperated, as
before a phenomenon not to be explained. It was this unusual resistance
that caused the somewhat impatient tone he took with her.

"It's all nonsense--your living as you do--like a professional trained
nurse."

"The life of a professional trained nurse isn't nonsense."

"It is for you."

"On the contrary; it's for me, more than for almost any one, to justify my
right to being in the world."

"Oh, come now! Don't let us begin on that."

"I don't want to begin on it. I'd much rather not. But if you don't, you
throw away the key that explains everything about me."

"All right," he rejoined, in an argumentative tone. "Let's talk about it,
then. Let's have it out. You feel your position; granted. Mind you, I've
always said you wouldn't have done so if it hadn't been for Gertrude
Wayne. The world to-day has too much common sense to lay stress on a
circumstance of that kind. Believe me, nobody thinks about it but
yourself. Did Lady Bonchurch? Did any of her friends? You've got it a
little bit--just a little bit--on the brain; and the fault isn't yours; it
belongs to the woman whose soul is gone, I hope, where it's freed from the
rules of a book of etiquette."

"She meant well--"

"Oh, every failure, and bungler, and mischief-maker means well. That's
their charter. I'm not concerned with that. I'm speaking of what she did.
She fixed it in your mind that you were like a sapling sprung from a seed
blown outside the orchard. You think you can minimize that accident by
bringing forth as good as any to be found within the pale. Consequently
you've taken a poor, helpless, blind man off the hands of the people whose
duty it is to look after him--and who are well able to do it--"

"That isn't the reason," she declared, flushing. "If Mr. Wayne and I live
together it's because we're used to each other--and in a way he has taken
the place of my father."

"Oh, come now! That's all very fine. But haven't you got in the back of
your mind the thought that the wild tree that's known by its good fruit is
the one that's best worth grafting?"

"If I had--" she began, with color deepening.

"If you had, you'd simply be taking a long way round, when there's a short
cut home. I'm the orchard, Miriam. All you've got to do is to walk into
it--with me."

A warmer tone came into his voice as he uttered the concluding words,
adding to her discomfort. She moved the tea-things about, putting them
into an unnecessary state of order, before she could reply.

"There's a reason why I couldn't do that," she said, meeting his sharp
eyes with one of her fugitive glances. "I would have given it to you
when--when you brought up this subject last spring, only you didn't ask
me."

"Well, what is it?"

"I couldn't love you."

She forced herself to bring out the words distinctly. He leaned back in
his chair, threw one leg across the other, and stroked the thin, colorless
line of his mustache.

"No, I suppose you couldn't," he said, quietly, after considering her
words.

"So that my answer has to be final."

"I don't see that. Love is only one of the many motives for marriage--and
not, as I understand it, the highest one. The divorce courts are strewn
with the wrecks of marriages made for love. Those that stand the test of
life and time are generally those that have been contracted from some of
the more solid--and worthier--motives."

"Then I don't know what they are."

"I could explain them to you if you'd let me. As for love--if it's needed
at all--I could bring enough into hotch-potch as the phrase goes, to do
for two. I'm over fifty years of age. It never occurred to me that you
could--care about me--as you might have cared for some one else. But as
far as I can see, there's no one else. If there was, perhaps I shouldn't
persist."

She looked up with sudden determination.

"If there was any one else, you--would consider that as settling the
question?"

"I might. I shouldn't bind myself. It would depend."

"Then I'll tell you; there _is_ some one else." The words caused her to
flush so painfully that she hastened to qualify them. "That is, there
might have been."

"What do you mean by--might have been?"

"I mean that, though I don't say I've ever--loved--any man, there was a
man I might have loved, if it had been possible."

"And why wasn't it possible?"

"I'd rather not tell you. It was a long time ago. He went away. He never
came back again."

"Did he say he'd come back again?"

She shook her head. She tried to meet his gaze steadily, but it was like
facing a search-light.

"Were you what you would call--engaged?"

"Oh no." Her confusion deepened. "There was never anything. It was a long
time ago. I only want you to understand that if I could care for any one
it would be for him. And if I married you--and he came back--"

"Are you expecting him back?"

She was a long time answering the question. She would not have answered it
at all had it not been in the hope of getting rid of him.

"Yes."

He took the declaration coolly, and went on.

"Why? What makes you think he'll come?"

"I have no reason. I think he will--that's all."

"Where is he now?"

"I haven't the faintest idea."

"Hasn't he ever written to you?"

"Never."

"And you don't know what's become of him?"

"Not in the least."

"And yet you expect him back?"

She nodded assent.

"You're waiting for him?"

Once more she braced herself to look him in the eyes and answer boldly.

"I am."

He leaned back in his chair and laughed, not loudly, but in good-humored
derision.

"If that's all that stands between us--"

To her relief he said no more; though she was disappointed that the
subject should be dropped in a way that made it possible to bring it up
again. As he was taking his leave she renewed the attempt to end the
matter once for all.

"I know you think me foolish--" she began.

"No, not foolish; only romantic."

"Then, romantic. Romance is as bad as folly when one is twenty-seven. I
confess it," she went on, trying to smile, "only that you may understand
that it's a permanent condition which I sha'n't get over."

"Oh yes, you will."

"Things happened--long ago--such as don't generally happen; and so--I'm
waiting for him. If he never comes--then I'd rather go
on--waiting--uselessly."

It was hard to say, but it was said. He laughed again--not quite so
derisively as before--and went away.

When he had gone, she resumed her seat behind the tea-table. She sat
looking absently at the floor and musing on the words she had just spoken.
Not in all the seven or eight years since Norrie Ford went away had she
acknowledged to her own heart what, within the last few minutes, she had
declared aloud. The utmost she had ever owned to herself was that she
"could have loved him." When she refused other men, she did not confess to
waiting for him; she evaded the question with herself, and found pretexts.
She would have continued doing so with Conquest, had not his persistency
driven her to her last stand. But now that she had uttered the words for
his benefit, she had to repeat them for her own. Notwithstanding her
passionate love of woods, winds, and waters, she had always been so sane,
so practical, in the things that pertained to daily life that she
experienced something like surprise at detecting herself in this condition
of avowed romance. She had actually been waiting for Norrie Ford to
return, and say what he had told her he _would_ say, should it ever become
possible! She was waiting for him still! If he never came she would rather
go on waiting for him--uselessly! The language almost shocked her; but now
that the thing was spoken she admitted it was true. It was a light thrown
on herself--if not precisely a new light, at least one from which all
shades and colored wrappings that delude the eye and obscure the judgment
had been struck away.

She smiled to herself to think how little Conquest understood her when he
ascribed to her the ambition to graft her ungarnered branch on the stock
of a duly cultivated civilization. She might have had that desire once,
but it was long past. It was a kind of glory to her now to be outside the
law--with Norrie Ford. There they were exiles together, in a wild paradise
with joys of its own, not less sweet than those of any Eden. She had faced
more than once the question of being "taken into the orchard," as Conquest
put it. The men who had asked her at various times to marry them had been
like himself, men of middle age, or approaching it--men of assured
position either by birth or by attainment. As the wife of any one of them
her place would have been unquestioned. She had not rejected their offers
lightly, or from any foregone conclusion. She had taken it as a duty to
weigh each one seriously as it came; and, leaving the detail of love
apart, she had asked herself whether it was not right for her to seize the
occasion of becoming "some one" in the world. Once or twice the position
offered her was so much in accordance with her tastes that her refusal
brought with it a certain vague regret. "But I couldn't do it," were the
words with which she woke from every dream of seeing herself mistress in a
quiet English park, or a big house in New York. Her habits might be those
of civilized mankind; but her heart was listening for a call from beyond
the limits in which men have the recognized right to live. She could put
no shackles on her freedom to respond to it--if it ever came.



XIV



She discovered that Norrie Ford had come back, and that some of her
expectations were fulfilled by finding him actually seated beside her one
evening at dinner.

Miss Jarrott's taste in table light was in the direction of candles
tempered by deep-red shades. As no garish electricity was allowed to
intrude itself into this soft glow, the result was that only old
acquaintances among her guests got a satisfactory notion of each other's
features. It was with a certain sense of discovery that, by peering
through the rose-colored twilight, Miriam discerned now a Jarrott or a
Colfax, now an Endsleigh or a Pole--faces more or less well known to her
which she had not had time to recognize during the few hurried minutes in
the drawing-room.

It was the dinner of which Evie had said, in explaining her plan of
campaign to Miriam, "We must kill off the family first of all." It was
plain that she regarded the duty as a bore; but she was too worldly wise
not to see that her bread cast upon the waters would return to her. Most
of the Jarrotts were important; some were wealthy; and one--Mrs. Endsleigh
Jarrott--was a power in such matters as assemblies and cotillons. The
ladies Colfax were little less influential; and while the sphere of the
Poles and Endsleighs was in the world of art, letters, and scholarship,
rather than in that of fashion and finance, they had the uncontested
status of good birth. To Evie they represented just so much in the way of
her social assets, and she was quick in appraising them at their correct
relative values. Some would be good for a dinner given in her honor,
others for a dance. The humblest could be counted on for a theatre-party
or a "tea." She was skilful, too, in presenting her orphan state with a
touching vividness that enlisted their sympathies on behalf of "poor
Jack's," or "poor Gertrude's," pretty little girl, according to the side
of the house on which they recognized the relationship.

With the confusion incidental to the arrival from South America, the
settling into a new house, and the ordering of new clothes, Miriam had had
little of the old intimate intercourse with Evie during the six weeks
since the latter's return. There was no change in their mutual relation;
it was only that Evie was caught up into the glory of the coming winter,
and had no time for the apartment in Fifty-ninth Street. It was with
double pleasure, therefore, that Miriam responded one day to Evie's
invitation to "come and look at my things," which meant an inspection of
the frocks and hats that had just come home. They lay about now, in clouds
like a soft summer sunset, or in gay spots of feathers and flowers, on the
bed and the sofa in Evie's room, and filled all the chairs except the one
on which Miriam had retreated into the farthest corner of the bay-window.
Seated there, not quite in profile, against the light, her head turned and
slightly inclined, in order to get a better view of Evie's finery, her
slender figure possessed a sort of Vandyke grace, heightened rather than
diminished by the long plumes and rich draperies of the month's fashion.
Evie flitted between closets, wardrobes, and drawers, prattling while she
worked off that first event of her season, in which the family were to be
"killed off." She recited the names of those who would "simply _have_ to
be asked" and of those who could conveniently be omitted.

"And, of course, Popsey Wayne must come," she observed in her practical
little way. "I dare say he won't want to, poor dear, but it wouldn't do if
he didn't. Only you, you dear thing, will have to go in with him--to pilot
him and look after him when the dishes are passed. But I'm going to have
some one nice on your other side, do you see?--some one awfully nice. We
shall have to ask a few people outside the family, just to give it relief,
and save it from looking like Christmas."

"You'll have Billy, I suppose."

Evie took the time to deposit a lace blouse in a drawer, as softly as a
mother lays a sleeping babe to rest.

"No, I sha'n't ask Billy," she said, while she was still stooping.

"Won't he think that queer?"

"I hope so." She turned from the drawer, and lifted a blue gossamer
creation from the bed. Miriam smiled indulgently.

"Why? What's the matter? Have you anything to punish him for?"

"I've nothing to punish him for; I've only got something I want to--bring
home to him." She paused in the middle of the room, with her blue burden
held in her outstretched arms, somewhat like a baby at a christening. "I
might as well tell you, Miriam, first as last. You've got to know it some
time, though I don't want it talked about just yet. I've broken my
engagement to Billy."

"Broken your engagement! Why, I saw Billy myself this morning. I met him
as I was coming over. He said he was here last night, and seemed
particularly cheerful."

"He doesn't know it yet. I'm doing it--by degrees."

"You're doing it by--what?" Miriam rose and came toward her, stopping
midway to lean on the foot-rail of the bed. "Evie darling, what do you
mean?"

Evie's eyes brimmed suddenly, and her lip trembled.

"If you're going to be cross about it--"

"I'm not going to be cross about it, but I want you to tell me exactly
what you're doing."

"Well, I'm telling you. I've broken my engagement, and I want to let Billy
know it in the kindest way. I don't want to hurt his feelings. You
wouldn't like me to do that yourself. I'm trying to bring him where he'll
see things just as I do."

"And may I ask if you're--getting him there?"

"I shall get him there in time. I'm doing lots of things to show him."

"Such as what?"

"Such as not asking him to the dinner, for one thing. He'll know from that
there's something wrong. He'll make a fuss, and I shall be disagreeable.
Little by little he'll get to dislike me--and then--"

"And how long do you think it will take for that good work to be
accomplished?"

"I don't see that that matters. I suppose I may take all the time I need.
We're both young--"

"And have all your lives to give to it. Is that what you mean?"

"I don't want to give all my life to it, because--I may as well tell you
that, too, while I'm about it--because I'm engaged to some one else."

"Oh, Evie!"

Miriam went back, like a person defeated, to the chair from which she had
just risen, while Evie buried herself in the depths of a closet, where she
remained long enough, as she hoped, to let Miriam's first astonishment
subside. On coming out she assumed a virtuous tone.

"You see now why I simply _had_ to break with Billy. I couldn't possibly
keep the two things going together--as some girls would. I'm one of those
who do right, whatever happens. It's very hard for me--but if people would
only be a little more sympathetic--"

It was some minutes before Miriam knew just what to say. Even when she
began to speak she doubted her capacity for making herself understood.

"Evie darling," she said, trying to speak as for a child's comprehension,
"this is a very serious matter. I don't think you realize how serious it
is. If you find you don't love Billy well enough, of course you must ask
him to release you. I should be sorry for that, but I shouldn't blame you.
But until you've done it you can't give your word to any one."

"Well, I must say I never heard anything like that," Evie declared,
indignantly. "You do have the strangest ideas, Miriam. Dear mamma used to
say so, too. I try to defend you, but you make it difficult for me, I must
say. I never knew any one like you for making things more complicated than
they need be. You talk of my asking Billy to release me when I released
myself long ago--in my own mind. That's where I have to look. I must do
things according to my conscience--and when that's clear--"

"It isn't only a case of conscience, dear; it's one of common sense.
Conscience has a way of sometimes mistaking the issue, whereas common
sense can generally be trusted to be right."

"Of course, if you're going to talk that way, Miriam, I don't see what's
left for me to answer; but it doesn't sound very reverent, I must say. I'm
trying to look at things in the highest light, and it doesn't strike me as
the highest light to be unkind to Billy when I needn't be. If you think I
ought to treat him cruelly you must keep your opinion, but I know you'll
excuse me if I keep mine."

She carried her head loftily as she bore another gown into the adjoining
darkness, and Miriam waited patiently till she emerged again.

"Does your other--I hardly know what to call him--does your other fiancé
know about Billy?"

"Why on earth should he? What good would that do? It will be all over--I
mean about Billy--before I announce my second engagement, and as the one
to Billy will never be announced at all there's no use in saying anything
about it."

"But suppose Billy himself finds out?"

"Billy won't find out anything whatever until I get ready to let him."

The finality of this retort reduced Miriam to silence. She allowed some
minutes to pass before saying, with some hesitation:

"I suppose you don't mind my knowing--who it is?"

Evie was prepared for this question and answered it promptly.

"I shan't mind your knowing--by-and-by. I want you to meet him first.
When you've once seen him, I know you'll be more just to me. Till then I'm
willing to go on being--misunderstood."

       *       *       *       *       *

During the three more weeks that intervened before the family dinner
Miriam got no further light on Evie's love-affairs. She purposely asked no
questions through fear of seeming to force the girl's confidence, but she
obtained some relief from thinking that the rival suitor could be no other
than a certain young Graham, of whom she had heard much from Evie during
the previous year. His chances then had stood higher than Billy Merrow's;
and nothing was more possible than a discovery on Evie's part that she
liked him the better of the two. It was a situation that called for
sympathy for Billy, but not otherwise for grave anxiety, so that Miriam
could wait quietly for further out-pourings of Evie's heart, and give her
mind to the mysteries incidental to the girl's social presentation to the
world.

Of the ceremonies attendant on this event the "killing off" of the family
was the one Miriam dreaded most. It was when she came within the periphery
of this powerful, meritorious, well-to-do circle, representing whatever
was most honorable in New York, that she chiefly felt herself an alien.
She could scarcely have explained herself in this respect, since many of
the clan had been kind to her, and none had ever shown her incivility. It
was when she confronted them in the mass, when she saw their solidarity,
their mutual esteem, their sum total of wealth, talents, and good works,
that she grew conscious of the difference of essence between herself and
them. Not one of them but had the right to the place he sat in!--a right
maintained by himself, but acquired by his fathers before him--not one of
them but was living in the strength of some respectable tradition of which
he could be proud! Endsleigh Jarrott's father, for example, had been a
banker, Reginald Pole's the president of a university, Rupert Colfax's a
judge; and it was something like that with them all. In the midst of so
much that was classified, certified, and regular she was as obviously a
foreign element as a fly in amber. She came in as the ward of Philip
Wayne, who himself was a new-comer and an intruder, since he entered
merely as "poor Gertrude's second husband," by a marriage which they all
considered a mistake.

With the desire to be as unobtrusive as possible, she dressed herself in
black, without ornament of any kind, unaware of the fact that with her
height of figure, her grace of movement, her ivory tint, and that
expression of hers which disconcerted people because it was first
appealing and then proud, she would be more than ever conspicuous against
the background of brilliant toilets, fine jewels, and assured manners
which the family would produce for the occasion. As a matter of fact,
there was a perceptible hush in the hum of talk as she made her entry into
the drawing-room, ostensibly led by Philip Wayne, but really leading him.
As she paused near the door, half timid, half bewildered, looking for her
hostess, it did not help her to feel at ease to see Mrs. Endsleigh
Jarrott--a Rubens _Maria de Medici_ in white satin and pearls--raise her
lorgnette and call on a tall young man who stood beside her to take a
look. There was no time to distinguish anything further before Miss
Jarrott glided up, with mincing graciousness, to shake hands.

"How do you do! How do you do! So glad you've come. I think you must know
nearly every one here, so I needn't introduce any one. I hardly ever
introduce. It's funny, isn't it? They say it's an English custom not to
introduce, but I don't do it just by nature. I wonder why I
shouldn't?--but I never do--or almost never. So if you don't happen to
know your neighbors at table just speak. It was Evie who arranged where
every one was to sit. _I_ don't know. They say that's English, too--just
to speak. I believe it's quite a recognized thing in London to say, 'Is
this your bread or mine?' and then you know each other. Isn't it funny?
Now I think we're all here. Will you take in Miriam, Mr. Wayne?"

A hasty embrace from Evie--an angelic vision in white--was followed by a
few words of greeting from Charles Conquest after which Miriam saw Miss
Jarrott take the arm of Bishop Endsleigh, and the procession began to
move.

At table Miriam was glad of the dim, rose-colored light. It offered her a
seclusion into which she could withdraw, tending her services to Wayne.
She was glad, too, that the family, having so much to say to itself, paid
her no special attention. She was sufficiently occupied in aiding the
helpless blind man beside her, and repeating for his benefit the names of
their fellow-guests. As the large party talked at the top of its lungs,
Miriam's quiet voice, with its liquid, almost contralto, quality, reached
her companion's ears unheard by others. She began with Bishop Endsleigh
who was on Miss Jarrott's right. Then came Mrs. Stephen Colfax; after her
Mr. Endsleigh Jarrott, who had on his right Mrs. Reginald Pole. Mrs.
Pole's neighbor was Charles Conquest, whom she shared with Mrs. Rodney
Wrenn. Now and then Wayne himself would give proof of that increased
acuteness in his hearing of which he had spoken more than once since his
blindness had become total. "Colfax Yorke is here," he observed at one
time. "I hear his voice. He's sitting on our side of the table." "Mrs.
Endsleigh Jarrott is next but one to you," he said at another time. "She's
airing her plans for the reconstruction of New York society."

So for a while they kept one another in small talk, affecting the same
sort of vivacity that obtained around them. It was not till dinner was
half over that he asked in an undertone:

"Who is your neighbor?"

"I don't know," she managed to whisper back. "He's so taken up with Mrs.
Endsleigh Jarrott that he hasn't looked this way. I don't think he's any
member of the family."

"He must be," Wayne replied. "I know his voice. I have some association
with it, but just what I can't remember."

Miriam herself listened to hear him speak, catching only an irrelevant
word or two.

"He sounds English," she said then.

"No, he isn't English. That's not my association. It's curious how the
mind acts. Since I became--since my sight failed--my memory instinctively
brings me voices instead of faces, when I want to recall anything. Aren't
you going to speak to him? You've got the formula: Is this your bread or
mine?"

"It's very convenient, but I don't think I shall use it."

"He'd like you to, I know. I heard him say to Mrs. Endsleigh Jarrott as we
came in--while Queenie Jarrott was talking--that you were he most
strikingly beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. How's that for a
compliment from a perfect stranger?"

"I certainly sha'n't speak to him now. A man who could say that to Mrs.
Endsleigh, after having seen _her,_ must be wofully wanting in tact."

Mary Pole on Wayne's right claimed his attention and Miriam was left her
own mistress. Almost at once her attention was arrested by hearing Mrs.
Endsleigh Jarrott saying in that appealing voice which she counted as the
secret of her success with men:

"Now do give me your frank opinion, Mr. Strange. You don't know how much I
should like it. It's far from my idea that we should slavishly copy
London. You know that, don't you? We've an entirely different stock of
materials to work with. But I'm firmly convinced that by working on the
London model we should make society far more general, far more
representative, and far--oh, _far_--more interesting! Now, what do _you_
think? Do give me your frank opinion."

Mr. Strange! Her own name was sufficiently uncommon to cause Miriam to
glance sidewise, in her rapid, fugitive way, at the person who bore it.
His face was turned from her as he bent toward Mrs. Jarrott, but again she
heard his voice, and this time more distinctly.

"I'm afraid my opinion wouldn't be of much value. Nevertheless, I know you
must be right."

"Now I'm disappointed in you," Mrs. Jarrott said, with pretty
reproachfulness. "You're not taking me seriously. Oh, I see, I see. You're
just an ordinary man, after all; when I thought for a minute you might
be--well, a little different. Do take some of that asparagus," she added
in another tone. "It's simply delicious."

It was while he was helping himself to this delicacy that Miriam got the
first clear view of his face, half turned as it was toward her. He seemed
aware that she was observing him, for during the space of some seconds he
held the silver implements idle in his hands, while he lifted his eyes to
meet hers. The look they exchanged was significant and long, and yet she
was never quite sure that she recognized him then. For the minute she was
only conscious of a sudden, inward shock, to which she was unable to
ascribe a cause. Something had happened, though she knew not what. Having
in the course of a few minutes regained her self-control, she could only
suppose that it was a repetition of that unreasoning panic which had now
and then brought her to the verge of fainting, when by chance, in London,
Paris, or New York, she caught a glimpse of some tall figure that carried
her imagination back to the cabin in the Adirondacks. She had always
thought that he might appear in some crowd and take her by surprise. She
had never expected to find him in a gathering that could be called social.
Still less had she looked to meet him like this, with Philip Wayne who had
sentenced him to death not three feet away. The mere idea was
preposterous. And yet--

She glanced at him again. He was listening attentively while Mrs.
Endsleigh Jarrott's voice ran on:

"People say our society has no traditions. It _has_ traditions. It has the
traditions of the country village, and it has never outgrown them. We're
nothing but the country village writ large. New York, Philadelphia,
Boston, Baltimore--we're the country village over again, with its
narrowness its sets, its timidity, all writ _so_ large that they hide
anything like a real society from us. Now isn't it so, Mr. Strange? Don't
be afraid to give me your frank opinion because that's what I'm asking
for."

Miriam herself made an effort to seem to be doing something that would
enable her to sit unnoticed. She was glad that Wayne was engaged by Mary
Pole so that he could no longer listen to the voice that wakened his
recollections. She looked again at the tall, carefully dressed man beside
her, so different in all his externals from anything she imagined Norrie
Ford could ever become. Norrie Ford was an outlaw and this was a man of
the world. She felt herself being reassured--and yet disappointed. Her
first feeling of faintness passed away, enabling her to face the situation
with greater calm. Under cover of the energetic animation characteristic
of every American dinner-party at which the guests are intimate, she had
leisure to think over the one or two hints that were significant. Now and
then a remark was addressed to her across the table to which she managed
to return a reply sufficiently apt to give her the appearance of being in
touch with what was going on around her; but in reality she was taking in
the fact, with the spirit rather than the mind, that Norrie Ford had
returned.

She never understood just how and when that assurance came to her. It was
certainly not by actual recognition of his features, as it was not by
putting together the few data that came under her observation. Thinking it
over in after years, she could only say that she "just found herself
_knowing it_." He was there--beside her. Of that she had no longer a
doubt.

Her amazement did not develop all at once. Indeed, the position had an odd
naturalness, like something in a dream. The element of impossibility in
what had happened was so great that for the time being her mind refused to
meet it. She was only aware of that vague sense of satisfaction, of inward
peace, that comes when long-desired ends have been fulfilled.

The main fact being accepted, her outer faculties could respond to the
call that a dinner-party makes on its least important member. When the
conversation at her end of the table became general she took her part, and
later engaged in a three-cornered discussion with Wayne and Mary Pole on
the subject of an endowed theatre; but all the while her subconscious mind
was struggling for a theory to account for Norrie Ford's presence in that
particular room and in that unexpected company. The need of some
immediate, plausible reason for so astounding an occurrence deadened her
attention to the comparative quietness with which she accepted his
coming--now that she had regained her self-control, although she was
conscious of stirrings of wild joy in this evidence that he had been true
to her. Had she recalled what she had said to him eight years ago as to
the Argentine, and the "very good firm to work for," she would have had an
easy clew, but that had passed from her mind almost with the
utterance--certainly with his departure He had gone out into the world,
leaving no more trace behind him than the bird that has flown southward.
Not once during the intervening years did the thought cross her mind that
words which she had spoken nearly at haphazard could have acted as a guide
to him, while still less did she dream that they could have led him into
the very seat beside her which he was occupying now.

Nevertheless, he was there, and for the present she could dispense with
the knowledge of the adventures that had brought him. He was there, and
that was the reason of his coming in itself. He had hewn his way through
all difficulties to reach her--as Siegfried came to Brunhild, over the
mountains and through the fire. He had found the means--both the means
and the daring--to enter and make himself accepted in her own world, her
own circle, her own family--in so far as she had a family--and to sit
right down at her side.

She was not surprised at it. She assured herself of that. At the very
instant when she was saying to Mary Pole, across Philip Wayne's white
waistcoat, that she had always thought of endowed institutions of creative
art as belonging to the races of weaker individual initiative--at the very
instant when she was saying that, she was repeating to herself that the
directness, the high-handedness, and the success of this kind of exploit
was exactly what she would have expected of Norrie Ford. It was what she
_had_ expected of him--in one form or another. It was with a sense of
inward pride that she remembered that her faith in him had never wavered,
even though it was not until Conquest forced her that she had confessed
the fact. She glanced at Conquest across the table now and caught his eye.
He smiled at her and raised his glass, as though to drink to her health.
She smiled in return, daringly, triumphantly, as she would not have
ventured to do an hour ago. She could see him flush with pleasure--a rare
occurrence--at her unusual graciousness, while she was only rejoicing in
her escape from him. Under the shadow of the tall man beside her, who had
achieved the impossible in order to be loyal to her, she felt for the
first time in her life that she had found a shelter. It mattered nothing
that he was engrossed with Mrs. Endsleigh Jarrott, and that, after the one
glance, he had not turned toward her again; she was sure he knew that she
understood him, and that he recognized her power to wait in patience to
have the mystery explained.

In the drawing-room he was introduced to her. Miss Jarrott led him up and
made the presentation.

"Miss Strange, I want you to know Mr. Strange. Now isn't that funny? You
can't think how many times I've thought how interesting it would be to see
you two meet. It's so unusual to have the same name, especially when it's
such a strange name as yours. There's a pun. I simply can't help making
them. My brother says I inherited all the sense of humor in the family. I
don't know why I do it, but I always see a joke. Can you tell me why I do
it?"

Neither Strange nor Miriam knew what replies they made, but a conversation
of some sort went on for a minute or two, after which Miss Jarrott whisked
him away to present him to some one else. When he had gone Miriam was left
with a feeling of spiritual chill. While it was impossible to betray a
previous acquaintance before Miss Jarrott, there had been nothing whatever
in his bearing to respond to the recognition in hers. There was something
that might have been conveyed from mind to mind without risk, and he had
not used the opportunity. In as far as he addressed her at all it had been
through Miss Jarrott, and he had looked around her and over her rather
than directly into her eyes.

During the rest of the evening she caught glimpses of him only in the
distance, talking now to one member of the family, now to another. It was
clear that Miss Jarrott was, in a way, showing him off, and that he was
received as some one of importance. She admired the coolness with which he
carried himself, while her inherited instincts gave her a curious thrill
of content that these law-making, law-keeping people should be duped.

She hoped he would find an occasion for passing again in her direction.
If she could have only a word with him it might help to make the situation
intelligible. But he did not return, and presently she noticed, in looking
about the room, that he had disappeared. She, too, was eager to be gone.
Only in solitude could she get control of the surging thoughts, the
bewildering suggestions, the contradictory suppositions that crowded it on
her. She saw how useless it was to try to build a theory without at least
one positive fact to go on.

