George left Princeton with a sense of flight. The reception of a diploma didn't interest him, nor did the cheers he received class day or on the afternoon of the Yale baseball game when, beneath a Japanese parasol, he led the seniors in front of admiring thousands who audibly identified him for each other.

The man that had done most for Princeton! He admitted he had done a good deal for himself. Of course, Squibs was right and he was abnormally selfish; only it was too bad Betty couldn't have thought so. He had tried to make her and had failed, he told himself, because Betty couldn't understand selfishness.

He avoided during those last days every chance of seeing her alone; but even in the presence of others he was aware of an alteration in her manner, to be traced, doubtless, to the night of his difficult confession. She was kinder, but her eyes were often puzzled, as if she couldn't understand why he didn't want to see her alone.

He counted the moments, anxious for Blodgett and the enveloping atmosphere of his marble-and-mahogany office. That would break the last permanent tie. He would return to Princeton, naturally, but for only a day or two now and then, too short a time to permit its influences appreciably to swerve him.

Without meaning to, he let himself soften on the very edge of his departure when the class sang on the steps of Nassau Hall for the last time, then burned the benches about the cannon, and in lock step, hands on shoulders, shuffled slowly away like men who have accomplished the interment of their youth.

A lot of these mourning fellows he would never meet again; but he would see plenty of Goodhue and Wandel and other useful people. Why, then, did he abruptly and sharply regret his separation from all the others, even the submerged ones who had got from Princeton only an education taken like medicine and of about as much value? In the sway of this mood, induced by permanent farewells, he came upon Dalrymple.

"There's no point saying good-bye to you," George offered, kindly.

Of course not. They would meet each other in town too frequently, secreting a private enmity behind publicly worn masks of friendship. George was wandering on, but Dalrymple halted him. The man was a trifle drunk, and the sentiment of the moment had penetrated his narrow mind.

"Not been very good friends, George, you and I."

Even then George shrank from his apologies, since he appreciated their precise value.

"Why don't you forget it?" he asked, gruffly.

Dalrymple nodded, but George knew in the morning the other would regret having said as much as he had.

Immediately after that sombre dissolution of the class George said good-bye to the Baillys. Although it was quite late they sat waiting for him in the study, neat and serene as it had been on that first day a hundred years ago. The room was quite the same except that Bill Gregory's picture had lost prominence while George's stood in the place of honour—an incentive for new men, although George was confident Squibs didn't urge certain of his qualities on his youngsters.

Squibs looked older to-night, nearly as old, George thought, as the disgraceful tweeds which he still wore. Mrs. Bailly sat in the shadows. George kissed her and sank on the sofa at her side. She put her hand out and groped for his, clinging to his fingers with a sort of despair. For a long time they sat without speaking. George put his arm around her and waited for one or the other to break this silence which became unbearable. He couldn't, because as he dreamed among the shadows there slipped into his mind the appearance and the atmosphere of another room where three had sat without words on the eve of a vital parting. Tawdry details came back of stove and littered table and ungainly chairs, and of swollen hands and swollen eyes. He had suffered an unbearable silence then because he had found himself suddenly incapable of speaking his companions' language. With these two the silence was more difficult, because there was too much to say—more than ever could be said.

He started. Suppose Squibs at the very last should use his father's parting words:

"It's a bad start, but maybe you'll turn out all right after all."

His lips tightened. Would it be any truer now than it had been then? For that matter, would Squibs have cared for him or done as much for him, if he had been less ambitious, if he had compromised at all?

One thing was definite: No matter what he did these two would never demand his exile; and the old pain caught him, and he knew it was real, and not a specious cover for his relief at not having to see his parents again. It hurt—most of all his mother's acceptance of a judgment she should have fought with all her soul.

He stroked the soft hand that clung to his. From that parting he had come to the tender and eager maternal affection of this childless woman, and he knew she would always believe he was right.

But she wanted him to have Betty——

He stood up. He was going away from home. She expressed that at the door.

"This is your home, George."

Bailly nodded.

"Never forget that. Don't let your ideas smoulder in your own brain. Come home, and talk them over."

George kissed Mrs. Bailly. He put his hands on Bailly's narrow shoulders. He looked at the young eyes in a wrinkled face.

"The thing that hurts me most," he muttered, "is that I haven't paid you back."

"Perhaps not altogether," Bailly answered, gravely, "but someday you may."

II

The last thing George did before leaving his dismantled room, which for so long had sheltered Sylvia's riding crop and her photograph, was to write this little note to Betty:

Dear Betty:

It's simpler to go without saying good-bye.

G. M.

Then he was hustled through the window of the railroad train, out of Princeton, and definitely into the market-place.

After the sentiment of the final days the crowding, unyielding buildings, and the men that shared astonishingly their qualities, offered him a useful restorative. He found he could approximate their essential hardness again.

The Street at times resembled the campus—it held so many of the men he had learned to know at Princeton. Lambert was installed in his father's marble temple. He caught George one day on the sidewalk and hustled him to a luncheon club.

"I suppose I really ought to put you up here."

"Why?" George asked.

"Because I'm always sure of a good scrap with you. I missed not playing against you in the Princeton game last fall. Now there's no more football for either of us. I like scraps."

Blodgett, he chanced to mention later, had spent the previous week-end at Oakmont. Blodgett had already bragged of that in George's presence. He forgot the excellent dishes Lambert had had placed before him.

"Have you put Blodgett up here, too?" he asked in his bluntest manner.

Lambert shook his head.

"That's different."

"Not very honestly different," George said, attempting a smile.

"You mean," Lambert laughed, "because I've never asked you to Oakmont? Under the circumstances——"

"I don't mean that," George said. "I mean Blodgett."

"I can only arrange my own likes and dislikes," Lambert answered, still amused.

Then who at Oakmont liked the fat financier?

Rogers was in the street, too, selling bonds with his old attitude toward the serious side of life, striving earnestly only to spy out the right crowd and to run with it.

"Buy my bonds! Buy my bonds!" he would cry, coming into George's office. "They're each and every one a bargain. Remember, what's a bargain to-day may be a dead loss to-morrow, so buy before it's too late."

Goodhue planned to enter a stock exchange firm in the fall, and a lot of other men from the class would come down then after a long rest between college and tackling the world on twenty dollars a month. Wandel alone of George's intimates rested irresolute. George, since he had taken two rooms and a bath in the apartment house in which Wandel lived, saw him frequently. He could easily afford that luxury, for each summer his balance had grown, and Blodgett, now that he had George for as long as he could keep him, was paying him handsomely, and flattering him by drawing on the store of special knowledge his extended and difficult application had hoarded.

To live in such a house, moreover, was necessary to his campaign, which, he admitted, had lagged alarmingly. Sylvia had continued to avoid him. She seemed to possess a special sense for the houses and the parties where he would be, and when, in spite of this, they did meet, she tried to impress him with a thorough indifference; or, if she couldn't avoid a dance, with a rigid repulsion that failed to harmonize with her warm colouring and her exquisite femininity.

Through some means he had to get on. His restless apprehension had grown. Her departure for Europe with her mother fed the rumours that from time to time had connected her name with eligible men. It was even hinted now that her mother's eyesight, which reached to social greatness across the Atlantic, was responsible for her celibacy.

"There'll be an announcement before she comes back," the gossip ran. "They'll land a museum piece of a title."

George didn't know about that, but he did realize that unless he could progress, one day a rumour would take body. He resented bitterly her absence this summer, but if things would carry on until the fall he would manage, he promised himself, to get ahead with Sylvia.

Wandel seemed to enjoy having George near, for, irresolute as he was, he spent practically the entire summer in town. George, one night when they had returned from two hours' suffering of a summer show, asked him the reason. They smoked in Wandel's library.

