Early in Lent the weather treated Florence to what Aurora and Estelle called a cold snap. Their surprise and indignation were extreme. That Italy, sunny Italy, should feel herself free to have these alpine or polar fancies!

Estelle showed what she thought of it by taking cold. Aurora affected wearing her furs in the house. To increase their sense of ill usage, they would now and then turn their faces away from the fire and sigh, admiring how the air was dimmed by a puff of silver smoke. These pilgrims from a Northern climate, who knew so well the sensation of breath freezing in the nostrils and numbness seizing the nose when on certain winter days they stepped from their houses into the snow-piled streets at home, could not admit that in the City of Flowers one should catch sight of one’s breath,–indoors, too.

The little monthly roses, shivering but brave, blooming still, or blooming already, out in the garden, bore witness, after all, to the clemency of the winter, and upheld the city’s title to its name. The garden altogether was nearly as green as ever. Against alaternus, ivy, myrtle, laurestine the season could not prevail. Aurora decided that the blame for their discomfort rested with the house; she planned drastic and fundamental improvements which it was quite certain the noble landlord would not permit her to carry out.

225What with Estelle being half sick and herself, as she claimed, half frozen, Aurora at the end of a day during which the sun had not lighted the world by one feeblest ray, and the night had closed down thick and damp, was just a little disposed to low spirits. She had not been out, and nobody had come to see her. She felt the weariness that follows for certain sociable natures upon a long stretch of hours without renewal from outside.

She sensibly reacted against it by making the sitting-room as cozy as she could, drawing close the crushed-strawberry curtains, piling wood on the fire, placing a screen so that it shielded her chair and table from the draft; and, seated in her chimney-corner, took up a piece of knitting.

She was not very fond of reading, and she was fond of knitting large soft woolly afghans, of which she made presents to her friends. Reading seemed to her, anyhow, a rather idle thing to be doing. Knitting came under the head of work. How often had her story-paper been snatched from her when she was a girl, and a sock to knit thrust in her hand, with the bidding to be about something useful. How she had hated it. But now that she was free she still had a better conscience when she knit.

To the click of her long wooden needles she thought, with more pleasure than was afforded by any other vision at the moment, of a hot water bottle gently warming the bed into which she meant to creep at exactly nine o’clock. This hour she had set when at eight already the temptation to go to bed and forget the unsatisfactory day in sound warm slumbers had been so strong as to make yielding to it appear wrong.

These vestiges of Puritanism Aurora did not recognize 226as such, but yet her mind as she was practicing self-discipline turned, without seeking for the reason, toward the person who had done most to inculcate in her the doctrine that if you like to do a thing that itself is almost surely a sign of the thing being wicked, and that if you dislike it it is very probably your duty.

While she continued to appear the signora to whom the servants’ eyes were accustomed, albeit a trifle more absent and unsmiling, she was to herself a young girl in a far country, living and moving in scenes of difficulty and misunderstanding with a sharp-chinned, narrow-chested, timidly-beloved just woman–her mother, long since laid to rest....

There was nothing from outside to dispel the faint heartache accompanying this retrospection; wind and rain against the windows were more proper to increase the melancholy, and Aurora, suddenly sick of staying up to be blue, wound her yarn to start for bed. But first, for just a moment, she would go down-stairs, she thought, and have a look at her portrait, for that was the most comforting thing to do that she could think of. She loved her portrait as a child loves its favorite toy.

This she was intending when the sound of the door-bell at once stopped and cheered her by the possibility it held out of some diversion. Vitale entered with a package.

Catching in what he said the name Gaetano, Aurora took it to mean that Gaetano had brought the package. He was waiting below, she did not doubt. Gaetano was Giovanna’s nephew, and had more than once come on errands from Gerald. Saying, “Aspettare!” she hastened into her room for the porte-monnaie which resided in her top drawer. From this she drew a reward that should make 227the journey through night and rain from Gerald’s house to hers seem no hardship. Her blues had vanished.

Before removing the rain-splashed newspaper, she gazed for a moment at the package, trying to guess what it could be. It was square, flat, about a foot and a half one way by a foot the other. What was Gerald Fane sending her like that without any enlightening missive? A note might be inside. She cut the string, took off the newspaper, to find a second wrapper of clean white drawing-paper. After touching and pinching, she guessed the object to be a picture-frame and picture. Filled with curiosity, she pulled off the last wrapping, and with a face at first very blank stared before her....

It was a painting, one of the kind she had seen at Gerald’s studio and not liked.

Different though it was from the portrait down-stairs,–as different as poverty from riches, as twilight from day,–she could yet see that this also was meant for a portrait of herself. She remembered tying that blue neckerchief over her head and under her chin one evening, trying to look like an Italian in her pezzola, to make the others laugh.

She stood the picture on the chair which she had pulled up before her so as to rest her feet on the rung, off the stone floor, still to be felt, she imagined, through the rug. Of course it was herself, but how disappointing–disappointing enough to shed tears over–to have this held up to her after that lovely being down-stairs! How unkind of her friend Gerald!

Unfair, too, for although this, in not being a beauty, was obviously more like her than the other, she could not admit that it was any truer. She could not believe that she ever really looked like this, though she knew that it was the 228way she sometimes felt. How had Gerald known she ever felt like this?

That she was a person who ate well, slept well, felt well, loved fun, was giving and gay–that was all most people knew, or were entitled to know, of her; all she knew of herself a good deal of the time. Such things could never be the whole of any person, of course. Every one has had something to overcome. Some persons have had to overcome and overcome and overcome, one thing after another, one thing after another, that has tried to drag and keep them down. She had had–probably because, as her mother often told her, she was born with such a lot of the devil in her–a great many trials sent to her, for her discipline, no doubt, her cleansing; but she had come out of them still unreduced, still eager for a good time.

All persons are made up, in a way, of these experiences of the past, but they don’t expose them in their faces, they forget them as much as they can.

Yes, as much as they can. How much is that? The only true sorrows being involved with one’s affections, and the objects of one’s love never far from one’s thoughts, how much could a person be said to forget her sorrows, really?

Aurora reflected upon this for some time, staring the while at her portrait. The face looking back from the canvas was very like her, had she but known it, at this exact moment, while the thoughts produced, the memories wakened, by it substituted for her ordinary hardiness the delicate look of a capacity for pain.