It was just as they were departing that her opportunity to ask a question
came. They had said their good-nights to Miss Jarrott and were in the
hall, waiting for the footman to call their carriage, when Evie, whom they
had not wanted to disturb, came fluttering after them. She was flushed but
radiant, and flung herself into Miriam's arms.

"You dear thing! I haven't had time to say a word to you or Popsey Wayne
the entire evening. But you'll excuse me, won't you? I've had to be civil
to them all--do you see?--and do them up well. I knew you wouldn't mind. I
wanted you to have a good time, but I'm afraid you haven't."

"Oh yes," Miriam said, disengaging herself from the girl's embrace. "It's
been wonderful--it really has. But, Evie dear," she whispered, drawing her
away from the group of ladies who stood cloaked and hooded, also waiting
for their carriages, "tell me--who is that Mr. Strange who sat next to
me?"

Evie's eyes went heavenward, and she took on a look of rapture.

"I hope you liked him."

"I didn't have much chance to see. But why do you hope it?"

"Because--don't you see? Oh, surely you _must_ see--because--he's the
one."



XV



Enlightenment came to her in the carriage while she was driving homeward.
During the five or ten minutes since Evie had spoken she, Miriam, had been
sitting still and upright in the darkness, making no further attempt to
see reason through this succession of bewilderments from sheer inability
to contend against them. For the time being, at any rate, the struggle was
too much for her. The issues raised by Evie's overwhelming announcement
were so confusing that she must postpone their consideration. She must
postpone everything but her own tumultuous passion, which had to be faced
and mastered instantly. She was fighting with herself, with her own wild
inward cries of protest, anger, jealousy, and self-pity, trying to
distinguish each from the others and to silence it by appeal to her years
of romantic folly, when suddenly Wayne spoke, in the cheery tone of a man
who has unexpectedly passed a pleasant evening.

"I had a nice long chat with the Great Unknown, who was sitting beside
you, when the ladies left the dining-room. Who do you think he is?"

After the shocks of the last two hours, she was prepared to hear Wayne
tell her, in an offhand way, that it was Norrie Ford. Nevertheless, she
summoned what was left of her stunned faculties and did her best to speak
carefully.

"I heard them call him Mr. Strange--"

"Odd that was, wasn't it? But it isn't such a very uncommon name. I've met
other Stranges--"

"Oh yes. So have I."

"Well, who do you think he is? Why, he's Stephens and Jarrott's new man in
New York. He's taken Jenkins's place. You remember Jenkins, don't you?
That little man with a lisp. I had a nice long chat with him--Strange, I
mean. He tells me he's a New-Yorker by birth, but that he went out to the
Argentine after his father failed in business. Well, _he_ won't fail in
business, _I_ bet a penny. He's tremendously enthusiastic over the
Argentine, too. Showed he had his head put on the right way when he went
there. Wonderful country--the United States of South America some people
call it. We're missing our opportunities out there. Great volume of trade
flowing to Europe of which we had almost the monopoly at one time. I had a
nice long chat with him."

Her tired emotions received a new surprise as Wayne's words directed her
thoughts to the morning when she had made to Ford the first suggestion of
the Argentine. She had not precisely forgotten it; she had only thought it
of too little importance to dwell on. She remembered that she had
considered the idea practical till she had expressed it, but that his
opposition had seemed to turn it into the impossible. She had never
supposed that he might have acted on it--not any more than she had
expected him to retain her father's name once he had reached a place of
safety. In spite of the suddenness with which her dreams regarding him had
been dispelled, it gave her a thrill of satisfaction to think that the
word which, in a sense, had created him had been hers. To her fierce
jealousy, with which her pride was wrestling even now, there was a
measure of comfort in the knowledge that he could never be quite free from
her, that his existence was rooted in her own.

"Queenie Jarrott tells me," Wayne meandered on, "that her brother thinks
very highly of this young man. It seems that his business abilities are
quite remarkable, and they fancy he looks like Henry--the eldest of the
boys who died. It's extraordinary how his voice reminds me of some
one--don't know who. It might be--But then again--"

"His voice is like a thousand other voices," she thought it well to say,
"just as he looks like a thousand other men. He's one of those rather
tall, rather good-looking, rather well-dressed youngish men--not really
young--of whom you'll pass twenty within a mile any day in Fifth Avenue,
and who are as thick as soldiers on a battle-field at the lower end of
Broadway."

       *       *       *       *       *

With the data Wayne had given her she worked out the main lines of the
story during the night; but it was not until she had done so that its full
significance appeared to her. Having grasped that, she could scarcely wait
for daylight in order to go to Evie, and yet when morning came she
abandoned that course as impolitic. Reflection showed her that her
struggle must be less with Evie than with Ford, while she judged that he
himself would lose no time in putting the battle in array. He must see as
plainly as she did that she stood like an army across his path, and that
he must either retreat before her or show fight. She believed he would do
the latter and do it soon. She thought it probable that he would appear
that very day, and that her wisest plan was to await his opening attack.
The necessity, so unexpectedly laid upon her, of defending the right
deflected her mind from dwelling too bitterly on her own disillusioning.

The morning having passed without a sign from him, she made her
arrangements for having the afternoon undisturbed sending Wayne to drive,
and ordering the servants to admit no one but Mr. Strange, should he
chance to call. Having intrenched herself behind the fortification of the
tea-table, she waited. In spite of her preoccupation, or rather because of
it, she purposely read a book, forcing herself to fix her attention on its
pages in order to have her mind free from preconceived notions as to how
she must act and what she must say. Her single concession to herself was
to put on a new and becoming house dress, whose rich tones of brown and
amber harmonized with her ivory coloring and emphasized the clear-cut
distinction of her features. Before taking up her position she surveyed
herself with the mournful approval which the warrior about to fall may
give to the perfection of his equipment.

It was half-past four when the servant showed him in. His formal attire
seemed to her, as he crossed the room, oddly civilized and correct after
her recollections of him. Notwithstanding her dread of the opening
minutes, the meeting passed off according to the fixed procedure of the
drawing-room. It was a relief to both to find that the acts of shaking
hands and sitting down had been accomplished with matter-of-course
formality. With the familiar support of afternoon-call conventions
difficult topics could be treated at greater ease.

"I'm very glad to find you at home," he began, feeling it to be a safe
opening. "I was almost afraid--"

"I stayed in on purpose," she said, frankly. "I thought you might come."

"I wasn't sure whether or not you knew me last night--"

"I didn't at first. I really hadn't noticed you, though I remembered
afterward that you were standing with Mrs. Endsleigh Jarrott when Mr.
Wayne and I came into the room. I wonder now if you recognized me?"

"Oh, rather! I knew you were going to be there. I've been in New York a
month."

"Then you might have come to see me sooner."

"Well, you see--"

He paused and colored, trying to cover up his embarrassment with a smile.
She allowed her eyes to express interrogation not knowing that her frank
gaze disconcerted him. She herself went back so eagerly to the days when
he was the fugitive, Norrie Ford, and she the nameless girl who was
helping him, that she could not divine his humiliation at being obliged to
drop his mask. Since becoming engaged to Evie Colfax and returning to New
York, he perceived more clearly than ever before that his true part in the
world was that of the respectable, successful man of business which he
played so skilfully. It cost him an effort she could have no reason to
suspect to be face to face with the one person in the world who knew him
as something else.

"You see," he began again, "I had to consider a good many
things--naturally. It wouldn't have done to give any one an idea that we
had met before."

"No, of course not. But last night you might have--"

"Last night I had to follow the same tactics. I can't afford to run risks.
It's rather painful, it's even a bit humiliating--"

"I can imagine that, especially here in New York. In out-of-the-way places
it must be different. There it doesn't matter. But to be among the very
people who--"

"You think that there it does matter. I had to consider that. I had to
make it plain to myself that there was nothing dishonorable in imposing on
people who had forced me into a false position. I don't say it's
pleasant--"

"Oh, I know it can't be pleasant. I only wondered a little, as I saw you
last night, why you let yourself be placed in a position that made it
necessary."

"I should have wondered at that myself a year ago. I certainly never had
any intention of doing it. It's almost as much a surprise to me to be here
as it is to you to see me. I suppose you thought I would never turn up
again."

"No, I didn't think that. On the contrary, I thought you _would_ turn
up--only not just here."

It struck him that she was emphasizing that point for a purpose--to bring
him to another point still. He took a few seconds to reflect before
deciding that he would follow her lead without further hanging back.

"I shouldn't have returned to New York if I hadn't become engaged to Miss
Colfax. You know about that, don't you? I think she meant to tell you."

She inclined her head assentingly, without words. He noticed her dark eyes
resting on him with a kind of pity. He had cherished a faint hope--the
very faintest--that she might welcome what he had just said
sympathetically. In the few minutes during which she remained silent that
hope died.

"I suppose," she said, gently, "that you became engaged to Evie before
knowing who she was?"

"I fell in love with her before knowing who she was. I'm afraid that when
I actually asked her to marry me I had heard all there was to learn."

"Then why did you do it?"

He shrugged his shoulders with a movement acquired by long residence
among Latins. His smile conveyed the impossibility of explaining himself
in a sentence.

"I'll tell you all about it, if you'd like to hear."

"I should like it very much. Remember, I know nothing of what happened
after--after--"

He noticed a shade of confusion in her manner, and hastened to begin his
narrative.

Somewhat to her surprise, he sketched his facts in lightly, but dwelt
strongly on the mental and moral necessities his situation forced on him.
He related with some detail the formation of his creed of conduct in the
dawn on Lake Champlain, and showed her that according to its tenets he was
permitted a kind of action that in other men might be reprehensible. He
came to the story of Evie last of all, and allowed her to see how
dominating a part Fate, or Predestination had played in evolving it.

"So you see," he ended, "it was too late then to do anything--but to
yield."

"Or withdraw," she added, softly.

He stared at her a moment, his body bent slightly forward his elbows
resting on the arms of his chair. As a matter of fact, he was thinking
less of her words than of her beauty--so much nobler in type than he
remembered it.

"Yes," he returned, quietly, "I can see that it would strike you in that
way. So it did me--at first. But I had to look at the subject all round--"

"I don't need to do that."

He stared at her again. There was a decision in her words which he found
hard to reconcile with the pity in her eyes and the gentle softness of her
smile.

"You mean that you don't want to take my--necessities--into
consideration."

"I mean that when I see the one thing right to do, I don't have to look
any further."

"The one thing right to do--for you?--or for me?"

"There's no reason why I should intervene at all. I look to you to save me
from the necessity."

He hesitated a minute before deciding whether to hedge or to meet her
squarely.

"By giving up Evie and--clearing out," he said, with a perceptible hint of
defiance.

"I shouldn't lay stress on your--clearing out."

"But you would on my giving up Evie?"

"Don't you see," she began, in an explanatory tone, "I, in my own person,
have nothing to do with it? It isn't for me to say this should be done or
that. You can't imagine how hard it is for me to say anything at all; and
if I speak, it isn't as myself--it's as the voice of a situation. You must
understand as well as I do what that situation imposes."

"But I don't intend that a situation shall impose anything--on me. I mean
to act as master--"

"But I'm neither so independent nor so strong--nor is Evie. You don't
consider her."

"I don't have to consider any one. When I make Evie happy I do all that
can be asked of me."

"No, you would be called on to _keep_ her happy. And she couldn't remain
happy if she were married to you. It isn't possible. She couldn't live
with you any more than--than a humming-bird could live with a hawk."

They both smiled, rather nervously.

"But I'm not a hawk," he insisted. "I'm much more a humming-bird than you
imagine. You think me some sort of creature of prey because you
believe--that I did--what I was accused of--"

The circumstances seemed so far off from him now, so incongruous with what
he had become, that he reverted to them with difficulty.

"I don't attach any importance to that," she said, with a tranquillity
that startled him. "I suppose I ought to, but I never have. If you killed
your uncle, it seems to me--very natural. He provoked you. He deserved it.
My father would have done it certainly."

"But I didn't, you see. That puts another color on the case."

"It doesn't for me. And it doesn't, as it affects Evie. Whether you're
innocent or guilty--and I don't say I think you to be guilty--I've never
thought much about it--but whether you're guilty or not, your life is the
kind of tragedy Evie couldn't share. It would kill her."

"It wouldn't kill her, if she didn't know anything about it."

"But she would know. You can't keep that sort of thing from a wife. She
wouldn't be married to you a year before she had discovered that you
were--a--"

"An escaped convict. Why not say it?"

"I wasn't going to say it. But at least she would know that you were a man
who was pretending to be--something that he wasn't."

"You mean an impostor. Well, I've already explained to you that I'm an
impostor only because Society itself has made me one, I'm not to blame--"

"I quite see the force of that. But Evie wouldn't. Don't you understand?
That's my point. She would only see the horror of it, and she would be
overwhelmed. It wouldn't matter to her that you could bring forward
arguments in your own defence. She wouldn't be capable of understanding
them. You must see for yourself that mentally--and spiritually--just as
bodily--she's as fragile as a butterfly. She couldn't withstand a storm.
She'd be crushed by it."

"I don't think you do her justice. If she were to discover--I mean, if the
worst were to come to the worst--well, you can see how it's been with
yourself. You've known from the beginning all there is to know--and yet--"

"I'm different."

She meant the brief statement to divert his attention from himself, but
she perceived that it aroused a flash of self-consciousness in both. While
she could hear herself saying inwardly, "I'd rather go on waiting for
him--uselessly," he was listening to a silvery voice, as it lisped the
words, "Dear mamma used to think she was in love with some one; we didn't
know anything about it." Each reverted to the memory of the lakeside scene
in which he had said, "My life will belong to you ... a thing for you to
dispose of ..." and each was afraid that the other was doing so.

All at once she saw herself as she fancied he must see her--a woman
claiming the fulfilment of an old promise, the payment of a long-standing
debt. He must think she was making Evie a pretext in her fight for her own
hand. His vow--if it was a vow--had been the germ of so much romance in
her mind that she ascribed it to a place in the foreground of his. In all
she was saying he would understand a demand on her part that he should
make it good. Very well, then; if he could do her such injustice, he must
do it. She could not permit the fear of it to inspire her with moral
cowardice or deter her from doing what was right.

Nevertheless, it helped her to control her agitation to rise and ring for
tea. She felt the need of some commonplace action to assure herself and
him that now, at last, she was outside the realm of the romantic. He rose
as she did, to forestall her at the bell; and as the servant entered with
the tray, they moved together into the embrasure of the wide bay-window.
Down below the autumn colors were fading, while leaves, golden-yellow or
blood-red, were being swirled along the ground.

"I had to do things out there"--his nod was meant to indicate the
direction of South America--"in a somewhat high-handed manner, and I've
acquired the habit of it. If I'd stuck at difficulties I shouldn't have
got anywhere."

She looked at him inquiringly, as though to ask the purport of the
observation.

"You must see that I'm obliged to put this thing through--on Evie's
account as much as mine. After getting her to care for me, I can't desert
her now, whatever happens."

"She wouldn't suffer--after a while. She'd get over it. You might not, but
she--"

"She shall not get over it, if I can help it. How can you ask me to let
her?"

"Only on the ground that you love her well enough."

"Would you call that love?"

"In view of all the circumstances, it would be my idea of it."

"Then it wouldn't be mine. The only love I understand is the love that
fights for its object, in the face of all opposition."

She looked at him a minute with what she tried to make a smile, but which
became no more than a quivering of the lip and lashes.

"I hope you won't fight," she said, in a tone of appeal, "because it would
have to be with me. If anything could break my heart, that would."

She knew how near to self-betrayal she had gone, but in her eagerness she
was reckless of the danger.

"How do you know it wouldn't break mine too?" he asked, with a scrutiny
that searched her eyes. "But there are times in life when men have just to
fight--and let their hearts be broken. In becoming responsible for Evie's
happiness I've given a pledge from which I can't withdraw--"

"But that's where you don't understand her--"

"Possibly; but it's where I understand myself."

"Tea is served, miss," the maid said, coming forward to where they talked
in undertones. At the same minute there was a shuffling at the door and
Wayne entered from his drive. Ford would have gone forward to help him,
but she put out her hand and stopped him.

"He likes to find his way himself," she whispered.

"They tell me there's tea in here," Wayne said, cheerily, from the
doorway.

"There's more than tea," Miriam replied in as bright a tone as she could
assume. "There's Mr. Strange, whom you met last night."

"Ah, that's good." Wayne groped his way toward the voices. "How do you do!
Glad to see you. It's windy out-of-doors. One feels the winter beginning
to nip."

Ford took the extended hand, and, without seeming to do so, adroitly
piloted the blind man to a seat as they moved, all three, to the
tea-table.

For the next ten minutes their talk turned on the common topics of the
day. As during her conversation with Conquest a few weeks before, Miriam
found again that the routine of duties of acting as hostess steadied her
nerves. With Ford aiding her in the little ways to which he had become
accustomed since his engagement to Evie, hostility was absent from their
mutual relation, even though opposition remained. That at least was a
comfort to her; and now and then, as she handed him the bread and butter
or a plate of cakes to pass to Wayne, their eyes could meet in a glance of
comprehension.

Wayne was still enjoying his tea when Ford turned to him with an abrupt
change of tone.

"I'm glad you came in, sir, while I was still here, because there's
something I particularly want to tell you."

He did not look at Miriam, but he could feel the way in which she sat
upright and aghast. Wayne turned his sightless eyes, hidden by large
colored glasses, toward the speaker, and nodded.

"Yes?" he said, interrogatively.

"I would have told you before, only that Miss Jarrott and Miss Colfax
thought I had better wait till every one got settled. In any case, Mr.
Jarrott made it a condition before I left Buenos Aires that it shouldn't
go outside the family till Miss Colfax had had her social winter in New
York."

Wayne's face grew grave, but not unsympathetic.

"I suppose I know what's coming," he said, quietly.

"It's the sort of thing that was bound to come sooner or later with Miss
Colfax," Ford smiled, speaking with an air of assurance. "What makes me
uneasy is that I should be the man to come and tell the news. If it was
any one you knew better--"

"You've probably heard that I'm not Evie's guardian," Wayne interposed.
"I've no control at all over what she does."

"I understand that; but to me there's an authority above the legal one--or
at least on a level with it--and I should be unhappy--we should both be
unhappy--if we didn't have your consent."

Wayne looked pleased. He was so rarely consulted in the affairs of the
family, especially since his affliction had forced him aside, that this
deference was a clew to the young man's character. Nevertheless, he
allowed some seconds to pass in silence, while Ford threw at Miriam a
glance of defiance, in which there was also an expression of audacious
friendliness. She sat rigid and pale, her hands clinching the arms of her
chair.

"It's a serious matter--of course," Wayne said, after becoming hesitation;
"but I've great confidence in Henry Jarrott. Next to Evie herself, he's
the person most concerned--in a certain way. I'm told he thinks well of
you--"

"He ought to know," Ford broke in, confidently. "I've nothing to show in
the way of passports, except myself and my work. I've been with him ever
since I went to South America, and he's been extremely kind to me. The
only certificate of character I can offer is one from him."

"That's sufficient. We should be sorry to let Evie go, shouldn't we,
Miriam? She's a sweet child, and very much like her dear mother. But, as
you say, it was bound to happen one day or another; and we can only be
glad that--I'm happy to congratulate you, Mr. Strange. Your name, at any
rate, is a familiar one. It's that of an old boyhood's friend of mine, who
showed me the honor of placing this young lady in my charge. We called
him Harry. His full name was Herbert Harrington, but he dropped the first.
You seem to have taken it up--it's odd, isn't it, Miriam?--and I take it
as a happy omen."

"Thank you." Ford rose, and made the blind man understand that he was
holding out his hand, "I shall be more satisfied now for having told you."

Miriam accompanied him into the hall, on pretext of ringing for the lift.

"Oh, why did you do that?" she protested. "Don't you see that it only
makes things more complicated than they were already?"

"It's my first move," he laughed, with friendly bravado. "Now you can make
yours."

She gazed at him in puzzled distress as the lift rose.

"I'm coming again," he said, with renewed confidence. "I've a lot more
things to say."

"And I have only one," she answered, turning back toward the drawing-room.

"He's a nice young fellow," Wayne said, as he heard her enter. He had
risen and felt his way into the bay-window, where he stood looking outward
as if he could see. "I suppose it must be all right, since the Jarrotts
are so enthusiastic Poor little Evie! I hope she'll be happy. It's
extraordinary how his voice reminds me of--"

She stood still in the middle of the room, waiting for him to continue.
Nothing he could add would have surprised her now. But he said no more.



XVI



Thinking that Ford might come again next afternoon, Miriam went out. On
her return she found his card--_Mr. Herbert Strange._ The same thing
occurred the next day, and the next, and so on through the week. She was
not afraid of seeing him. Now that the worst was known to her, she was
sure of her mastery of herself, and of her capacity to meet anything. What
she feared most was her sympathy for him, and the possibility that in some
unguarded moment of pity he might wring concessions from her which she had
no right to make. She hoped, too, that time, even a few days' time, would
help him to work out the honorable course for himself.

Her meetings with Evie were more inevitable, and required greater
self-repression. She was so used to the part of elder sister, with whom
all confidences are discussed, that she found it difficult not to speak
her heart out frankly.

"I heard he had been to see you and Popsey Wayne, and told you," Evie
said, with her pretty nose just peeping above the bedclothes, at midday,
on a morning later in the week. It was the day after Evie's first large
dance, and she had been sleeping late. Miriam sat on the edge of the bed,
smoothing stray golden tendrils off the flushed, happy little face.

"He did come," Miriam admitted. "Mr. Wayne made no objections. I can't
say he was glad. You wouldn't expect us to be that, dear, would you?"

"I expect you to like him. It isn't committing you to much to say that.
But you seem so--so every which way about him."

"I'm not every which way about him. I can't say that I'm any way at all.
Yes, I do like him--after a fashion. If I make reserves, it's because I'm
not sure that I think him good enough for my little Evie."

"He's a great deal too good!" Evie exclaimed, rapturously. "Oh, Miriam, if
you only knew how fond I am of him! I'd die for him--I truly believe I
would--almost! Oh, it was so stupid last night without him! All these boys
seem such pigeons beside him. I'm sorry now we're not going to announce
the engagement at once. I certainly sha'n't change my mind--and it would
be such fun to be able to say I was engaged before coming out."

"Twice before coming out."

"Oh, well, I only count it once, do you see? Billy's such a goose. You
should have seen him last night when I forgot two of my dances with
him--on purpose. He's really getting to dislike me; so that I shall soon
be able to--to show him."

"I wouldn't be in a hurry about that, dear. There's lots of time. As you
said the other day, it's no use hurting his feelings--"

Evie sat up suddenly in bed, and looked suspicious.

"So you're taking that stand. Now I know you don't like him. You've got
something against him, though I can't for the life of me imagine what it
can be, when you never laid eyes on him till a few days ago. Well, I'm not
going to change, do you see? You may as well make up your mind to that at
once. And it will be Billy or no Billy."

Nearer than that Miriam could not approach the subject through fear of
doing more harm than good. At the end of a week Ford found her at home,
chiefly because she felt it time he should. She secured again the
afternoon-call atmosphere; but she noticed that he carried a small
packet--a large, brownish-yellow envelope, strapped with rubber
bands--which he kept in his hand. She was struck by the greater ease of
his entry, and by the renewal of that sense of comradeship which had
marked his bearing toward her in the old days in the cabin. The small
comedy of introductory commonplace went off smoothly.

"Well?" he said then, with a little challenging laugh.

"Well--what?"

"I've been waiting for your move. You haven't made it."

She shook her head. "I've no move to make."

"Oh yes, you have--a great big move. You can easily say, Check. I doubt if
you can make it, Checkmate."

"I'm afraid that's a game I don't know how to play."

He stared at her inquiringly--noting the disdain with which her chin
tilted and her lip curled, though he could see it was a disdain suffused
with sweetness.

"Do you mean that you wouldn't--wouldn't give me away?"

"I mean that you're either broaching a topic I don't understand or
speaking a language I've never learned. If you don't mind, we won't
discuss the subject, and we'll speak our mother-tongue--the mother-tongue
of people like you and me."

He stared again. It took him some few seconds to understand her
phraseology. In proportion as her meaning broke upon him, his face glowed.
When he spoke it was with enthusiasm for her generosity in taking this
stand rather than in gratitude for anything he was to gain by it.

"By Jove, you're a brick! You always were. I might have expected that this
is exactly what you'd say."

"I hope so. I didn't expect that you'd talk of my giving you away, as you
call it--to any one."

"But you're wrong," he said, with a return to the laughing bravado which
concealed his inward repugnance to his position. "You're wrong. I'll give
you that tip now. I'll fight fair. I sha'n't be grateful. I'll profit by
your magnanimity. Remember it's my part in the world to be unscrupulous.
It has to be. I've told you so. With me the end justifies the
means--always; and when the end is to keep my word to Evie, it will make
no difference to me that you were too high-minded to put the big obstacle
in my way."

"You'll not expect me to be otherwise than sorry for that--for your sake."

"No, I dare say. But I can't stop to think of what any one feels for my
sake when I know what I feel for my own."

"Which is only an additional reason for my being--sorry. You don't find
fault with me for that?"

"I do. I don't want you to be sorry. I want to convince you. I want you to
see things from my point of view--how I've been placed. Good Lord! it's
hard enough, without the sense that you're sitting in judgment on me."

"I'm not sitting in judgment on you--except in so far as concerns Evie
Colfax. If it was anybody else--"

"But it couldn't be anybody else It's Evie or no one. She's everything on
earth to me. She's to me what electricity is to the wire--that which makes
it a thing alive."

"To be a thing alive isn't necessarily the highest thing."

"Ah, but that doesn't apply to me. It's all very well for other men to
say, 'All is lost to save honor.' They have compensations. I haven't. You
might as well ask a man to think of the highest thing when he's drowning."

"But I should. There have been men who haven't--and they've saved their
lives by it. But you know what we've called them."

"In my case there'd be only you to call me that--if you wanted to."

"Oh no; there'd be--you."

"I can stand that. I've stood it for eight years already. If you think I
haven't had times when it's been hell, you're quite mistaken. I wonder if
you can guess what it means to me--in here"--he tapped his breast--"to go
round among all these good, kind, honorable people, passing myself off as
Herbert Strange when all the time I'm Norrie Ford--and a convict? But I'm
forced to. There's no way out of it."

"Because there's no way out of it isn't a reason for going further in."

"What does that matter? When you're in up to the eyes, what does it matter
if you go over your head?"

"In this case it would matter to Evie. That's my point. I have to protect
her--to save her. There's no one but me to do it--and you."

"Don't count on me," he said, savagely. "I've the right, in this wild
beast's life, to seize anything I can snatch."

He renewed his arguments, going over all the ground again. She listened
to him as she had once listened to his plea in his defence--her pose
pensive, her chin resting on her hand, her eyes pitiful. As far as she was
aware of her own feelings it was merely to take note that a kind of
yearning over him, an immense sorrow for him and with him, had
extinguished the fires that a few days ago were burning for herself. It
was hard to sit there heedless of his exposition and deaf to his
persuasion. Seeing her inflexible, he became halting in his speech, till
finally he stopped, still looking at her with an unresenting, dog-like
gaze of entreaty.

She made no comment when he ceased, and for a time they sat in silence.

"Do you know what this is?" he asked, holding the packet toward her.

She shook her head wonderingly.

"It's what I owe you." She made a gesture of deprecation. "It's the money
you lent me," he went on. "It's a tremendous satisfaction--that at
least--to be able to bring it back to you."

"But I don't want it," she stammered, in some agitation.

"Perhaps not. But I want you to have it." He explained to her briefly what
he had done in the matter.

"Couldn't you give it to something?" she begged, "to some church or
institution?"

"You can, if you like. I mean to give it to you. You see, I'm not
returning it with expressions of gratitude, because anything I could say
would be so inadequate as to be absurd."

He left his chair and came to her, with the packet in his outstretched
hand. She shrank from it, rising, and retreating into the space of the
bay-window.

"But I don't want it," she insisted. "I never thought of your returning
it. I scarcely thought of the incident at all. It had almost passed from
my memory."

"That's natural enough; but it's equally natural that it shouldn't have
passed from mine." He came close to her and offered it again. "Do take
it."

"Put it on the table. Please."

"That isn't the same thing. I want you to take it. I want to put it into
your own hand, as you put it into mine."

She remembered that she had put it into his hand by closing his fingers
forcibly upon it, and hastened to prevent anything of that kind now. She
took it unwillingly, holding it in both hands as if it were a casket.

"That's done," he said, with satisfaction. "You can't imagine what a
relief it is to have it off my mind."

"I'm sorry you should have felt about it like that."

"You would have felt like that yourself, if you were a man owing money to
a woman--and especially a woman who was your--enemy."

"Oh!" She cowered, as if he had threatened her.

"I repeat the word," he laughed, uneasily. "Any one is my enemy who comes
between me and Evie. You'll forgive me if I seem brutal--"

"Yes, I'll forgive you. I'll even accept the word." She was pale and
nervous, with the kind of nervousness that kept her smiling and still, but
sent the queer, lambent flashes into her eyes. "Let us say it. I'm your
enemy, and you pay me the money so as to feel free to strike me as hard as
you can."