"I can look around better here," was all Wandel would say.

"But Driggs! Those precious talents!"

Wandel stretched himself in an easy chair.

"What would you suggest, great man?"

George laughed.

"Do you write poetry in secret—the big, wicked, and suffering city, seen from a tenth-story window overlooking a pretty park?"

Vehemently Wandel shook his head.

"You know what most of our modern American jinglers are up to—talking socialism or anarchy to get themselves talked about. If only they wouldn't apply such insincere and half-digested theories to their art! It's a little like modern popular music—criminal intervals and measures against all the rules. But crime, you see, is invariably arresting. My apologies to the fox-trot geniuses. They pretend to be nothing more than clever mutilators; but the jinglers! They are great reformers. Bah! They remind me of a naughty child who proudly displays the picture he has torn into grotesque pieces, saying: 'Come quick, mother, and see what smart little Aleck has done.' You'll have to try again, George."

George glanced up. His face was serious.

"Don't laugh at me. I mean it. Politics."

"At Princeton I wasn't bad at that," Wandel admitted, smiling reminiscently. "But politics mixes a man with an unlovely crowd—uncouth provincials, a lot of them, and some who are to all purposes foreigners. Do you know, my dear George, that ability to read and write is essential to occupying a seat in the United States Senate? I was amazed the other day to hear it was so. You see how simple it is to misjudge."

"Then there's room," George laughed, "for more honest, well-educated, well-bred Americans."

"Seems to me," Wandel drawled, "that a little broad-minded practicality in our politics would be more useful than bovine honesty. I could furnish that. How should I begin?"

"You might get a start in the State Department," George suggested, "diplomacy, a secretaryship——"

"For once you're wrong," Wandel objected. "In this country diplomacy is a destination rather than a route. The good jobs are frequently given for services rendered, or men pay enormous sums for the privilege of being taken for waiters at their own functions. To start at the bottom——Oh, no. I don't possess the cerebral vacuity, and you can only climb out of the service."

"Just the same," George laughed, "you'd make a tricky politician."

Wandel puffed thoughtfully.

"You're a far-seeing, a far-going person," he said. "You are bound to be a very rich man. You'll want a few practical politicians. Isn't it so? Never mind, but it's understood if I ever run for President or coroner you'll back me with your money bags."

George glanced about the room, as striking and costly in its French fashion as the green study had been.

"You have all the money you need," he said.

"But I'd be a rotten politician," Wandel answered, "if I spent any of my own money on my own campaigns. So we have an understanding if the occasion should arise——"

With a movement exceptionally quick for him, suggesting, indeed, an uncontrollable nervous reaction, Wandel sprang to his feet and went to the window where he leant out. George followed him, staring over the park's far-spread velvet, studded with the small but abundant yellow jewels of the lamps.

"What is it, little man? It's insufferable in town. Why don't you go play by the sea or in the hills?"

"Because," Wandel answered, softly, "I can't help the feeling that any occasion may arise. I don't mean our little politics, George. Time enough for them. I don't want to go. I am waiting."

George understood.

"You mean the murders at Sarajevo," he said. "You're over-sensitive. Run along and play. Nothing will come of that."

"Tell me," Wandel said, turning slowly, "that you mean what you say. Tell me you haven't figured on it already."

George shrugged his shoulders.

"You're discreet. All right. I have figured, because, if anything should come of it, it offers the chance of a lifetime for making money. Mundy's put me in touch with some useful people in London and Paris. I want to be ready if things should break. I hope they won't. Honestly, I very much doubt if they will. Even Germany will think twice before forcing a general war."

"But you're making ready," Wandel whispered, "on the off-chance."

George pressed a switch and got more light. It was as if a heavy shadow had filled the delightful room.

"We're growing fanciful," he said, "seeing things in the dark. By the way, you run into Dalrymple occasionally? I'm told he comes often to town."

Wandel left the window, nodding.

"How long can he keep it up?" George asked.

"I'm not a physician."

"No, no. I mean financially. I gather his family live up to what they have."

"I daresay it would pain them to settle Dolly's debts frequently," Wandel smiled.

"Then," George said, slowly, "he is fairly sure to come to you—that is, if this keeps up."

"Why," Wandel asked, "should I encourage Dolly to be charitable to rich wine agents and under-dressed females?"

George shook his head.

"If he asks you for help don't send him to the money lenders. Send him discreetly to me. If I didn't have what he'd want, I daresay I could get it."

Wandel stared, lighting another cigarette.

"I'd like to keep him from the money lenders," George said, easily.

He didn't care whether Wandel thought him a forgiving fool or a calculating scoundrel. Goodhue and Wandel had long since seen that he had been put up at a number of clubs. The two had fancied they could control Dalrymple's resentments. George, following his system, preferred a whip in his own hand. He harboured no thought of revenge, but he did want to be able to protect himself. He would use every possible means. This was one.

"We'll see," Wandel said. "It's too bad great men don't get along with little wasters."

III

More than once George was tempted to follow Sylvia, trusting to luck to find means of being near her. Such a trip might, indeed, lead to profit if the off chance should develop. Still that could be handled better from this side, and it was, after all, a chance. He must trust to her coming back as she had gone. His place for the present was with Blodgett and Mundy.

The chance, however, was at the back of his head when he encountered Allen late one hot night in a characteristic pose in Times Square. Allen still talked, but his audience of interested or tolerant college men had been replaced by hungry, ragged loafers and a few flushed, well-dressed males of the type that prefers any diversion to a sane return home. Allen stood in the centre of this group. His arms gestured broadly. His angular face was passionate. From the few words George caught his sympathy for these failures was beyond measure. He suggested to them the beauties of violence, the brilliancies of the social revolution. The loafers commented. The triflers laughed. Policemen edged near.

"Free liquor!" a voice shrilled.

Allen shook his fist, and continued. The proletariat would have to take matters into its own hands.

"Fine!" a hoarse and beery listener shouted, "but what'll the cops say about it?"

The edging policemen didn't bother to say anything at first. They quietly scattered the scarecrows and the laggards. They indicated the advisability of retreat for the orator. Then one burst out at Allen.

"God help the proletariat if I have to take it before McGloyne at the station house."

And George heard another sneer:

"Social revolution! They've been trying to throw Tammany out ever since I can remember."

George got Allen away. The angular man was glad to see him.

"You look overworked," George said. "Come have a modest supper with me."

Allen was hungry, but he managed to grumble discouragement over his food.

"They laugh. They'll stop listening for the price of a glass of beer."

"Maybe," George said, kindly, "they realize it's no good trying to help them."

"They've got to be helped," Allen muttered.

"Then," George suggested, "put them in institutions, but don't expect me nor any one else to approve when you urge them to grab the leadership of the world. You must have enough sense to see it would mean ruin. I know they're not all like this lot, but they're all a little wrong or they wouldn't need help."

"It's because they've never had a chance," Allen protested.

It came to George that Allen had never had a chance either, and he wondered if he, too, could be led aside by the price of a glass of beer.

"You all want what the other fellow's got," he said. "From that one motive these social movements draw the bulk of their force. A lot for nothing is a perfect poor man's creed."

"You're a heathen, Morton."

"That is, a human being," George said, good naturedly. "You're another, Allen, but you won't acknowledge it."

Because he believed that, George took the other's address. Allen was loyal, aggressive, and extraordinarily bright, as he had proved at Princeton. It might be convenient to help him. Besides, he hated to see a man he knew so well waste his time and look like a fool.

IV

By late July the off chance had pretty thoroughly defined itself except to the blind. Blodgett, however, was still skeptical. He thought George's plans were sound, provided a war should come. But there wouldn't be any war. His correspondents were optimistic.

"Have I your permission to use Mundy in his off time?" George asked.