As she gazed at the portrait longer she liked it better; from minute to minute she became more reconciled, and found herself finally almost attracted. Something from it penetrated her for which she had no definition. It was 229perhaps the dignity of humanity confronting her in that strong and simple face framed by the kerchief, like a woman of the people’s,–her own face, but not certainly as she saw it in the mirror; a humanity that out of the common materials offered to it day by day had rejected all that was mean and contrived to build up nobleness.

Half perceiving that this portrait in its different way flattered her as much if not more than the portrait down-stairs, she, while modestly refusing to be fooled by the compliment, yet felt a motion of affectionate gratitude toward Gerald for the sympathy which had enabled him to pierce beneath the surface and see that Bouncing Betsy had her feelings, too, her history; yes, her bitter tragedy.

While continuing with her eyes on the picture, she from time to time wiped them, and when the door-bell rang again, aware of being “a sight,” took the precaution of retiring to her bedroom, so that if Vitale should come to announce a visit,–it was not yet nine o’clock,–she could the better make him understand that he must excuse her to the visitor; she was going to bed.

But learning from the servant that Signor Fane was below, she changed her mind, and chose unhesitatingly from her stock of useful infinitives the appropriate two: “Dire venire.”

Gerald found her by the fire, her fur-cloak over her shoulders, her woolly afghan in her hands, and the picture on the chair before her.

“Well?” he asked expectantly, looking at it, too, after they had shaken hands.

“You’ve made me feel sorry for myself. What’s the use?” she answered in a little sigh, keeping her reddened eyes turned away from him. “Hush! Wait a moment! 230I was forgetting,” she added, in comedy anticlimax, like a housewife who in the midst of a scene of sentiment should smell the dinner scorching. She jumped up, and went without the least noise to close the door to Estelle’s room, returning from which she illogically fell to talking in a whisper.

“Estelle’s gone to bed. She’s got a snow-balling old cold. I’ve rubbed her chest with liniment, and tied up her throat in a compress, and given her hot lemonade, and she lies there with a hot water bottle at her feet and grease on her nose, and let’s hope she’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Let’s hope, indeed. I’m very sorry to hear she’s ill. But she’s sure to be better by to-morrow, isn’t she, with all that care and those remedies. I hope you haven’t a cold, too, Mrs. Hawthorne. You almost look,” he said innocently, “as if you had. This weather is dreadful. You haven’t, have you, dear friend?”

“No; I guess what you see is just that I’ve been crying. Don’t say anything about it. Don’t notice it. Never mind. Come and sit down by the fire and get warm. Your hand was like ice.”

“It’s very bad out, and not much better in, except here by your generous fireside. I haven’t been warm all day.”

“Why didn’t you come before? It isn’t what I call balmy here, but I expect it’s balmier than at your place.”

With her kindly unconstraint she reached for one of his hands to test its temperature. With a little cry of “Mercy me!” she closed his numb fingers between her palms to warm them, as if the blaze could not have accomplished this end so well as they.

He let it be, not with the same unconsciousness in the 231matter as she, but hoping that the soft, warm infolding would somehow do him good. He had come in the rather desperate hope of being done good to. As he had been about to start out, having intended, when he sent the portrait, to follow close upon it, he had found himself feeling so ill–feeling, at the end of the dismal day, so indescribably burdened and ill and apprehensive of worse things–that he had been on the point of giving it up. But then the wish itself to escape from his bad feelings had impelled him forth toward the spot glowing warmer and cheerier in his thoughts than any other, where, if he could forget how ill he felt, he would naturally feel better. Aurora’s house during the days of painting the first portrait had come to feel remarkably like home to him.

So when Aurora released his hand, saying, “Let’s have the other,” he docilely gave it to her, though the fire had already partly thawed it. Gratefully, with the hand set free, he covered both her kind hands, which loved so much to warm things and feed things and pet things and give away money.

Overcoming his ordinary stiffness, he pressed them right manfully, to signify that he would not speak of her tears if she wished him not to, but here was his sympathy, and with it his penitence, if so were that, as she intimated, he had had a share in making them flow.

“So you are all alone this evening?” he asked in the voice that makes whatever is said seem affectionate and comforting.

“Yes. I haven’t even Busteretto. I let Estelle keep him on the foot of her bed. She’s perfectly devoted to him. And Clotilde is busy in her own corner of the house, going over the bills. It takes lots of time.”

232“And where is the musician in ordinary, the gifted Italo?” he inquired, with a smile meant to draw from her a smile.

She was caught without difficulty. “The gifted Checkerberry hasn’t been round lately,” she smiled. “He won’t expose himself to the night air for some time. He’s got laryngitis so he can’t talk above a whisper.” Her eye twinkled and she laughed, though what she communicated was not on the face of it very funny.

He was perhaps calling attention to this when he said, “Poor devil!”

“Yes,” she agreed, achieving sobriety, “it’s bad weather for laryngitis,” and went on with the weather, dropping Italo. “It’s been a mean sort of day, hasn’t it? I haven’t set foot outside. I was already feeling kind of blue and making up my mind to go to bed when Gaetano came with your present.”

There was an intimation in her glance that this event had not made the world appear any rosier.

Both turned to look at the picture. Their hands loosened naturally; they sat apart.

“Can’t you see why I had to paint it, Mrs. Hawthorne?” he asked, speaking eagerly, and as if pressing his defense.

“How could I endure to have that thing down-stairs stand as my idea, my sole idea, of you? And how could I bear to make you a gift, a sole gift, of a piece of work I do not respect? This may be worth no more,–I think differently,–but it is at least the best I can produce. It has my sanction. You, too, believe me, will prefer it to the other after a while.”

She shook her head a little disconsolately.

“The other you can, if you must, keep in your drawing-room 233to make an agreeable spot of color,” he went on, reversing their parts and trying to induce in her a lighter humor; “it has that perfectly legitimate use. In your drawing-room, you know, Auroretta, among the pictures of your choosing, it does not, in our Italian idiom, altogether disappear. This one you will keep out of sight, but will look at now and then, if you please; and I quite trust you, with time, to recognize that it was painted by some one who understood and honored you more than there was any evidence of his doing when he perpetrated, for a joke, that bonbon-box subject down-stairs.”

Mrs. Hawthorne, with soft and saddened eyes fixed on the portrait, again shook her head, sighing, “Poor thing!”

“Not at all!” he protested almost peevishly. “Please not to suggest by pitying her that I have not represented there a fine, big, strong thing, built to stand up under anything! I could slay, with pleasure, at any time”–he diverged, carried away by a long-standing disgust,–“the pestiferous asses who call my things morbid. I am too careful to keep true to what I see. The difference between them–I mean the critics who call me morbid–and myself, is in the degree of sight.”