He kept to his laugh, but there was a forced ring in it.

"I don't call that a fair way of putting it, but--"

"I don't see that the way of putting it matters, so long as it's the
fact."

"It's the fact twisted in a very ingenious fashion. I should say
that--since I'm going to marry Evie--I want--naturally enough--to feel
that--that"--he stammered and reddened, seeking a word that would not
convey an insult--"to feel--that I--met other claims--as well as I could."

He looked her in the eyes with significant directness. His steady gaze, in
which she saw--or thought she saw--glints of challenge toned down by
gleams of regret, seemed to say, "Whatever I owe you other than money is
out of my power to pay." She fully understood that he did not repudiate
the debt; he was only telling her that since he had given all to Evie, his
heart was bankrupt. What angered her and kept her silent, fearing she
would say something she would afterward repent, was the implication that
she was putting forth her claim for fulfilment.

He still confronted her, with an air of flying humiliation as a flag of
defiance, while she stood holding the packet in both hands, when the door
was pushed open, and Evie, radiant from her walk in the cold air and fine
in autumn furs and plumage, fluttered in. Her blue eyes opened wide on the
two in the bay-window, but she did not advance from the threshold.

"Dear me, dear me!" she twittered, in her dry little fashion, before they
had time to realize the fact that she was there. "I hope I'm not
interrupting you."

"Evie dear, come in." Miriam threw the packet on a table, and went
forward. Ford followed, trying to regain the appearance of "just making a
call."

"No, no," Evie cried, waving Miriam back. "I only came--for nothing. That
is--But I'll go away and come back again. Do you think you'll be long? But
I suppose if you have secrets--"

Her hand was on the knob again, but Miriam caught her.

"No, darling, you must stay. You're absurd. Mr. Strange and I were
just--talking."

"Yes, so I saw. That's why I thought I might be _de trap_. How do you do!"
She put out her left hand carelessly to Ford, her right hand still holding
the knob, and twisted her little person impatiently. Ford held her hand,
but she snatched it away. "There's not the least reason why I should stay,
do you see?" she hurried on. "I only came with a message from Aunt
Queenie."

"I'm sure it's confidential," Ford laughed, "so I'll make myself scarce."

"You can do just as you like," Evie returned, indifferently. "Cousin
Colfax Yorke," she added, looking at Miriam, "has telephoned that he can't
come to dine; and, as it's too late to get anybody else, Aunt Queenie
thought you might come and make a fourth. It's only ourselves and--- him,"
she nodded toward Strange.

"Certainly, I'll come, dear--with pleasure."

"And I'll go," Ford said; "but I won't add with pleasure, because that
would be rude."

When he had gone Evie sniffed about the room, looking at the pictures and
curios as if she had never seen them before. It was evident that she had
spied the packet, and was making her way, by a seemingly accidental route,
toward it. Miriam drifted back to her place in the bay-window, where,
while apparently watching the traffic in the street below, she kept an eye
on Evie's manœuvres.

"What on earth can you two have to talk about?" Evie demanded, while she
seemed intent on examining a cabinet of old porcelain.

"If you're very good, dear," Miriam replied, trying to take an amused,
offhand tone, "I'll tell you. It was business."

"Business? Why, I thought you hardly knew him."

"You don't have to know people very well to transact business with them.
He came on a question of--money."

"No, but you don't start up doing business with a person that's just
dropped down from the clouds--like that." She snapped her fingers to
indicate precipitous haste.

"Sometimes you do."

"Well, _you_ don't. I know that for a fact." She was inspecting a vase on
a pedestal in a corner now. It was nearer to the packet. She wheeled round
suddenly, so that it should take her by surprise. "What's that?"

"You see. It's an envelope with papers in it."

"What sort of papers?"

"I haven't looked at them yet. They have to do with money, or investments,
or something. I'm never very clear about those things."

"I thought you did all that through Cousin Endsleigh Jarrott and Mr.
Conquest?"

"This was a little thing I couldn't trouble them with."

"And you went straight off to _him_, when you'd only known him--let me
see!--how many days?--one, two, three, four--"

"I've gone to people I didn't know at all--sometimes. You have to. If you
only knew more about investing money--"

"I don't know anything about investing money; but I know this is very
queer. And you didn't like him--or you said you didn't."

"I said I did, dear--after a fashion--and so I do."

"In that case I should think a good deal would depend upon the fashion.
Look here. It's addressed--_Miss Strange._ That's his writing. That's how
he scribbles his name. And there's something written in tiny, tiny letters
in the corner. What is it?" Without touching the envelope she bent down to
see. "It's _The Wild Olive_. Now, what in this world can that mean? That's
not business, anyhow. That means something."

"No, that's not business, but I haven't an idea what it means." Miriam was
glad to be able to disclaim something. "It was probably on the envelope by
accident. Some clerk wrote it, and Mr. Strange didn't notice it."

Evie let the explanation pass, while continuing to stare at the object of
her suspicions.

"That's not papers," she said, at last, pointing as she spoke to something
protruding between the rubber bands. "There's something in there. It looks
like a"--she hesitated to find the right article--"it looks like a
card-case."

"Perhaps it is," Miriam agreed. "But I'm sure I don't know why he should
bring me a card-case."

"Why don't you look?"

"I wasn't in a hurry; but you can look yourself if you want to."

Evie took offence. "I'm sure I don't want to. That's the last thing."

"I wish you would. Then you'd see."

"I only do it under protest," she declared--"because you force me to." She
took up the envelope, and began to unloose the rubber bands. "_The Wild
Olive_" she quoted, half to herself. "Ridiculous! I should think clerks
might have something better to do than write such things as that--on
envelopes--on people's business." But her indignation turned to surprise
when a small flat thing, not unlike a card-case, certainly, tumbled out.
"What in the name of goodness--?"

Only strong self-control kept Miriam from darting forward to snatch it
from the floor. She remembered it at once. It was a worn red leather
pocket-book, which she had last seen when it was fresh and new--sitting in
the sunset, on the heights above Champlain, and looking at the jewelled
sea. A card fell from it, on which there was something written. Evie
dropped on one knee to pick it up. Miriam was sorry to risk anything, but
she felt constrained to say, as quietly as possible:

"You'd better not read that, dear. It might be private."

Evie slipped the card back into the pocket-book, which she threw on the
table, where Miriam let it lie. "I won't look at anything else," Evie
said, with dignity, turning away.

"I want you to," Miriam said, authoritatively. "I beg you to."

Thus commanded, Evie drew forth a flat document, on which she read, in
ornamental letters, the inscription, _New York, Toronto, and Great Lakes
Railroad Company_. She unfolded it slowly, looking puzzled.

"It's nothing but a lot of little square things," she said, with some
disdain.

"The little square things are called coupons, if you know what they are."

"I know they're things people cut--when they have a lot of money. I don't
know why they cut them; and still less do I know why he should be bringing
them to you."

Miriam had a sudden inspiration that made her face beam with relief.

"I'll tell you why he brought them to me, dear--though I do it under
protest, as you say yourself. Your curiosity forces my hand, and makes me
show it ahead of time. He brought them to me because it's a
wedding-present for you. When you get married--or begin to get
married--you can have all that money for your trousseau."

"Aunt Helen is going to give me my trousseau. She said so."

"Then you can have it for anything you like--for house-furnishings or a
pearl necklace. You know you wanted a pearl necklace--and there's plenty
for a nice one. Each of those papers is worth a thousand dollars, or
nearly. And there are--how many?"

"Three. You seem very keen on getting rid of them."

"So I am--to you, darling."

Evie prepared to depart, looking unconvinced.

"It's awfully nice of you--of course. But still--if that's what you had
meant at first--from the beginning--you would have--Well, I'll tell Aunt
Queenie you'll come."

Left alone, Miriam made haste to read the card in the pocket-book.

   _As deep calls to deep, so Spirit speaks to Spirit. It is the only true
   communion between mutually comprehending souls. But it is
   unerring--pardoning all, because understanding all, and making the
   crooked straight._

She read it more than once. She was not sure that it was meant for her.
She was not sure that it was in Ford's own handwriting. But in their
situation it had a meaning; she took it as a message to herself; and as
she read, and read again, she felt on her face the trickling of one or two
slow, hard tears.



XVII



The result of the dinner that evening was that Evie grew more fretful.
After the departure of her guests, she evolved a brief formula which she
used frequently during the next few weeks: "There's something!" With her
quick eyes and quicker intuitions, it was impossible for her not to see
that Ford and Miriam possessed common memories of the kind that
distinguish old acquaintances from new ones. When it did not transpire in
chance words she caught it in their glances or divined it in the mental
atmosphere. As autumn passed into early winter she became nervous,
peevish, and exacting; she lost much from her pretty ways and something
from her looks. In the family the change was ascribed to the fatigue
incidental to the sudden round of lunches, dinners, dances, suppers,
theatre-parties, opera-goings, and "teas" with which American boys and
girls of a certain age are surfeited pitilessly with pleasure, as
Strasburg geese are stuffed for paté de foie gras. Ford, however,
suspected the true reason, and Miriam knew it. They met as seldom as might
be; and yet, with the many things requiring explanation between them,
frank conversation became imperative.

"You see how it is already," Miriam said to him. "It's making her unhappy
from the start. You can't conceal the truth from her very long."

"She isn't fretting about the truth; she's fretting about what she
imagines."

"She's fretting because she doesn't understand, and she'll go on fretting
till she does. I'm not sorry. It must show you--"

"It shows me the necessity of our being married as soon as possible, so
that I may take care of her, and put a stop to it."

"I agree with you that you'd put a stop to it. You'd put a stop to
everything. She wouldn't live a year--or you wouldn't. Either she'd
die--or she'd abhor you. And if she didn't die, you'd want to."

"I wish to the Lord I had died--eight years ago. The great mistake I made
was when the lumber-jacks loosed my hand-cuffs and started me through the
woods. They called it giving me a chance, and for a few minutes I thought
it was one. A chance! Good God! I remember feeling, as I ran, that I was
deserting something. I didn't know what it was just then, but I've
understood it since. It would have been a pluckier thing to have been in
my coffin as Norrie Ford--or even doing time--than to be here as Herbert
Strange."

She said nothing for the moment, but as they walked along side by side he
shot a glance at her, and saw her coloring. They had met in the park. He
was going toward the house in Seventy-second Street when she was coming
away from it. Seizing the opportunity of a few words in private, he had
turned to stroll back with her.

"I didn't expect you to be here as Herbert Strange," she said, as though
in self-excuse. "I had to give you a name that was like my own, when I was
writing letters about your ticket, and sending checks. I had to do
everything to avoid suspicion at a time when Greenport was watched. I
thought you might be able to take your own name or something like it--"

He explained to her how that had never been possible.

"Evie fidgets about it," he continued. "She puts together the two facts
that you and I seem to have known each other, and that my name is
identical with your father's. She doesn't know what to make of it; she
only thinks 'there's something.' She hasn't said more than that in words,
but I see her little mind at work."

"Evie isn't the only one," she informed him. "There's Mr. Wayne. He has to
be reckoned with. He recognized your voice from the first minute of
hearing it, though he hasn't said yet that he knows whose it is. He may do
so at any time. He's very surprising at that sort of thing. I can see him
listening when you're there, not only to your words, but to your very
movements, trying to recapture--"

"The upshot of everything," he said, abruptly, "is that I must marry her,
take her back to the Argentine, where I found her, and where we shall both
be out of harm's way."

"You wouldn't be out of harm's way. You can't turn your back on it like
that. You alone might be able to slip through, but not if you have Evie."

"That will be my affair; I'll see to it. I take the full responsibility on
myself."

"I couldn't let you. Remember that. You can't marry her. Let me say it
plainly--"

"Oh, you've said it plainly enough."

"If I've said it too plainly, it's because you force me. You're so
wilful."

"You mean, I'm so determined. What it amounts to is the clash of your
will against mine; and you refuse to see that I can't give way."

"I see that you must give way. It's in the nature of things. It's
inevitable. If I didn't know that, do you think I should interfere? Do you
think I should dare to run the risk of wrecking your happiness if I could
do anything else? If you knew how I hate doing anything at all--"

"But you needn't. You can just let things be."

"I can't let things be--with all I know; and yet it's impossible for me to
appeal to any one, except yourself. You put me in a position in which I
must either betray you or betray those who trust me. Because I can't do
either--"

"I profit by your noble-mindedness. I told you I would. I'm sorry to have
to do it--I'll even admit that I'm ashamed of it--and yet there's no other
course for me. I'm not taking you at an unfair advantage, because I've
concealed nothing from you from the first. You talk about the difficulty
of your position, but you don't begin to imagine mine. As if everything
else wasn't gall to me, I've got your disapproval to add wormwood."

"It isn't my disapproval; it's simply--the situation. My opinion counts
for nothing--"

"It counts for everything with me--and yet I have to ignore it. But, after
all," he flung out, bitterly, "it's the old story. I claim the right to
squeeze out of life such drops of happiness--if you can call it
happiness--as men have left to me, and you deny it. There it is in a
nutshell. Because other people have inflicted a great wrong on me, you
insist that I shall inflict a greater one on myself. And this time it
wouldn't be only on myself; it would be on poor little Evie. There's
where it cuts. No, no; I shall go on. I've the right to do it. You must
stop me if you can. If you don't, or won't--why, then--"

"I can stop you ... if you drive me to extremes ... but it wouldn't be by
doing ... any of the things you expect."

It was because of the catch in her voice that he stopped in his walk, and
confronted her. In spite of the little tremor he could see in her no sign
of yielding, and behind her veil he caught a gleam like that of anger. It
was at that minute, perhaps, that he became distinctly conscious for the
first time of a doubt as to the superiority of "his type of girl."
Notwithstanding the awakening of certain faint perceptions, he had
hitherto denied within himself that there was anything higher or more
lovely. But in this girl's unflinching loyalty, and in her tenacious
clinging to what she considered right, he was getting a new glimpse of
womanhood, which, however, in no way weakened his determination to resist
her.

"As far as I see," he said, after long hesitation, "you and I have two
irreconcilable duties. My duty is to marry Evie; yours is to prevent me.
In that case there's nothing for either of us but to forge ahead, and see
who wins. If you win, I shall bear no malice; and I hope you'll be equally
generous if I do."

"But I don't want to win independently of you. If I did, nothing could be
easier."

"Then why not do it?"

He tossed up his hand with one of his fatalistic Latin gestures, drawing
the attention of the passers-by to the man and woman talking so earnestly.
For this reason, and because she was losing her self-command, she hastened
to take leave of him.

Arrived at home, it gave her no comfort to find Charles Conquest--the
most spick and span of middle-aged New-Yorkers--waiting in the
drawing-room.

"I thought you might come in," he explained, "so I stayed. I have to get
your signature to the papers about that property in Montreal. I've fixed
the thing up and we'll sell."

"You said you'd send the papers--"

"That sounds as if you weren't glad to see me," he laughed, "but I'll
ignore the discourtesy. Here," he added, unfolding the documents, "you put
your name there--and there--near the L.S."

She carried the papers to her desk, and sat down to write. Conquest took
the liberty of old friendship to stroll about the room, with his hands
behind him, humming a little tune.

"Well," he said suddenly, "has he come back?"

He had not approached the subject, beyond alluding to it covertly, since
the day she had confided to him the confused story of her hopes. She
blotted her signature carefully thinking out her reply.

"I've given up expecting him," she said at last.

"Ho! ho! So that's out of the way."

She pretended to be scanning the documents before her so as to be able to
sit with her back to him.

"It isn't, for the reason that there's--no _way_," she said, after some
hesitation.

"Oh yes, there is," he laughed, "where there's a will."

"But I've no will."

"I have; I've enough for two."

"I'll tell you what you have got," she said, half turning and speaking to
him over the back of her chair. He drew near her. "You've got a great
deal of common sense, and I want to ask your advice."

"I can give that, as radium emits light--without ever diminishing the
original store."

"Then tell me. Has one ever the right to interfere where a man and a
woman--"

"No, never. You needn't give me any more details, because it's one of the
questions an oracle finds easiest to answer. No one ever thanks you--"

"I shouldn't be doing it for thanks."

"And you get your own fingers burnt."

"That wouldn't matter. I'd let my fingers burn to the bone if it would do
any good."

"It wouldn't. You may take my word for it. I know who you're talking
about. It's Evie Colfax."

She started, looking guilty. "Why should you suppose that?"

"I've got eyes. I've watched her, and I know she's a little minx. Oh, you
needn't protest. She's a taking little minx, and this time she's in the
right."

"I'm afraid I don't know what you mean."

"What has Billy Merrow got to offer her, even if he is my nephew? Come
now! He won't be in a position to marry for the next two or three years.
Whereas that fellow Strange--"

"Have you heard anything about him?" she asked, breathlessly.

"It isn't what I've heard, it's what I see. He's a very good chap, and a
first-rate man of business."

"Do you know him well--personally?"

"I meet him around--at the club and other places--and naturally I have
something to do with him at the office. I like him. If Evie can snap him
up she'll be doing well for herself. I'm sorry for Billy, of course; but
he'll have time to break his heart more than once before he'll have money
enough to do anything else with it. If I'd married at his age--"

This, however, was venturing on delicate ground, so that he broke off,
wheeling round toward the centre of the drawing-room. She folded the
documents and brought them to him.

"You know why I didn't send them?" he said, as he took them. "I thought if
I came myself, you might have something to tell me."

"I haven't; not anything special, that is."

"You've told me something special already--that you're not looking for him
back."

"I'd rather not talk about it now, if you don't mind."

"Then we'll talk about what goes with it--the other side of the subject."

"There is no other side of the subject."

"Oh, come now, Miriam! You haven't heard all I've got to tell you. You've
never let me really present my case, as we lawyers say. If you could see
things as I do--"

"But I can't, and you mustn't ask me to-day. I'm tired--"

"It would rest you."

"No, no; not to-day. Don't you see I'm not--I'm not myself? I've had a
very trying morning."

"What's the matter? Tell me. I can keep a confidence even if I can't do
some other things. Come now! I don't like to think you're worried when
perhaps I could help you. That's what I should be good for, don't you see?
I could assist you to bear a lot of things--"

His tone, which was so often charged with a slightly mocking banter,
became tender, and he attempted to take her hand. For a minute it seemed
as if it might be a relief to trust him, to tell him the whole story and
follow his counsel; but a second's thought showed her that she could not
shift the responsibility from herself, and that in the end she should have
to act alone.

"Not to-day," she pleaded. "I'm not equal to it."

"Then I'll come another day."

"Yes, yes; if you like, only--"

"Some day soon?"

"When you like, only leave me now. Please go away. You won't think I'm
rude, will you? But I'm not--not as I generally am--"

"Good-bye." He put out his, hand frankly, and smiled so humbly, and yet
withal so confidently, that she felt as if in spite of herself she might
yield to his persistence through sheer weariness.

       *       *       *       *       *

To her surprise, the next few weeks passed without incident bringing no
development in the situation. She saw little of Evie and almost nothing of
Ford. One or two encounters with Charles Conquest had no result beyond the
reiteration on his part of a set phrase, "You're coming to it, Miriam,"
which, while exasperating her nerves, had a kind of hypnotic effect upon
her will. She felt as if she might be "coming to it." Without calculating
the probabilities she saw clearly enough that if she married Conquest the
very act would furnish proof to Ford that her intervention in his affairs
had been without self-interest. It would even offer some proof to herself,
the sort of proof that strengthens the resolution and supports what is
tottering in the pride. Notwithstanding the valor with which she
struggled her victory over herself was not so complete that she could
contemplate the destruction of Ford's happiness with absolute confidence
in the purity of her motives in bringing it to ruin. It was difficult to
take the highest road when what was left of her own fiercest instincts
accompanied her on it. That she had fierce instincts she was quite aware.
It was not for nothing that she had been born almost beyond the confines
of the civilized earth, of parents for whom law and order and other men's
rights were as the dead letter. True, she was trying to train the
inheritance received from them to its finer purposes, as the vine draws
strange essences from a flinty soil and sublimates them into the
grape--but it was still their inheritance. While she was proud of it, she
was afraid of it; and the fact that it leaped with her to separate Norrie
Ford from Evie Colfax was a reason for distrusting the very impulse she
knew to be right. Marriage with Conquest presented itself, therefore as a
refuge--from Ford's suspicion and her own.

For the time being, however, the necessity for doing anything was not
pressing. Evie was caught into the social machine that had been set going
on her account, and was not so much whirling in it as being whirled. Her
energies were so taxed by the task of going round that she had only
snatches of time and attention to give to her own future. In one of these
she wrote to her uncle Jarrott, asking his consent to the immediate
proclamation of her engagement, with his approval of her marriage at the
end of the winter, though the reasons she gave him were not the same as
those she advanced to Miriam. To him she dwelt on the maturity of her
age--twenty by this time--the unchanging nature of her sentiments, and her
desire to be settled down. To Miriam she was content to say, "There's
something! and I sha'n't get to the bottom of it till we're married."

Of the opening thus unexpectedly offered her Miriam made full use,
pointing out the folly or verifying suspicions after marriage rather than
before.

"Well, I'm going to do it, do you see?" was Evie's only reply. "I know it
will be all right in the end."

Still a few weeks were to pass, and it was early in the new year before
Uncle Jarrott's cablegram arrived with the three words, "_If you like_."
Miriam received the information at the opera, where she had been suddenly
called on to take the place of Miss Jarrott, laid low with "one of her
headaches." It was Ford who told her, during an entr'acte, when for a few
minutes Evie had left the box with the young man who made the fourth in
the party. Finding themselves alone, Ford and Miriam withdrew as far as
possible from public observation, speaking in rapid undertones.

"But you'll not let her do it?" Miriam urged.

"I shall, if you will. You can stop it--or posptone it. If you don't, I
have every right to forge ahead. It's no use going over the old arguments
again--"

"You put me in an odious position. You want me either to betray you or
betray the people who've been kind to me. It _would_ be betrayal if I were
to let you go on."

"Then stop me; it's in your power."

"Very well; I will."

He gave her a quick look, astonished rather than startled, but there was
no time for further speech before Evie and her companion returned.

It was Miriam's intention to put her plan into immediate execution, but
she let most of the next day go by without doing anything. Understanding
his driving her to extremes to be due less to deliberate defiance than to
a desperate braving of the worst, she was giving him a chance for
repentance. Just at the closing in of the winter twilight, at the hour
when he generally appeared, the door was flung open and Billy Merrow
rushed in excitedly.

"What's all this about Evie?" he shouted, almost before crossing the
threshold. "I've been there, and no one is at home. What's it about? Who
has invented the confounded lie?"

She could only guess at his meaning, but she forced him to shake hands and
calm himself. Turning on the electric light, she saw a young man with
decidedly tousled reddish hair, and features as haggard as a perfectly
healthy, honest, freckled face could be.

"Sit down, Billy, and tell me about it."

"I can't; I'm crazy."

"So I see; but tell me what you're crazy about."

"Haven't you heard it? Of course you have. They wouldn't be writing it to
Uncle Charlie if you didn't know all about it. But I'm hanged if I'll let
it go on."

Little by little she dragged the story from him. Miss Queenie Jarrott had
written to Charles Conquest as one of the oldest friends of the family to
inform him, "somewhat confidentially as yet," of her niece's engagement to
Mr. Herbert Strange, of Buenos Aires and New York. Uncle Charlie, knowing
what this would mean to him, had come to break the news and tell him to
"buck up and take it standing."

"I'll bet you I sha'n't take it lying down," he assured Miriam. "Evie is
engaged to _me_."

"Yes, Billy, but you see Miss Jarrott didn't know it. That's where the
mistake has been. You know I've always been opposed to the secrecy of the
affair, and I advised you and Evie to wait till you could both speak out."

"It isn't so very secret. You know it and so does Uncle Charlie."

"But Evie's own family have been kept in the dark, except that she told
her aunt in South America. But that's where the mistake comes in, don't
you see? Miss Jarrott, not having an idea about you, you see--"

"Spreads it round that Evie is engaged to some one else, when she isn't.
I'll show her who's engaged, when I can find her in. I'm going to sit on
her door-step till--"

"I wouldn't do anything rash, Billy. Suppose you were to leave it to me?"

"What good would that do? If that old witch is putting it round, the only
thing for Evie and me to do is to contradict her."

"Has Evie ever given you an idea that anything was wrong?"

"Evie's been the devil. I don't mind saying it to you, because you
understand the kind of devil she'd be. But Lord! I don't care. It's just
her way. She's told me to go to the deuce half a dozen times, but she
knows I won't till she comes with me. Oh, no. Evie's all right--"

"Yes, of course, Evie's all right. But you know, Billy dear, this thing
requires a great deal of management and straightening out, and I do wish
you'd let me take charge of it. I know every one concerned, you see, so
that I could do it better than any one--any one but you, I mean--"

"I understand that all right. I'm not going to be rough on them, but all
the same--"

She got him to sit down at last, made tea for him, and soothed him. At
the end of an hour he had undertaken not to molest Miss Jarrott, or to
fight that "confounded South-American," or to say a word of any kind to
Evie till she was ready to say a word to him. He became impressed with the
necessity for diplomatic action and, after some persuasion, promised to
submit to guidance--at any rate, for a time.

"And now, Billy, I'm going to write a note. The first thing to be done is
that you should find Mr. Strange and deliver it to him before nine o'clock
this evening. You'll do it quietly, won't you? and not let him see that
you are anything more than my messenger. No matter where he is, even in a
private house, you must see that he gets the note, if at all possible."

When he had sworn to this she wrote a few lines hurriedly. He carried them
away in the same tumultuous haste with which he had come. After his
departure she felt herself unexpectedly strong and calm.



XVIII



The feeling of being equal to anything she might have to face continued
with her. Now that the moment for action had arrived she had confidence in
her ability to meet it, since it had to be done. At dinner she was able to
talk to Wayne on indifferent topics, and later, when he had retired to his
den to practise his Braile, she sat down in the drawing-room with a book.
Noticing that she wore the severe black dress in which she had assisted at
the "killing off" of Evie's family, she brightened it with a few
unobtrusive jewels, so as to look less like the Tragic Muse. The night
being cold, a cheerful fire burned on the hearth, beside which she sat
down and waited.

When he was shown in, about half-past eight, it seemed to her best not to
rise to receive him. Something in her repose, or in her dignity, gave him
the impression of arriving before a tribunal, and he began his
explanations almost from the doorway.

"I got your note. Young Merrow caught me at dinner. I was dining alone, so
that I could come at once."

"You're very kind. I'm glad you were able to do it. Won't you sit down?"

Without offering her hand, she indicated a high arm-chair suitable for a
man, on the other side of the hearth. He seated himself with an air of
expectation, while she gazed pensively at the fire, speaking at last
without looking up.

"I hear Miss Jarrott has begun to announce your engagement to Evie."

"I understood she was going to, to a few intimate friends."

"And you allowed it?"

"As you see."

"Didn't you know that I should have to take that for a signal?"

"I've never given you to understand that a signal wouldn't come--if you
required one."

"No; but I hoped--" She broke off, continuing to gaze at the fire. "Do you
remember," she began again--"do you remember telling me--that evening on
the shore of Lake Champlain--just before you went away--that if ever I
needed your life, it would be at my disposal?--to do with as I chose?"

"I do."

"Then I'm going to claim it." She did not look up, but she heard him
change his position in his chair. "I shouldn't do it if there was any
other way. I'm sure you understand that. Don't you?" she insisted,
glancing at him for an answer.

"I know you wouldn't do it, unless you were convinced there was a reason."

"I've tried to be just to you, and to see things from your point of view.
I do; I assure you. If I were in your position I should feel as you do.
But I'm not in your position. I'm in one of great responsibility, toward
Evie and toward her friends."

"I don't see what you owe to them."

[Illustration: Again there was a long silence.]

"I owe them the loyalty that every human being owes to every other."

"To every other--except me."

"I'm loyal to you, at least, whoever else may not be. But it wouldn't be
loyalty if I let you marry Evie. I'm going to ask you--not to do it--to go
away--to leave her alone--to go--for good."

There was a long silence. When he spoke, it was hoarsely but otherwise
without change of tone.

"Is that what you meant?--just now?"

"Yes. That's what I meant."

"Do you intend me to get out of New York, to go back to the South--?"

She lifted her hand in protestation.

"I'm not giving orders or making conditions. New York is large. There's
room in it for you and Evie, too."

"I dare say. One doesn't require much space to break one's heart in."

"Evie wouldn't break her heart. I know her better than you do. She'd
suffer for a while, but she'd get over it, and in the end, very soon
probably--marry some one else."

"How cruel you can be," he said, with a twisted smile.

"I can be, when it's right. In this case I'm only as cruel as--the truth.
I'm saying it because it must make things easier for you. Your own pain
will be the less from the knowledge that, in time, Evie will get over
hers."

"I suppose it ought to be, but--"

He did not finish his sentence, and again there was a long hush, during
which, while she continued to gaze pensively at the fire, she could hear
him shifting with nervous frequency in his chair. When at last she
ventured to look at him he was bowed forward, his elbow supported on his
knee, and his forehead resting on his hand.