"As far as I'm concerned," Blodgett said, "Mundy can play parchesi in his off time."

George telephoned Lambert Planter and sent a telegram to Goodhue. He took them to luncheon and had Mundy there, too. He outlined his plans for the formation of the firm of Morton, Planter, and Goodhue.

"He's called the turn of the cards," Mundy offered.

Such cards as he possessed George placed on the table. He furnished the idea, and the preliminary organization, and what money he had. He took, therefore, the major share of the profits. The others would give what time to the business they could, but it was their money he wanted, and the credit their names would give the firm. Mundy and he had made lists of buyers and sellers. No man in the Street was better equipped than Mundy to pick such a force. If Lambert and Goodhue agreed, these men could be collected within a week. Some would go to Europe. Others would scatter over the United States. It would cost a lot, but it meant an immeasurable amount in return, for the war was inevitable.

Goodhue and Lambert were as skeptical as Blodgett, but they agreed to give him what he needed to get his organization started. By that time, he promised them, they would see how right he was, and then he could use more of their money.

"It's the nearest I've ever come to gambling," he thought as he left them. "Gambling on a war!"

Because of his confidence, before a frontier had been crossed he had bought or contracted for large quantities of shoes and cloths and waterproofing. He had taken options on stock in small and wavering automobile concerns, and outlying machine shops and foundries, some of them already closed down, some struggling along without hope.

"If the war lasts a month," he told his partners, "those stocks will come from the bottom of nothing to the sky."

Goodhue became thoroughly interested at last. He cancelled his vacation and installed himself in the offices George had rented in Blodgett's building. With the men Mundy had picked, and under Mundy's tutelage, he took charge of the routine. George went to Blodgett the first of August.

"I want to quit," he said. "I've got a big thing. I want to give it all my time."

Blodgett mopped his face. His grin was a little sheepish.

"I want to invest some money in your firm," he jerked out.

"I can use it," George said.

"You've got Goodhue there," Blodgett went on in a complaining way, "and Mundy's working nights for you. Don't desert an old man without notice. I'll give you plenty of time upstairs. Other things may come off here. I can use you."

"If you want to pay me when you know my chief interest is somewhere else," George said, "it's up to you."

"When I think I'm getting stung I'll let you know," Blodgett roared.

George sent for Allen, and urged him to go to London to open an office with an expert Lambert had got from his father's marble temple. Allen would be a check on the more experienced men whose scruples might not stand the temptations of this vast opportunity. Allen said he couldn't do it; couldn't abandon the work he had already commenced.

"There'll be precious little talk of socialism," George said, "until this thing is over. It's a great chance for a man to study close up the biggest change the world has ever undergone. Those fellows will want everything, and I'll give them everything I can lay my hands on. I'm ahead of a lot of jobbers here. I'll pay you well to see I don't get robbed on that side. Come on. Take a shot at hard facts for a change."

Allen gasped at the salary George mentioned. He hesitated. He went. George was glad to have helped him. He experienced also an ugly sense of triumph. He felt that he wanted to tell Squibs Bailly right away.

Sylvia and her mother, he heard later, had come home out of the turmoil, unacquainted with the discomforts of people who had travelled without the Planter prestige. Whether the war was to blame or not, she had returned without a single rumour touching fact. He didn't see her right away, because she clung to Oakmont. More and more, as his success multiplied, keeping pace with the agony in Europe, he longed to see her. All at once a return to Oakmont was, in a sense, forced upon him, but he went without any thought of encountering Sylvia, hoping, indeed, to avoid her.

It was like his mother to express her letter with telegraphic bluntness without, however, going to the expense of actually wiring. Where he had expected her customary stiff gratitude for money sent he found a scrawled announcement of his father's death, and her plans for the funeral the following afternoon.

"Of course you won't come," she ended.

Yet it seemed to him that he should go, to arrange her future. This was the moment to snap the last enslaving tie between the Mortons and Oakmont. There was, of course, the chance of running into Sylvia, or some visitor who might connect him with the little house. Suppose Dalrymple, for example, should be staying with the Planters as he often did? George shrugged his shoulders. Things were coming rather rapidly to him. Besides, it was extremely unlikely that any one from the great house would see the Morton ceremony. The instincts of those people would be to avoid such sights.

V

About his return there was a compelling thrill. He drove from the station in one of the cheap automobiles that had made his father practically a pensioner of the Planters. With an incredulous appreciation that he had once accepted its horizon as the boundary of his life, he examined the familiar landscape and the scar made upon it by the village. Curtly he refused to satisfy the driver's curiosity. He had some business at the little house on the Planter estate.

There, through the nearly stripped trees, it showed, almost audibly confessing its debt to the Planter carpenters, painters, and gardeners. In a clouded light late fall flowers waved from masses of dead leaves. Their gay colours gave them an appearance melancholy and apprehensive.

Here he was back at last, and he wasn't going in at the great gate.

He walked around the shuttered house and crossed the porch where his father had liked to sit on warm evenings. He rapped at the door. Feet shuffled inside. The door swayed open, and his mother stood on the threshold. Most of the changes had come to him, but in her red eyes sparkled a momentary and mournful importance. At first she didn't recognize her son.

"What is it?"

George stooped and kissed her cheek.

"I'm sorry, Mother."

Instead of holding out her arms she drew away, staring with fascination, a species of terror, at his straight figure, at his clothing, at his face that wouldn't coarsen now. When she spoke her voice suggested a placating of this stranger who was her son.

"I didn't think you'd come. I can't believe you're George—my Georgie."

Over her shoulders in the shadowed house he saw the inquisitive faces of women. It was clear that for them such an arrival was more divertive than the sharing of a sorrow that scarcely touched their hearts.

George went in. He remembered most of the faces that disclosed excitement while fawning upon his prosperity. He received an unpleasant impression that these poor and ignorant people concealed a dangerous envy, that they would be glad to grasp in one moment, even of violence, all that it had taken him years of difficult struggle to acquire. Whether that was so or not they ought not to stand before him as if his success were a crown. He tried to keep contempt from his voice.

"Please sit down. I want to talk to my mother. Where——"

With slow steps she crossed the kitchen and opened the door of the parlour, beckoning. He followed, knowing what he would find in that uncomfortable, gala room of the poor.

He closed the door. In the half light he saw standing on trestles an oblong box altogether too large for the walls that seemed to crowd it. He had no feeling that anything of his father was there. He realized with a sense of helpless regret that all that remained to him of that unhappy man were the ghosts of such emotions as avarice, fear, and the instinct to sacrifice one's own flesh and blood for a competence.

"Why don't you look at him, George?"

"I don't think he'd care to have me looking at him now."

She wiped her eyes.

"You are too bitter against your father. After all, he was a good man."

"Why should death," he asked her, musingly, "make people seem better than they were in life? It isn't so."

"That's wicked. If your father could rise——"

His attention was caught by an air of pointing the oblong box had, as if to something infinitely farther than ambition and success, yet so close it angered him he couldn't see or touch it. His father had gone there, beyond the farthest horizon of all. Old Planter couldn't make trouble for him now. He was quite safe.

Over in Europe, he reflected, they didn't have enough coffins.

The oblong box for the first time made him think of that war, that was making him rich, in terms of life instead of dollars and cents. He felt dissatisfied.

"There should be more light here," he said, defensively.

But his mother shook her head.

He arranged a chair for her and sat near by while they discussed the details of her departure. She let him see that she shrank from leaving the house, against which, nevertheless, she had bitterly complained ever since Old Planter had got it. Evidently she wanted to linger in her familiar rut, awaiting with the attitude of a martyr whatever fate might offer. That was the reason people had to be helped, because they preferred vicious inertia to the efforts and risks of change. Then why did they want the prizes of those who had had the courage to go forth and fight? Why couldn't Squibs see that?