“Don’t get excited, Geraldino!” she checked fumings which she did not entirely understand. “What I meant was that looking at her has made me think of all the things that have gone wrong with me in my whole life. Don’t you call that a tribute? You couldn’t have painted this picture if you hadn’t suspected those things, and, honest, I don’t see how you could suspect them. Ever since I came over here I’ve been so jolly. Seems to me I’ve been nothing but jolly. I’ve been having such a good time! How you could see under it, I don’t know. 234As a matter of fact, I’ve always been jolly between-times. Give me half a chance, let me get out of the frying-pan, I’d be ready in a minute to go on a picnic. But I’ve not been spared my troubles, Geraldino; you were right there.”

At this reference to many sorrows, he found a thing to do more expressive than words. Sitting near each other as they were, he could reach her without rising; he bent forward and touched his lips commiseratingly to her hand.

He might have known that it would bring her story, but he had not schemed for this, and, unwilling, yet eager, to hear, was a prey to compunctions on more than one ground when, after a little gulp and sniff, she burst forth:

“I’ve seen perfectly dreadful times, Geraldino. Some of them were the sort of thing you can get over, but some of them–upon my word, I wonder at myself how I’ve got over them as I have. The queer thing is–I haven’t, in a way. It will come over me sometimes, in the queerest places, at the oddest moments, that I am still that woman to whom such awful things happened, that I, playing my silly monkey-shines, am that heart-broken woman.”

“I know,” murmured Gerald, and took her plump hands steadyingly between his hard, thin ones.

“I’ve never had any sense,” she let herself go. “Anybody can see that; and when I was younger I had even less, naturally, than I have now. Always, always, I wanted so to be happy! I wanted to have a good time. I was born wanting to have a good time. And everything was against it. But I managed somehow. One way or another, I got to the circus ’most every time. My mother used to wonder what my finish would be, and try to lick the Old Boy out of me. But it couldn’t be done. I’m just like my father, my dear old pa, who was a sinner. He let ma 235have her way in everything, as he thought it right to do. Not, I guess, because he always liked her way, but because after my sister, who was a beautiful child, died in such a terrible way that I can’t even bear to mention it,–she caught fire,”–Aurora hurriedly interjected, “ma came so near going out of her senses that pa humored her in everything. He thought the world of her; so did we all, but it couldn’t be called a happy home. There were three boys, besides me,–I was the last,–and we were all such everlastingly lively young ones, and ma was so strict! Pa was away most of the time getting a living. My pa, you know, was a pilot. It wasn’t a fat living for so many of us, but that wouldn’t have mattered long as we had enough to eat. But ma, poor soul, because of that twist her mind had taken through sorrow, was always seeing something wrong in everything we did; she never could be quiet or contented. The boys didn’t get so much of it: they were off out of doors and later at their trades; but me, I was kept in to help with the housework, and kept in for company, and kept in for no other reason, I guess, than because my wicked heart longed so to go out and play with the girls and boys. I dare say it was good for me. Ma meant all right, that I know, but ma was all along a sick woman. We realized later that though she was round and about, busy every minute, she was sick for years with the trouble that finally took her away. I don’t want you to think I didn’t have a real good mother, for I did–a first-rate mother who did her honest best to make a good woman of me.”

“I know, I know.” By a reminding pressure of her hands he begged she would trust him not to misunderstand.

236“But my pa–you should have known my pa!” Aurora’s face brightened immensely, and Gerald suspected that it was like him she looked when she screwed her lips to one side in a manner humorously suggesting a pipe at the corner of her mouth, and said in a voice not her own, “Golly, Nell, can’t you whistle for a snifter?” He could almost see a sailor’s chin-whiskers.

“He took me with him once in a while. Golly, those were good times, if you please! Free as air, all the peanuts I could eat, out in the boat with my pa, and catch fish, and catch a steamer if we could. We had an 8 big as a house on our sail. He was as good a seaman, my pa was, as any in East Boston, but he wasn’t a hustler. But there, if he’d been a hustler, he wouldn’t have been my pa. Wouldn’t for a house with a brownstone front have had my pa any different from what he was. Grandma was just the same sort, God bless her! easy-going, jolly, come a day, go a day, do as she please and let you do as you please. I used to have such lovely times at her house, summers, down on the Cape, before my sister died!

“It was there I first knew Hattie–Estelle. Her aunt’s house was next to my grandma’s. I used to think her the luckiest child that ever was born. Seemed to me she had just about everything–a gold locket and chain, bronze boots, and paper dolls by the dozen. We used to play together, day in day out, one of those plays that last all the time, where you pretend you’re some one else and act it out in all you do. We kept it up for years. I don’t see that we’ve changed much with growing up. Seems to me we were pretty near the same then as we are now, having our spats, but having lots of fun, and wanting to share everything. Estelle lived in East Boston, too, and 237was going to be a school-teacher. It seemed to me that to be a school-teacher was just about the finest thing anybody could do. That would have been my ambition, to be a school-teacher. But I never got beyond the grammar school, I was needed at home to help mother. Then my poor pa died–an accident down in the docks,”–Aurora, lowering her voice, began to hurry and condense,–“then Ben, then Joe, then–will you believe it?–Charlie, that I loved best. They all had the same delicate constitution as ma, it turned out, and a predisposition to the same trouble. Then finally, after going through with so much, my poor mother went, too, and for that I could only be thankful. And I had taken care of them all. I wasn’t twenty-three when I was the last left. Doesn’t it seem strange! I sometimes can’t believe it even now.”

This rapid enumeration of calamities so great robbed them of terror and pathos, yet Gerald had somewhat the startled, shocked feeling of a man who knows he has been struck by a bullet, though his nerves have not yet announced it by suffering.

Aurora, who after the passing of years could think of these things without tears, yet in speaking of them to a sympathetic hearer had obvious difficulty in keeping a stiff upper lip. Gerald turned away his eyes while with her hand she covered and tried to stop her mouth’s trembling.

“Poor child!” he said, with a sincerity which saved the words from insignificance.