"You'll keep your promise to me?" she persisted, softly, with a kind of
pitiful relentlessness.

"I'll tell you in a minute."

He jerked out the words in the brusque way in which a man says all that,
for the moment, he is physically able to utter. She allowed more time to
elapse. The roar of traffic and the clanging of electric trams came up
from the street below, but no sound seemed able to penetrate the stillness
in which they sat. As far as Miriam was conscious of herself at all, it
was simply to note the curious deadness of her emotions, as though she had
become a mere machine for doing right, like a clock that strikes
punctually. Nevertheless, it caused her some surprise when he raised
himself and said, in a voice that would have been casual on a common
occasion:

"I suppose you think me a cad?"

"No; why should I?"

"Because I am one."

"I don't know why you should say that, or what it has to do
with--anything."

"It's about that--that--promise."

"Oh!"

"Do you mind if we speak quite frankly? I should like to. I've been
bluffing that point ever since you and I met again. It's been torture to
have to do it--damned, humiliating torture; but it's been difficult to do
anything else. You see, I couldn't even speak of it without seeming to--to
insult you--that is, unless you took me in just the right way."

His look, his attitude, the tones of his voice, the something woe-begone
and yet boyish in his expression, recalled irresistibly the days in the
cabin, when he often wore just this air. She had observed before that when
they were alone together the years seemed to fall from his manner, while
he became the immature, inexperienced young fugitive again. She had
scarcely expected, however, that this lapse into youth would occur
to-night. She herself felt ages old--as though all the ends of the world
had come upon her.

"You may say anything you like. There's nothing you could possibly tell me
that I shouldn't understand."

"Well, then, when I made that promise, I meant to keep it, and to keep it
in a special way. I thought--of course we were both very young--but I
thought that, after what had happened--"

"Wait a minute. I want to tell you something before you go on." She
rallied her spirit's forces for a desperate step, gathering all her life's
possible happiness into one extravagant handful, and flinging it away, in
order to save her pride before this man, who was about to tell her that he
had never been able to love her. "What I am going to say may strike you as
irrelevant; but if it is, you can ignore it. I expect to be married--in a
little while--it's practically a settled thing--to Charles Conquest, whom
I think you know. Now, will you go on, please?"

He stared at her in utter blankness.

"Good God!"

He got up and took a few restless turns up and down the room, his head
bent, his hands behind his back. He reseated himself when his confused
impressions grew clearer.

"So that it doesn't matter what I thought about--that promise?"

"Not in the least." She had saved herself. "The one thing important to me
is that you should have made it."

"And that you can hold me to it," he added, tersely.

"I presume I can do that?"

"You can, unless--unless I find myself in a position to take the promise
back."

"I can hardly see how that position could come about," she said, with an
air of wondering.

"I can. You see," he went on in an explanatory tone, "it was an unusual
sort of promise--a promise made, so to speak, for value received--for
unusual value received. It wasn't one that a common occasion would have
called forth. It was offered because you had given me--life."

He rested his arm now on a table that stood between them and, leaning
toward her, looked her steadily in the eyes.

"I haven't the faintest idea what you're going to say," she remarked,
rather blankly.

"No, but you'll see. You gave me life. I hold that life in a certain sense
at your pleasure. It is at your disposal. It must remain at your
disposal--- until I give it back."

She sat upright in her chair, leaning in her turn on the table, and
drawing nearer to him.

"I can't imagine what you mean," she said, under her breath and looking a
little frightened.

"You'll see presently. But don't be alarmed. It's going to be all right.
As long as I hold the life you gave me," he continued to explain, "I must
do your bidding. I'm not a free man; I'm--don't be offended--I'm your
creature. I don't say I was a free man before this came up. I haven't been
a free man ever since I've been Herbert Strange. I've been the slave of a
sort of make-believe. I've made believe, and I've felt I was justified.
Perhaps I was. I'm not quite sure. But I haven't liked it; and now I begin
to feel that I can't stand it any longer. You follow me, don't you?"

She nodded, still leaning toward him across the table, and not taking her
eyes from his. He remembered afterward though he paid no heed to it at the
time, how those eyes grew wide with awe and flashed with strange, lambent
brightness.

"I told you a few days ago," he pursued, "that there were _times_ when it
was hell. That was putting it mildly--too mildly. There's been no time
when it wasn't hell--in here." He tapped his forehead. "I've struggled,
and fought, and pushed, and swaggered, and bluffed, and had ups and downs,
and taken heart, and swaggered and bluffed again, and lied all
through--and I've made Herbert Strange a respectable man of business on
the high road to success. But when I come near you it all goes to
pieces--like one of those curiously conserved dead bodies when they're
brought to the air. There's nothing to them. There's nothing to me--so
long as I'm Herbert Strange."

"But you _are_ Herbert Strange. You can't help yourself--now."

"Herbert Strange goes back into the nothingness out of which he was born
the minute I become Norrie Ford again."

"But you can't do that!"

She drew herself up hastily, with a gasp.

"It's exactly what I mean to do." He spoke very slowly "I'm going to be a
free man, and my own master, even if it leads me where--where they meant
to put me when you snatched me away. I'm going back to my fellow-men, to
the body corporate--"

She rose in agitation, and drew back from him toward the chimney-piece.
"So that if--if anything happens," she said, "I shall have driven you to
it. That's how you get your revenge."

"Not at all. I'm not coming to this decision suddenly, or in a spirit of
revenge, in any way." He followed her, standing near her, on the
hearth-rug. "I can truthfully say," he went on in his slow, explanatory
fashion, "that there's been no time, since the minute I made my first dash
for liberty, when I haven't known, in the bottom of my heart, what a good
thing it would have been if I hadn't done it. I've come to see--I've _had_
to--- that the death-chair would have been better, with self-respect, than
freedom to go and come, with the necessity to gag every one, every minute
of the day, and every day in the year, and all the time, with lies. If
that seems far-fetched to you--"

"No, it doesn't."

"Well, if it did you'd see it wasn't, if you were in my place for a month.
I didn't mind it so much at first. I stood it by day and just suffered by
night--till the Jarrotts began to be so kind to me, and I came to New
York--and--and--and Evie!"

"I'm sorry I've spoken to you as I have," she said, hastily. "If I'd known
you felt like that--"

"You were quite right. I always understood that. But I can't go on with
it. If Evie marries me now, it shall be knowing who I am."

"You don't mean that you could possibly tell her?"

"I'm going to tell every one."

She stifled a little cry. "Then it will be my doing!"

"It will be your doing--up to a point. But it will be something for you to
be proud of, not to regret. You've only brought my mistake so clearly
before me that even I can't stand it--when I've stood so much. You ask me
to turn my back on Evie and sneak away. You've got the right to command,
and there's nothing for me but to obey you. But I can't help seeing the
sort of life that would be left to me after I'd carried out your orders.
It wouldn't only be the loss of Evie--I may lose her in any case--it would
be the loss of everything within myself that's enabled me hitherto merely
to hold up my head--and bluff."

"I might withdraw what I've just asked you to do. Perhaps we could find
some other way."

He laughed with grim lightness.

"You're weakening. That's not like you. And it wouldn't do any good now.
Even if we did patch up some other scheme, there would still remain what
you talked about a minute ago--the loyalty that every human being owes to
every other."

"But I thought you didn't recognize that?"

"I said I didn't. But in here"--he tapped his fingers over the heart--"I
did, and I do. You've brought me to see it."

"That's very noble, but you saw it for yourself--"

"Through a glass--darkly; now I can look at the thing in clear daylight,
and see what I have to do."

She dropped into her chair again, looking up at him. He stood with his
back to the fire, holding his head high, his bearing marked by a dogged,
perhaps forced, serenity.

"But what _can_ you do?" she asked, after considering his words. "You're
so involved. All this business--and the people in South America--"

"Oh, there are ways and means. I haven't made plans, but I've thought,
from time to time, of what I should do if I ever came to just this pass.
The first thing would be to tell the few people who are most concerned,
confidentially. Then I should go back to South America, and settle things
give me your respect again--not even the little you've given me
hitherto--and God knows that can't have been much. I could stand anything
in the world--anything--rather than that you should come to that."

"But I shouldn't, when I myself had dissuaded you--"

"No, no; don't try. You'd be doing wrong. You've been to me so high and
holy that I don't like to think you haven't the strength to go on to the
end. I've got it, because you've given it me. Don't detract from your own
gift by holding me back from using it. You found me a prisoner--or an
escaped one--and I've been a prisoner all these years, the prisoner of
something worse than chains. Now I'm going free. Look!" he cried, with
sudden inspiration. "I'll show you how it's done. You'll see how easy it
will be."

He moved to cross the room.

"What are you going to do?"

She sprang up as if to hold him back, but his finger was on the bell.

"You don't mind, I hope?" he asked; but he had rung before she could give
an answer. The maid appeared in the doorway.

"Ask Mr. Wayne if he would be good enough to come in here a minute. Tell
him Mr. Strange particularly wants to see him."

He went back to his place by the fireside, where he stood apparently calm,
showing no sign of excitement except in heightened color and the stillness
of nervous tension Miriam sank into her chair again.

"Don't do anything rash," she pleaded. "Wait till to-morrow There will
always be time. For God's sake!"

If he heard her he paid no attention, and presently Wayne appeared. He
hesitated a minute on the threshold, and during that instant Ford could
see that he looked ashy and older, as if something had aged him suddenly.
His hands trembled, too, as he felt his way in.

"Good-evening," he said, speaking into the air as blind men do. "I thought
I heard your voice."

Having groped his way across the room and reached the table that stood
between the arm-chairs Miriam and Ford had occupied, he stopped. He stood
there, with fingers drumming soundlessly on the polished wood, waiting for
some one to speak.

In spite of the confidence with which he had rung the bell, Ford found it
difficult now to begin. It was only after one or two inarticulate attempts
that he was able to say anything.

"I asked you to come in, sir," he began, haltingly, "to tell you something
very special. Miss Strange knows it already.... If I've done wrong in not
telling you before ... you'll see I'm prepared to take my punishment....
My name isn't Strange ... it isn't Herbert."

"I know it isn't."

The words slipped out in a sharp tone, not quite nervous, but thin and
worn. Miriam's attitude grew tense. Ford took a step forward from the
fireside. With his arm flung over the back of his chair, and his knee
resting on the seat of it, he strained across the table, as if to
annihilate the space between Wayne and himself.

"You _knew_?"

The blind man nodded. When he spoke it was again into the air.

"Yes; I knew. You're Norrie Ford. I ought to say I've only known it
latterly--about a fortnight now."

"How?"

"Oh, it just came to me--by degrees, I think."

"Why didn't you say something about it?"

"I thought I wouldn't. It has worried me, but I thought I'd keep still."

"Do you mean that you were going to let everything--go on?"

"I weighed all the considerations. That's the decision I came to. You must
understand," he went on to explain, in a voice that was now tremulous as
well as thin, "that I'd had you a good deal on my mind, during these past
eight years. I sentenced you to death when I almost knew you were
innocent. It was my duty. I couldn't help it. The facts told dead against
you. Every one admitted that. True, the evidence might have been twisted
to tell against old Gramm and his wife, but they hadn't been dissipated,
and they hadn't been indicted, and they hadn't gone round making threats
against Chris Ford's life like you."

"I didn't mean them. It was nothing but a boy's rage--"

"Yes, but you made them; and when the old man was found--But I'll not go
into that now. I only want to say that, while I couldn't acquit you with
my intelligence, I felt constrained to do it in my heart, especially when
everything was over, and it was too late. The incident has been the one
thing in my professional career that I've most regretted. I don't quite
blame myself. I had to do my duty. And yet it was a relief to me when you
got away. I don't know that I could have acted differently, but--but I
liked you. I've gone on liking you. I've often thought about you, and
wondered what had become of you. And one day--not long ago--as I was going
over the old ground once more, I saw I'd been thinking about--_you_.
That's how it came to me."

"And you were going to remain silent, and let me marry Evie?"

The blind man reflected.

"I saw what was to be said against it. But I weighed all the evidence
carefully. You were an injured man; you'd made a great fight and you'd
won--as far as one man can win against the world. I came to the conclusion
that I wasn't called on to strike you down a second time, after you'd
scrambled up so pluckily. Evie is very dear to me; I don't say that I
should see her married to you without some misgiving; but I decided that
you deserved her. It was a great responsibility to take, but I took it and
made up my mind to--let her go."

"Oh, you're a good man! I didn't think there was such mercy in the world."

Ford flung out the words in a cry that was half a groan and half a shout
of triumph. Miriam choked back a sob. The neat little man shrugged his
shoulders deprecatingly.

"There's one thing I should like to ask," he pursued, "among the many that
I don't know anything about, and that I don't care to inquire into. How
did you come by the name of this lady's father, my old friend Herbert
Strange?"

Ford and Miriam exchanged swift glances. She shook her head, and he took
his cue.

"I happened to see it in a--a sort of--paper. I had no idea it was that of
a real person. I fancied it had come out of a novel--- or something like
that. I didn't mean to keep it, but it got fastened on me."

"Very odd," was his only comment. "Isn't it, Miriam?

"Now," he _added_, "I suppose you've had all you want of me, so I'll say
good-night."

He held out his hand, which Ford grasped, clinched rather, in both his
own.

"God bless you!" Wayne murmured, still tremulously. "God bless you--my
boy, and bring everything out right. Miriam, I suppose you'll come in and
see me before you go to bed."

They watched him shuffle his way out of the room, and watched the door
long after he had closed it. When at last Miriam turned her eyes on Ford
they were luminous with the relief of her own defeat.

"You see!" she cried, triumphantly. "You see the difference between him
and me--between his spirit and mine! Now which of us was right?"

"You were."



XIX



The one thing clear to Miriam on the following day was that she had ruined
everything with astonishing completeness--a curious result to come from
what she was firmly convinced was "doing right." She had calculated that,
by a moderate measure of suffering to Evie, and a large one to Ford,
Evie's ultimate welfare at least would be secured. Now everything was
being brought to grief together. Out of such a wreck nothing could be
saved.

With Ford's desire to break the force which made him an impostor she had
sympathy, but his willingness to risk his life in order to be in harmony
with law and order again was not so easy for her to understand. While
education, training and taste kept her, in her own person, within the
restrictions of civilized life, yet the part of a free-lance in the world
appealed to her strongly atavistic instincts far more directly than
membership in a disciplined regular army. The guerilla fighter must of
necessity be put to shifts--even moral shifts--which the common soldier,
trained and commanded by others, can be spared; but her heart was with the
man roving in the hills on his own account. That Ford should deliberately
seek chains in barracks, when by her surrender on the subject of Evie she
had made it possible for him still to keep the liberty of the field, was
to her at once incomprehensible and awful. She had not only the sense of
watching a man rushing upon Fate, but the knowledge that she herself had
given him the impetus; while she was fully alive to the fact that when he
fell everything she cared for in the world would fall with him.

Her mind was too resourceful, her spirit too energetic, to permit of her
sitting in helpless anguish over his new determination. She was already
busy with plans for counteracting him, in one of which at least she saw
elements of hope. Having conceived its possibilities, she was eager to go
and test them; but she had decided not to leave the house until she knew
that Ford was really putting his plans into execution. The minute Evie
learned the fatal news she would have need of her, and she dared not put
herself out of the child's reach. Her first duty must be toward the
fragile little creature, who would be crushed like a trampled flower.

Shortly before noon she was summoned to the telephone, where Evie was
asking if she should find her in. Miriam judged from the tones of the
transmitted voice that the worst had been made known. She was not,
however, prepared for the briskness with which, ten minutes later, Evie
whisked into the room, her cheeks aglow with excitement and her heavenly
eyes dancing with a purely earthly sparkle.

"Isn't this awful?" she cried, before Miriam could take her into her
loving arms. "Isn't it appalling? But it's not a surprise to me--not in
the least. I knew there was something. Haven't I said so? I almost knew
that his name wasn't Strange. If I hadn't been so busy with my coming
out--and everything--I should have been sure of it. I haven't had time to
think of it--do you see? With a lunch somewhere every day at half-past
one," she hurried on, breathlessly, "and a tea at half-past four, and a
dinner at eight, and a dance at eleven, and very likely the theatre or the
opera in between--well, you can see I haven't been able to give much
attention to anything else; but I knew, from the very time when I was in
Buenos Aires, that there was something queer about that name. I never saw
a man so sensitive when any one spoke about his name, not in all my life
before--and you know down there it's the commonest thing--why, they're so
suspicious on that point that they'd almost doubt that mine was Evie
Colfax."

She threw her muff in one direction, her boa in another, and her gloves in
still another.

"But, Evie darling, you surely didn't think--"

"Of course I never thought of anything like this. I didn't really think of
anything at all. If I'd begun to give my mind to it, I should probably
have hit on something a great deal worse."

"What do you mean, dear? Worse--than what?"

"Worse than just being accused of shooting your uncle--and it was only his
great-uncle, too. I might have thought of forgery or something
dishonorable, though I should know he wasn't capable of it. Being accused
isn't much. You can accuse _any one_--you could accuse _me_. That doesn't
prove anything when he says he didn't do it. Of course he didn't do it.
Can't any one _see_? My goodness! I wish they'd let me make the laws. I'd
show them. Just think! To put a man like that in prison--- and say they'd
do such awful things to him--and make him change his name--and everything.
It's perfectly scandalous. It's an outrage. I shouldn't think such things
would be allowed. They wouldn't be allowed in the Argentine. Why, there
was a man out there who killed his father-in-law--actually _killed_
him--and they didn't do anything to him at all. I've seen him lots of
times. Aunt Queenie has pointed him out to me. He used to have the box
next but two to ours at the opera. And to think they should take a man
like Herbert, and worry him like that--it makes me so indignant I'd like
to--"

Evie ground her teeth, threw her clinched fists outward, and twitched her
skirts about the room in the prettiest possible passion of righteous
anger.

"But, darling," Miriam asked, in a puzzled voice, "what are you going to
do about it?"

Evie wheeled round haughtily.

"Do about it? What would you expect me to do about it? I'm going to tell
every one he didn't do it--that's what I'm going to do about it. But of
course we're not to speak of it just yet--outside ourselves, you know.
He's going to Buenos Aires to tell Uncle Jarrott he didn't do it--and when
he comes back we're going to make it generally known. Oh, there's to be
law about it--and everything. He means to change his name again to what it
was before--Ford, the name was--and I must say, Miriam, I like that a good
deal better than Strange, if you don't mind my telling you. It seems odd
to have so many Stranges--and I must say I never could get used to the
idea of having exactly the same name as yours. It was almost like not
being married outside the family--and I should hate to marry a relation.
That part of it comes as a pleasant surprise, do you see? I'd made up my
mind to Strange, and thought there was no way of getting rid of it, unless
I--but I wasn't looking ahead to anything of _that_ kind. I hope I shall
never--"

"So, darling, you're going to be true to him?"

"True to him? Of course I'm going to be true to him. Why shouldn't I be?
I'm going to be more true to him now than I was before. He's so noble
about it, too. I wish you could have seen the way he broke it to me. Aunt
Queenie said she never saw anything so affecting, not even on the stage.
She was there, you know. Herbert felt he couldn't go over it all twice,
and he thought I should need some one to support me through the shock. I
didn't--not a bit. But I wish you could have been there, just to see him."

"I can fancy it, dear."

"Of course I know now what you've been fidgeting about ever since he came
to New York. He says you recognized him--that you'd seen him at Greenport.
Oh, I knew there was something. But I must say, Miriam, I think you might
have told me confidentially, and not let it come on me as such a blow as
this. Not that I take it as a blow, though, of course, it upsets things
terribly. We can't announce our engagement for ever so long, and Aunt
Queenie is rushing round in the motor now to take back what she wrote to a
few people yesterday. I can't imagine what she'll tell them, because I
charged her on her sacred honor not to give them the idea it was broken
off, although I'd rather they thought it was broken off than that I hadn't
been engaged at all."

"Miss Jarrott takes it quietly, then?"

"Quietly! I wish you could see her. She thinks there never was anything so
romantic. Why, she cried over him, and kissed him, and said she'd always
be his friend if every one else in the world were to turn against him. As
a matter of fact, the poor old dear is head over heels in love with
him--do you see?--in that sort of old-maid way--you know the kind of
thing I mean. She thinks there's nobody like him, and neither there is. I
shall miss him frightfully while he's down there telling Uncle Jarrott. I
shall skip half my invitations and go regularly into retreat till he comes
back. There's lots more he's going to tell me then--all about what Popsey
Wayne had to do with it--and everything. I'm glad he doesn't want to do it
now, because my head is reeling as it is. I've so many things to think
of--and so much responsibility coming on me all at once--and--"

"Are you going to do anything about Billy?"

"Well, I can postpone that, at any rate. Thank goodness, there's _one_
silver lining to the cloud. I was going to give him a pretty strong hint
to-night, seeing Aunt Queenie has begun writing notes around, but now I
can let him simmer for a while longer. He won't be able to say I haven't
let him down easy, poor old boy. And, Miriam dear," she continued,
gathering up her various articles of apparel, preparatory to taking leave,
"you'll keep just as quiet about it as you can, like a dear, won't you? We
don't mean to say a word about it outside ourselves till Herbert comes
back from seeing Uncle Jarrott. That's my advice--and it's all our
advice--I mean, Aunt Queenie's, too. Then they're going to law--or
something. I know you _won't_ say anything about it, but I thought I'd
just put you on your guard."

       *       *       *       *       *

If Evie's way of taking it was a new revelation to Miriam, of her own
miscalculation, it was also a new incentive to setting to work as promptly
as possible to repair what she could of the mischief she had made. With
Evie's limitations she might never know more of the seriousness of her
situation than a bird of the nature of the battle raging near its nest;
while if even Ford "went to law," as Evie put it, and he came off
victorious, there might still be chances for their happiness. To anything
else Miriam was indifferent, as a man in the excitement of saving his
children from fire or storm is dead to his own sensations. It was with
impetuous, almost frenzied, eagerness, therefore, that she went to the
telephone to ring up Charles Conquest, asking to be allowed to see him
privately at his office during the afternoon.

In what she had made up her mind to do the fact that she was planning for
herself an unnecessary measure of sacrifice was no deterrent. She was in a
mood in which self-immolation seemed the natural penalty of her mistakes.
She was not without the knowledge that money could buy the help she
purposed to obtain by direct intervention; but her inherited instincts,
scornful of roundabout methods, urged her to pay the price in something
more personal than coin. It replied in some degree to her self-accusation,
it assuaged the bitterness of her self-condemnation, to know that she was
to be the active agent in putting right that which her errors of judgment
had put wrong. To her essentially primitive soul atonement by proxy was as
much out of the question as to the devotee beneath the wheels of
Juggernaut. Somewhere in the background of her thought there were faint
prudential protests against throwing herself away; but she disdained them,
as a Latin or a Teuton disdains the Anglo-Saxon's preference for a court
of law to the pistol of the duellist. It was something outside the realm
of reason. Reckless impulses subdued by convent restraint or civilized
requirements awoke with a start all the more violent because of their long
sleep, driving her to do that which she knew other women would have done
otherwise or not at all.

She was aware, therefore, of limitations in the sacrifice she was making;
she was even aware that, in the true sense, it was no sacrifice whatever.
She was offering herself up because she chose to--in a kind of
wilfulness--but a passionate wilfulness which claimed that for her at
least there was no other way. Other women, wiser women, women behind whom
there was a long, moderation-loving past, might obey the laws that prompt
to the economy of one's self; she could only follow those blind urgings
which drove her forefathers to fight when they might have remained at
peace, or whipped them forth into the wild places of the earth when they
could have stayed in quiet homes. The hard way in preference to the easy
way was in her blood. She could no more have resisted taking it now than
she could have held herself back eight years ago from befriending Norrie
Ford against the law.

Nevertheless, it was a support to her to remember that Conquest's manner
on the occasions when business brought her to his office was always a
little different from that which he assumed when they met outside. He was
much more the professional man with his client, a little the friend, but
not at all the lover--if he was a lover anywhere. Having welcomed her now
with just the right shade of cordiality, he made her sit at a little
distance from his desk, while he himself returned to the revolving-chair
at which he had been writing when she entered. After the preliminary
greetings, he put on, unconsciously, the questioning air a business man
takes at the beginning of an interview which he has been invited to
accord.

"I came--about Evie."

Now that she was there it was less easy to begin than she had expected.

"Quite so. I knew there was a hitch. I've just had a mysterious note from
Queenie Jarrott which I haven't been able to make out. Can't they hit it
off?"

"It's a good deal more serious than that. Mr. Strange came to see Mr.
Wayne and me last night. I may as well tell you as simply as I can. His
name isn't Strange at all."

"Ho! ho! What's up?"

"Did you ever hear the name of--Norrie Ford?"

"Good Lord, yes! I can't quite remember--Let's see. Norrie Ford? I know
the name as well as I know my own. Wasn't that the case--why, yes, it must
have been--wasn't that the case Wayne was mixed up in six or eight years
ago?"

"Yes, it was."

"The fellow gave 'em all the slip, didn't he?"

She nodded.

"Hadn't he been commuted to a life sentence--?"

"Mr. Wayne hoped it would be done, but it hadn't been done yet. He was
still under sentence of--death."

"Yes, yes, yes. It comes back to me. We thought Wayne hadn't displayed
much energy or ability of foresight--or something. I remember there was
talk about it, and in the newspapers there was even a cock-and-bull story
that Wayne had connived at his escape. Well, what has that got to do with
Evie?"

"It has everything to do with her."

Conquest's little gray-green eyes blinked as if against the blaze of their
own light, while his features sharpened to their utmost incisiveness.

"You don't mean to say--?"

"I do."

"Well, upon--my--!" The exclamation trailed off into a silent effort to
take in this extraordinary piece of intelligence "Do you mean to say the
scamp had the cheek--? Oh no, it isn't possible. Come now!"

"It was exactly as I'm going to tell you, but I don't think you should
call him a scamp. You see, he's engaged to Evie--"

"He's not engaged to her now?"

"He is. She means to be true to him. So do we all."

Two little scarlet spots burned in her cheeks, but it was not more in the
way of emotion than a warm partisanship on Evie's account demanded.

"Well, I'm blowed!" He swung one leg across the other, making his chair
describe a semicircle.

"Perhaps you won't be so much--blowed, when you hear all I have to tell
you."

"Go ahead; I'm more interested than if it was a dime novel."

As lucidly as she could she gave him the outline of Ford's romance,
dwelling as he had done in relating it to her, less on its incidents than
on its mental and moral effect upon himself. She suppressed the narrative
of the weeks spent in the cabin and based her report entirely on
information received from Ford. For testimony as to his life and character
in the Argentine she had the evidence of Miss Jarrott, while on the
subject of his business abilities--no small point with a New York business
man, as she was astute enough to see--there could be no better authority
than Conquest himself, who, as Stephens and Jarrott's American legal
adviser, had had ample opportunity of judging. She was gratified to note
that as her story progressed it called forth sympathetic looks, and an
occasional appreciative exclamation, while now and then he slapped his
thigh as a mark of the kind of amused astonishment that verges on
approbation.

"So we couldn't desert him now, after she's been so brave, could we?" she
pleaded, with some amount of confidence; "and especially when he's engaged
to Evie."

"I suppose we can't desert him, if he's sane."

"Oh, he's sane."

"Then why the deuce, when he was so well out of harm's way, didn't he stay
there?"

"Because of his love for Evie, don't you see?" She had to explain Ford's
moral development and psychological state all over again, until he could
see it with some measure of comprehension.

"It certainly is the queerest story I ever heard," he declared, in
enjoyment of its dramatic elements, "and we're all in it, aren't we? It's
like seeing yourself in a play."

"I thought you would look at it in that way. As soon as I began wondering
what we could do--this morning--I saw that, after Evie, you were the
person most concerned."

"Who? I? Why am I concerned? I've got nothing to do with it!"

"No, of course not, except as Stephens and Jarrott's lawyer. When their
representative in New York--"

"Oh, but my dear girl, my duties don't involve me in anything of this
kind. I'm the legal adviser to the firm, but I've nothing to do with the
private affairs of their employees."

"Mr. Jarrott is very fond of Mr. Strange--"

"Perhaps this will cool his affection."

"I don't think it will as long as Evie insists on marrying him. I'm sure
they mean to stand by him."

"They won't be able to stand by him long, if the law gives him--what it
meant to give him before."

"Oh, but you don't think there's any danger of that?"

"I don't know about it," he said, shaking his head, ominously. "The fact
that he comes back and gives himself up isn't an argument in favor of his
innocence. There's generally remorse behind that dodge."

"Then isn't that all the more reason why we should help him?"

"Help him? How?"

"By trying to win his case for him."

He looked at her with eyes twinkling while his fingers concealed the smile
behind his colorless mustache.

"And how would you propose to set about that?"

"I don't know, but I suppose you do. There must be ways. He's leaving as
soon as he can for South America. He thinks it may be months before he
gets back. I thought that--perhaps--in the mean time--while he won't be
able to do anything for himself--you might see--"

"Yes, yes; go on," he said, as she hesitated.

"You might see if there is any evidence that could be found--that wasn't
found before--isn't that the way they do it?--and have it ready--for him
when he came back."