Patiently George told her she needn't worry about money again. She had a sister who years ago had married and moved West to a farm that was not particularly flourishing. Undoubtedly her sister would be glad to have her and her generous allowance. So his will overcame his mother's reluctance to help herself. She glanced up.

"Who is that?"

He listened. The women in the kitchen were standing again. Light feet crossed the floor.

"Maybe somebody from the big house," his mother whispered. "They sent Simpson last night."

For a moment the entire building was as silent as the oblong box. Then the door opened.

Sylvia Planter slipped in and closed the door.

George caught his breath, studying her as she hesitated, accustoming herself to the insufficient light. She wore a broad-brimmed hat that gave her the charm and the grace of a portrait by Gainsborough. When she recognized him, indeed, she seemed as permanently caught as a portrait.

"Miss Sylvia!" his mother worshipped.

"They told me I would find you here," Sylvia said, uncertainly. "I didn't know——"

She broke off, biting her lip. George strolled around the oblong box to the window, turning there with a slow bow. Even across that desolate, dead shell, the obstinate distaste and the challenge were lively in her glance.

"It was very kind of you to come," he said.

But he was sorry she had come. To see him in such surroundings was a stimulation of the ugly memories he had struggled to destroy. He read her instinct to hurt him now as she had hurt the impertinent man, Morton, who had lived in this house.

"When one of our people is in trouble——" she began, deliberately. "I thought I might be of some help to your mother."

Even over the feeling of security George had just tried to give her the old menace reached the uneasy woman.

"You—you remember him, Miss Sylvia?"

"Very well," Sylvia answered. "He used to be my groom."

"The title comes from you," George said, dryly.

His mother's glance fluttered from one to the other. What did she expect—Old Planter stalking in to carry out his threats?

"After all these years I scarcely knew him myself."

Sylvia's colour heightened. He appraised her rising temper.

"Bad servants," he said, "linger in good employers' memories."

"I know, Miss Sylvia," his mother burst out, "that he wasn't to come back here, but——"

She unclasped her nervous hands. One indicated the silent cause of his disobedience. George moved toward the door. Sylvia stepped quickly aside. He felt, like a physical wave, her desire to hurt.

"At such a time," she said, "it's natural he should come back to his home. I think my father would be glad to have him with his mother."

George shrugged his shoulders, slipped out, navigated the shoals of whispering women, and reached the clean air. He buttoned his overcoat and shuffled through the dead leaves beneath the trees until he found himself at the spot where Lambert and he had fought. He recalled his hot boasts of that day. Fulfilment had seemed simple enough then. The scene just submitted reminded him how short a distance he had actually travelled.

He knew she would pass that way on her return to the big house, so he waited, and when he heard her feet disturbing the dead leaves he didn't turn. She came closer than he had expected, and he heard her contralto voice, quick and defiant:

"I hadn't expected to see you. I didn't quite realize what I was saying. I should have had more respect for any one's grief."

Having said that, she was going on, but he turned and stopped her. As he looked at her he reflected that everything had altered since that day—she most of all. Then the woman had been a little visible in the child. Now, he fancied, the child survived in the woman only through the persistence of this old quarrel. He stared at her lips, recalling his boast that no man should touch them unless it were George Morton. He was no nearer them than he had been that day. Unless he got nearer some man would. It was incredible that she hadn't married. She would marry.

"In the sense you mean, I have no grief," he said.

"Then I needn't have bothered. I once said you were a—a——"

"Something melodramatic. A beast, I think it was," he answered. "If you don't mind I'll walk on with you for a little way."

"No," she said.

"If you please."

"You've no perception," she cried, angrily.

"Don't you think it time," he suggested, "that you ceased treating me like a groom? It isn't very convincing to me. I doubt if it is to you. I fancy it's really only your pride. I don't see why you should have so much where I am concerned."

Her hand made a quick gesture of repulsion.

"You've not changed. You may walk on with me while I tell you this: If you were like the men I know and can be friends with you'd leave me alone. Will you stop this persecution? It comes down to that. Will you stop forcing me to dance with you, to listen to you?"

He smiled, shaking his head.

"I'll make you dance with me more than ever. I've seen very little of you lately. I hope this winter——"

She stopped, facing him, her cheeks flaming.

"You see! You remind me every time I meet you of just what you are, just what you came from, just what you said and did that day."

"That is my aim," he smiled.

He moved his hand in the direction of the little house.

"When we're all like that will it make much difference who our fathers and mothers were?"

She shivered. She started swiftly away.

"Miss Planter!"

The unexpectedness of the naked command may have brought her around. He walked to her.

"When will you realize," he asked, "that it is unforgivable to turn your back on life?"

Had he really meant to suggest that she could possess life only through him? Doubtless the sublime effrontery of that interpretation reached her. She commenced to laugh, her colour rising. She glanced away, and her laughter died.

"You may as well understand," he said, "that I am never going to leave you alone."

She started across the leaf-strewn grass. He kept pace with her.

"Are you going to force me to make a scene?" she asked.

"Except with your father," he said, "I don't think it would make much difference."

He felt that if she had had anything in her hands then she would have struck at him.

"It's not because I'm a beast," he said, quietly, "that I have no grief for my father. He was through. Life had nothing to offer him. He had nothing to offer life. Don't think I'm incapable of grief. I experienced it the day I thought you might be dead. That was because you had so much to offer life—rather more than life had to offer you."

He saw her shrink from him but she walked on, repressing her pain and her anger.

"Since I've known intimately girls of your class," he said, "I've realized that not all of them would have turned and tried to wound as you did that day. Some would have laughed. Some would have been sorry and sympathetic. I don't think many would have made such a scene."

He smiled down at her.

"I want you to realize it is your own fault. You started this. I'm not scolding. I'm glad you were such a little fury. Otherwise, I might have gone on working for your father or for somebody else's father. But you're to blame for my persistence, so learn to put up with it. As long as I keep the riding crop with which you tried to cut my face I'll remember what I said I'd do, and I'll do it."

She didn't answer, but if she tried to give him the impression she wasn't listening she failed utterly.

Around a curve in the path came a bent, white old man, bundled in a heavy muffler and coat. In one hand he carried a thick cane. The other rested on the arm of a young fellow of the private secretary stamp. There, George acknowledged, advanced the single person with whom a scene might make a serious difference, yet a more compelling thought crept in and overcame his sense of danger. That was the type of man who made wars. That man, indeed, was helping to finance this war. George was obsessed by the dun day: by the leaves, fallen and rotten; by the memory of the oblong box. Everything reminded him that not far away Death marched with a bland, black triumph, greeting science as an ally instead of an enemy.

"Suppose," he mused, "America should get in this thing."

At last she spoke.

"What did you say? Do you see my father?"

He nodded.

"Wouldn't it be wiser," she asked, "to leave me alone?"

"Your father," he said, "looks a good deal older."

Old Planter had, in fact, gone down hill since George's last glimpse of him in New York, or else he didn't attempt here to assume a strength he no longer possessed. He was quite close before he gave any sign of seeing the pair, and then he muttered to his secretary who answered with a whisper. He limped up and took Sylvia's hand.

"Where has my little girl been?"

She laughed harshly.

"To a rendezvous in the forest. You shouldn't let me go out alone."

Planter glanced from clouded eyes at George. His lips between the white hair smiled amiably.

"I don't believe I remember——"

"It's one of Lambert's business friends," Sylvia said, hastily. "Mr. Morton."

The old man shifted his cane and held out his hand.

"Lambert," he joked, "says he's going to make more money through you than I can hope to leave him. You seem to have got the jump on a lot of shrewd men. I'll see you at dinner? Lambert isn't coming to-night?"

George briefly clasped the hand of the big man.