“Yes,” she half laughed. “Wouldn’t one think it enough to sort of subdue anybody, take the starch out of them for some time? When I came out of that house of sickness I couldn’t think of anything else but sickness and death. It stuck to me like the smell of disinfectants 238after you’ve been in a hospital. I couldn’t think of anything but that it would take me next. I supposed I must be affected, too. But the doctor examined me, and do you know what he said? ‘Sound as a trout,’ he said. ‘You’re so sound,’ he said, ‘you’re so healthy, that we’ll have to shoot you to get you to the resurrection.’ Then I felt better. He was a new doctor that we’d called in toward the end. He knew how I was situated, and as he seemed to think I’d make a good nurse, he got me a chance in the City Hospital, where I could get my training. And Hattie, dear Hattie, what a friend she’s been! She and her ma and pa made me come and make my home with them. It’s since then that we’ve been like sisters.”

At the sound, appositely occurring, of a cough in the neighboring room, Aurora stopped and listened.

“Dear me!” she whispered. “D’you suppose she’s lying awake?”

“She may be coughing in her sleep,” he suggested.

“Yes,” Aurora said dubiously, after further listening, and hearing nothing more. “And if I should go in to see, I might wake her. The bell-rope is right at the head of her bed; all she has to do is pull it if she wants somebody to come. I was entertaining you with the story of my life, wasn’t I? Where had I got to? Oh, yes. There in the hospital I just loved it. Perhaps you can’t see how I could. I just did. I had lots of hard work. The training was sort of thrown in in my case with other duties, but there were the other nurses and the house-doctors, I grew chummy with them all. I had fun with the patients, too. You don’t know how much good it does you to watch anybody get well; the majority get well. It’s good for them, besides, to have you jolly.”

239“Your gaiety of heart makes me think of the grass, Aurora, the blessed ineradicable grass, that will grow anywhere, that you see pushing up between the paving-stones of the hard city, and finding a foothold on the blank of the rock, and fringing the top of the ruined castle, and hiding the new-made graves.”

Aurora, always simple-mindedly charmed with a compliment, paused long enough to investigate Gerald’s comparison, then resumed, with the effect of taking a plunge into deep waters:

“But it was there I met the fellow who did me the worst turn of any....

“They brought him in with broken ribs one rainy night, after he’d been knocked down in the street by a team and kicked by the horses. I wasn’t his regular nurse, but I was in and out of his room, and if he rang while his regular nurse was at her meals, I’d go. Everybody knows that when a man’s sick he’s liable to get sweet on this or that one of his nurses.

“How I could have been mistaken in Jim Barton I can’t see now. Since knowing him, if I ever see anybody that looks a bit like him, I shun them like poison, because I know as well as I need to that however nice they may appear, you can’t depend upon them. But before I knew him I’d never stop to distrust anybody.

“It began with our setting up jokes together; he could be awfully funny even when he was swearing like a pirate about his luck landing him in a hospital. Bad language didn’t seem so awful coming from him, because he was so light-complexioned and boyish-looking. He was only passing through the city, in an awful hurry to get West, when he got hurt, and he was madder than a hornet at 240the delay. But after a while he quieted down, because he’d got something else to think about, which was getting me to go along with him to California, where he’d bought a share in a mine. And me, star idiot of the world, it seemed the grandest thing that had ever happened. I’d never had anybody in love with me that way before. The boys had always liked me, but I’d been like another fellow among them, and I’d never more than just been silly for a week or two at a time over one fellow and another at a distance. And here was a solid offer from a perfectly splendid man who had everything, money included. They’d found several thousand dollars on him when he was picked up. And the yarns he told about gold-mines!... But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the gold-mines, it was ‘the way with him’ that caught me. I guess when you’re in love you’re no judge of your man. We two, I tell you, seemed made for each other. He was as fond of a good time as I, and he loved fun, like me. We were going to California to make our everlasting fortune. You’d have thought there was no more doubt about it than the Gospels being true. And the good times we were going to have while doing it were nothing to the good times we’d have after, when I’d have my diamonds and he’d have his horses and things. As I said, the diamonds weren’t needed; I’d have gone with him anywhere just for the fun of being together. I couldn’t see what I’d done to deserve my blessings. I guess he was in love, too, as far as it was in him to be; I’ll do him that justice.

“Hattie and her ma, while they had nothing to say against Jim, wanted me to wait awhile. But Jim couldn’t wait. The moment he was well enough he wanted to be 241off. And I didn’t care much about waiting either. I felt as if I’d known him all my life. So they said nothing more and gave us a perfectly lovely wedding from their house. They didn’t see through him any more than I did, and in a way it wasn’t strange, because he wasn’t hiding anything in particular or misrepresenting anything. He believed all he said about the big money he was going to make and the grand times we should have. He was born with the sort of nature that always believes things are going to turn out right without labor and perseverance on your part. He wasn’t fond of work, that’s sure. What we ought to have done was find out something about his past; but even that, I guess, wouldn’t have opened our eyes, with him before us looking like one of ourselves. And it wasn’t a very long past; he was young. He came of good folks, I guess. I never saw them, but there are ways of telling. Good folks, but not wealthy, and so as to get rich easily he had tried one thing after another. He was quick’ discouraged, and the moment the thing didn’t look so big or easy he wanted to throw it over and try something else. Then I’ve come to the conclusion he loved change for its own sake–go somewhere else, take a new name, and start a new business, talking big. It came out after he died that he’d been known under half a dozen names in as many States. There simply wasn’t anything to him. I don’t believe he meant to act like a skunk, but, then, he hadn’t any principles either to keep him from acting like a skunk, or meaner than a skunk, when it came to getting himself out of difficulty. And I, for my sins, had to marry such a fellow as that! It was like there had stood the good times I’d always wanted, 242 right before me in the body, and I took them for better, for worse, and got what my ma said I deserved to get when she tried to cure me of my fancy for good times!”

“Don’t!” protested Gerald, softly. “Don’t regard as wrong what was so natural. All who have the benefit of knowing you must thank the stars which permitted your beautiful love of life to survive the dreadfulness of which you have given me a glimpse.”

“The dreadfulness, Geraldino! I haven’t told you anything yet of the dreadfulness. I haven’t come to it. I haven’t come to what makes her”–she nodded toward the portrait,–“look like that.”

“Then tell me!” he encouraged her.

“It isn’t Jim. When I think of Jim, it only makes me mad. My heart is hard as stone toward him.” She clenched her jaws and looked, in fact, rather grim. “That he’s dead doesn’t change it. I hope I forgive him as a Christian ought to who asks forgiveness for her own trespasses. I know I don’t feel revengeful. There wasn’t enough toJim for me to wish him punished in hell. But if you think I have any sentiment because I used to love him, or that I was sorry I woke up from my fool dream when I once had seen it was a dream–Not a bit of it. There was a time, though, when I first began to suspect and understand, that makes me rather sick to think of even now. I was so far from home, you see. I hadn’t a friend, and I wouldn’t for worlds have written back to my old friends that I’d made a bad bargain–not while I wasn’t dead sure. And I kept on hoping.