"For a wedding present."

"It _would_ be a wedding present--to all of us. It would be for Evie's
sake. You know how I love her. She's the dearest thing to me in the world.
If I could only secure her happiness like that--"

"You mean, if I could secure it."

"You'd be doing it actively, but I should want to co-operate."

"In what way?"

She sat very still. She was sure he understood her by the sudden rigidity
of his pose, while his eyes stopped twinkling, and his fingers ceased to
travel along the line of his mustache. Her eyes fell before the scrutiny
in his, but she lifted them again for one of her quick, wild glances.

"In any way you like."

She tried to make her utterance distinct, matter of fact, not too
significant, but she failed. In spite of herself, her words conveyed all
their meaning. The brief pause that followed was not less eloquent, nor
did it break the spell when Conquest gave a short little laugh that might
have been nervous and, changing his posture, leaned forward on his desk
and scribbled on the blotting-pad. While he would never have admitted it,
it was a relief to him, too, not to be obliged to face her.

He was not shocked, neither was he quite surprised. He was accustomed to
the thought that a woman's love was a thing to purchase. One man bought it
from her father for a couple of oxen, another from herself for an
establishment and a diamond tiara. It was the same principle in both
cases. He had never considered Miriam Strange as being without a price;
his difficulty had been in knowing what it was. The establishment and the
diamond tiara having proved as indifferent to her as the yoke of oxen, he
was thrown back upon the alternative of heroic deeds. He had more than
once suspected that these might win her if they had only been in his line.
There being few opportunities for that kind of endeavor as the head of a
large and lucrative legal practice, the suggestion only left him cynical.
In the bottom of his heart he had long wished to dazzle, by some act of
prowess, the eyes that saw him only as a respectable man of middle age,
but the desire had merely mocked him with the kind of derision which
impotence gets from youth. It seemed now a stroke of luck which almost
merited being termed an act of Providence that there should have come a
call for exactly his variety of "derringdo" from the very quarter in which
he could make it tell.

"We've never gone in for any criminal business here," he said, after long
reflection, while he continued to scribble aimlessly, "but, of course,
we're in touch with the people who take it up."

"I thought you might be."

"But it's only fair to tell you that if your motive is to save time for
our friend in question--"

"That _is_ my motive--the only one."

"Then you could get in touch with them, too."

"But I don't want to."

"Still I think you should consider it. The best legal advice in the world
can be--bought--for money."

"I know that."

Lifting his eyes in a sharp look, he saw her head lilted back with her own
special air of deliberate temerity.

"Oh, very well, then," he said, quietly, resuming his scribbling again.
After this warning he felt justified in taking her at her word.

With that as a beginning she knew she had gained her first great point. In
answer to his questions she told the story over again, displaying, as he
remembered afterward--but long afterward--a surprising familiarity with
its details. She made suggestions which he noted as marked by some acumen,
and laid stress on the value of the aid they might expect privately from
Philip Wayne. The beauty and eagerness in her face fired the almost
atrophied enthusiasm in his own heart, while he could not but see that
this entirely altruistic interest had brought them in half an hour nearer
together than they had ever been before. It was what they had never had
till now--a bond in common. In spite of the persistency of his efforts and
his assertions, he had never hitherto got nearer her than a statue on a
pedestal gets to its neighbor in a similar situation but now at last they
were down on the same earth together. This was more than reason enough for
his taking up the cause of Norrie Ford, consecrating to it all his
resources, mental and material, and winning it.

In the course of an hour or two their understanding was complete, but he
did not refer again to the conditions of their tacit compact. It was she
who felt that sufficient had not been said--that the sincerity with which
she subscribed to it had not been duly emphasized. She was at the door on
the point of going away when she braced herself to look at him and say:

"You can't realize what all this means to me. If we succeed--that is, if
you succeed--I hardly dare to tell you of the extent to which I shall be
grateful."

He felt already some of the hero's magnanimity as to claiming his reward.

"You needn't think about that," he smiled. "I sha'n't. If by making Evie
happy I can serve you, I shall not ask for gratitude."

She looked down at her muff and smoothed its fur, then glanced up swiftly.
"No; but I shall want to give it."

With that she was gone--lighter of heart than a few hours ago it had
seemed to her possible ever to be again. Her joy was the joy of the
captain who feels that he has saved his ship, though his own wound is
fatal.



Part IV

Conquest



XX



Among the three or four qualities Conquest most approved of in himself,
not the least was a certain capacity for the patient acquisition of the
world's more enviable properties. He had the gift of knowing what he
wanted, recognizing it when he saw it, and waiting for it till it came
within his reach. From his youth upward he had been a connoisseur of
quality rather than a lover of abundance, while he owned to a talent for
seeing the value of things which other people overlooked, and throwing
them into relief when the objects became his. As far back as the time when
the modest paternal heritage had been divided between his brothers and
sisters and himself, he had been astute enough to leave the bulk of it to
them, contenting himself with one or two bits of ancestral furniture and a
few old books, which were now known by all to have been the only things
worth having. Throughout his life he had followed this principle of
acquiring unobtrusively but getting exactly what he wanted. It was so that
he bought his first horse, so that he bought his first motor, so that he
purchased the land where he afterward built his house--in a distant,
desolate stretch of Fifth Avenue which his acquaintances told him would be
hopelessly out of reach, but where, not many years after, most of them
were too late to join him.

In building his house, too, he took his time, allowing his friends to
make their experiments around him, while he studied the great art of "how
not to do it." One of his neighbors erected a Flemish château, another a
Florentine palazzo, and a third a François Premier _hôtel_; but his plot
of ground remained an unkempt tangle of mullein and blue succory. In the
end he put up a sober, handsome development on a style which the humbler
passers-by often called, with approval, "good, plain American," but whose
point of departure was Georgian. He had the instinct for that which
springs out of the soil. For this reason he did not shrink from an Early
Victorian note--the first note of the modern, prosperous New York--in
decoration; and the same taste impelled him toward the American in art.
While Neighbor Smith displayed his Gainsboroughs, and Neighbor Jones his
Rousseaus or Daubignys, Conquest quietly picked up a thing here and
there--always under excellent advice--which no picture-dealer had been
able to dispose of, because it came from some studio in Twenty-third
Street. Hung on his walls, it produced that much-sought-for effect of
"having been always there." He was not a Chauvinist, nor had he any
sympathy with the intolerantly patriotic. He was merely a lover of the
indigenous.

In much the same way he had sought for--and waited for--a wife. He had
been rashly put down as "not a marrying man," when he was only taking his
time. He had seen plainly of excellent possibilities--fine women, handsome
women, clever women, good women--any of whom presumably he could have had
for the asking; but none was, in his own phraseology, "just the right
thing." He wanted something unusual, and yet not exotic--something
obvious, which no one else had observed--something cultivated, and yet
native--something as exquisite as any hothouse orchid, but with the keen,
fresh scent of the American woods and waters on its bloom. It was not a
thing to be picked up every day, and so he kept on the lookout for it, and
waited. Even when he found it, he was not certain, on the spur of the
moment, that it would prove exactly what he had in mind. So he waited
longer. He watched the effect of time and experience upon it, until he was
quite sure. He knew the risk he was running that some one else might
snatch it up; but his principle had always been to let everything, no
matter how coveted, go, rather than buy in haste.

Lest such an attitude toward Miriam Strange should seem cold-blooded, it
should be said in his defence that he considered the aggregate of his
sentiments to be--love. She was to be more than "something better than his
dog, a little dearer than his horse," more than the living, responsive
soul among his chattels. There was that in her which appealed to his
desire, and to something more deeply seated in him still. After satisfying
ear, eye, and intelligence, there was in her nature a whole undiscovered
region, undivined, undefined, wakening the imagination, and stirring the
speculative faculties, like the subconscious elements in personality. In
her wild, non-Aryan glances he saw the flame of eyes that flashed on him
out of a past unknown to history; in the liquid cadences of her voice he
heard the echo of the speech that had sounded in the land before Plymouth
was a stockade or Manhattan was a farm; in her presence he found a claim
that antedated everything sprung of Hudson, Cabot, or Columbus. The
slender thread that attached her to the ages of nomadic mystery made her
for him the indigenous spirit, reborn in a woman of the world.

Knowing himself too old to be dominated by a passion, and too experienced
to be snared by wiles, he estimated his feelings as being those of love,
as he understood the word. He conceded the fact that love, like every
other desire, must work to win, and proceeded to set about his task
according to his usual methods of persistent, unobtrusive siege. It was
long before Miriam became aware of what he was doing, and her surprise as
she drew back was not quite so great as his to see her do it. He was so
accustomed to success--after taking the trouble to insure it--that he was
astonished, and a little angry, to find his usual tactics fail. He did not
believe that she was beyond his grasp; he perceived only that he had taken
the wrong way to get her. That there was a right way there could be no
question; and he knew that by patient, unremitting search he should find
it.

He had, therefore, several sources of satisfaction in espousing the cause
of Norrie Ford. The amplitude of his legal knowledge would be to him as
gay feathers to the cock; while the contemplation of the prize added to
his self-approval in never doubting that it could be won.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was early March when Ford sailed away, leaving his affairs in
Conquest's charge, at the latter's own request. He in his turn placed them
in the hands of Kilcup and Warren, who made a specialty of that branch of
the law. The reward was immediate, in that frequent talks with Miriam
became a matter of course.

His trained mind was prompt to seize the fact that these interviews took
place on a basis different from that of their meetings in the past. Where
he had been seeking to gain an end he was now on probation. He had been
told--or practically told--that what he had been asking would be granted,
as soon as certain conditions were fulfilled. It became to him, therefore,
a matter of honor, in some degree one of professional etiquette, to fulfil
the conditions before referring to the reward. Instead of a suitor
pressing his suit, he became the man of business recounting the points
scored, or still to be scored, in a common enterprise. In keeping her
informed of each new step that Kilcup and Warren were taking, he
maintained an attitude of distant respect, of which she could have nothing
to complain.

Expecting an equal reserve on her part, it was with some surprise that he
saw her assume the initiative in cordiality. He called it cordiality,
because he dared not make it a stronger word. Her manner went back to the
spontaneous friendliness that had marked their intercourse before she
began to see what he was aiming at, while into it she threw an infusion of
something that had not hitherto been there. When he came with the
information that a fresh bit of evidence had been discovered, or a new
light thrown on an old one, she listened with interest--just the right
kind of interest--and made pretexts to detain him, sometimes with Wayne as
a third, sometimes without, for the pleasure of his own company. Now and
then, as spring came on, they would all three, at her suggestion, cross
the street, and stroll in the park together. Leaving Wayne on some
convenient seat, they would prolong their own walk, talking with the
unguarded confidence of mutual trust. It was she who furnished the
topics--books, music, politics, people, anything that chanced to be
uppermost. When he decided to purchase an automobile a whole new world of
consultation was opened up. They visited establishments together, and
drove with Wayne into the country to test machines. Returning Conquest
would dine informally, in morning dress, with them; or else, from time to
time he would invite them to a restaurant. By-and-by he took to organizing
little dinners at his own house, ostensibly to cheer up Wayne, but really
to see Miriam at his table.

In all this there was nothing remarkable, as between old friends, except
the contrast with her bearing toward him during the past year. He had
expected that when Norrie Ford went finally free she would fulfil her
contract, and fulfil it well; but he had not expected this instalment of
graciousness in advance. It set him to pondering, to looking in the
mirror, to refining on that careful dressing which he had already made an
art. After all, a man in the fifties was young as long as he looked young,
and according as one took the point of view.

Except when Ford's affairs came directly under discussion he occupied,
seemingly, a secondary place in their thoughts. Miriam rarely spoke of him
at all, and if Conquest brought up his name more frequently it was because
his professional interest in the numerous "nice points" of the case was
becoming keen. He talked them over with her, partly because of his
pleasure in the intelligence with which she grasped them, and partly
because their intimacy deepened in proportion as the hope strengthened
that Ford's innocence would be proved.

It was June before Miriam heard from South America. Two or three letters
to Evie had already come, guardedly written, telling little more than the
incidents of Ford's voyage and arrival. It was to Miriam he wrote what he
actually had at heart.

       *       *       *       *       *

"The great moment has come and gone," she read to Conquest. "I have seen
Mr. Jarrott, and made a clean breast of everything. It was harder than I
expected, though I expected it would be pretty hard. I think I felt
sorrier for him than for myself, which is saying a good deal. He not only
takes it to heart, but feels it as a cut to his pride. I can see that that
thought is uppermost. What he feels is not so much the fact that _I_
deceived him as that I deceived _him_. I can understand it, too. In a
country where there is such a lot of this sort of thing, he has never been
touched by it before. It has been a kind of boast that his men were always
the genuine article. If one of them is called Smith, it is because he _is_
a Smith, and not a Vere de Vere in hiding. But that isn't all. He took me
into his family--into his very heart. He showed that, when I told him. He
tried not to, but he couldn't help it. I tell you it hurt--_me_. I won't
try to write about it. I'll tell you everything face to face, when I get
up to the mark, if I ever do. Apparently my letters hadn't prepared him
for the thing at all. He thought it was to be something to do with Evie,
though he might have known I wouldn't have chucked up everything for that.
The worst of it is, he's no good at seeing things all round. He can't take
my point of view a bit. It is impossible to explain the fix I was put in,
because he can see nothing but the one fact that I pulled the wool over
his eyes--_his_ eyes, that had never suffered sacrilege before. I
sympathize with him in that, and yet I think he might try to see that
there's something to be said on my side. He doesn't, and he never
will--which only hurts me the more.

"As for Evie, he wouldn't let me mention her name. I didn't insist,
because it was too painful--I mean, too painful to see how he took it. He
said, in about ten words, that Evie had not been any more engaged than if
she had given her word to a man of air, and that there was no reason why
she should be spoken of. We left it there. I couldn't deny that, and it
was no use saying any more. The only reply to him must be given by Evie
herself. He is writing to her, and so am I. I wish you would help her to
see that she must consider herself quite free, and that she isn't to
undertake what she may not have the strength to carry out. I realize more
and more that I was asking her to do the impossible."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was an hour or two after reading this, when Conquest had gone away,
that Evie herself--as dainty as spring, in flowered muslin and a Leghorn
hat crowned with a wreath of roses--came fluttering in.

"I've had the queerest letter from Uncle Jarrott," she began,
breathlessly. "The poor old dear--well, something must be the matter with
him. I can't for the life of me imagine what Herbert can have told him,
but he doesn't understand a bit."

Miriam locked her own letter in her desk, saying as she did so:

"How does he show it?--that he doesn't understand."

"Why, he simply talks wild--that's how he shows it. He says I am not to
consider myself engaged to Herbert--that I was never engaged to him at
all. I wonder what he calls it, if it isn't engaged, when I have a
ring--and everything."

"It is rather mystifying." Miriam tried to smile. "I suppose he means that
having given your word to Herbert Strange, you're not to consider yourself
bound to Norrie Ford, unless you want to."

"Pff! I don't care anything about that. I never liked the name of
Herbert--or Strange, either. I told you that before. All the same, I wish
Uncle Jarrott would have a little sense."

"Suppose--I mean, just suppose, dear--he felt it his duty to forbid your
engagement altogether. What would you do then?"

"It wouldn't be very nice of him, I must say. He was as pleased as Punch
over it when I was down there. If he's so capricious, I don't see how he
can blame me."

"Blame you, for what, dear?"

"For staying engaged--if it's all right."

"But if he thought it wasn't all right?"

"You do, don't you?"

Evie, who had been prancing about the room, turned sharply on Miriam, who
was still at her desk.

"That isn't the question--"

"No, but it's _a_ question. I presume you don't mind my asking it?"

"You may ask me anything, darling--of course. But this is your uncle
Jarrott's affair, and yours. It wouldn't do for me--"

"Oh, that's so like you Miriam. You'd exasperate a saint--the way you
won't give your opinion when you've got one. I wish I could ask Billy.
He'd know. But of course I couldn't, when he thinks I'm still engaged to
_him_."

"What do you want to ask him, Evie, dear?"

"Well, he's a lawyer. He could tell me all about what it's all about. I'm
sure _I_ don't know. I didn't think it was anything--and yet here's Uncle
Jarrott writing as if it was something awful. He's written to Aunt
Queenie, too. Of course I must stand by Herbert, whatever happens--if it
isn't very bad; but you can see yourself that I don't want to be mixed up
in a--a--in a scandal."

"It would hardly be a scandal, dear; but there would be some--some
publicity about it."

"I don't mind publicity. I'm used to that, with my name in the paper every
other day. It was in this morning. Did you see it?--the Gresley's dance.
Only I do wish they would call me Evelyn, and not Evie. It sounds so
familiar."

"I'm afraid they'd put more in about you than just that."

"Would they? What?" Her eyes danced already, in anticipation.

"I can't tell you exactly what; but it would be things you wouldn't like."

Evie twitched about the room, making little clicking sounds with her lips,
as signs of meditation.

"Well, I mean to be true to him--a while longer," she said, at last, as if
coming to a conclusion. "I'm not going to let Uncle Jarrott think I'm just
a puppet to be jerked on a string. The idea! When he was as pleased as
Punch about it himself. And Aunt Helen said she'd give me my trousseau. I
suppose I sha'n't get that now. But there's the money you offered me for
the pearl necklace. Only I'd much rather have the pearl--Well, I'll be
true to him, do you see? We're leaving for Newport the day after
to-morrow. They say there hasn't been such a brilliant summer for a long
time as they expect this year. Thank goodness, there's something to take
my mind off all this care and worry and responsiblity, otherwise I think I
should pass away. But I shall show Uncle Jarrott that he can't do just as
he likes with me, anyhow."

Evie and Miss Jarrott went to Newport, and it was the beginning of July
before Miriam heard from Ford again. Once more she read to Conquest such
portions of the letter as she thought he would find of interest.

       *       *       *       *       *

"It is all over now," Ford wrote, "between Stephens and Jarrott and me.
I'm out of the concern for good. It was something of a wrench, and I'm
glad it is past. I didn't see the old man again. I wanted to thank him and
say good-bye, but he dodged me. Perhaps it is just as well. Even if I were
to meet him now, I shouldn't make the attempt again. I confess to feeling
a little hurt, but I thoroughly understand him. He is one of those
men--you meet them now and again--survivals from the old school--with a
sense of rectitude so exact that they can only see in a straight line. It
is all right. Don't think that I complain. It is almost as much for his
sake as for my own that I wish he could have taken what I call a more
comprehensive view of me. I know he suffers--and I shall never be able to
tell him how sorry I am till we get into the kingdom of heaven. In fact, I
can't explain anything to any one, except you, which must be an excuse for
my long letters. I try to keep you posted in what I'm going through, so
that you may convey as much or as little of it as you think fit to Evie. I
can't tell her much, and I see from the little notes she writes me that
she doesn't yet understand.

"The cat seems to be quite out of the bag in the office, though I haven't
said a word to any one, and I know Mr. Jarrott wouldn't. Pride and sore
feeling will keep him from ever speaking of me again, except when he can't
help it. I don't mean to say that the men know exactly what it is, but
they know enough to set them guessing. They are jolly nice about it, too,
even the fellows who were hardly decent to me in the old days. Little
Green--the chap from Boston who succeeded me at Rosario; I must have told
you about him--and his wife can't do enough for me, and I know they mean
it."

There was a silence of some weeks before he wrote again.

"I shall not get away from here as soon as I expected, as my private
affairs are not easily settled up. This city grows so fast that I have had
a good part of my savings in real estate. I am getting rid of it by
degrees, but it takes time to sell to advantage. I may say that I am doing
very well, for which I am not sorry, as I shall need the money for my
trial. I hope you don't mind my referring to it, because I look forward to
it with something you might almost call glee. To get back where I started
will be like waking from a bad dream. I can't believe that Justice will
make the same mistake twice--and even if she does I would rather she had
the chance. I am much encouraged by the last reports from Kilcup and
Warren. I've long felt that it was Jacob Gramm who did for my poor uncle,
though I didn't like to accuse him of it when the proofs seemed all the
other way. He certainly had more reason to do the trick than I had, for my
uncle had been a brute to him for thirty years, while he had only worried
me for two. He wasn't half a bad old chap, either--old Gramm--and it was
one of the mysteries of the place to me that he could have stood it so
long. The only explanation I could find was that he had a kind of
affection for the old man, such as a dog will sometimes have for a master
who beats him, or a woman for a drunken husband. I believe the moment came
when he simply found himself at the end of his tether of endurance--and
he just did for him. His grief, when it was all over, was real enough.
Nobody could doubt that. In fact, it was so evidently genuine that the
theory I am putting forward now only came to me of late years. I think
there is something in it, and I believe the further they go the more they
will find to support it. Now that the old chap is dead I should have less
scruple in following it up--especially if the old lady is gone too. She
was a bit of a vixen, but the husband was a good old sort. I liked him."

Some weeks later he wrote:

"I wander about this place a good deal like a ghost in its old haunts.
Everything here is so temporary, so changing--much more so than in New
York--that one's footprints are very quickly washed away. Outside the
office almost no one remembers me. It is curious to think that I was once
so happy here--and so hopeful. There was always a kind of hell in my
heart, but I kept it banked down, as we do the earth's internal fires,
beneath a tolerably solid crust. Yesterday, finding myself at the
Hipodromo, I stood for a while on the spot where I first saw Evie. It used
to seem to me a bit of enchanted ground, but I feel now as if I ought to
erect a gravestone there. Poor little Evie! How right you were about it
all. It was madness on my part to think she could ever climb up my
Calvary. My excuse is that I didn't imagine it was going to be so steep. I
even hoped she would never see that there was a Calvary at all. Her notes
are still pitifully ignorant of the real state of things.

"And speaking of gravestones, I went out the other day to the Recoleta
Cemetery, and looked at the grave of my poor old friend, Monsieur Durand.
Everything neat, and in good order. It gives me a peculiar satisfaction
to see that the decorum he loved reigns where he 'sleeps.' I never knew
his secret--except that rumor put him down for an unfrocked priest.

"I doubt if I shall get away from here till the beginning of October; but
when I do, everything will be in trim for what I sometimes think of as my
resurrection."

       *       *       *       *       *

These letters, and others like them, Miriam shared conscientiously with
Conquest. It was part of the loyalty she had vowed to him in her heart
that she should keep nothing from him, except what was sanctified and
sealed forever, as her own private history. In the impulse to give her
life as a ransom for Norrie Ford's she was eager to do it without
reserves, or repinings, or backward looks--without even a wish that it had
been possible to make any other use of it. If she was not entirely
successful in the last feat, she was fairly equal to the rest, so that in
allowing himself to be misled Conquest could scarcely be charged with
fatuity. With his combined advantages, personal and otherwise, it was not
astonishing that a woman should be in love with him; and if that woman
proved to be Miriam Strange, one could only say that the unexpected had
happened, as it often does. If, in view of all the circumstances, he
dressed better than ever, and gave his little dinners more frequently,
while happiness toned down the sharpness of his handsome profile to a
softer line, he had little in common with Malvolio.

And what he had began to drop away from him. Insensibly he came to see
that the display of his legal knowledge, of his carefully chosen ties, of
his splendid equipment in house, horses, and automobiles, had something of
the major-domo's strut in parti-colored hose. The day came when he
understood that the effort to charm her by the parade of these things was
like the appeal to divine grace by means of grinding on a prayer-mill. It
was a long step to take, both in thought and emotion, leading him to see
love, marriage, women's hearts, and all kindred subjects, from a different
point of view. Love in particular began to appear to him as more than the
sum total of approbation bestowed on an object to be acquired. Though he
was not prepared to give it a new definition, it was clear that the old
one was no longer sufficient for his needs. The mere fact that this woman,
whom he had vainly tempted with gifts--whom he was still hoping to capture
by prowess--could come to him of her own accord, had a transforming effect
on himself. If he ever got her--by purchase, conquest, or any other form
of acquisition--he had expected to be proud; he had never dreamed of this
curious happiness, that almost made him humble.

It was a new conception of life to think that there were things in it that
might be given, but which could not be bought; as it was a new revelation
of himself to perceive that there were treasures in his dry heart which
had never before been drawn on. This discovery was made almost
accidentally. He stumbled on it, as men have stumbled on Koh-i-noors and
Cullinanes lying in the sand.

"What I really came to tell you," he said to her, on one occasion, as they
strolled side by side in the Park, "is that I am going away to-morrow--to
the West--to Omaha."

"Isn't that rather sudden?"

"Rather. I've thought for the last few days I might do it. The fact is,
they've found Amalia Gramm."

She stopped with a sudden start of interrogation, moving on again at once.
It was a hot September evening, at the hour when twilight merges into
night. They had left Wayne on a favorite seat, and having finished their
own walk northward, were returning to pick him up and take him home. It
was just dark enough for the thin crescent of the harvest moon to be
pendulous above the city, while a rim of lighted windows in high façades
framed the tree-tops The peace of the quiet path in which they rambled
seemed the more sylvan because of the clang and rumble of the streets, as
a room will appear more secluded and secure when there is a storm outside.

"They've found her living with some nieces out there," he went on to
explain. "She appears to have been half over the world since old Gramm
died--home to Germany--back to America--to Denver--to Chicago--to
Milwaukee--to the Lord knows where--and now she has fetched up in Omaha.
She strikes me in the light of an unquiet spirit. It seems she has nephews
and nieces all over the lot--and as she has the ten thousand dollars old
Chris Ford left them--"

"Are they going to bring her here?"

"They can't--bedridden--paralyzed, or something. They've got to take her
testimony on the spot. I want to be there when they do it. There are
certain questions which it is most important to have asked. In a way, it
is not my business; but I'm going to make it mine. I've mulled over the
thing so long that I think I see the psychology of the whole drama."

"I can never thank you enough for the interest you've shown," she said,
after a brief silence.

He gave his short, nervous laugh.

"Nor I you for giving me the chance to show it. That's where the kindness
comes in. It's made a different world for me, and me a different man in
it. If anybody had told me last winter that I should spend the whole
summer in town working on a criminal case--"

"You shouldn't have done that. I wanted you to go away as usual."

"And leave you here?"

"I shouldn't have minded--as long as Mr. Wayne preferred to stay. It's so
hard for him to get about, anywhere but in the place he's accustomed to.
New York in summer isn't as bad as people made me think."

"I too have found that true. To me it has been a very happy time. But
perhaps my reasons were different from yours."

She reflected a minute before uttering her next words, but decided to say
them.

"I fancy our reasons were the same."

The low voice, the simplicity of the sentence, the meanings in it and
behind it, made him tremble. It was then, perhaps, that he began to see
most clearly the true nature of love, both as given and received.

"I don't think they can be," he ventured, hoping to draw her on to say
something more; but she did not respond.

After all, he reflected, as they continued their walk more or less in
silence, too many words would only spoil the minute's bliss. There was,
too, a pleasure in standing afar off to view the promised land almost
equal to that of marching into it--especially when, as now, he was given
to understand that its milk and honey were awaiting him.



XXI



It was the middle of October when Evie wrote from Lenox to say she would
come to town to meet Ford on his arrival, begging Miriam to give her
shelter for a night or two. The Grants remaining abroad, Miss Jarrott had
taken the house in Seventy-second Street for another winter, but as Evie
would run up to New York alone she preferred for the minute to be Miriam's
guest.

"The fact is, I'm worried to death," she wrote, confidentially "and you
must help me to see daylight through this tangled mass of everybody saying
different things. Aunt Queenie has gone completely back on Herbert, just
because Uncle Jarrott has. That doesn't strike me as very loyal, I must
say. I shouldn't think it right to desert anybody, unless I wanted to. I
wouldn't do it because some one else told me to--not if he was my brother
ten times over. I mean to be just as true to Herbert as I can Not that he
makes it very easy for me, because he has broken altogether with Uncle
Jarrott--and that seems to me the maddest thing. I certainly sha'n't get
my trousseau from Aunt Helen now. I don't see what we're all coming to.
Everybody is so queer, and they keep hinting things they won't say out, as
if there was some mystery. I do wish I could talk to Billy about it. Of
course I can't--the way matters stand. And speaking of Billy, that rich
Mr. Bird--you remember I told you about him last winter--has asked me to
marry him. Just think! I forget how much he has a year, but it's something
awful. Of course I told him I couldn't give him a definite answer yet--but
that if he insisted on it I should have to make it No. He said he didn't
insist--that he'd rather wait till I had time to make up my mind, if I
didn't keep him dangling. I told him I wouldn't keep him doing anything
whatever, and that if he dangled at all it would be entirely of his own
accord. I think he liked my spirit, so he said he'd wait. We left it
there, which was the wisest way--though I must say I didn't like his
presuming on his money to think I would make a difference between him and
the others. Money doesn't mean anything to me, though dear mamma hoped she
would live to see me well established. She didn't, poor darling, but
that's no reason why I shouldn't try to carry out her wishes. All the
same, I mean to be true to Herbert just as long as possible; and so you
may expect me on the twenty-ninth."