"I must go back to town this afternoon."

"Then another time."

Planter shifted his cane and leant again on his secretary.

"Let's get on, Straker. Doctor's orders."

"Why," George asked when Sylvia and he were alone, "didn't you spring at the chance?"

"I prefer to fight my own battles," she said, shortly.

"Don't you mean," he asked, quizzically, "that you're a little ashamed of what you did that day?"

She shook her head.

"I was a frightened child. I have changed."

"Isn't it," he laughed, "a little because I, too, have changed? It never occurred to your father to connect me with the Mortons living on his place."

Again she shook her head, turning away. He held out his hand.

"I must go back. Let's admit we've both changed. Let us be friends."

She didn't answer. She made no motion to take his hand.

"One of the promises I made that day," he reminded her, "was to teach you not to be afraid of my touch."

"Does it amuse you to threaten me?" she asked.

Suddenly he reached out, caught her right hand before she could avoid him, and gave it a quick pressure.

"Of course you're right," he laughed. "Actions are more useful than threats."

While she stared, flushed and incredulous, at the hand he had pressed, George walked swiftly away, tingling with life, back to the house of death.

VI

At the funeral he submitted to the amazed scrutiny of the country people. They couldn't hurt him, because they impinged not at all on his world; but he was relieved when the oblong box had been consigned to the place reserved for it, and he could, after arranging the last details of his mother's departure, take the train back to New York.

Blodgett didn't even bother to ask where he had been. He was content these days to let George go his own way. He hadn't forgotten that the younger man had seen farther off than he the greatest opportunity for money making the world had ever offered the greedy. He personally was more interested in the syndicating of foreign external loans. The Planters weren't far from the head of that movement, and George rather resented his stout employer's working hand in hand with the Planters. George longed to ask him how often he was trying to appear graceful at Oakmont these days.

The firm of Morton, Planter, and Goodhue had grown so rapidly that it took practically all of George's and Lambert's time. Mundy, to whom George had given a small interest, asked Blodgett if he couldn't leave to devote himself entirely to the offices upstairs.

"Go to it," Blodgett agreed, good naturedly. "Draw your profits and your salary from Morton after this."

George mulled over the sacrifice. Did it mean that Blodgett was so close to the Planters that a merger was possible?

"There's no use," he told Blodgett. "I'm earning practically nothing in your office, because I'm never here. I want to resign."

"Run along, sonny," Blodgett said. "Your salary is a small portion of the profits your infant firm is bringing me. I like you around the office once a day. Old Planter hasn't fired his boy, has he, and he's upstairs all the time, and he's taken over some of the old man's best clerks."

"He's Mr. Planter's son," George reminded him.

"And ain't you like a good son to me," the other leered, "making money for papa Blodgett?"

"Why did you let Mundy go so peacefully?" George asked, suspiciously.

"Because," Blodgett said, "he's been here a good many years, and he can make more money this way. Didn't want to stand in his light, and I had somebody in view."

But George wouldn't credit Blodgett with such altruism. Why was the man so infernally good natured, exuding an oily content? Goodhue hinted at a reason one day when they were talking of Sinclair and his lack of interest in the office.

"I've heard rather privately," Goodhue said, "that Sinclair got pretty badly involved a few months ago. If it hadn't been for Blodgett he'd have gone on the rocks a total wreck. Josiah puffed up and towed him away whole. Naturally Sinclair and his lady are grateful. I daresay this winter Blodgett's receiving invitations he's coveted, and if he gives any parties himself he'll have some of the people he's always wanted."

George hid his disapproval. Blodgett didn't even have a veneer. Money was all he could offer. And was Sinclair a great fool, or Blodgett the cleverest man in Wall Street, that Sinclair didn't know who had involved him and why?

As a matter of fact, Blodgett did appear at several dances, wobbling about the room to the discomfort of slender young things, getting generally in everyone's way. George hated to see him attempting to dance with Sylvia Planter. Sylvia seemed rather less successful in avoiding him than she did in keeping out of George's way. Until Blodgett's extraordinary week-end in February, indeed, George didn't have another chance to speak to her alone.

"Of course you'll come, George," Blodgett said. "If this weather holds there'll be skating and sleighing—horses always, if you want 'em; and a lot of first-class people."

"Who?" George asked.

"How about another financial chick—one of your partners?"

"Lambert Planter?"

The puffy face expanded.

"And the Sinclairs, because I'm a bachelor, and——"

But, since he could guess Sylvia would be there, George didn't care for any more names. He wondered why Lambert or his sister should go. Had her attitude toward the fat, coarse man conceivably altered because of his gambolling at Oakmont? While he talked business with Mundy, Lambert, and Goodhue, George's mind was distracted by a sense of imponderable loss. Was it the shadow of what Sylvia had lost by accepting such an invitation?

He didn't go until Saturday afternoon—there was too much to occupy him at the office. This making money out of Europe's need had a good deal constricted his social wanderings. It was why he hadn't frequently seen Dalrymple close enough for annoyance; why he had met Betty only briefly a very few times. He hadn't expected to run into either of them at Blodgett's, but both were there. Betty was probably Lambert's excuse for rushing out the night before.

George felt sorry for Mrs. Sinclair. Still against the corpulent crudities of her host she could weigh the graces of his guests. It pleased George that her greeting for him should be so warm.

The weather, too, had been considerate of Blodgett, refraining from injuring his snow or ice. A musical and brassy sleigh met George at the station. Patches of frosty white softened the lines of the house and draped the self-conscious nudity of the sculpture in the sunken garden.

"And it'll snow again to-night, sir," the driver promised, as if even the stables pulled for the master's success.

Everyone was out, but it was still early, so George asked for a horse and hurried into his riding clothes. He had been working rather too hard recently. The horse a groom brought around was a good one, and by no means overworked. George was as eager as the animal to limber up and go. Off they dashed at last along a winding bridle-path, broken just enough to give good footing. The war, and his share of helping the allies—at a price; his uncomfortable fear that the Baillys didn't like him to draw success from such a disaster; his disapproval of Sylvia's coming here—all cleared from his head as he galloped or trotted through the sharp air.

One thing: Blodgett hadn't spoiled these woodland bridle-paths; yet George had a sensation of always looking ahead for a nude marble figure at a corner, or an urn elaborately designed for simple flowers, or some iron animals to remind a hunter that Blodgett knew what a well-bred forest was for. Instead he saw through the trees ice swept clear of snow across which figures glided with joyful sounds.

"Some of his flashy guests," George thought.

He rode slowly to the margin of the pond, which shared the colour of the sky. Several of the skaters cried greetings. He recognized Dalrymple then, skating with a girl. Dalrymple veered away, waving a careless hand, Lambert came on, fingers locked with Betty's, and scraped to a halt at the pond's edge.

"So the war's stopped for the week-end at last?" Lambert called.

"I wondered if you'd come at all," Betty cried.

George dismounted, smothering his surprise.

"A men and youths' general furnisher," he said, "has to stick pretty much to the store. I never dreamed of seeing you here, Betty."

Perhaps Lambert caught George's real meaning.

"She's staying with Sylvia," he explained, "so, of course, she came."

George mounted and rode on, his mood suddenly as sunless as the declining afternoon. Those two still got along well enough. Certainly it was time for a rumour to take shape there. He had a sharp appreciation of having once been younger. Suppose, because of his ambition, he should see all his friends mate, leaving him as rich as Blodgett, and, like him, unpaired? He quickened the pace of his horse. It was inconceivable. No matter what Sylvia did he would never slacken his pursuit. In every other direction he had forged ahead. Eventually he would in that one. Then why did it hurt him to picture Betty gone beyond his reach?