“At first we had a real good time. We lived in a miner’s cottage, but that seemed sort of jolly. I’d been used to hard work all my life, so I didn’t mind that, and 243I wanted him to have as nice a home as any man could on the same money. So I cleaned and contrived and baked and brewed and fixed up. I wanted him to be pleased with me and proud among the other men. But pretty soon I found I didn’t care to make acquaintances, because I was ashamed of the way Jim did. He kept putting all his money into the mine, sending good money after bad, and let me keep house on nothing, and then was in a worse and worse temper because the mine didn’t pan out and things weren’t more comfortable at home. I began to wake up in the night and lie there in a cold sweat, clean scairt. I haven’t told you that we were looking for an addition to the family. That’s one reason I was so scairt. But I shut my teeth, and said I to myself, ‘This baby’s going to have a chance if his mother can give it to him by not getting excited or letting things prey on her mind.’ So I kept a hold on myself and didn’t let anything count except guarding that baby. I seemed to care more about it than all the rest of the world put together. Oh, I can’t begin to tell you how much more than for all the rest of the world put together. I don’t know that a man would understand.”

“Yes, he would; of course he would,” spoke Gerald, gently reverent, yet a little impatient; then he qualified his assertion: “He could imagine, I mean to say, how you would have felt that way.”

“Well, that matter was going to be put safely through, no matter what. The first mistake I made was not making friends with my women neighbors, so that everybody in Elsinore supposed that Jim’s wife was the same stripe as he,–or that’s what I thought they supposed,–and when I needed friends I couldn’t think of any to turn to except 244those at home. The other mistake I made was not to write them at home and tell them the truth and then wait for them to send me money to come. But I guess my mind stopped working when the shock came.”

Aurora appeared to brace herself, while decently considering how to minimize to her audience the brutality of her next revelation.

“Jim cleared out one night while I was asleep, taking every cent we’d got and every last thing he could hope to turn into a cent,” she said, hardening her voice and lips. Gerald was given a moment in which to visualize the situation, before she went on: “I guess, as I said before, that I wasn’t in my right mind for a spell; all I could think of was getting home to my own folks, and I was going to do it somehow, though I hadn’t a cent. I hadn’t even my wedding-ring. I’d put it off because my finger had grown fatter, and he’d taken even that to go and try his luck somewhere else.–What do you think of it?” she mechanically added.

She was pale, remembering these things. Gerald drew in a long, unsteady breath, oppressed.

“I was going to get home somehow,” Aurora repeated, “and I wasn’t going to waste time waiting for anything. And how was I going to do it? I don’t suppose I really thought; I followed instinct like an animal. I hid in a freight-car going East–”

A definite difficulty here stopped Aurora. While she felt for words in which to clothe what followed, the images in her mind made her eyes, which were not seeing the things actually before them, more descriptive of the anguish of remembered scenes than her words were likely to be.

245“I’m going to skip all that, Gerald.” With a gesture, she suddenly rolled up a part of her story and threw it aside. “But when I came to see and understand rightly again, weeks after, in a hospital at Denver, I cried, oh! how I cried, and didn’t care what became of me. Because I’d lost him; they hadn’t succeeded in saving him. He had lived, mind you,” she emphasized with pride–“he had lived a little while, he was all right, perfect in every way–a son.”

His due of tears was not withheld from the wee frustrated god. Aurora gave up talking, so as to have her cry in quietness.

Gerald, holding back a sound of distress, twisted on his chair, not daring to recall himself to Aurora’s notice either by speaking or touching her.

“I’m plain sorry for myself,” she explained her tears while trying to stop them. “You can’t be sorry, for their own sakes, for the little children who go back to God without knowing anything of this life’s troubles. It’s for myself I’m sorry. I never can bring up those times without the feeling of them coming over me again, and then, as I tell you, I’m sorry for that poor fool in her empty house, and then in the thundering freight-car, and then in the hospital. I see her outside of me just as plain as I would another person. Then, too”–she dried her eyes as if this time for good–“I feel a burning here”–she touched her breast–“like anger. Angry. I feel angry at being robbed, in a way I never seem to get over. To think I might have had him all my life, like millions of other women, and I never even saw him! And he was as real to me all those months before!... I don’t see how I could have loved him more than I did. I’m hungry for him 246 sometimes, just as I might be for food. And then I’m angry and rebellious. But I couldn’t tell you against who. It isn’t God, certainly. He’s our best friend, all we’ve got to rely on. And He’s been mighty good to me. There in Denver, when I hadn’t a friend or a penny, He raised up friends for me and gave me the most wonderful luck.

“I stayed right there in Denver till less than a year ago. I guess you’ve heard me speak of the Judge. The doctor in the hospital where they carried me was his son; that’s how it all came about–friends, good luck, money, everything. When I say I found friends, let me mention that I found enemies, too, the meanest, the bitterest! I–but there”–she interrupted herself as, on the very verge of further confidences, a change of mind was effected in her by sudden weariness or by a deterrent thought, or both–“I guess I’ve talked enough about myself for one evening. I didn’t have a soft time of it there in Denver,” she summed up the remainder of her story, “but I’d got back to being my old self. You’d never have known what I’d been through. I was just about as you’ve known me here. Funny, isn’t it,”–Aurora seemed almost ashamed, apologetic,–“how the disposition you’re born with hangs on?”

“Golden disposition,” Gerald commented soothingly. Timid about looking directly at her just yet, he looked instead at the portrait, whereon lay the shadow of the events just related.

After a little period of thought in silence Aurora said, with the shamefaced air she took when venturing to talk of high things:

“I heard a sermon once on the text, ‘Mary kept all these things in her heart.’ The minister said that it wasn’t only Mary who did this, but ordinary women, so often. And 247I know from myself how true it is. You see a woman all dressed up at a party, laughing with the others, dancing perhaps, and she’ll be saying inside of herself, ‘If baby had lived, he’d have been three years old.’ Or thirteen, or thirty. I’ve no doubt it goes on as long as she lives. And she can see him before her just as plain, as he would have been.... My baby would have been five last October.”

Gerald remembered how sweet he had always thought it of her to wish to stop and fondle little children, often wee beggars, stuffing little grimy fists with pennies, not avoiding to touch soiled little cheeks with her clean gloves. He had attributed this propensity to a simple womanly talent for motherliness.