       *       *       *       *       *

If there was much in this letter that Miriam found disturbing, it was not
the thought that Evie might be false to Ford, or that Ford might suffer,
which alarmed her most. There was something in her that cried out in fear
before the possibility that Norrie Ford might be free again. Her strength
having sprung so largely from the hope of restoring the plans she had
marred, the destruction of the motive left her weak; but worse than that
was the knowledge that, though she had tried to empty her heart completely
of its cravings, only its surface had been drained. It was to get
assurance rather than to give information that she read fragments of
Evie's letter to Conquest, on the evening of his return from Omaha. He had
come to give her the news of his success. That it was good news was
evident in his face when he entered the room; and, almost afraid to hear
it, she had broached the subject of her anxiety about Evie first.

"She's going to give him the sack; that's what _she's_ going to give him,"
Conquest said, conclusively, while Miriam folded the dashingly scribbled
sheets. "You needn't be worried about her in the least. Miss Evie knows
her way about as cleverly as a homing bee. She'll do well for herself
whatever else she may not do. _Come now_!"

"I'm not thinking of that so much as that she should do her duty."

"Duty! Pooh! That sort of little creature has no duty--the word doesn't
apply to it. Evie is the most skilful mixture of irresponsible impulse and
shrewd calculation you'll find in New York. She'll use both her gifts with
perfect heartlessness, and yet in such a way that even her guardian angel
won't know just where to find fault with her."

"But she must marry Mr. Ford--now."

He was too busy with his own side of the subject to notice that her
assertion had the intensity of a cry. He had a man's lack of interest in
another man's love-affairs while he was blissfully absorbed in his own.

"You might as well tell a swallow that it must migrate--now," he laughed.
"Poor Ford will feel it, I've no doubt; but we shall make up to him for a
good deal of it. We're going to pull him through."

For the instant her anxiety was diverted into another channel. "Does that
mean that Amalia Gramm has told you anything?"

"She's told us everything. I thought she would. I don't feel at liberty to
give you the details before they come out at the proper time and place;
but there's no harm in saying that my analysis of the old woman's
psychological state was not so very far wrong. There's no question about
it any longer. We'll pull him through. And, by George, he's worth it!"

The concluding exclamation, uttered with so much sincerity, took her by
surprise, transmuting the pressure about her heart into a mist of sudden
tears. Tears came to her rarely, hardly, and seldom with relief. She was
especially unwilling that Conquest should notice them now; but the attempt
to dash them away only caused them to fall faster. She could see him
watching her in a kind of sympathetic curiosity, slightly surprised in his
turn at the unexpected emotion, and trying to divine its cause. Unable to
bear his gaze any longer, she got up brusquely from her chair, retreating
into the bay-window, where--the curtains being undrawn--she stood looking
down on the sea of lights, as beings above the firmament might look down
on stars. He waited a minute, and came near her only when he judged that
he might do so discreetly.

"You're unnerved," he said, with tender kindliness. "That's why you're
upset. You've had too much on your mind. You're too willing to take all
the care on your own shoulders, and not let other people hustle for
themselves."

She was pressing her handkerchief against her lips, so she made no reply.
The moment seemed to him one at which he might go forward a little more
boldly. All the circumstances warranted an advance from his position of
reserve.

"You need me," he ventured to say, with that quiet assurance which in a
lover means much. "I understand you as no one else does in the world."

Her brimming eyes gave him a look which was only pathetic, but which he
took to be one of assent.

"I've always told you I could help you," he went on, with tranquil
earnestness, "and I could. You've too many burdens to carry alone--burdens
that don't belong to you, but which, I know, you'll never lay down. Well,
I'll share them. There's Wayne, now. He's too much for you, by yourself--I
don't mean from the material point of view, but--the whole thing. It wears
on you. It's bound to. Wayne is my friend just as much as yours. He's my
responsibility--so long as you take it in that light. I've been thinking
of him a lot lately--and I see how, in my house--could put him
up--ideally."

Still pressing her handkerchief against her lips with her right hand, she
put out her left in a gesture of deprecation. He understood it as one of
encouragement, and went on.

"You must come and look at my house. You've never really seen it, and I
think you'd like it. I think you'd like--everything I've got everything to
make you happy; and if you'll only let me do it, you'll make me happy,
too."

She felt able to speak at last. Her eyes were still brimming as she turned
toward him, but brimming only as pools are when the rain is over.

"I want you to be happy. You're so good ... and kind ... and you've done
so much for me ... you deserve it."

She turned away from him again. With her arm on the woodwork of the
window, she rested her forehead rather wearily on her hand. He understood
so little of what was passing within her that she found it a relief to
suspend for the minute her comedy of spontaneous happiness, letting her
heart ache unrestrainedly. Her left hand hanging limp and free, she made
no effort to withdraw it when she felt him clasp it in his own. Since she
had subscribed to the treaty months ago, since she had insisted on doing
it rightly or wrongly, it made little difference when and how she carried
the conditions out. So they stood hand in hand together, tacitly, but, as
each knew, quite effectually, plighted. In her silence, her resignation,
her evident consent he read the proof of that love which, to his mind, no
longer needed words.

       *       *       *       *       *

Late that night, after he had gone away, she wrote to Evie, beseeching her
to be true to Ford. The letter was so passionate, so little like herself,
that she was afraid of destroying it if she waited till morning, so she
posted it without delay. The answer came within forty-eight hours, in the
shape of a telegram from Evie. She was coming to town at once, though it
wanted still three or four days to Ford's arrival.

It was a white little Evie, with drawn face, who threw herself into
Miriam's arms at the station, clutching at her with a convulsive sob.

"Miriam, I can't do it," she whispered, in a kind of terror. "They say
he's going to be put in--_jail_!"

Her voice rose on the last word, so that one or two people paused in their
rush past to glance at the pitifully tragic little face.

"Hush, darling," Miriam whispered back. "You'll tell me about it as we go
home."

But in the motor Evie could only cry, clinging to Miriam as she used to do
in troubled moments in childhood. Arrived at the apartment, Wayne had to
be faced with some measure of self-control, and then came dinner. At table
Evie, outwardly mistress of herself by this time, talked feverish
nonsense about their common friends in Lenox, after which she made an
excuse for retiring early. It was only in the bedroom, when they were
secure from interruption that Miriam heard what Evie had to tell. She was
tearless now, and rather indignant.

"I've had the strangest letter from Herbert," she declared excitedly, as
soon as Miriam entered the room. "I couldn't have believed he wrote it in
his senses if Aunt Queenie hadn't heard the Same thing from Uncle Jarrott.
He says he's got to go to--_jail_."

There was the same rising inflexion on the last word, suggestive of a
shriek of horror, that Miriam had noticed in the station. In her white
peignoir, her golden hair streaming over her shoulders, and her hands
flung wide apart with an appealing dramatic gesture, Evie was not unlike
some vision of a youthful Christian martyr, in spite of the hair-brush in
her hand. Miriam sat down sidewise on the edge of the couch, looking up at
the child in pity. She felt that it was useless to let her remain in
darkness any longer.

"Of course he has to," she said, trying to make her tone as matter of fact
as might be. "Didn't you know it?"

"Know it! Did _you_?"

Evie stepped forward, bending over Miriam as if she meant to strike her.

"I knew it in a general way, darling. I suppose, when he gives himself to
the police--"

"The police!" Evie screamed. "Am I to be engaged to a man who--gives
himself up to the police?"

"It will only be for a little while, dear--"

"I don't care whether it's for a little while or foreverit can't _be_.
What is he thinking of? What are _you_ thinking of? Don't you _see_? How
can I face the world--with all my invitations--when the man I'm engaged to
is--in jail?"

Evie's hands flew up in a still more eloquent gesture, while the blue
eyes, usually so soft and veiled, were wide with flaming interrogation.

"I knew that--in some ways--it might be hard for you--"

Evie laughed, a little silvery mirthless ripple of scorn.

"I must say, Miriam, you choose your words skilfully. But you're wrong, do
you see? There's no way in which it can be hard for me, because there's no
way in which it's possible."

"Oh yes, there is, dear--if you love him."

"That has nothing to do with it. Of course I love him. Haven't I said so?
But that doesn't make any difference. Can't I love him without being
engaged to--to--to a man who has to go to jail?"

"Certainly; but you can't love him if you don't feel that you must--that
you simply _must_--stand by his side."

"There you go again, Miriam, with your queer ideas. It's exactly what any
one would expect you to say."

"I hope so."

"Oh, you needn't hope so, because they would--any one who knew you. But I
have to do what's right. I know what I feel in my conscience--and I have
to follow it. And besides, I couldn't--I couldn't"--her voice began to
rise again--"I couldn't face it--I couldn't bear it--not if I loved him a
great deal better than I do."

"That's something you must think about very seriously, dear--"

"I don't have to!" she cried, with a stamp of her foot. "I know it
already. It wouldn't make any difference if I thought about it a thousand
years. I couldn't be engaged to a man who was in jail, not if I worshipped
the ground he trod on."

"But when he's innocent, darling--"

"It's jail, just the same. I can't be engaged to people just because
they're innocent. It isn't right to expect it of me. And, anyhow," she
added, passionately, "I can't do it. It would kill me. I should never lift
my head again. I can't--I can't. It's hateful of any one to say I ought
to. I'm surprised at you, Miriam, when you know how dear mamma would have
forbidden it. It's all very well for you to give advice, when you have no
family--and no one to think about--and hardly any invitations-- Well, I
can't, and there's an end of it. If that's your idea of love, then, I must
say, my conception is a little different. I've always had high ideals, and
I feel obliged to hold to them, however you may condemn me."

She ended with a catch in her breath something like a sob.

"But I'm not condemning you, Evie dear. If you feel what you say, there's
nothing for it but to see Mr. Ford and tell him so."

At this suggestion Evie sobered. She was a long time silent before she
observed, in a voice that had become suddenly calm and significantly
casual, "That's easy for you to say."

"If you speak to him as decidedly as to me, I should think it would be
easy for you to do."

"And still easier for you."

Evie spoke in that tone of unintentional intention which is most pointed.
It was not lost on Miriam, who recoiled from the mere thought. It seemed
to her better to ignore the hint, but Evie, with feverish eagerness,
refused to let it pass.

"Did you hear what I said?" she persisted, sharply.

"I heard it, dear; but it didn't seem to me to mean anything."

"That would depend on whether you heard it only with the ear or in the
heart."

"You know that everything that has to do with you is in my heart."

"Well, then?"

"But if you mean by that that I should tell Mr. Ford you're not going to
marry him--why, it's out of the question."

"Then who's to tell him? _I_ can't. It's not to be expected."

"But, darling, you must. This is awful."

Miriam got up and went toward her, but Evie, who was nervously brushing
her hair, edged away.

"Of course it's awful, but I don't see the use of making it worse than it
need be. He'll feel it a great deal more if he sees me, and so shall I."

"And what shall I feel?" Miriam spoke unguardedly, but Evie was too
preoccupied to notice the bitterness of the tone.

"I don't see why you should feel anything at all. It's nothing to you--or
very little. It wouldn't be your fault; not any more than it's the
postman's if he has to bring you a letter with bad news."

Miriam went back to her place on the edge of the couch, where with her
forehead bowed for a minute on her hand she sat reflecting. An
overwhelming desire for confidence, for sympathy perhaps, for the
clearing up of mysteries in any case, was impelling her to tell Evie all
that had ever happened between Ford and herself. It had been necessary to
maintain so many reserves that possibly this new light would enable Evie
to see her own duty more straightforwardly.

"Darling," she began, "I want to tell you something--"

But before she could proceed Evie flung the hair-brush on the floor and
uttered a great swelling sob. With her hands hanging at her sidess and her
golden head thrown back, she wept with the abandonment of a child, while
suggesting the seraphic suffering of a grieving angel by some old master.

In an instant Miriam had her in her arms. It was the appeal she had never
been able to resist.

"There, there, my pet," she said, soothingly, drawing her to the couch.
"Come to Miriam, who loves you. There, there."

Evie clung to her piteously, with flower-like face tilted outward and
upward for the greater convenience of weeping.

"Oh, I'm so lonely!" she sobbed. "I'm so lonely ... I I wish dear mamma
... hadn't died."

Miriam pressed her the more closely.

"I'm so lonely ... and everything's so strange ... and I don't know what
to do ... and he's going to be put in jail ... and you're so unkind to
me.... Oh, dear! ... I can't tell him ... I can't tell him ... I can't ...
I can't ..."

She pillowed her head on Miriam's shoulder, like a child that would force
a caress from the hand that has just been striking it. The action filled
Miriam with that kind of self-reproach which the weak creature inspires so
easily in the strong. In spite of her knowledge to the contrary, she had
the feeling of having acted selfishly.

"No, darling," she said, at last, as Evie's sobs subdued into convulsive
tremblings, "you needn't tell him. I'll see him. He'll understand how hard
it's been for you. It's been hard for every one--and especially for you,
darling. I'll do my best. You know I will. And I'm sure he'll understand.
There, there," she comforted, as Evie's tears broke out afresh. "Have your
cry out, dear. It will do you good. There, there."

       *       *       *       *       *

So Evie went back next day to Lenox, while Miriam waited for Ford.



XXII



A few days later she read his name, in a morning paper, in the _Asiatic's_
list of passengers the steamer having arrived at quarantine the night
before: Mr. John Norrie Ford. Though flung carelessly into a paragraph
printed in small type, it seemed to blaze in fire on the page! It was as
if all America must rise at it. As she looked from the window it was with
something like surprise that she saw the stream of traffic roaring onward,
heedless of the fact that this dread name was being hawked in the streets
and sold at the news-stands. She sent out for the evening papers that
appear at midday, being relieved and astonished to find that as yet it had
created no sensation.

She was not deceived by his ease of manner when he appeared at the
apartment in the afternoon. Though he carried his head loftily, and smiled
with his habitual air of confidence, she could see that the deep waters of
the proud had gone over his soul. Their ebb had streaked his hair and
beard with white, and deepened the wrinkles that meant concentrated will
into the furrows that come of suffering. She was more or less prepared for
that. It was the outward manifestation of what she had read between the
lines of the letters he had written her. As he crossed the room, with hand
outstretched, her one conscious thought was of the chance to be a woman
and a helpmeet Evie had flung away. She had noticed how, on the very
threshold, he had glanced twice about the room, expecting to find her
there.

They did not speak of her at once. They talked of commonplace introductory
things--the voyage, the arrival, the hotel at which he was
staying--anything that would help her, and perhaps him, to control the
preliminary nervousness. There was no sign of it, however, on his part,
while she felt her own spirit rising, as it always did, to meet
emergencies. Presently she mentioned her fears regarding his use of his
true name.

"No; it isn't dangerous," he assured her, "because I'm out of danger now.
Thank the Lord, that's all over. I don't have to live with a great hulking
terror behind me any longer. I'm a man like any other. You can't imagine
what it means to be yourself, and not to care who knows it. I'm afraid I
parade my name just like a boy with a new watch, who wants to tell every
one the time. So far no one has paid any particular attention; but I dare
say that will come. Is Evie here?"

"She's not here--to-day."

"Why not?" he asked, sharply. "She said she would be. She said she'd come
to town--"

"She did come to town, but she thought she'd better not--stay."

"Not stay? Why shouldn't she stay? Is anything up? You don't mean that
Miss Jarrott--?"

"No; Miss Jarrott had nothing to do with it. I know her brother has
written to her, in the way you must be prepared for. But she couldn't have
kept Evie from waiting for you, if Evie herself--"

"Had wanted to," he finished, as she seemed to hesitate at the words.

Since she said nothing to modify this assertion, she hoped he would
comprehend its gravity. Indeed, he seemed to be trying to attenuate that
when he spoke next.

"I suppose she had engagements--or something."

"She did have engagements--but she could have put them off."

"Only she didn't care to. I see."

She allowed him time to accept this fact before going on.

"Her return to Lenox," she said then, "wasn't because of her engagements."

"Then it must have been because of me. Didn't she want to see me?"

"She didn't want to tell you what she felt she would have to say."

"Oh! So that was it."

He continued to sit looking at her with an expression of interrogation,
though it was evident from his eyes that his questions had been answered.
They sat in the same relative positions as on the night of their last long
talk together, he in his big arm-chair, she in her low one. It struck her
as strange--while he stared at her with that gaze of inquiry from which
the inquiry was gone--that she, who meant so little to his inner life,
should be called on again to live through with him minutes that must
forever remain memorable in his existence.

"Poor little thing! So she funked telling me."

The comment was made musingly, to himself, but she took it as if addressed
to her.

"She wasn't equal to it."

"But you are. You're equal to anything. Aren't you?" He smiled with that
peculiar twisted smile which she had noticed at other times, when he was
concealing pain.

"One is generally equal to what one has to do. All the same," she added,
with an impulse she could not repress, "I'm sorry to be always associated
in your mind with things that must be hard for you."

"You're associated in my mind with everything that's high and noble.
That's the only memory I shall ever have of you. You've been with me
through some of the dark spots of my life; but if it hadn't been for you I
shouldn't have found the way."

"Thank you. I'm glad you can say that. I should be even more sorry than I
am to give you this news to-day, if it were not that perhaps I can explain
things a little better than Evie could."

"I don't imagine that they require much explanation. I've seen from Evie's
letters that--"

"That she was afraid of--the situation. She hasn't changed toward you."

"Do you mean by that that she still--cares anything about me?"

"She says she does."

"But you don't believe her."

"I'm not entitled to an opinion. It's something you and she must work out
together. All I can do is to tell you what may give you a little hope."

She watched for the brightening effect of these words upon him, but he sat
looking absently at the floor, as if he had not heard them.

"Evie is afraid," she continued, "but I think it's only fair to remember
that the circumstances might well frighten any young girl of her sort."

He showed that he followed her by nodding assent, though he neither lifted
his head nor spoke.

"She wanted me to tell you that while the--the trial--and other
things--are going on, she couldn't be engaged to you--I'm using her own
expression, but she didn't say that, when it was all over and you were
free, she wouldn't marry you. I noticed that."

He looked up quickly.

"I'm not sure that I catch your drift."

"I mean that when it's all over, and everything has ended as you hope it
will, it may be quite possible for you to win her back."

He stared at her, with an incredulous lifting of the eyebrows

"Would you advise me to try?"

"It isn't a matter I could give advice about. I'm showing you what might
be possible, but--"

"No, no. That sort of thing doesn't work. There was just a chance that
Evie might have stuck to me spontaneously but since she didn't--"

"Since she didn't--what?"

"She was quite right not to. I admit that. It's in the order of things.
She followed her instinct rather than her heart--I'm ready to believe
that--but there are times in life when instinct is a pretty good guide."

"Am I to understand that you're not--hurt?--or disappointed? Because in
that case--"

"I don't know whether I am or not. That's frank. I'm feeling so many
things all at once that I can hardly distinguish one emotion from another,
or tell which is strongest. I only know--it's become quite plain to
me--that a little creature like Evie couldn't find a happy home in my
life, any more than a humming-bird, as you once called her, could make its
nest among crags."

"Do you mean by that," she asked, slowly, "that
you're--definitely--letting her go?"

"I mean that, Evie being what she is, and I being what life has made
me--Isn't it perfectly evident? Can you fancy us tied together--now?"

"I never could fancy it. I haven't concealed that from you at any time.
But since you loved her, and she loved you--"

"That was true enough--in its way. In its way, it's still true. Evie still
loves the man I was, perhaps, and the man I was loves her. The difference
is that the man I was isn't sitting here in front of you."

"One changes with years, of course. I didn't suppose one could change in a
few months, like that."

"One changes with experience--above all, with that kind of experience
which people generally call--suffering. That's the great Alchemist; and he
often transmutes our silver into gold. In my case, Evie was silver; but
I've found there's something else that stands for--"

"So that," she interposed, quickly, "you're not sorry that Evie--?"

He got up, restlessly, and stood with his back to the empty fireplace.

"It isn't a case for sorrow," he replied, after a minute's thinking, "as
it isn't one for joy. It's one purely for acceptance. When I first knew
Evie I was still something of a kid. It was so all the more because the
kid element in me had never had full play. I was arrogant, and cock-sure
and certain of my ability to manipulate the world to suit myself. That was
all Evie saw, and she liked it. In as far as she had it in her to fall in
love with anything, she fell in love with it."

He took a turn or two across the room, coming back to his stand on the
hearth-rug.

"I've travelled far since then," he continued; "I've _had_ to travel far.
Evie hasn't been able to come with me; and that's all there is to the
story. It isn't her fault; because when I asked her, I had no intention of
taking this particular way."

"It was I who drove you into that," she said, with a hint of remorse.

"Yes--you--and conscience--and whatever else I honor most. I give you the
credit first of all, because, if it hadn't been for you, I shouldn't have
had the moral energy to assert my true self against the false one. Isn't
it curious that, after having made me Herbert Strange, it should be you
who turned me into Norrie Ford again? It means that you exercise supreme
power over me--a kind of creative power. You can make of me what you care
to. It's no wonder that I've come to see----" He paused, in doubt as to
how to express himself, while her eyes were fixed on him in troubled
questioning. "It's no wonder," he went on again, "that I've come to see
everything in a truer light--Evie as well as all the rest of it."

With a renewed impulse to move about, he strode toward the bay-window,
where he stood for a few seconds, looking out and trying to co-ordinate
his thoughts. Wheeling round again, he drew up a small chair close to
hers, seating himself sidewise, with his arm resting on the back. He
looked like a man anxious to explain himself.

"You're blaming me, I think, because I don't take Evie's defection more to
heart. Isn't that so?"

"I'm not blaming you. I may be a little surprised at it."

"You wouldn't be surprised at it, if you knew all I've been through. It's
difficult to explain to you--"

"There's no reason why you should try."

"But I want to try. I want you to know. You see," he pursued, speaking
slowly, as if searching for the right words--"you see, it's largely a
question of progress--of growth. Trouble has two stages. In the first, you
think it hard luck that you should have to meet it. In the second, you see
that, having met it, and gone through it, you come out into a region of
big experience, where everything is larger and nobler than you thought it
was before. Now, you'd probably think me blatant if I said that I feel
myself emerging into--_that_."

"No, I shouldn't. As a matter of fact, I know you're doing it."

"Well, then, having got there--out into that new kind of world"--he
sketched the vision with one of his Latin gestures--"I discover that--for
one reason or another--poor little Evie has stayed on the far side of it.
She couldn't pass the first gate with me, or the second, or the third, to
say nothing of those I have still to go through. You know I'm not
criticising, or finding fault with her, don't you?"

She assured him of that.

"And yet, I must go on, you see. There's no waiting or turning back for
me, any more than for a dying man. No matter who goes or who stays, I must
press forward. If Evie can't make the journey with me, I can only feel
relieved that she's able to slip out of it--but I must still go on. I
can't look back; I can't even be sorry--because I'm coming into the new,
big land. You see what I mean?"

She signified again that she followed him.

"But the finding of a new land doesn't take anything from the old one. It
only enlarges the world. Europe didn't become different because they
discovered America. The only change was in their getting to know a country
where the mountains were higher, and the rivers broader, and the sunshine
brighter, and where there was a chance for the race to expand. Evie
remains what she was. The only difference is that my eyes have been opened
to--a new ideal."

It was impossible for her not to guess at what he meant. Independently of
words, his earnest eyes told their tale, while he bent toward her like a
man not quite able to restrain himself. In the ensuing seconds of silence
she had time to be aware of three distinct phases of emotion within her
consciousness, following each other so rapidly as to seem simultaneous. A
throb of reckless joy in the perception that he loved her was succeeded by
the knowledge that loyalty to Conquest must make rejoicing vain, while it
flashed on her that, having duped herself once in regard to him, she must
not risk the humiliating experience a second time. It was this last
reflection that prevailed, keeping her still and unresponsive. After all,
his new ideal might be something--or some one--quite different from what
her fond imagining was so ready to believe.

"I suppose," she said, vaguely, for the sake of saying something, "that
trial is the first essential to maturity. We need it for our ripening, as
the flowers and fruit need wind and rain."

"And there are things in life," he returned, quickly, "that no immature
creature can see. That's the point I want you to notice. It explains me.
In a way, it's an excuse for me."

"I don't need excuses for you," she hastened to say, "any more than I
require to have anything explained."

"No; of course not. You don't care anything about it. It's only I who do.
But I care so much that I want you to understand why it was that--that--I
didn't care before."

She felt the prompting to stop him, to silence him, but once more she held
herself back. There was still a possibility that she was mistaking him,
and her pride was on its guard.

"It was because I didn't know any better," he burst out, in naïve
self-reproach. "It was because I couldn't recognize the high, the fine
thing when I saw it. I've had that experience in other ways, and with just
the same result. It was like that when I first began to hear good music. I
couldn't make it out--it was nothing but a crash of sounds. I preferred
the ditties and dances of a musical comedy; and it was only by degrees
that I began to find them flat. Then my ear caught something of the
wonderful things in the symphonies that used to bore me. You see, I'm
slow--I'm stupid--"

"Not at all," she smiled. "It's quite a common experience."

"But I'm like that all through, with everything. I've been like that--with
women. I used to be attracted by quite an ordinary sort. It's taken me
years--all these years, till I'm thirty-three--to see that there's a
perfect expression of the human type, just as there's a perfect expression
of any kind of art. And I've found it."

He bent farther forward, nearer to her. There was a light in his face that
seemed to her to denote enthusiasm quite as much as love. To her wider
experience in emotions this discovery of himself, which was involved in
his discovery of her, was rather youthful, provoking a faint smile.

"You're to be congratulated, then," she said, with an air of distant
friendliness. "It isn't every one who's so fortunate."

"That's true. There's only one man in the world who's more fortunate than
I. That's Conquest."

"Oh!"

In the brusqueness with which she started she pushed her chair slightly
back from him. It was to conceal her agitation that she rose, steadying
herself on the back of the chair in which she had been seated.

"Conquest saw what I didn't--till it was too late."

He was on his feet now, facing her, with the chair between them.

"I wish you wouldn't say any more," she begged, though without
overemphasis of pleading. She was anxious, for her own sake as well as for
his, to keep to the tone of the colloquial.

"I don't see why I shouldn't. I'm not going to say anything to shock you.
I know you're going to marry Conquest. You told me so before I went away,
and----"

"I should like to remind you that Mr. Conquest is the best friend you
have. When you hear what he's done for you, you will see that you owe him
more than you do any man in the world."

"I know that. I'm the last to forget it. But it can't do any harm to tell
the woman--who's going to be his wife--that I owe her even more than I do
him."

"It can't do any harm, perhaps; but when I ask you not to----"

"I can't obey you. I shouldn't be a man if I went through life without
some expression of my--gratitude; and now's the only time to make it.
There are things which I wasn't free to say before, because I was bound
to Evie--and which it will soon be too late for you to listen to, because
you'll be bound to him. You're not bound to him yet----"

"I _am_ bound to him," she said, in a tone in which there were all the
regrets he had no reason to divine. "I don't know what you think of
saying; but whatever it is, I implore you not to say it."

"It's precisely because you don't know that I feel the necessity of
telling you. It's something I owe you. It's like a debt. It isn't as if we
were just any man and any woman. We're a man and a woman in a very special
relation to each other. No matter what happens, nothing can change that.
And it isn't as if we were going to live in the same world, in the same
way. You will be Conquest's wife--a great lady in New York. I shall
be--well, Heaven only knows what I shall be, but nothing that's likely to
cross your path again. All the same, it won't hurt you, it wouldn't hurt
any woman, however good, to hear what I'm going to tell you. It wouldn't
hurt any man--not even Conquest--that it should be said to his wife--in
the way that I shall say it. If it could, I wouldn't----"

"Wait a minute," she said, suddenly. "Let me ask you something." She took
a step toward him, though her hand rested still on the back of the chair.
"If I know it already," she continued, looking him in the eyes, "there
would be no necessity for you to speak?"

He took the time to consider this in all its bearings.

"I'd rather tell you in my own words," he said, at last; "but if you
assure me that you know, I shall be satisfied."

She took a step nearer to him still. Only the tips of her fingers now
rested on the back of the chair, to which she held, as to a bulwark.
Before she spoke she glanced round the room, as though afraid lest the
doors and walls might mistake her words for a confession.

"Then I do know," she said, quietly.



XXIII



"The old lady was willing enough to talk," Conquest assured Ford, in his
narrative of the taking of Amalia Gramm's testimony. "There's nothing more
loquacious than remorse. I figured on that before going out to Omaha."

"But if she had no hand in the crime, I don't see where the remorse comes
in."

"It comes in vicariously. She feels it for Jacob, since Jacob didn't live
to feel it for himself. It involves a subtle element of wifely devotion
which I guess you're too young, or too inexperienced, to understand. She
was glad old Jacob was gone, so that she could make his confession with
impunity. She was willing to make any atonement within _her_ power, since
it was too late to call _him_ to account."

"Isn't that a bit far-fetched?"

"Possibly--except to a priest, or a lawyer, or a woman herself. It isn't
often that a woman's heroism works in a straight line, like a soldier's,
or a fireman's. It generally pops at you round some queer corner, where it
takes you by surprise. Before leaving Omaha I'd come to see that Amalia
Gramm was by no means the least valiant of her sex."

Conquest's smoking-room, with its space and height, its deep leather
arm-chairs, its shaded lamps, its cheerful fire, suggested a club rather
than a private dwelling, and invited the most taciturn guest to
confidence. Ford stretched himself before the blaze with an enjoyment
rendered keener by the thought that it might be long before he had
occasion to don a dinner-jacket again, or taste such a good Havana. Though
it was only the evening of his arrival, he was eager to give himself up.
Now that he had "squared himself," as he expressed it, with Miriam
Strange, he felt he had put the last touch to his preparations. Kilcup and
Warren were holding him back for a day or two, but his own promptings were
for haste.