He crossed the Blodgett boundaries, and entered a country road as undisturbed and enticing as the private bridle-paths had been. He took crossroads at random, keeping only a sense of direction, trying to understand why he was sorry he had to be with Betty when he had come only to be near Sylvia.

The thickening dusk warned him, and he chose a road leading toward Blodgett's. First he received the horseman's sense of something ahead of him. Then he heard the muffled tread of horses in the snow, and occasionally a laugh.

"More of Josiah's notables," he hazarded.

He put spurs to his horse, and in a few minutes saw against the snow three dark figures ambling along at an easy trot. When he had come closer he knew that two of the riders were men, the other a woman. It was easy enough to identify Blodgett. A barrel might have ridden so if it had had legs with which to balance itself; and that slender figure was probably the trapped Sinclair. George hurried on, his premonition assuming ugly lines of reality. Even at that distance and from the rear he guessed that the graceful woman riding between the two men was Sylvia. Why had she chosen an outing with the ridiculous Blodgett? Sinclair, no man possessed sufficient charm to offset the disadvantages of such a companionship.

George, when he was sure, reined in, surprised at his reflections. Blodgett, heaven knew, had been good to him, and he had once liked the man. Why, then, had he turned so viciously against him? Adjectives his mind had recently applied to Blodgett flashed back: "Coarse," "fat," "ridiculous." Was it just? Why did he do it in spite of himself?

Sinclair turned and saw him. The party reined in, Sylvia, as one would have expected, impatiently in advance of the others. Her nod and something she said were lost in the men's cheery greetings. Since she was in advance, and edging on, as if to get farther away from him, George's opportunity was plain. The road wasn't wide enough for four abreast. If he could move forward with her Blodgett and Sinclair would have to ride together.

"Since I'm the last," he interrupted them, "mayn't I have first place?"

Quite as a matter of course he put his horse through and reined in at her side. They started forward.

"You ride as well as ever," he commented.

She shot a glance at him. Calmly he studied the striking details of her face. Each time he saw her she seemed more desirable. How was he to touch those lips that had filled his boy's heart with bursting thoughts? For the first time since that day they rode together, only now he was at her side, instead of heeling like a trained dog. In his man's fashion he was as well clothed as she. When they got back he would enter the great house with her instead of going to the stables. Whether she cared to acknowledge it or not he was of her kind—more so than the millionaire Blodgett ever could be. So he absorbed her beauty which fired his imagination. Such a repetition seemed ominous of a second climax in their relations.

Her quick glance, however, disclosed only resentment for his intrusion. He excused it.

"You see, I couldn't very well ride behind you."

She turned away.

"Hurry a little," Blodgett called.

It was what George wished, as she wished to crawl, never far in advance of the others.

"Come," he said, and flecked her horse with his crop.

"Don't do that again!"

He had gathered his own horse, and was galloping. Hers insisted on following. When George pulled in to keep at her side they were well in advance of the others. Now that he was alone with her he found it difficult to speak, and evidently she would limit his opportunity, for as he drew in she spurred her horse. He caught her, laughing.

"You may as well understand that I'll never ride behind you again."

She pressed her provocative lips together. So in silence, except for the crunching and scattering of the snow, they tore on through the dusk, rounding curves between hedges, rising to heights above bare, white stretches of landscape, dipping into hollows already won by the night. And each moment they came nearer the house.

In the night of the hollows he battled his desire to reach over and touch her, and cry out:

"Sylvia! You've got to understand!"

And in one such place her horse stumbled, and she pulled in and bent low over her saddle, and said, as if he had really spoken:

"I can't understand——"

Her outline was blurred, but her face was like a light in that shadowed valley. He didn't speak until they were up the hill and the wind had caught them.

"What?" he asked then.

Was it the glow, offered by the white earth rather than the sky, that made him fancy her lips quivered?

"Why you always try to hurt me."

He thought of her broken riding crop, of her attempts to hurt him every time he had seen her since the day she had tried to cut him with it. A single exception clung to his memory—the night of Betty's dance, years ago, when she had failed to remember him. Her words, therefore, carried a thrill, a colour of surrender, since from the very first she had made him attack for his own defence.

"That's an odd thing for you to say."

There were lights ahead, accents in the closing night for Blodgett's huge and ugly extravagance. They rode slowly up the drive.

"Will you ever stop following me? Will you ever leave me alone?"

He stared at her, answering softly:

"It is impossible I should ever leave you alone."

At the terrace he sprang down, tossed his reins to a groom, and went to her, raising his hands. For a moment she looked at him, hesitating. There were two grooms. So she took his hands and leapt down. It was a quick, uncertain touch her fingers gave him.

"Thanks," she said, and crossed the terrace at his side.

That moment, he reflected, was in itself culminating, yet he couldn't dismiss the feeling that their relations approached a larger climax. All the better, since things couldn't very well go on as they were. Was it that fleeting contact that had altered him, or her companionship in the gray night? He only knew as he walked close to her that the bitterness in his heart had diminished. He was willing to relinquish the return blow if she would ease the hurt she had given him. He told himself that she had never been nearer. An odd fancy!

The others rode up as they reached the door, and the hall was noisy with people just returned from the pond, so that their solitude was destroyed. While he bathed and dressed he tried to understand just what had happened. The alteration in his own heart could only be accounted for by a change in hers. Perhaps his mood was determined by her unexpected wonder that he should always try to hurt. He couldn't drive from his mind the definite impression of her having come nearer.

"Winter sentiment!" he sneered, and hurried, for it was late.

VII

Lambert dropped in and lounged in a satin-covered chair while George wrestled with his tie. He gave Lambert the freshest news from the office, but his mind wasn't on business, nor, he guessed, was Lambert's.

"Blodgett does one rather well," Lambert said, glancing around the room.

George agreed.

"Only a marquise might feel more at ease in this room than a mere male."

He turned, smiling.

"I'm always afraid the furniture won't hold. Why should he have raised such a monster?"

"Maybe," Lambert offered, "to have it ready for a wife."

"Who would marry him?" George flashed.

"Nearly any girl," Lambert said. "So much money irons out a lot of fat. Then, when all's said and done, he's amusing and generous. He always tries to please. Why? What's made you scornful of Josiah?"

"There are some things," George said, "that one oughtn't to be able to buy with money."

Lambert arose, walked over to George, put his hands on his shoulders, and stared at him quizzically.

"You're a curious brute."

"I know what you mean," George said, "but let me remind you that money was just one of three things I started for."

Lambert's grasp tightened.

"And in a way you've got them all."

George shook off Lambert's grasp.

In a way!

"Let's go down."

In a way! It was rather cooling. It reminded him, too, that Squibs Bailly remained unpaid; and there was Sylvia, only a trifle nearer, and that, perhaps, in an eager imagination. Certainly he had forced some success, but would he actually ever complete anything? Would he ever be able to say I have acquired an exterior exactly as genuine as that one inherits, or I am a great millionaire, or I have proved myself worthy of all Squibs has given me, or I am Sylvia Planter's husband? Of course he had succeeded, but only in a way. Where was his will that he couldn't conquer altogether?

As he came down the stairs he saw Sylvia in a dazzling gown standing in front of the great fireplace surrounded by a group which included Dalrymple and Rogers who had managed an invitation and had just arrived with Wandel. Wandel brought excuses from Goodhue. It was like Goodhue, George thought, to avoid such a party.

Dalrymple smirked and chatted. George left Lambert and went straight to them. Sylvia could always be depended upon to be gracious to Dalrymple. She glanced at George and nodded. Although she continued to talk to Dalrymple she didn't turn away. George thought, indeed, that he detected a slight movement as if to make room for him. It was as if he had been any man of her acquaintance coming up. Then he had been right?

"Josiah said we'd have you," Dalrymple drawled. "Why didn't you skate? Anything to get on a horse, what? Freezing pleasure this weather."