“I’ve got this to be thankful for,” she came out again from silence, farther down along the line of her meditations, “that he did live for a few hours. I’ve got a son, just as much as if he’d grown to be a man.” She was dry-eyed, almost joyful in this.

“Yes, yes,” hurried Gerald, consolingly; “that’s what you must always think of–that and not the other things. You must lay hold of that thought and feel rich in it. But hear me, dear friend–me, trying to suggest ways to you of being brave and cheerful! You, who do from god-given temperament what I can only see as a right aim of aspiration, by light of a certain philosophy arrived at in my own way, through my own experiences. Philosophy is not the right word, either; the feeling I have is mainly esthetic. In order not to be too unhappy in this world, in order to have a little serenity, we must forgive everything, Aurora; that is what I have clearly seen. It’s the only way. We must forgive events just as we forgive persons. And we 248must love life. I who so much of the time hate life, yet know better. We must love it as we must love our enemies. The wherefore is a mystery, but peace of heart and beauty of life are involved with doing it. We mustn’t mind being wounded, crucified. We mustn’t mind anything, Aurora! We mustn’t be angry, the gestures of it are ugly. I, who am always being angry, who sometimes groan aloud my thoughts are so blasphemously bitter, I am telling you what I at bottom know. The game is so unfair, it calls for magnanimity on our part to stake handsomely and lose patiently. Patience, that’s it! We must be patient–patient as a cab-horse! Pride and dignity demand that we be patient, absolutely. For the sake of certain beautiful things and sweet people in the world, we must give it a good name. But hear me! Hear me giving counsels to you–you who without formulating these ideas act on them, whilst with me they are things which I see as fit to be done but can never hope to do.”

“You, too, Gerald, poor boy,” was Aurora’s simple reply–“you, too, have had lots to try you.”

He swept aside by a gesture the subject of his trials, removed it altogether from the horizon, unwilling really that the interest be shifted from her to him. She was equally determined, now that he had sympathized with her, to sympathize with him.

“I know you have,” she insisted; “I know you’ve had lots to try you, just as you knew that I’d had lots. And you’re so high-strung, so sensitive ... I never knew anybody like you. But there are good times coming for you; I’m sure of it.”

“I don’t in the least expect them.” He laughed a little harshly. He had winced at her description of him as sensitive, 249high-strung. “Dear incurable optimist, I don’t in the least expect them. It’s not because there will be compensation that I hold it the decentest thing to put up with the mechancetÉs of fate, fate’s ingenious stabs in the tender, as they come, without giving the exhibition of one’s vulnerability, or poisoning one’s system with hate!”

“But there will,” she continued to insist, “there will be compensations. I know it just as well.... You have so much talent, it’s perfectly wonderful, and it’s only a question of time your having the success you deserve. I, of course, am not educated up to your paintings, but even I am beginning to see something more than I did at first. I can see, for instance, that almost any fine painter, with a command of his colors, could have done the picture down-stairs, but that only you in the whole world could have done this one here. But, I say again, my opinion isn’t worth anything. But there’s Leslie, who knows all about art and such things, doesn’t she? Well, she ’s told me how wonderful you are. From what she’s told me I’m perfectly sure you’ll make your mark in the world.”

Again Gerald swept her words aside like noxious obscuring cobwebs. “What is, few know, and what will be, nobody knows whatever,” he said. “But of all things, I beg, I beg you will not think of me as a misunderstood genius! Art is not a passion with me, it is–an interest. And don’t hold out for a lure that will reconcile me, my dear friend, anything so vulgar as success! The single hope I have, when I am the most hopeful, is that simply my metal, my resistance, may never quite fail. I shall not have success, dear lady, though in your kindness you predict it. I shall go on and on seeing with different eyes from other people, carving my cherry-stones in my own 250way, and made unsociable by the failure of others to see how superior my way is. I shall go on growing more eccentric and solitary, and call myself lucky quite beyond my merits if those particular snares which the devil Melancholy sets for the solitary may be escaped, that I may neither drink, nor drug myself, nor shoot myself, nor marry the cook!”

“Don’t talk like that, Gerald!” cried Aurora. “Don’t say anything so awful! Now keep still while I talk, listen while I tell you. You’re going on painting in your own way, but some one–see?–some one is going to arise bright enough to recognize how perfectly wonderful your pictures are. Keep still. You mustn’t despise success, you know, success is what everybody needs and wants. You’re going to succeed. Keep still. Stupid people will want to buy your pictures because the people who know about such things have told the public how wonderful they are. Then you’ll grow rich and famous. You won’t be either eccentric or solitary. You’ll have hosts of admiring friends. I guess you could have them now, if you wanted to. You won’t be melancholy. You’ll be happy. In your home there will be a nice wife. Why are you supposing you’ll never marry? A dear true beautiful girl who thinks the world of you and that you think the world of. And when you’re an old gentleman with your grandchildren playing at your knee, you’ll say to yourself, ‘Aurora told me so!’”

She was all cheering smiles and dimples again.

“Be sure you remember now,” she said, holding up a finger and shaking it to mark her bidding, “to say to yourself, ‘Aurora told me so!’”

251It was a pity almost that Gerald should not have gone home at that point. He would have left with undividedly fond and approving feelings; he would have left tied to Aurora by a thousand sweet humanities in common, as well as impressed afresh by the depth and mysteriousness of woman. But he had either forgotten or was disregarding the hour–the clock on the mantelpiece, like most ornamental clocks, was not going; the bliss of being warm for the first time in days, warm through and through, warm to the middle of his heart, made him careless of correctness; and so he stayed on, to be rudely jarred by and by out of his contentment, and take with him finally into the night a renewed, even sharpened, perception of those exasperating faults which made Mrs. Hawthorne, as he named it, impossible.

Because they seemed to be on such solid terms of friendship after the long evening before the fire, when they had sorrowed together and sympathized; when he had been permitted to hold and press her hands; when with a veritable mutual outgoing of the heart they had vied in prophesying for each other fair and happy days, Gerald found the boldness–and found it without much strain–the boldness to utter a request which had burned on his lips before, but which he had repressed, saying to himself that what Mrs. Hawthorne did was no affair of his.

“Aurora,” he said–she was after this evening Mrs. Hawthorne to him only in the hearing of others,–“Aurora, I want to ask a favor, a great favor.”

“Go ahead. I guess it’s granted.”

“I wish I felt sure; but I’m afraid. Say you will not take part in the amateur variety show at mi-carÊme.”