"I admit," Conquest continued to explain, as he fidgeted about the room,
moving a chair here, or an ash-tray there, with the fussiness of an old
bachelor of housekeeping tastes--"I admit that I thought the old woman was
trying it on at first. But I came to the conclusion that she had told a
true story from the start. When she gave her evidence at your trial she
thought you were--the man."

"There's nothing surprising in that. They almost made me think so, too."

"It did look fishy, my friend. You won't mind my saying that much. Clearer
heads than your jury of village store-keepers and Adirondack farmers might
have given the same verdict. But old lady Gramm's responsibility hadn't
begun then. It was a matter of two or three years before she came to
see--as women do see things about the men they live with--that the hand
which did the job was Jacob's. By that time you had disappeared into
space, and she didn't feel bound to give the old chap away. She says she
would have done it if it could have saved you; but since you had saved
yourself, she confined her attentions to shielding Jacob. You may credit
as much or as little of that as you please; but I believe the bulk of it.
In any case, since it does the trick for us we have no reason to complain.
Come now!"

"I'm not going to complain of anything. It's been a rum experience all
through, but I can't say that, in certain aspects, I haven't enjoyed it. I
_have_ enjoyed it. If it weren't for the necessity of deceiving people who
are decent to you, I'd go through it all again."

"That's game," Conquest said, approvingly, as he worked round to the
hearth-rug, where he stood cutting the end of a cigar, with Ford's long
figure stretched out obliquely before him.

"I would," Ford assured him. "I'd go through it all again, like a shot.
It's been a lark from--I won't say from start to finish--but certainly
from the minute--let me see just when!--certainly from the minute when
Miss Strange beckoned to me, over old Wayne's shoulder."

An odd look came by degrees into Conquest's face--the look of pitying
amusement with which one listens to queer things said by some one in
delirium. He kept the cutter fixed in the end of the cigar, too much
astonished to complete his task.

"Since Miss Strange did--_what_?"

Ford was too deeply absorbed in his own meditations to notice the tone.

"I mean, since she pulled me through."

Conquest's face broke into a broad smile.

"Are you dreaming, old chap? Or have you 'got 'em again'?"

"I'm going back in the story," Ford explained, with a hint of impatience.
"I'm talking about the night when Miss Strange saved me."

"Miss Strange saved you? How?"

Ford raised himself slowly in his chair, his long legs stretched out
straight before him, and his body bent stiffly forward, as he stared up at
Conquest, in puzzled interrogation.

"Do you mean to say," he asked, incredulously, "that she hasn't told
you--_that_?"

"Perhaps you'll be good enough to tell me yourself. I'll be hanged if I
know what you're talking about."

There was suppressed irritation in the way in which he tore off the end of
the cigar and struck a match. Ford let himself sink back into the chair
again.

"So she never told you! By George, that's like her! It's just what I might
have expected."

"Look here," Conquest said, sharply, "did you know Miss Strange before you
came up here from South America?" He stood with his cigar unlighted, for
he had let the match burn down to his fingers before attempting to apply
it. "Was your taking the name of Strange," he demanded with sudden
inspiration, "merely an accident, as I've supposed it was--or had it
anything to do with her?"

"It wasn't an accident, and it did have something to do with her."

"Just so! And you kept it dark!"

Something in Conquest's intonation caused Ford to look up. He saw a man
with face suddenly growing gray, as though a light had gone out of it. He
was disturbed only to the point of feeling that he had spoken tactlessly,
and proceeded to repair the error.

"I kept it dark for obvious reasons. If Miss Strange didn't tell you about
it, it's because she isn't the kind of person to talk of an incident in
which her own part was so noble. I'll give you the whole story now."

"I should be obliged to you," Conquest said, dryly.

He sat down on the very edge of one of the big arm-chairs, leaning
forward, and fingering his still unlighted cigar nervously, as he watched
Ford puff out successive rings of smoke before beginning. He was less on
his guard to screen the intenseness with which he listened, because Ford
spoke at first in a dreamy way, without looking in his direction.

With more insight into the circumstances surrounding him Ford would have
told his tale with greater reticence. As it was he spoke with enthusiasm,
an enthusiasm born of an honest desire that Conquest should see the woman
he was about to marry in the full beauty of her character. In regard to
this he himself had made the discovery so slowly and so recently that he
was animated by something like a convert's zeal. Beginning his narrative
quietly, in a reminiscent vein, with intervals in which he lapsed
altogether into meditation, he was presently fired with all the animation
in a story-teller when he perceives he is holding his hearer spellbound.
As a matter of fact, he was moved not so much by the desire of convincing
Conquest of Miriam Strange's nobility, as by the impulse to do her
justice, once in his life at least, in language of his own.

It was a naïve bit of eloquence, of which no detail was lost on the
experienced man of the world, who sat twirling his cigar with nervous
fingers, his eyes growing keener in proportion as his face became more
gray. It was part of his professional acquirement to be able to draw his
deductions from some snatch of human drama as he listened to its
unfolding. His quickness and accuracy of judgment had, indeed, been a
large element in his success; so that the habit of years enabled him to
preserve a certain calmness of comprehension now. It lost nothing in being
a studied calmness, since the forcing of his faculties within restraint
concentrated their acumen.

Ford concluded with what for him was an almost lyric outburst.

"By George! Conquest, I didn't know there were such women in the world.
She's been a revelation to me--as art and religion are revelations to
other people. She came to me as the angel came to Peter in the prison;
but, like Peter, I didn't know it was an angel. There's a sort of glory
about her--a glory which it takes a higher sense than any I've got to see
and understand. After all she's done for me--after all this time--I'm only
now beginning to get glimpses of it; but it's merely as we get glimpses of
an infinite beyond, because we see the stars. She's a mystery to me, in
the same way that genius is a mystery, or holiness. I didn't appreciate
her because I hadn't the soul, and yet it's in seeing that I hadn't the
soul that I begin to get it. That's curious, isn't it? She's like some
heavenly spirit that's passed by me, and touched me into newness of life."

His ardor was so sincere, his hymn of praise so spontaneous that he
expected some sort of echo back. It seemed to him that even if Conquest
did not join in this chant in honor of the woman who presumably loved him,
whom more presumably still he loved, it would be but natural for him to
applaud it. Ford knew that if any one else had sung of Miriam Strange as
he had just been singing, he would have leaped to his feet and wrung the
man's hand till it ached. It surprised him, therefore, it disappointed
him, that Conquest should sit unmoved, unless the spark-like twinkle of
his little eyes could be taken as emotion.

It was a relief to Conquest to get up, scratch another match, and light
his cigar at last, turning his back so that it should not be seen that his
fingers trembled. When he was sure of himself he faced about again, taking
his seat.

"It's the most amazing story I ever heard," was his only comment, in
response to Ford's look of expectation.

"I hoped it might strike you as something more than--amazing," Ford
ventured, after a minute's waiting for a more appreciative word.

"Perhaps it will when I get my breath. You must give me time for that. Do
you actually tell me that she kept you in her studio for weeks----?"

"Three weeks and four days, to be exact."

"And that she furnished you with food and clothing----?"

"And money--but I paid that back."

"And got you away in that ingenious fashion----?"

"Just as I've told you."

"Amazing! Simply amazing! And," he added, with some bitterness, "you came
back here--and you and she together--took us all in."

Ford drew his cigar from his lips, and, turning in his chair, faced
Conquest in an attitude and with a look which could not be misinterpreted.

"I came back here, and took you all in--if you like. Miss Strange had
nothing to do with it. She didn't even expect me."

The last sentence gave Conquest the opening he was looking for, but now
that he had it, he hesitated to make use of it. In his memory were the
very words Miriam Strange had stammered out to him in the sort of
confession no woman ever makes willingly: "Things happened ... such as
don't generally happen ... and even if he never comes ... I'd rather go on
waiting for him ... uselessly." It was all growing clear to him, and yet
not so clear but that there was time even now to let the matter drop into
the limbo of things it is best not to know too much about. It was against
his better judgment, then--his better judgment as a barrister-at-law--that
he found himself saying:

"She didn't expect you at that day and date, perhaps: but she probably
looked for you some time."

"Possibly; but if so, I know little or nothing about it."

The reply, delivered with a certain dignified force of intention, recalled
Conquest to a sense of his own interests. He had too often counselled his
clients to let sleeping dogs lie, not to be aware of the advantage of
doing it himself; and so, restraining his jealous curiosity, he turned the
conversation back to the evidence of Amalia Gramm.

During the next half-hour he manifested that talent--partly native and
partly born of practice--which he had often commended in himself, of
talking about one thing and thinking of another. His exposition of the
line to be adopted in Ford's defence was perfectly lucid, when all the
while he was saying to himself that this was the man whom Miriam Strange
had waited for through eight romantic years.

The fact leaped at him, but it was part of his profession not to be afraid
of facts. If they possessed adverse qualities one recognized them boldly,
in the practise of law, chiefly with a view of circumventing them. The
matter presented itself first of all, not as one involving emotional or
moral issues, but as an annoying arrangement of circumstances which might
cheat him out of what he had honestly acquired. He had no intention of
being cheated by any one whatever; and as he made a rapid summary of the
points of the case he saw that the balance of probabilities was in his
favor. It was to make that clear to Ford that he led the conversation back
again to the subject of his adventures, tempting him to repeat at least a
portion of his hymn of praise. By the time he had finished it Conquest was
able to resume the friendly, confidential tone with which they had begun
the evening.

"It's very satisfactory to me, old man," he said, between quiet puffs at
his cigar, "to know that you think so highly of Miss Strange, because--I
don't know whether you have heard it--she and I are to be married before
long."

He looked to see Ford disconcerted by this announcement and was surprised
to see him take it coolly.

"Yes; I knew that. I've meant to congratulate you when the time came. I
should say it had come now."

There was a candor about him that Conquest could scarcely discredit,
though he was unwilling to trust it too far.

"Thanks, old man. I scarcely expected you to be so well posted. May I ask
how--?"

"Oh, I've known it a long time. Miss Strange told me before I went to
South America last spring."

This evidence of a confidential relation between the two gave him a second
shock, but he postponed its consideration, contenting himself for the
moment with making it plain to Ford that "Hands off!" must be the first
rule of the game. His next move was meant to carry the play into the
opponent's quarters.

"As a matter of fact, I've never congratulated _you_," he said, with
apparent tranquillity. "I've known about you and Evie for some time past,
but--"

"Oh, that's all off. In the existing circumstances Evie didn't feel
like--keeping the thing up."

"That's too bad. You've been pretty hard hit--what? When a fellow is as
game as you a girl should stand by him, come now! But I know Evie. I've
known her from her cradle. She'll back round, you'll see. When we've
pulled you through, as we're going to, she'll take another view of things.
I know for a fact that she's been head over heels in love with you ever
since her trip to Buenos Aires."

As Ford made no remark, Conquest felt it well to drive the point home.

"We can all help in that, old boy; and you can count on us--both on Miss
Strange and me. No one has such influence over Evie as Miriam, and I know
she's very keen on seeing you and her--you and Evie, I mean--hit it off. I
don't mind telling you that, as a matter of fact, it's been Miriam's
anxiety on Evie's account that has mixed me up in your case at all. I
don't say that I haven't got interested in you for your own sake; but it
was she who stirred me up in the first place. It's going to mean a lot to
her to see you get through--and marry Evie."

Ford smiled--his odd, twisted smile--but as he said nothing, Conquest
decided to let the subject drop. He had, in fact, gone as far as his
present judgment would carry him, and anything farther might lead to a
false step. In a situation alive with claims and counter-claims, with
yearnings of the heart and promptings of the higher law, he could preserve
his rights only by a walk as wary as the treading of a tight-rope.

This became clearer to him later in the night, when Ford had gone away,
and he was left free to review the circumstances with that clarity of
co-ordination he had so often brought to bear on other men's affairs. Out
of the mass of data he selected two conditions as being the only ones of
importance.

If Miriam Strange was marrying him because she loved him, nothing else
needed to be considered. This fact would subordinate everything to itself;
and there were many arguments to support the assumption that she was doing
so. One by one he marshalled them before him, from the first faint
possibility up to the crowning proof that there was no earthly reason for
her marrying him at all, unless she wanted to. He had pointed that out to
her clearly, on the day when she came to him to make her terms. He had
been guilty on that occasion of a foolish generosity, for that it went
with a common-sense honesty to take advantage of another's ignorance, or
impulsiveness, was part of his business creed. Nevertheless, having shown
her this uncalled-for favor, he did not regret it now, since it put the
spontaneous, voluntary nature of her act beyond dispute.

To a late hour of the night he wandered about the great silent rooms of
the house which he had made the expression of himself. Stored with costly,
patiently selected comforts, it lacked only the last requisite which was
to impart the living touch. Having chosen this essential with so much
care, and begun to feel for her something far more vital than the pride of
possession which had been his governing emotion hitherto, it was an agony
with many aspects to think he might have to let her go.

That there was this possibility was undeniable. It was the second of the
two paramount considerations. Though Ford's enthusiasm tried to make
itself enthusiasm and no more, there had been little difficulty in seeing
what it was. All the same, it would be a passion to pity and ignore, if on
Miriam's side there was nothing to respond to it. But it was here that,
in spite of all his arguments, Conquest's doubts began. With much curious
ignorance of women, there was a point of view from which he knew them
well. It was out of many a poignant bit of domestic history, of which his
profession had made him the confidant, that he had distilled the
observation made to Ford earlier in the evening: "It isn't often that a
woman's heroism works in a straight line, like a soldier's or a
fireman's." Notwithstanding her directness, he could see Miriam Strange as
just the type of woman to whom these words might be applicable. If by
marrying a man whom she did not love she thought she could help another
whom she did love, a culpable sacrifice was just the thing of which she
would be capable. He called it culpable sacrifice with some emphasis for
in his eyes all sacrifice was culpable. It was more than culpable, in that
it verged on the absurd. There were few teachings of an illogical
religion, few promptings of a misdirected energy, for which he had a
greater scorn than the precept that the strong should suffer for the weak,
or one man for another. Every man for himself and the survival of the
fittest was the doctrine by which he lived; and his abhorrence of anything
else was the more intense for the moment because he found himself in a
situation where he might be expected to repudiate his faith.

But there it was, that something in public opinion which, in certain
circumstances, might challenge him--might ask him for magnanimity, might
appeal to him for mercy, might demand that he make two other human beings
happy while he denied himself. It was preposterous, it was grotesque, but
it was there. He could hear its voice already, explaining that since
Miriam Strange had given him her word in an excess of self-devotion, it
was his duty to let her off. He could see the line of argument; he could
hear the applause following on his noble act. He had heard it
before--especially in the theatre--and his soul had shaken with laughter.
He had read of it in novels, only to toss such books aside. "The beauty of
renunciation," he had often said, "appeals to the morbid, the sickly, and
the sentimental. It has no function among the healthy and the sane." He
had not only said that, but he had believed it. He believed it still, and
lived by it. By doing so he had amassed his modest fortune and won a
respected position in the world. He had not got on into middle life
without meeting the occasion more than once when he could have saved
others--a brother, or a sister, or a friend--and forborne to save himself.
He had felt the temptation and resisted it, with the result that he was up
in the world when he might have been down in it, and envied by those who
would have despised him without hesitation when they had got out of him
all he could give. He could look back now and see the folly it would have
been had he yielded to impulses that every sentimentalist would have
praised. He was fully conscious that the moment of danger might be on the
point of returning again, and that he must be prepared for it.

He was able to strengthen himself with the greater conviction because of
his belief in the sanctity of rights. The securing of rights, the defining
of rights, the protection of rights, had been his trade ever since he was
twenty-five. The invasion of rights was among the darkest crimes in his
calendar. In the present case his own rights could not be called into
question; they were inviolable. Miriam Strange had come to him
deliberately, and for due consideration had signed herself away. He had
spared nothing, in time, pains, or money, to fulfil his part of the
compact. It would be monstrous, therefore, if he were to be cheated of his
reward. That either Ford or Miriam would attempt this he did not believe,
even if between them the worst, from his point of view, was at the worst;
but that an absurd, elusive principle which called itself chivalry, but
really was effeminacy of will, might try to disarm him by an appeal to
scruples he contemned, was the possibility he feared. He feared it because
he estimated at its worth the force of restraint a sentimental
civilization and a naïve people can bring to bear, in silent pressure,
upon the individual. While he knew himself to be strong in his power of
resistance, he knew too that the mightiest swimmer can go down at last in
a smiling, unrippled sea.

His exasperation was as much with his doubt about himself as with the
impalpable forces threatening him, as he strode fiercely from room to
room, turning out the flaring lights before going to bed. After all, his
final resolutions were pitifully insufficient, in view of the tragic
element--for he took it tragically--that had suddenly crept into his life.
While his gleam of happiness was in danger of going out, the sole means he
could find of keeping it aglow was in deciding on a prudent ignoring of
whatever did not meet the eye, on a discreet assumption that what he had
been dreaming for the past few months was true. As a matter of fact, there
was nothing to show him that it wasn't true; and it was only common sense
to let the first move toward clearing his vision come from the other side
rather than from his.

And yet it was precisely this passive attitude which he found himself next
day least able to maintain. If he needed anything further to teach him
that love was love, it was this restless, prying jealousy, making it
impossible to let well enough alone. After a trying day at the office,
during which he irritated his partners and worried his clerks, he
presented himself late in the afternoon at Miriam's apartment at the hour
when he generally went to his club, and he knew she would not expect him.
Thinking to surprise Ford with her--like the suspicious husband in a
French play, he owned to himself, grimly--he experienced something akin to
disappointment to find her drinking tea with two old ladies, whom he
outstayed. During the ceremonies of their leave-taking he watched Miriam
closely, seeking for some impossible proof that she either loved Ford or
did not love him, and getting nothing but a renewed and maddening
conviction of her grace and quiet charm.

       *       *       *       *       *

"What about Evie's happiness?"

Miriam raised her eyebrows inquiringly at the question before stooping to
put out the spirit-lamp.

"Well, what about it?" she asked, without looking up.

"Oh, nothing--except that we don't seem to be securing it."

She gazed at him now, with an expression frankly puzzled. He had refused
tea, but she kept her accustomed place behind the tea-table, while he
stretched himself comfortably in the low arm-chair by the hearth, which
she often occupied herself.

"Don't you remember?" he went on. "Evie's happiness was the motive of our
little--agreement."

He endeavored to make his tone playful, but there was a something sharp
and aggressive in his manner, at which she colored slightly, no less than
at his words.

"I suppose," she said, as if after meditation, "Evie's happiness isn't in
our hands."

"True; but there's a good deal that _is_ in our hands. There's, for
example--our own."

"Up to a point--yes."

"And up to that point we should take care of it. Shouldn't we?"

"I dare say. But I don't know what you mean."

He gave the nervous little laugh which helped him over moments of
embarrassment.

"Ford was with me last night. He said it was all off between him and
Evie."

"I thought he might tell you that."

"So that," he went on, forcing a smile, with which his voice and manner
were not in accord, "our undertaking having failed, the bottom's out of
everything. Don't you see?"

She was so astonished that she walked into his trap, just as he expected.

"I don't see in the least. I thought our undertaking--as you call it--was
going to be particularly successful."

"Successful--how?"

He dropped his smile and looked interrogative, his bit of acting still
keeping her off her guard.

"Why, if Amalia Gramm's testimony is all you think it's going to be----"

"Oh, I see. That's the way you look at it."

"Isn't it the way you look at it, too?"

He smiled again, indulgently, but with significance.

"No; I confess it isn't--at least, it hasn't been. I thought--perhaps I
was wrong--that our interest was in getting Ford off, so that he could
marry Evie. Since he isn't going to marry her, why--naturally--we don't
care so much--whether he gets off or not."

"Oh, but----"

She checked herself; she even grew a little pale. She began to see dimly
whither he was leading her.

"Of course I don't say we should chuck him over," he went on; "but it
isn't the same thing any longer, is it? I think it only fair to point that
out to you, because it gives you reasonable ground for reconsidering
your--decision."

"Oh, but I don't want to."

While she had said exactly what he hoped to hear, she had not said it as
he hoped to hear it. There were shades of tone even to impetuosity, and
this one lacked the note his ear was listening for. None the less, he told
himself, a wise man would have stopped right there; and he was conscious
of his folly in persisting, while he still persisted.

"That's for you to decide, of course. Only if we go on, it must be
understood that we've somewhat shifted our ground."

"I haven't shifted mine."

"Not as you understand it yourself--as, possibly, you've understood it all
along. But you have, as I see things. When you came to me--to my
office----"

She put up her hand as though she would have screened her face, but
controlled herself to listen quietly.

"Your object, then," Conquest continued, cruelly, "was to get Ford off, so
that he might marry Evie. Now, I understand it to be simply--to get him
off."

She looked at him with eyes full of distress or protest. It was a minute
or two before she spoke.

"I don't see the necessity for such close definition."

"I do. I want you to know exactly what you're doing. I want you to see
that you're paying a higher price than you need pay--for the services
rendered."

He had got her now just where he had been trying to put her. He had snared
her, or given her an opportunity, according as she chose to take it. She
could have availed herself of the latter by a look or a simple intonation,
for the craving of his heart was such that his perceptions were acute for
the slightest hint. Had she known that, it would have been easy for her to
respond to him, playing her part with the loyalty with which she had begun
it. As it was, his cold manner and his slightly mocking tone betrayed her.
Her answer was meant to give him the kind of assurance she thought he was
looking for; and she couched it in the language she supposed he would most
easily understand. In the things it said and did not say her very
sincerity was what stabbed him.

"I hope it won't be necessary to bring this subject up again. I know what
I undertook, and I'm anxious to fulfil it. I should be very much hurt if I
wasn't allowed to, just because you had scruples about taking me at my
word. You've been so--so splendid--in doing your part that I should feel
humiliated if I didn't do mine."

There was earnestness in her regard and a suggestion of haughtiness in the
tilt of her head. The Wise Man within him bade him be content, and this
time he listened to the voice. He did her the justice to remember, too,
that she was offering him all he had ever asked of her; and if he was
dissatisfied, it was because he had increased his demands without telling
her.

It was by a transition of topic that he saw he could nail her to her
purpose.

"By-the-way," he said, when they had got on neutral ground again, and
were speaking of Wayne, "I wish you would come and see what I think of
doing for him. There are two rooms back of my library--too dark for my
use--but that wouldn't matter to him, poor fellow--"

He saw that she was nerving herself not to flinch at this confrontation
with the practical. He saw too that her courage and her self-command would
have deceived any one but him. The very pluck with which she nodded her
comprehension of his idea, and her sympathy with it, enraged him to a
point at which, so it seemed to him, he could have struck her. Had she
cried off from her bargain he could have borne it far more easily. That
would at least have given him a sense of superiority, and helped him to be
magnanimous; while this readiness to pay put him in the wrong, and drove
him to exact the uttermost farthing of his rights. On a weak woman he
might have taken pity; but this strong creature, who refused to sue to him
by so much as the quiver of an eyelid, and rejected his concessions before
he had time to put them forth, exasperated every nerve that had been wont
to tingle to his sense of power. Since she had asked no quarter, why
should he give it?--above all, when to give quarter was against his
principles.

"And perhaps," he pursued, in an even voice, showing no sign of the
tempest within, "that would be as good a time as any for you to look over
the entire house. If there are any changes you would like to have
made----"

"I don't think there will be."

"All the same, I should like you to see. A man's house, however well
arranged, isn't always right for a woman's occupancy; and so----"

"Very well; I'll come."

"When?"

"I'll come to-morrow."

"About four?"

"Yes; about four. That would suit me perfectly."

She spoke frankly, and even smiled faintly, with just such a shadow of a
blush as the situation called for. The Wise Man within him begged him once
more to be content. If, the Wise Man argued, this well-poised serenity was
not love, it was something so like it that the distinction would require a
splitting of hairs. Conquest strove to listen and obey; but even as he did
so he was aware again of that rage of impotence which finds its easiest
outlet in violence. As he rose to take his leave, with all the outward
signs of friendly ceremoniousness, he had time to be appalled at the
perception that he, the middle-aged, spick-and-span New-Yorker, should so
fully understand how it is that a certain type of frenzied brute can kill
the woman whom he passionately loves, but who is hopelessly out of reach.



XXIV



Except when his business instincts were on the alert, Ford's slowness of
perception was perhaps most apparent in his judgment of character and his
analysis of other people's motives. Taking men and women as he found them,
he had little tendency to speculate as to the impulses within their lives,
any more than as to the furnishings behind their house-fronts. A human
being was all exterior to him, something like a street. Even in matters
that touched him closely, the act alone was his concern; and he dealt with
its consequences, without, as a rule, much inquisitive probing of its
cause.

So when Miriam Strange elected to marry Conquest, he accepted the settled
fact, for the time being, in the spirit in which he would have taken some
disastrous manifestation of natural phenomena. Investigation of the motive
of such a step was as little in his line as it would have been in the case
of a destructive storm at sea. To his essentially simple way of viewing
life it was something to be lamented, but to be borne as best one was
able, while one said as little as one could about it.

And yet, somewhere in the wide, rarely explored regions of his nature
there were wonderings, questionings, yearnings protests, cries, that
forced themselves to the surface now and then, as the boiling waters
within the earth gush out in geyser springs. It required urgent pressure
to impel them forth, but when they came it was with violence. Such an
occasion had been his night on Lake Champlain; such another was the
evening when he announced to Miriam his intention of becoming Norrie Ford
again. When these moments came they took him by surprise, even though
afterward he was able to recognize the fact that they had been long
preparing.

It was in this way, without warning, that his heart had sprung on him the
question: Why should she marry him? At the minute when Conquest was
leaving Miriam, he, Ford, was tramping the streets of New York, watching
them grow alive with light, in glaring, imaginative ugliness--ugliness so
dazzling in its audacity and so fanciful in its crude commercialism that
it had the power to thrill. It was perhaps the electric stimulus of sheer
light that quickened the pace of his slow mentality from the march of
acceptance to the rush of protest, at an instant when he thought he had
resigned himself to the facts.

Why should she marry Conquest? He was shouldering his way through the
crowds when the question made itself heard, with a curious illuminating
force that suggested its own answer. He was walking, partly to work off
the tension of the strain under which these few days were passing, and
partly because he had got the idea that he was being shadowed. He had no
profound objection to that, though he would have preferred to give himself
up of his own free will rather than to be arrested. Perhaps, after all, it
was only an accident that had caused him to catch sight of the same two
men at different moments through the day, and just now it amused him to
put them to the test by leading them a dance. He had come to the
conclusion that he had been mistaken, or that he had outwitted them, when
this odd question, irrelevant to anything he had directly in his thoughts,
presented itself as though it had been asked by some voice outside him:
Why should she marry him?

Up to the present his unanalytical mind would have replied--as it would
have replied to the same query concerning any one else--that she was
marrying him "because she wanted to." That would have seemed to him to
cover the whole ground of any one's affairs; but all at once it had become
insufficient. It was as if the street had suddenly become insufficient as
a highway, breaking into a chasm. He stopped abruptly, confronting, as it
were, that bewildering void which a psychological situation invariably
seemed to him. To get into a place where his few straightforward formulæ
did not apply gave him that sense of distress which every creature feels
out of its native element.

It was a proof of the dependence with which, in matters requiring mental
or emotional experience, he had come to lean on Miriam Strange, as well as
of the directness with which he appealed to her for help, that he should
face about on the instant, and turn his steps toward her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Only a few minutes earlier she had seen Conquest go, and in the interval
since his departure she had had time to detect the windings of his
strategy, and to be content with the skill with which she had met them.
She understood him thoroughly, both in his fear of letting her go and his
shame at holding her. Standing in her wide bay-window, her slight figure
erect, her hands behind her back, she looked down, without seeing it, on
the spangled city, as angels intent on their own high thoughts might pass
over the Milky Way. She smiled faintly to herself, thinking how she
should lead this kindly man, who for her sake had done so much for Norrie
Ford, back to a sense of security and self-respect. When Norrie Ford went
free she meant to live for nothing else but the happiness of the man who
had cleared his name and given him back to the world. It would be a kind
of consecration to her, like that of the nun who forsakes the dearest ties
for a life of good works and prayer. Conquest had told her that she was
paying a bigger price than she needed to pay for the services rendered,
but that depended somewhat on the value one set on the services. In this
case she would not have been content in paying less. To do so would seem
to indicate that she was not grateful. Since perceiving his compunction as
to claiming his reward, she was aware of an elation, an exaltation, in
forcing it upon him.

She was in the glow of this sentiment when Ford was ushered in. He was so
vitally in her thoughts that, though she did not expect him, his presence
gave her no surprise. It helped her, in fact, to sustain the romantic
quality in her mood to treat his coming as a matter of course, and make it
a natural incident to the moment.

"Come and look down on the stars," she said, in the tone she might have
used to another member of her household who had appeared accidentally.
"The view here, in the evening, makes one feel as if one had been wafted
above the sky."