George smiled at Sylvia.

"Not with the right horse and companionship."

Any one could see that Dalrymple had already swallowed an antidote for whatever benefit the day's fresh air and exercise had given him. Still in the weak face, across which the firelight played, George read other traits, settled, in a sense admirable; more precious than any inheritance a son could expect from a washerwoman mother and a labouring father. Then what was it Dalrymple had always coveted? What had made him rude to the poor men at Princeton? Something he hadn't had. Money. America, George reflected, could breed people like that. There was more than one way of being a snob. He wondered if Dalrymple would ever submerge his pride enough to come to him for money. He might go to Blodgett first, but George wasn't at all sure Blodgett would find it worth his while to buy up the young man.

Blodgett just then joined them. The white waistcoat encircling his rotund middle was like an advance agent, crying aloud: "The great Josiah is arriving just behind me."

"Everybody having a good time?" he bellowed.

Mrs. Sinclair, sitting near by, looked up, but her husband smiled indulgently. George watched Sylvia. Blodgett put the question to her.

"That was a fine ride, wasn't it? I'm always a little afraid for the horse I ride, though; might bend him in the middle."

George couldn't understand why she gave that friendly smile he coveted to Blodgett.

"I'd give a lot to ride like this young man," Blodgett went on, patting George's back. He preened himself. "Still we can't all be born in the saddle."

The thing was so obvious George laughed outright. Even Sylvia conceded its ugly, unintentional humour. A smile drew at the corners of her mouth. If she could enjoy that she was, indeed, for the moment nearer.

Two servants glided around with trays.

Blodgett gulped the contents of his glass and smacked his lips.

"That fellow of mine," he boasted, "has his own blend. Not bad."

Sylvia drank hers with Dalrymple, while Betty over there shook her head. Probably it was his ungraceful inheritance that made George dislike a glass in Sylvia's fingers. Dalrymple slipped away.

"Dividends in the smoking-room!" Blodgett roared.

"Dalrymple's drawing dividends," George thought.

The procession for the dining-room formed and disbanded. Blodgett had Mrs. Sinclair and Sylvia at either hand. It was natural enough, but George resented the arrangement, particularly with Dalrymple next to Sylvia on the other side. Betty sat between Dalrymple and Lambert. George was nearly opposite, flanked by fluffy clothes and hair; and straightway each ear was choked with fluffy chatter—the theatre; the opera, from the side of sartorial criticism; the east coast of Florida—"but why should I go so far to see exciting bathing suits out of season and tea tables wabbling under palm trees?"—a scandal or two—that is such details as were permissible in his presence. He divided his ears sufficiently to catch snatches from neighbouring sections of the table.

"Of course, we'll keep out of it."

It was Wandel, speaking encouragingly to a pretty girl. Out of what? Confound this chatter! Oh! The war, of course. It was the one remark of serious import that reached him throughout the dinner, and the country faced that possibility, and an increasing unrest of labour, and grave financial questions. The diners might have been people who had fled to a high mountain to escape an invasion, or happy ones who lived on a peak from which the menace was invisible. But it wasn't that. At other social levels, he knew, there was the same closing of the shutters, the same effort to create an enjoyable sunlight in a cloistered room. On the summit, he honestly believed, men did more and thought more. Perhaps where sensible men gathered together the curtains weren't drawn against grave fires in an abnormal night. Then it was the women. Did all men, like Wandel, choose to keep such things from the women? Did the women want them kept? Hang it! Then let them have the vote. Make them talk.

"You're really not going to Palm Beach, Mr. Morton?"

"I've too much to do."

"Men amuse me," the young lady fluffed. "They always talk about things to do. If one has a good time the things get done just the same."

God! What a point of view! Yet he wasn't one to pass judgment since he was more interested in the winning of Sylvia than he was in the winning of the war.

He watched her as he could, talking first to Blodgett then to Dalrymple. The brilliant Sylvia Planter had no business sitting between two such men. The fact that Blodgett had got the right people stared him in the face, but even so the man wasn't good enough to be Sylvia Planter's host. Nor did George like the way she sipped her wine. She seemed forcing herself to a travesty of enjoyment. Betty, on the other hand, drank nothing. He questioned if she was sorry Sylvia had brought her. She seemed glad enough, at least, to be with Lambert. He appeared to absorb her, and, in order to listen to him, she left Dalrymple nearly wholly to Sylvia. Once or twice she glanced across and smiled at George, but her kindliness had an air of coming from a widening distance. George was trapped—a restless giant tangled in a snarl of fluff.

He sighed his relief when the women had gone. He didn't remain long behind, wandering into the deserted hall where he stood frowning at the fire. He heard a reluctant step on the stairs and swung around. Sylvia walked slowly down, a cloak about her shoulders. In a sort of desperation he raised his hand.

"This party has got on my nerves."

He couldn't read the expression in her eyes.

"It's stifling in here," she said.

She walked the length of the hall, opened the door, and went through to the terrace.

George's heart quickened. She was out there alone. What had her eyes meant? He had never seen them just like that. They had seemed without challenge.

There was a coat closet at the rear of the hall. He ran to it, got a cap and somebody's overcoat, and followed her out.

She sat on the railing, far from the house. The only light upon her was the nebulous reflection from the white earth. He hurried to her, his heart beating to the rhythm of nearer—nearer—nearer——

She stirred.

"As usual with you," she said, "I am unfortunate. I didn't think you would follow me. I came here because I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think. Can you appreciate that?"

He sat on the railing close to her.

"You never want me. I have to grasp what opportunities I can."

He waited for her to rise and wander away. He was prepared to urge her to remain. She didn't move.

"I can't always be running away from you," she said.

She stared straight ahead over the garden, nearly phosphorescent with its snow.

"Nearer, nearer, nearer," went through his head.

"It has been a long time since I've seen you," he said, "but even so I wish you hadn't come here."

"Why did you come?" she asked.

"Because I thought I should find you."

"Why did you think that?"

"I'd heard Blodgett had been a good deal at Oakmont. I guessed if Lambert came you would, too."

"It is impertinent you should interest yourself in my movements. Why—why do you do it?"

"Because everything you do absorbs me. Why else do you suppose I took the trouble at Betty's dance years ago to tell you who I was?"

She drew back without answering. Her movement caught his attention. The change in her manner, the white night, made him bold.

"I've often wondered," he said, "why you didn't remember me that day in Princeton, or that night. It hadn't been long. Don't you see it was an acknowledgment that I wasn't the old George Morton even then?"

"Oh, no," she answered with a little laugh, "because I remembered you perfectly well."

"Remembered me!" he cried. "And you danced with me, and said you didn't remember, and let me take you aside, and——"

He moved swiftly nearer until his face was close to hers, until he stared into her eyes that he could barely see.

"Why did you do that?"

She didn't answer.

"Why do you tell me now?" he urged with an increasing excitement.

Such a confession from her had the quality of a caress! He felt himself reaching up to touch the summit.

"Why? You've got to answer me."

She arose with easy grace and stood looking down at him.

"Because," she said, "I want you to stop being ridiculous and troublesome; and, really, the whole thing seems so unimportant now that I am going to be married."

He cried out. He sprang to his feet. He caught her hands, and crushed them as if he would make them a part of his own flesh so that she could never escape to accomplish that unbearable act.

"Sylvia! Sylvia!"

She fought, gasping:

"You hurt! I tell you you hurt! Let me go you—you——Let me go——"

VIII

George stared at Sylvia as if she had been a child expressing some unreasonable and incredible intention. "What are you talking about? How can I let you go?"