252“Sakes!” cried Aurora, staring at him with round eyes. “Ask me something easy! Ask me something else! I can’t do that.”

“You can. Of course you can, if you wish to. You have only to give some excuse.”

“An excuse? Not for a farm! I don’t want to. I’ve bound myself. They expect me as much as anything. I couldn’t back out. It’s so near the time, too. Why, it’s to make money for the Convalescents’ Home. I’m a big feature of the show.”

“I know you are, and I have a perfect horror of what you may do. I can’t bear to think of the public sitting there gaping at you and laughing.”

“The public will be composed of friends. It’s all private. Give it up? Not much! I tell you, it’s nuts to me! I expect to have lots of fun. You’ve never seen, Geraldino, how funny I can be. You’ll see that night.”

“The voice runs that you’re going to appear as a nigger mammy and sing plantation songs.”

“Oh, does it? Well, that seems innocent. What objection do you see to that?”

“I did not call my request reasonable, dearest Aurora. I begged a personal favor. You know the sort of nerves I have. It is like pouring acid on them to think of you making a show of yourself.”

She laughed, but would not yield; she treated his proposition like a spoiled child’s demand for the moon, and, after condescending to tease like a boy, he woke suddenly to the fact of being ridiculous. He dropped the subject with the abruptness that causes the opponent nearly to topple over in surprise.

He had sat for a long moment in silence when, realizing 253that this appeared ill-humored and a piece of effrontery, he started in haste to talk again, choosing the first subject that came into his mind, which was a thing he had meant to tell Aurora this evening, but had not remembered until this moment. The wide distance between the subject he dropped and the subject he took up would show, it was hoped, how definitely he washed his hands of her doings.

“If you have wished for revenge on our friend Antonia,” he said, “you can be satisfied. She is in the most singular sort of difficulty.”

“Oh, is she? I’m sorry,” said Aurora. “Bless you! I never wished her any harm.”

“I went to see her yesterday. I had saved up my grievance and felt the need to lay it before her. I think one should give an old friend who has behaved badly the chance to make reparation, don’t you? After being angry as you saw me, I yet did not want to break with her. She was very kind to me when I was young. At the same time I could not let her rudeness to you pass. But I found her in such trouble already when I went to see her yesterday that I said not one word of my grievance. It will have to wait.”

“You needn’t think you must pick her up on my account. I don’t care. But what was the matter?”

“Two of her oldest friends, through an unaccountable mistake, turned into enemies. Both insist that under cover of a mask at the last veglione she insulted them. Unfortunately, her best friends are not kept by their actual knowledge of her from thinking it just possible she might desire to amuse herself with getting a claw into them. She has more than once given offense to her friends by putting them into her books. But Antonia swore to me that she 254 was innocent, and begged me to convince De BrÉzÉ. The villa she lives in is his property, and he has requested her to vacate it. The other aggrieved one, General Costanzi, she fears may succeed in preventing the publication of her next novel by threat of a libel suit.”

“Well, that sounds bad. But what do they say she’s done?”

“The poor woman doesn’t even know what she is supposed to have said; insulted them is all she can gather. Both maintain that though she tried to alter her voice they recognized her, and will not accept her word for it that she wore no such disguise as they describe. Which reminds me that the offender, or the offender’s double, for I have an idea there were two masked alike, came into your box early in the evening with a companion. You have not forgotten–that black domino with the crow’s beak?”

Aurora jumped on her seat with a cry of “Goodness gracious!”

“What is it?” he asked, looking at her more attentively. She appeared aghast.

She did not answer at once, tensely trying to think.

“Well,” she finally exclaimed, relaxing into limpness, “I’ve been and gone and done it!”

And as he waited–

“I guess I did that insulting,” she added, and wiped her brow.

He thought for a moment that she might be acting out a joke, but in the next accepted her perturbation as genuine.

“Can’t you see through it even now I’ve told you?” she asked.

255He shook his head.

“Did you suppose I didn’t really know those two who came into the box, the one who roared and the one who cawed? Well, I’m a better actress than I supposed.”

“But–”

“And did you really suppose I was going home to bed just as the fun was at its height? There again you’re simpler than I thought. Land! Don’t I wish now that I had gone home!”

“And you–”

“We’d heard so much from everybody of the pranks they play at these vegliones of yours that we wanted to play one, too–we wanted to intrigue you and a lot of other people. The trouble seems to be we did it too well. Land! I wish I hadn’t done it! I wish Heaven I’d consulted you, or some one–We hatched it all up with Italo and Clotilde.”

“Italo and Clotilde!”

“They were the two who came into the box and didn’t say a word, for fear of being known by their voices. Then, after you had so politely seen us off, Estelle and I in the carriage put on black dominos and crows’ beaks, and after driving around a couple of blocks came back and found Italo and Clotilde waiting for us. Clotilde had put off her black domino in the dressing-room; she was dressed under it exactly like her brother. D’you see now how we worked it? Estelle took Clotilde’s arm, and I took Italo’s; we separated and kept apart, and it was as if there had only been one couple, the same as there had been since the beginning of the evening.”

“I see.”

“I’ve been dying to tell you about it ever since, but I 256just haven’t told you. I don’t know what I was waiting for. I guess I was enjoying letting you stay fooled. I had the greatest time, bad cess to it! talking to some people I knew and to a lot that I didn’t. Italo would whisper to me beforehand what to say, and I’d say it. I didn’t always know what it was about, but nothing was further from my mind than to wish to insult anybody. I was so excited I didn’t always notice what I did say, it just seemed playful and funny and in the spirit of the rest. I went up to Charlie Hunt and spoke to him. I put a flea in his ear, and I’m positive from his face that he didn’t know me. I came near going up to you when you were talking with that Mr. Guerra, but I was too much afraid you’d recognize me; you’re so sharp, and, then, you’re the one most particularly who has heard me talk with my English accent, which I put on on the night of the veglione so as not to be known.”

“Your English accent? That explains.”

“What?”

“Your English accent is a caricature of Antonia’s.”

“I don’t have to tell you, I suppose, that I had no idea of personating Antonia.”

“The very difference between the original and your imitation might seem the result of an effort on her part to disguise her speech.”

“I’ve been a fool, of course, and some of the blame is mine, but just let me get hold of Italo and watch me shake the teeth out of his confounded little head. I remember perfectly speaking to the old general that we saw at Antonia’s that day and to the old viscount who came to my ball.”

“Do you remember what you said?”

