HEART-SICK WITH THOUGHT.
Two Gentlemen of Verona; i.—I.

The Fentons were just going to dinner when Helen arrived, and she was persuaded to dine with them. She was not without some curiosity to observe her friend in his new relations, and she also found herself attracted by Edith, although the two women had apparently little in common.

The talk at dinner flowed on easily enough, Arthur conversing in the strain which of old Helen had been pleased to call "amiable," and which fretted her by being conventional and not wholly sincere. She liked the artist best when he spoke without restraint, even though she might not agree with his extravagances and often detected a trace of artificiality in his clever epigrams. It seemed to her that the whole tendency of Edith's influence upon her husband was towards restraint, yet she could not be sure whether the ultimate result upon Fenton's character might not be beneficial.

"It depends upon Arthur himself," Helen mused. "If he is strong enough to endure the struggle of adapting his honest belief to her honest belief, he will be the better for it. I hope his love of ease will not make him evade the difficulty. It never used to occur to me how little I really know Arthur, so that I cannot tell how this will be."

When the host was enjoying his after dinner cigar, which by especial indulgence upon the part of Edith he was allowed to smoke in the parlor, Helen disclosed the object of her visit.

"Do you remember," she asked, "that model who posed for my May, and was to come to you next week?"

"Ninitta? Of course. What of her?"

"That is precisely what I wish to find out," she responded. "She has changed her address, and I thought it possible you might know something of her whereabouts."

"I have not seen her since the morning when she came into your studio.
Doesn't Herman know?"

"The truth is," Helen said slowly, weighing her words with regard to their effect upon Edith, "that she has run away, and we do not know what has become of her. She went off in a rage, and I am troubled about her."

"Is she the Italian you spoke of, Arthur?" interrupted Mrs. Fenton in her soft voice. "What is she like?"

"Yes; a black-haired, splendidly shaped girl with piercing black eyes."

"I think I know where she is," Edith said quietly.

"You?" the others asked in one breath.

"You see," Mrs. Fenton explained, turning towards Helen, "I have made rather a plunge into charity work. Of course I meant to do something, but I hardly expected to begin quite so soon. But Mr. Candish is my rector, and he came for me yesterday to go to an Italian family that cannot speak English well. The children have just been put into our schools, but they have not advanced very far as yet. Their teacher asked Mr. Candish to do something for them; they are wretchedly poor. I wish you could see the place, Mrs. Greyson. Eight people in a room not so large as this, and such poverty as you could hardly imagine. Yet these people had taken in another. The mother goes about selling fruit, and she happened to speak to this girl that I think is Ninitta in her own language one night. The girl had been wandering about in the cold, not knowing where to go, and I suppose the sound of her own tongue touched her heart. Poor thing; she would not speak a word to me. How strange that I should chance to find her."

"Thank heaven she is safe," was Helen's inward exclamation. Aloud she said: "But what is she doing?"

"Nothing," Edith answered. "She seems to have had a little money, so that she can pay the family something, and she has helped to take care of the children. They are Catholics, naturally, and not in Mr. Candish's parish; but they do not seem to have much religion of any kind, and keep clear of the priest for some reason."

"My wife will know more of the North End in a month," Arthur observed with an effort at good humor which did not wholly conceal from Helen a trace of annoyance, "than I should in six years. I wonder she can bear to go into such dirty places. Of course philanthropy is all very well, but I'd rather take it after it has been disinfected."

The bitterness in his tone jarred upon Helen. She felt a pang at his evident dissatisfaction with his wife's views, his want of harmony with his new surroundings.

"Arthur must be disciplined," Mrs. Fenton said, smiling fondly. "If he once learns that the secret of being happy lies in helping others, he'll be unselfish from mere selfishness, if from nothing else."

"Happy!" Helen exclaimed involuntarily. "Does one ever expect to be happy nowadays? Happiness went out of fashion with our grandmothers' bonnets."

"In this world," Edith answered, without any trace in her voice of the reproof which Helen half expected, "perhaps you are right. The age is too restless and skeptical for happiness here; but that makes me long the more for it hereafter."

"But even in a future life," returned Helen, "I can hardly expect to be happy, since I shall still be myself."

"Happiness," was Mrs. Fenton's reply, "is a question of harmony with surroundings, is it not? And your surroundings in the other life may be such that you cannot but be happy."

"No more theology, please," interposed Arthur. "You forget, Edith, that I have been to church to-day, and too much piety at once might impair my spiritual digestion forever."

A perception that the flippancy of his tone shocked his wife, made
Helen turn the conversation again to Ninitta, arranging to go with Mrs.
Fenton in the morning to find the missing girl.

They fell into silence after this, the twilight deepening until only the glow of the fire lighted the room. Edith went to the piano and played a bit of Mozart, wandering off then into the hymn-tunes which she loved and which were familiar in all orthodox homes of the last generation: plaintive Olmutz and stately Geneva, aspiring Amsterdam and resonant St. Martin's, placid Boylston and grand Hamburg, Nuremburg, Benevento, Turner and Old Hundred; the tunes of our fathers, the melodies which embody the spirit of the old time New England Sabbath, a day heavy, constrained and narrow, it may be; but, too, a day calm, unworldly and pure.

Arthur's cigar was finished, and he had fallen into a deep reverie, looking into the coals. He recalled his conversations with Helen before his marriage. He wondered whether his acquiescence in the limitations of his present condition, his yielding to his wife's social and religious views, was an advance or a deterioration. These pious tunes jarred upon his mood, and he was glad when his wife left the instrument. His Bohemian instinct stirred within him, and taunted the ease-loving quality of his nature which put him in subjection to that which he believed no more now than in the days when he was the most sharp-spoken of the Pagans. A wave of disgust and self-loathing swept over him. He turned abruptly in the dusk toward Helen.

"Sing to us," he said. "Edith has never heard you."

But Helen had been moved by the melodies, which came to her as an echo from her childhood. She understood the half-peremptory accent in Arthur's voice to which she had so often yielded, but to which she would not now submit.

"No," she answered. "How can you ask me. My barbaric chant would be wholly out of keeping here. Some other time I shall be glad to sing for Mrs. Fenton; now I must go home."