She half-turned toward him, but did not offer her hand as he took his
place by her side. For a few seconds he said nothing, and when he spoke
she accepted his words in the manner in which she had taken his coming.

"So you're going to marry Conquest!"

It was to show that the abrupt remark had not perturbed her that she
nodded her head assentingly, still with the smile that had greeted his
arrival.

"Why?"

In spite of her efforts she manifested some surprise.

"What makes you ask that question--now?"

"Because it never occurred to me before that there might be a special
reason."

"Well, there is one."

"Has it anything to do with me?"

She backed away from him slightly, to the side curve of the window, where
it joined the straight line of the wall. In this position she had him more
directly in view.

"I said there was a reason," she answered, after some hesitation. "I
didn't say I would tell you what it was."

"No, but you will, won't you?"

"I don't see why you should want to know."

"Is that quite true?" he queried, with a somewhat startling fixing of his
eyes upon her. "Don't you see? Can't you imagine?"

"I don't see why--in such circumstances as these--any man should want to
know what a woman doesn't tell him."

"Then I'll explain to you. I want to know, because ... I think ... you're
marrying Conquest ... when you don't love him ..."

"He never asked me to love him. He said he could do without that."

"... while ... you do love ... some one else."

She reflected before speaking. Under his piercing look she took on once
more the appealing expression of forest creatures at bay.

"Even if that were true," she said, at last, "there would be no harm in
it as long as there was what you asked me for at first--a special reason."

"Is there ever a reason for a step like that? I don't believe it."

"But I do believe it, you see. That makes a difference."

"It would make a still greater difference if I begged you not to do it,
wouldn't it?"

She shook her head. "It wouldn't--now."

"I let you see yesterday that I--I loved you."

"Since you force me to acknowledge it--yes."

"And you've shown me," he ventured, "within the last minute, that
you--love me."

Her figure grew more erect against the background of exterior darkness.
Even the hand that rested on the woodwork of the window became tense.
Lambent fire in her eyes--the light that he used to call non-Aryan--took
the place of the fugitive glance of the woodland animal; but she kept her
composure.

"Well, what then?"

"Then you'd be committing a sacrilege against yourself--if you married any
one else but me."

If her heart bounded at the words, she did nothing to betray it.

"You say that, because it seems so to you. I take another view of it. Love
to me does not necessarily mean marriage, any more than marriage
necessarily implies love. There have been happy marriages without love,
and there can be honorable love that doesn't ask marriage as its object.
If I married you now, I should seem to myself to be deserting a high
impulse for a lower one."

"There's only one sort of impulse to love."

"Not to my love. I know what you mean--but my love has more than one
prompting, and the highest is--or I hope it is--to try to do what's
right."

"But this would not be right."

"I'm the only judge of that."

"Not if we love each other. In that case I become a judge of it, too."

Once more she reflected. In speaking she lifted her head and looked at him
frankly.

"Very well; I'll admit it. Perhaps it's true. In any case, I'd rather
things were clear to you. It will help us both. I'll tell you what I'm
doing, and why I'm doing it."

It was one of those occasions when a woman's emotion is so great that she
seems to have none at all. As iron is said to come to a degree of heat so
intense that it does not burn, so Miriam Strange seemed to herself to have
reached a stage where the sheer truth, simple and without reserve, could
bring no shame to her womanhood. Words that could not have passed her lips
either before that evening or after it escaped her in the subsequent
minutes as a matter of course.

"I entered into your life twice, and each time I did you harm. On the
first occasion I turned you into Herbert Strange, and sent you out on a
career of deception; on the second, I came between you and Evie, and
brought you to the present pass, where you're facing death again, as you
were eight or nine years ago. It's no use to tell you that I wanted to do
my best, because good intentions are not much excuse for the trouble they
often cause. But I'm ready to say this: that whenever you've suffered,
I've suffered more. That's especially true of what's happened in the last
six months. And when I saw how much I had put wrong, it was a comfort to
think there was something at least that I could put right again."

"But you've put nothing wrong. That's what I should like to convince you
of."

"I've put you in a position of danger. When I see that, I see enough to
act upon."

"It's a very slight danger."

"It is now, because I've made it slight. It wasn't--before I went to Mr.
Conquest."

"You went to him--what for?"

"He wanted me to marry him. He had wanted it for a long time. I told him I
would do so, on condition that he found the evidence that would prove you
innocent."

Ford laughed harshly, and rather loudly, stopping suddenly, as though he
had ceased to see the joke.

"So that's it! That's why Conquest has been so devilishly kind. I wondered
at his interest--or at least I should have wondered if I'd had the time.
As a matter of fact, I took it for granted that he should help me, as a
drowning man takes it for granted that the chance passer-by should pull
him out. It wasn't till this evening--about half an hour ago--By Jove! I
ran right up against it."

"You ran right up against--what?"

"Against the truth. It came in a flash--just like that." He snapped his
fingers. "You're selling yourself--to get me off."

She seemed to grow straighter, taller. For the minute he saw nothing but
the blaze of her eyes.

"Well? Why shouldn't I? My mother sold herself--to get a man off. He was
my father. I'm proud of her. She did the best she could with her life. I'm
doing the best I can with mine."

"But I shouldn't be doing the best I can with mine--if I let you
continue."

"Isn't it too late for you to stop me? If I've sold myself as you put it,
the price has been paid in. Mr. Conquest has secured the evidence that
will acquit you. It will be used. That's all I care about--much."

She saw the hot color surge into his cheeks and brows. It seemed to her
that his eyes grew red as the blood left his lips. She had never before
been called on to confront a man angry with a passion beyond his control,
but instinct told her what the signs were. Instinct told her, too, that,
however confused his own sensations might be, his anger was not so much
resentment against anything she might have done as it was despair at
having lost her. She had guessed already that he would be seized with a
blind impulse to strike, as soon as he came to a realizing sense of her
action; though she had not expected the moment of his fury till after he
went free. Till then, she had thought, he would be partially unconscious
of his pain, just as a soldier fighting will run along for a while without
feeling a bullet in his flesh. The anticipation of an awakening on his
part some time enabled her to see beyond the madness of this instinct,
even though the words he threw at her struck like stones. The very fact
that she could see how he labored with himself to keep them back gave her
strength to take them without flinching.

"You ... dared...? Without ... my ... permission...?"

"I'd done so many things without your permission that it seemed I could
venture that far."

"You were wrong. It was--too far."

"It wasn't too far--when I loved you."

She uttered the words in a matter-of-fact voice, without a tremor. She
foresaw their effect in bringing him to himself In his next words his tone
had already softened slightly to one of protest.

"But I could have done it so much better--! so much more easily--!
without----"

"I could have done that too. Mr. Conquest pointed it out to me. He took no
advantage of my ignorance. As a matter of fact, I wasn't ignorant at all.
I was extremely clear-sighted and wise. My love for you made me so. I
knew--I felt it--that money might fail to do what I wanted. But I knew too
that there was one thing that wouldn't fail. If you were innocent--and I
wasn't wholly sure that you were--I knew there was one energy that would
surely prove you so--and that was Charles Conquest's desire to have me as
his wife. I took the course in which there was least risk of failure--and
you see----"

A little gesture, triumphant in its suggestion, finished her sentence.

"What I see is this," Ford answered, thickly, "that I'm to hold my life at
the cost of your degradation."

"Degradation? That's a hard word. But as applied to me--I don't know what
it means."

"Isn't it degradation?--to enter into a marriage in which you put no
love?"

There was a kind of superb indifference in her answer.

[Illustration: "I'm to hold my life at the cost of your degradation"]

"You may call it degradation if you choose. I shouldn't. As long as you go
free, you can call my action anything you like. I dare say," she admitted,
"you're quite right, from the highest moral--and modern--point of view;
but that doesn't appeal to me. You see--you've got to make allowances for
it--I'm not a child of your civilization. I'm not a child of any
civilization at all. At best I'm like the wild creature that submits to
being tamed because it doesn't know what else to do--but remains wild at
heart. I used to think I could come into your system of law and order if
any one would take me. But now I know I shall always be outside it. The
very word you've just used of me shows me that. You say I'm to be
degraded--it's your civilized point of view. I have no comprehension of
that whatever. Because I love you I want to save you. I don't care
anything about the means so long as I reach the end. To undo the harm I've
done to you I'd freely give my body to be burned; so why shoudn't I--? No,
no," she cried, as he made as though he would approach her, "keep away.
Don't come near me! I can only talk to you like this--at a distance. I
shall never say these things again--but I want to tell you--to explain to
you--I should like you to understand."

She repeated herself haltingly because, as Ford held back from approaching
her, a sudden spasm passed over his face, while he hung his head, and
compressed his lips in a way that made him seem surprisingly boyish all at
once, and touched that maternal tenderness in her that had always formed
such a large part of her yearning over him. It was the kind of tenderness
that steadied her own nerve, and kept her dry-eyed and strong, as she saw
him reel to a chair, and flinging his arms on the table beside it, bow
himself down on them, while his form shook convulsively. She had no shame
for him. She understood perfectly that the pressure of years had been
brought to bear on the complex emotions of the moment--to which reaction
from his brief anger and his bitter words added an element of remorse--to
cause this honest, manly nature that had never made any pretence of being
stronger than it was, to give way to the instant's weakness. She was sure
he would never have done it in the presence of any one but her, and she
was thrilled with a curious joy at this proof of their spiritual intimacy.
What was difficult was not the keeping of her own self-control, but the
holding herself back from crossing the room and laying a hand on his
shoulder, in token of their oneness at heart; but there, she felt, the
forbidden line would be passed. She could only wait--it was not long--till
he was calm again. Then he pulled himself together, got up heavily, and
obviously refrained from looking her in the face. In the act and the
attitude there was something so boylike, so natural, so entirely lacking
in the dignity of grief, that if she had any impulse to let her own tears
flow it was then.

But she knew it to be one of those minutes when a woman has to be strong
for herself and for the man, too, even though she break down afterward.
The necessity of coming to an understanding with him, once for all,
impelled her to the economy of her forces, while the nervous snapping of
his fortitude had given her an opportunity she could not afford to lose.

"So I want you to see," she went on, quietly, as though no interruption
had occurred, "that having gained my point in helping to--to get you off,
it's to some extent a matter of indifference what you think of me--what
any one thinks of me--just as it was when I hid you in my studio, nearly
nine years ago. You must put it down to my being of wild origin and not
wholly amenable to civilized dictates. I can only do what the inward
urging drives me on to do--just as my mother did--and my father. If it's
degrading--"

Raising his head at last, he strode toward her. He put his hands rigidly
behind his back, as if to show her that he pinioned them there in token
that she had nothing to fear from him. His eyes were red, and there was
still a painful tightening about his lips.

"You'll have to let me take that back," he muttered, unsteadily. "I didn't
know what I was saying. It's come on me so suddenly that it's broken me
all up. I haven't realized till this evening what--what everything meant.
It seemed to me then that I couldn't stand it."

"But you can."

"Yes, I can," he replied, doggedly. "One can stand anything. If I reached
my limit for a minute, it was in seeing that you have to suffer for my
sake----"

"Wouldn't you suffer for mine?"

"I couldn't. Suffering for your sake would become such a joy----"

"That it wouldn't be suffering. That's just it. That's what I feel,
exactly. It isn't hard for me to do what I'm doing because I know--I
_know_--I'm helping to save your honor if not your life. I don't believe
money would have done it. Mr. Conquest reminded me that the best legal
services can be bought, but I never thought for an instant that you could
secure zeal such as his for anything less than I offered him. And he's
been so superb! He's given himself up to the thing absolutely. He's
followed every trail with a scent--- with a certainty--your other men,
your Kilcup and Warren, would never have been capable of. I've seen that;
I'm sure of it. He has a wonderful mind, and in his way he has the kindest
heart in the world. I'm very, very fond of him, and I'm deeply grateful.
Next to seeing you free, I don't think I have any desire in life so
strong as to make him happy. I dare say that isn't civilized either--but
it's what I feel. And so we must think of this," she continued, eagerly
explanative; "we must be loyal to him, you and I, as the first of all our
duties. Don't you think so?"

He withdrew his eyes from hers before answering. His power of resistance
was broken. The signs of struggle were visible, and yet the quixotic
element in his own nature helped him to respond to that in hers.

"I'll try," he muttered, looking on the ground.

"You'll do more than try--you'll succeed. Only very small souls could
grudge him what he's earned when he's worked so hard and given himself so
unstintingly. The very fact that you and I know that we love each other
will make it easier to be true to him."

"Conquest must know that we love each other, too," he declared, with some
bitterness.

"Perhaps he does; but, you see, every one has a different way of looking
at life, and I don't think that with him it's a thing that counts greatly.
I'm not sure that I understand him in that respect. I only know that you
and I, who owe him so much, can repay him by giving him what he asks for.
Will you promise me to do it?"

He continued to look downward, as though finding it hard to give his word;
but when he raised his eyes again, he flung back his head with his old air
of resolution.

"I'll promise to do anything you ask me throughout our lives. I don't
admit that Conquest should demand this thing or that he had any right to
let you offer it. But since you want to give it--and I can show you no
other token of my love--and shall never again be able to tell you that I
adore you--that I _adore_ you--I promise--to obey."



XXV



The inspection of the house was over, and they had come back to the
drawing-room for tea. Conquest had lavished pains on the occasion, putting
flowers in the rooms, and strewing handsome objects carelessly about, so
as to impart to the great shell as much as possible the air of being lived
in. To the tea-table he had given particular attention, ordering out the
most ornamental silver and the costliest porcelain, and placing the table
itself just where she would probably have it in days to come, so as to get
the effect she produced in sitting there, as he liked to do with a new
picture or piece of furniture.

On her part, Miriam had made the rounds of the rooms with conscientious
care, observing, admiring, suggesting, with just that mingling of shyness
and interest with which a woman in her situation would view her future
home. Having got, by intuition, the idea that he was watching for some
flaw in her manner, she was determined that he should find none. It was
the beginning of that lifelong schooling to his service to which she had
vowed herself, though the effort would have been easier had he not
rendered her self-conscious by scanning her so keenly out of his little
gray-green eyes. Nevertheless, she was pleased with the manner in which
she was acquitting herself, giving him his tea and taking her own with no
sign of embarrassment. As on the preceding day, it was this perfection of
acting, as he chose to call it, that exasperated his restless suspicion
more than any display of weakness.

The thought that she was keeping her true self locked against him had,
during the last twenty-four hours, become an obsession, making it
impossible for him to eat or to sleep. In her serene, impeccable bearing
he saw nothing but the bars up and the blinds drawn down. An instant of
faltering or self-betrayal would have admitted him to at least a glimpse
of what was passing within; but through this well-balanced graciousness it
was as difficult to get at her soul as to read the mind of the Venus of
Milo in the marble nobility of her face. He had led her from room to room,
describing one, explaining another, and apologizing for a third, but all
the while trying to break down her guard, only to find, as they returned
to the point at which they started, that he had failed. It was with nerves
all unstrung, and with a lack of self-command he would have been, in his
saner senses, the first to condemn, that he strode up at last and rapped
sharply at the door of her barricaded citadel.

"Why did you never tell me that you knew Norrie Ford--years ago?"

He was putting his empty cup on the table as he spoke, so that he could
avoid looking at her. She was glad of this respite from his gaze, for she
found the question startling. Before the scrutiny of his eyes was turned
on her again she had herself in hand.

"I should probably have told you some time."

"Very likely. The odd thing is that you didn't tell me at once."

"It wasn't so odd--given all the circumstances."

"It wasn't so odd, given some of the circumstances; but given them
all--_all_--I should say, I ought to have known."

She allowed a few seconds to pass.

"I suppose," she said, slowly, then, "that may fairly be considered a
matter of opinion. I don't see, however, that it makes much
difference--since you know now."

"My knowing or not knowing now isn't quite the point. The fact of
importance is that you never told me."

"I'm sorry you should take it in that way; but since I didn't--and the
matter is beyond remedy--I suppose we shouldn't gain anything by
discussing it."

"I don't know about that. It seems to me a subject that ought to
be--aired."

She tried to smile down his aggressiveness, succeeding partially, in that
he subdued the quarrelsomeness of his voice and manner to that affectation
of banter behind which he concealed habitually his real self, and by which
he most easily deceived her.

"Very well," she laughed; "I'm quite ready to air it; only I don't know
just how it's to be done."

"Suppose you were to tell me what happened, in your own language?"

"If Mr. Ford has told you already, as I imagine he has, I don't see that
my language can be very different from his. All the same, I'll try, since
you want me to."

"Just so."

During the few minutes she took to collect her thoughts he could see sweep
over her features one of those swift, light changes--as delicate as the
ripple of summer wind on water--which transformed her in an instant from
the woman of the world to the forest maid, the spirit of the indigenous.
The mystery of the nomadic ages was in her eyes again as she began her
narrative, wistfully, and reminiscently.

"You see, I'd been thinking a good deal of my father and mother. I hadn't
known about them very long, and I lived with their memory. The Mother
Superior had told me a few things--all she knew, I suppose--before I left
the convent at Quebec; and Mr. and Mrs. Wayne--especially Mrs. Wayne--had
added the rest. That was the chief reason why I wanted the studio--so that
I could get away from the house, which was so oppressive to me, and--so it
seemed to me--live with them, with nothing but the woods and the hills and
the sky about me. I could be very happy then--painting thinge I fancied
they might have done, and pinning them up on the wall. I dare say it was
foolish, but----"

"It was very natural. Go on."

"And then came up all this excitement about Norrie Ford. For months the
whole region talked of nothing else. Nearly every one believed he had shot
his uncle, but, except in the villages, the sympathy with him was
tremendous. Some people--especially the hotel-keepers and those who
depended on the tourist travel--were for law and order; but others said
that old Chris Ford had got no more than he deserved. That was the way
they used to talk. Mr. Wayne was on the side of law and order,
too--naturally--till the trial came on; and then he began----"

"I know all about that. Go on."

"My own sympathy was with the man in prison. I used to dream about him. I
remembered what Mrs. Wayne had told me my mother had done for my father. I
was proud of that. Though I knew only vaguely what it was, I was sure it
was what I should have done, too. So when there was talk of breaking into
the jail and helping Norrie to escape, I used to think how easily I could
keep any one hidden in my studio. I don't mean I thought of it as a
practical thing; it was just a dream."

"But a dream that came true."

"Yes; it came true. It was wonderful. It was the day Mr. Wayne sentenced
him. I knew what he was suffering--Mr. Wayne, I mean. We were all
suffering; even Mrs. Wayne, who in her gentle way was generally so hard.
Some people thought Mr. Wayne needn't have done it; and I suppose it was
just his conscientiousness--because he had such a horror of the
thing--that drove him on to it. He thought he mustn't shirk his duty. But
that night at the house was awful. We dressed for dinner, and tried to act
as if nothing frightful had happened--but it was as if the hangman was
sitting with us at the table. At last I couldn't endure it. I went out
into the garden--you remember it was one of those gardens with clipped
yews. Out there, in the air, I stopped thinking of Mr. Wayne and his
distress to think of Norrie Ford. It seemed to me as if, in some strange
way, he belonged to me--that I ought to do something--as my mother had
done for my father. And then--all of a sudden--I saw him creep in."

"How did you know it was he?"

"I thought it must be, though I was only sure of it when I was on the
terrace and saw his face. He crept along and crept along--Oh, such a
forlorn, hopeless, outcast figure! My heart ached at the sight of him. I
didn't know what he meant to do, and at first I had no intention of
attempting anything. It was by degrees that my own thought about the
studio came back to me. By that time he was on the veranda of the house,
and I was afraid he meant to kill Mr. Wayne. I went after him. I thought I
would entice him away and hide him. But the minute he heard my footstep he
leaped into the house. The next I saw, he was talking to Mr. and Mrs.
Wayne--and something told me he wouldn't hurt them. After that I watched
my chance till he looked outward, and then I beckoned to him. That's how
it happened."

"And then?"

"After that everything was easy. He must have told you. I kept him in the
studio for three weeks, and brought him food--and clothing of my father's.
It seemed to me that my father was doing everything--not I. That's what
made it so simple. I know my father would have wanted me to do it. I was
only the agent in carrying out his will."

"That's one way of looking at it," Conquest said, grimly.

"It's the only way I've ever looked at it; the only way I ever shall."

       *       *       *       *       *

"It was a romantic situation," he observed, when she had given him the
outlines of the rest of the story. "I wonder you didn't fall in love with
him."

He smoothed the colorless line of his mustache, as though concealing a
smile. He had recaptured the teasing tone he liked to employ toward her,
though its nervous sharpness would have betrayed him had she suspected his
real thoughts. While she said nothing in response, the tilt of her head
was that which he associated with her moods of indignation or pride.

"Perhaps you did," he persisted. Then, as she remained silent, "Did you?"

She resolved on a bold step--the audacity of that perfect candor she had
always taken as a guide.

"I don't know that one could call it that," she said, quietly.

He drew a quick inward breath, clinching his teeth, but keeping his fixed
smile.

"But you don't know that one couldn't."

"I can't define what I felt at all."

"It was just enough," he pursued, in his bantering tone, "to keep
you--looking for him back--as you told me--that day."

She lifted her eyes in a swift glance of reproach.

"It was that--then."

"But it's more--now. Isn't it?"

She met him squarely.

"I don't think you've any right to ask."

He laughed aloud, somewhat shrilly.

"That's good!--considering we're to be man and wife."

"We're to be man and wife on a very distinct understanding to which I'm
perfectly loyal. I mean to be loyal to it always--and to you. I shall give
you everything you ever asked for. If there are some things--one thing in
particular--out of my power to give you, I've said so from the first, and
you've told me you could do without them. If what I can't give you I've
given to some one else--because--because--I couldn't help it--that's my
secret, and I claim the right to guard it."

They faced one another across the table piled with ornate silver. He had
not lost his smile.

"You've the merit of being clear," was his only comment.

"You force me to be clear," she declared, with heightened color, "and a
little angry. When you asked me to be your wife--long ago--I told you
there were certain conditions I could never fulfil--and you waived them.
On that ground I'm ready to meet all your wishes, and make you a good wife
to the utmost of my power. I'm eager to do it--because I honor and respect
you as women don't always honor and respect the very men they love. I've
told Norrie Ford, and I repeat it to you, that after seeing him go free
and restored to his place among men, the most ardent desire of my life is
to make you happy. I'm perfectly true; I'm perfectly sincere. What more
can you ask of me?"

He looked at her searchingly, while he thought hard and rapidly. He could
not complain that the bars were up and the blinds drawn any longer. On the
contrary, she had let him see into the recesses of her life with a clarity
that startled him, as pure truth startles often. As he sat musing, his
pretence at cynicism fell from him, together with something of his
furbished air of youth. She saw him grow graver, grayer, older, under her
very eyes, and was moved with compunction--with compassion. Her face still
aglow and her hands clasped in her lap, she leaned to him across the
table, speaking in the rich, low voice that always thrilled him.

"What I feel for you is ... something so much like ... love ... that you
would never have known the difference ... if you hadn't wrung it from me."

Though he toyed aimlessly with some small silver object on the table and
did not look up, her words sent a tremor through his frame. The Wise Man
within him was very eloquent, repeating again and again the sentence she
herself had used a minute or two ago: What more could he ask of her? What
more _could_ he ask of her, indeed, after this assurance right out of the
earnestness and honesty of her pure heart? It was enough to satisfy men
with far greater claims than he had ever put forth, and far more
pretension than he had ever dreamed of cherishing. The Wise Man supplied
him with two or three phrases of reply--neat little phrases, that would
have bound her forever, and yet saved his self-esteem. He turned them over
in his mind and on his tongue, trying to add a touch of glamour while he
kept them terse. He could feel the Wise Man fidgeting impatiently, just as
he could feel her flaming, expectant eyes upon him; and still he toyed
with the small silver object aimlessly, conscious of a certain bitter joy
in his soul's suspense. He had not yet looked up, nor polished the Wise
Man's phrases to his taste, when a footman threw the door open, and Norrie
Ford himself walked in.

The meeting was saved from awkwardness chiefly by Ford's own lack of
embarrassment. As he crossed the room and shook hands, first with Miriam,
then with Conquest, there was a subdued elation in his manner and glance
that reduced small considerations to nothing.

"No; I won't sit down," he explained, hurriedly, and not without
excitement, "because I only looked in for a minute. I've got a cab waiting
for me outside. The fact is, I ran in to say good-bye."

"Good-bye?" Miriam questioned.

"Not for long, I hope. I'm off--to give myself up."

"But why to-night?" Conquest asked. "What's the rush?"

"Only that I want to get my word in first. They've got their eye on me. I
thought it yesterday, and I know it to-day. I want them to see that I'm
not afraid of them, and so I'm asking their hospitality for to-night. I've
got my bag in the cab, and everything ship-shape. I couldn't do it
without coming round for a last word with you, old man; and I was going to
see you afterward, Miss Strange. But since I've found you here----"

"You won't have to," she finished, brightly. "I'm glad to be able to save
your time. I'm confident we're not losing you for long; and as I know
you're eager, I can only wish you God-speed, and be glad to see you go"

She held out her hand, frankly, strongly, as one who has no fear.

"Now," she added, turning to Conquest, "I'll ask you to see me to my
motor. I shall leave you and Mr Ford together, as I know you must have
some last detail to arrange."

Ford protested, but she gathered up her gloves and furs, and both men
accompanied her to the street.

It was an autumn evening, drizzling and dark. Up and down Fifth Avenue the
wet pavements reflected the electric lamps like blurred mirrors. There
were few passengers on foot, but an occasional motor whizzed weirdly out
of the dark and into it. It was because there were no other people to be
seen that two men standing in the rain attracted the attention of the
three who descended Conquest's steps together.

"There they are," Ford said, jerkily. "By George! they've got ahead of
me."

Instinctively Miriam clutched his arm, while one of the two strangers came
forward apologetically.

"You're Mr. John Norrie Ford, ain't you?"

"I am."

"I'm very sorry, sir, but I've got a warrant for your arrest."

"That's all right," Ford said, cheerily. "I was on my way to you, anyhow.
You'll find my bag in the cab, and everything ready. We'll drive, if it's
all the same to you."

"Yes, sir. Sure thing, sir."

The man dropped back a few paces courteously, while Ford turned to his
friends. His air was buoyant. Miriam, too, reflected the radiance of her
vision of his triumph. Conquest alone, looking small and white and
shrivelled in the rain, showed care and fear.

"I don't think there's anything special to say," Ford remarked, with the
awkwardness of a simple nature at an emotional crisis. "I'm not very good
at thanks. Miss Strange knows that already. But it's all in here"--he
tapped his breast, with a characteristic gesture--"very sacred, very
strong."

"We know that," Conquest said, unsteadily, with an embarrassment like
Ford's own.

"Well, then--good-bye."

"Good-bye."

With a long pressure of the hand to each, he turned toward his cab. Of the
two strangers, one took his place beside the driver on the box, while the
other held the door open for Ford to enter. His foot was already on the
step when Miriam cried, "Wait!"

He turned toward her as she glided across the wet pavement.

"Good-bye, good-bye," she whispered again; and drawing down his face to
hers, she kissed him, as she had kissed him once before, beside the waters
of Champlain.

As she drew back from him, Ford's countenance wore the uplifted look of a
knight who has received the consecration to his quest. Even the two
strangers bowed their heads, as though they had witnessed the bestowal of
a sacrament. To Miriam herself it was the seal set on a past that could
never be reopened. She felt the definiteness with which it was ended, as
she heard, on her way back to Conquest's side, the door slammed, while the
cab lumbered away. It seemed to her that Conquest shrank from her as she
approached him.

       *       *       *       *       *

"You'll come to-morrow? I shall be home about five."

Conquest had put her into her motor, drawn the rugs about her, and closed
the door. As he did so, she noticed something slow and broken in his
movements. Leaning from the open window, she held out her hand, but he
barely touched it.

"No," he said, hoarsely, "I shall not come to-morrow."

"Then, the next day."

"No, nor the next day."

"Well, when you can. If you let me know, I shall stay in, whenever it may
be."

"You needn't stay in. I'm not coming any more."

"Oh, don't say that. Don't say that," she pleaded. "You hurt me."

"I can't come, Miriam. Don't you see? Isn't it plain enough? I can't come.
I thought I could. I tried to think I could hold you--in spite of
everything. But I can't. I _can't_."

"You can hold me--if I stay. I want to stay. You mustn't let me go. I want
you to be happy. You deserve it. You've done so much for me--and _him_."

It was the stress she laid on the last word--a suggestion of something
triumphant and enraptured beyond restraint--that made him bound back to
the centre of the pavement.

"Go on, Laporte," he said to the chauffeur, in a sharp voice. "Miss
Strange is ready."

"No, no," Miriam cried, stretching both hands toward him. "I'm not ready.
Keep me. I want to stay."

"Go on!" he cried, sternly, as the chauffeur hesitated. "Miss Strange is
quite ready. She must go."

Standing by the curb, he watched the motor glide off into the misty,
lamplit darkness. He was watching it still, as it overtook the carriage in
which Norrie Ford had just driven away. As the two vehicles passed abreast
out of his range of vision, he knew they were bearing Ford and Miriam side
by side into Life.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Wild Olive" ***

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