257“Not exactly, but in both cases it seemed harmless. I wouldn’t have said it if it hadn’t seemed harmless. I couldn’t have wished to insult them, how could any one suppose it? To the general it was something about a horse.”

Gerald gave a sound of raging disgust.

Aurora waited, watching him.

“Was it very bad?” she asked finally, and held her breath for his answer.

“Just as bad as possible. Ceccherelli deserves to be flayed. Is the man mad? And what, may I ask, did you say to De BrÉzÉ?”

“I only remember it was something about ermine. I forgot until this moment that I meant to ask Italo what the joke was about ermine. Was that too very bad?”

“Just as bad as possible. No, rather worse. Both relate to ancient bits of scandal that no one would dare refer to–that would place a man referring to them in the necessity to fight a duel. Mind you, mean and discredited scandal. I won’t resurrect it to enlighten you. You can interrogate Signor Ceccherelli, who has really distinguished himself in his quality of habituÉ of this house and your particular friend.”

“I know you’re angry, Gerald; I don’t wonder you’re ready to call names. But the thing is simple, isn’t it, after all, now that I understand. The harm done isn’t such as can never be mended. All I have to do is write to Antonia and tell her I was the black crow, or, if you advise, write to the two gentlemen I’ve offended.”

“Heavens, no! you can’t do that!”

“Why can’t I?”

“You can’t; that’s all. You can’t admit that that 258little vermin is on terms of intimacy with you permitting his prompting your Carnival witticisms, and you can’t hope to make any one in Florence believe you didn’t understand what you were saying.”

“Yes, I can, my friend; I can make them believe. I can speak the truth. I can, at all events, prove that Antonia had nothing whatever to do with it.”

“No, no, no, I tell you! You can do nothing whatever about it. Your name must not be allowed to appear in the matter at all. It would serve Ceccherelli right that his part in the disgraceful business should be known, dangerous little beast that he is. He would receive a lesson, and an excellent thing it would be; but that, again, might involve you. One couldn’t trust him to keep your name out of it. Besides, it would very likely ruin him, disgusting little beggar.”

“You leave him to me! He roared his throat to a frazzle the other night, and can’t make a sound, but he’ll come round as soon as he’s better, and then if I don’t give it to him! Little cuss!... But I’m to blame, too, Gerald. You told me over and over that I oughtn’t to encourage him to gossip as I did, but I went right on doing it because it was as good as a play to hear him tell his queer stories in his queer English. It amused me, I’ve no other excuse. I sort of knew all the time that it was wrong. And so he got bolder and bolder and finally overstepped the line. And now I’ve got my come-uppance. I’ll settle him, trust me, and I’ll write to Antonia, and I’ll write the two gentlemen, if you’ll just tell me where to write.”

“Must I tell you again that you are above all things to do nothing of the kind? Not certainly if you think of continuing to live in Florence. Leave the matter to me. 259I am well acquainted with everybody in question and shall be able to satisfy them, I hope, while leaving them completely in the dark as to the real culprit.”

Mrs. Hawthorne appeared to hesitate.

“I really should feel better if I could confess,” she said. “It would take a whole load off my chest. You see, I don’t know your ways of doing over here; that would be my way. They might all forgive me and say I was just a fool. But if they didn’t, and, as you seem to fear, made Florence too unpleasant to hold me, luckily I’m not tied down. I’m free. I can pull up stakes when I please and go pitch my tent elsewhere.”

“The delightful independence of riches! The grandeur and detachment of your point of view!” he spoke in a flare of excited bitterness. “What you have said is equivalent to saying that your friends of Florence are a matter of complete indifference to you!”

“I love my friends of Florence, and you know it, Gerald Fane! And I don’t believe they’d ever turn against me, no matter what trouble I’d made for myself at that confounded veglione. So I don’t look to leaving Florence just yet a while. You know I was only talking. I felt perfectly safe–But it’s astonishing to me, dear boy, how ready you are to get mad at me. When you know me so well, too. You ought to be ashamed.”

“I am, dear. It’s my temper that’s bad. And you’re so kind,” he meekly subsided. “But you are trying, you know,” he added, after a moment, with returning vivacity, “what with the extreme bad taste of your masked ball adventures, and your obstinate determination to publish them, and then your insane obstinacy to make a show of yourself as a colored nurse in this vaudeville–But I 260 forgot, I had sworn to myself not to speak of that again. May I count upon you at least to leave entirely to me the matter of exculpating Antonia to General Costanzi and De BrÉzÉ?”

“Oh, very well, if you think best.”

“Will you promise solemnly to be silent on the whole matter?”

“All right. But I don’t like it, Gerald. If I’ve done wrong, I should feel lots easier in my mind if I could tell.”

“That feeling of yours is precisely what I wish to guard against. Do believe that in this matter the old Florentine I am knows better than you. Promise.”

“All right, I promise.”

After a moment, “There’s no chance, is there, of your changing your mind about the other matter”–he asked sheepishly,–“the matter which I must not mention? No, I supposed not. I am perfectly aware of my presumption in making any suggestion to you on the subject. But if you knew how the thought of it torments me....”

“You’ll get over it when you see me. You’ll just laugh with the rest.”

“Enough. Good night,” he said stiffly, but it is doubtful that the word of leave-taking was anything more than a mode of expressing displeasure, or that departure would immediately have succeeded upon his rising from his chair, had not a sound of coughing from the neighboring room called up before him an image of Harriet Estelle, wide awake, with a stern and feverish eye fixed on the clock.

He was startled into a consciousness of the lateness of the hour.

“Good night!” he repeated in a guilty whisper. “I 261daren’t look at my watch. I’m afraid I’ve kept you shockingly late.”

The night, when Gerald went out into it, was quieter and dryer. The streets were altogether empty. He had quite forgotten having felt ill earlier in the evening, and did not remember it even when he found his teeth chattering as a result of coming out into the penetrating night air after sitting so close to the fire. A thing he did remember, as he took out the large iron key to the door of home, was that after all Helen Aurora telling him her story he did not know how she came to be Mrs. Hawthorne. There must have been a second marriage there in Denver, one of those little-considered episodes in American life, perhaps, that are hardly thought worth mentioning. She sometimes spoke of “the judge.” She had spoken to-night of a doctor, son of the judge. No, he decided, it could not be either of them. The second husband, whoever he had been, had clearly not been important, and he was dead, for Mrs. Foss had told him explicitly that Aurora was a real, and not what is called in America a grass, widow. From this second husband it must have been that she derived her wealth.