Even in that light he became aware of the distortion of her face, of an unexpected moisture in her eyes; and he realized quite distinctly where he was, what had been said, just how completely her announcement for the moment had swept his mind clean of the restraints with which he had so painstakingly crowded it. Now he appreciated the power of his grasp, but he watched a little longer the struggles of her graceful body; for, after all, he had been right. How could he let her go to some man whose arms would furnish an inviolable sanctuary? He shook his head. No such thing existed. Hadn't he, indeed, foreseen exactly this situation, and hadn't he told himself it couldn't close the approach to his pursuit? But he had never reconnoitred that road. Now he must find it no matter how forbidding the places it might thread. So he released her. She raised her hands to her face.

"You hurt!" she whispered. "Oh, how you hurt!"

"Please tell me who it is."

She turned, and, her hands still raised, started across the terrace. He followed.

"Tell me!"

She went on without answering. He watched her go, suppressing his angry instinct to grasp her again that he might force the name from her. He shrugged his shoulders. Since she had probably timed her attack on him with a general announcement, he would know soon enough. He could fancy those in the house already buzzing excitedly.

"I always said she'd marry so and so;" or, "She might have done better—or worse;" perhaps an acrid, "It's high time, I should think"—all the banal remarks people make at such crises. But what lingered in George's brain was his own determination.

"She shan't do it. Somehow I'll stop her."

He glanced over the garden, dully surprised that it should retain its former aspect while his own outlook had altered as chaotically as it had done that day long ago when he had blundered into telling her he loved her.

He turned and approached the house to seek this knowledge absolutely vital to him but from which, nevertheless, he shrank. Two names slipped into his mind, two disagreeable figures of men she had recently chosen to be a good deal with.

George acknowledged freely enough now that he had taken his later view of his employer from an altitude of jealousy. Blodgett offered a possibility in some ways quite logical. With war finance he worked closer and closer to Old Planter. He had become a familiar figure at Oakmont. George had seen Sylvia choose his companionship that afternoon, had watched her a little while ago make him happy with her smiles; yet if she could tolerate Blodgett why had she never forgiven George his beginnings?

Dalrymple was a more likely and infinitely less palatable choice. He was good-looking, entirely of her kind, had been, after a fashion, raised at her side; and Sylvia's wealth would be agreeable to the Dalrymple bank account. George had had sufficient evidence that he wanted her—and her money. A large portion of the enmity between them, in fact, could be traced to the day he had found her portrait displayed on Dalrymple's desk. The only argument against Dalrymple was his weakness, and people smiled at that indulgently, ascribing it to youth—even Sylvia who couldn't possibly know how far it went.

Suspense was intolerable. He walked into the house and replaced the coat and cap in the closet. He commenced to look for Sylvia. No matter whose toes it affected he was going to have another talk with her if either of his hazards touched fact.

IX

He caught the rising and falling of a perpetual mixed conversation only partially smothered by a reckless assault on a piano. He traced the racket to the large drawing-room where groups had gathered in the corners as if in a hopeless attempt to escape the concert. Sylvia sat with none. One of the fluffy young ladies was proving the strength of the piano. Rogers was amorously attentive to her music. Lambert and Betty sat as far as possible from everyone else, heads rather close. Blodgett hopped heavily from group to group.

Over the frantic attempts of the young performer the human voice triumphed, but the impulse to this conversation was multiple. From no group did Sylvia's name slip, and George experienced a sharp wonder; so far, evidently, she had chosen to tell only him.

The young lady at the piano crashed to a brief vacation. The chatter, following a perfunctory applause, rose gratefully.

"Fine! Fine!" Blodgett roared. "Your next stop ought to be Carnegie Hall."

"She ought to play in a hall," someone murmured unkindly.

George retreated, relieved that Blodgett wasn't with Sylvia; and a little later he found Dalrymple in the smoking-room sipping whiskey-and-soda between erratic shots at billiards. Wandel was at the table most of the time, counting long strings with easy precision.

"What's up, great man?" he wanted to know.

Dalrymple, too, glanced curiously at George over his glass. "Nothing exceptional that I know of," George snapped and left the room.

It added to his anger that his mind should let through its discontent. At least Sylvia wasn't with Blodgett or Dalrymple, and he tried to tell himself his jealousy was too hasty. All the eligible men weren't gathered in this house. He wandered from room to room, always seeking Sylvia. Where could she have gone?

He met guests fleeing from drawing-room to library, as if driven by the tangled furies of a Hungarian dance.

"Will that girl never stop playing?" he thought.

Betty came up to him.

"Talk to me, George."

He found himself reluctant, but two tables of bridge were forming, and Betty didn't care to play. Lambert did, and sat down. George followed Betty to a window seat, telling himself she wanted him only because Lambert was for the time, lost to her.

"Now," she said, directly, "what is it, George?"

"What's what?" he asked with an attempt at good-humour.

Her question had made him uneasy, since it suggested that she had observed the trouble he was endeavouring to bury. Would he never learn to repress as Goodhue did? But even Goodhue, he recalled, had failed to hide an acute suffering at a football game; and this game was infinitely bigger, and the point he had just lost vastly more important than a fumbled ball.

"You've changed," Betty was saying. "I'm a good judge, because I haven't really seen you for nearly a year. You've seemed—I scarcely know how to say it—unhappy?"

"Why not tired?" he suggested, listlessly. "You may not know it, but I've been pretty hard at work."

She nodded quickly.

"I've heard a good deal from Lambert what you are doing, and something from Squibs and Mrs. Squibs. You haven't seen much of them, either. Do you mind if I say I think it makes them uneasy?"

"Scold. I deserve it," he said. "But I've written."

"I don't mean to scold," she smiled. "I only want to find out what makes you discontented, maybe ask if it's worth while wearing yourself out to get rich."

"I don't know," he answered. "I think so."

It was his first doubt. He looked at her moodily.

"You're not one to draw the long bow, Betty. Honestly, aren't you a little cross with me on account of the Baillys?"

"Not even on my own account."

Her allusion was clear enough. George was glad Blodgett created a diversion just then, lumbering in and bellowing to Lambert for news of his sister. George listened breathlessly.

"Haven't seen her," Lambert said, and doubled a bid.

"Miss Alston?" Blodgett applied to Betty.

"Where should she be?" Betty answered.

"Got me puzzled," Blodgett muttered. "Responsibility. If anything happened!"

Betty laughed.

"What could happen to her here?"

George guessed then where Sylvia had gone, and he experienced a strong but temporal exaltation. Only a mental or a bodily hurt could have driven Sylvia to her room. He didn't believe in the first, but he could still feel the shape of her slender fingers crushed against his. The greater her pain, the greater her knowledge of his determination and desire.

"Guess I'll send Mrs. Sinclair upstairs," Blodgett said, gropingly.

He hurried out of the room. Betty rose.

"I suppose I ought to go."

"Nonsense," George objected. "She isn't the sort to come down ill all at once."

He followed Betty to the hall, however. Mrs. Sinclair was halfway up the stairs. Blodgett had gone on, always pandering, George reflected, to his guests.

"I'll wait here," Betty said to Mrs. Sinclair. "I mean, if anything should be wrong, if Sylvia should want me."

Mrs. Sinclair nodded, disappearing in the upper hall.

Finally George faced the moment he had avoided with a persistent longing. For the first time since the night of his confession he was quite alone with Betty. He tried not to picture her swaying away from him in a moonlight scented with flowers; but he couldn't help hearing her frightened voice: "Don't say anything more now," and he experienced again her hand's delightful and bewitching fragility. Why had his confession startled? What had it portended for her?

He sighed. There was no point asking such questions, no reason for avoiding such dangerous moments now; too many factors had assumed new shapes. The long separation had certainly not been without its effect on Betty, and hadn't he recently seen her absorbed by Lambert? Hadn't she just now scolded him with a clear appreciation of his shortcomings? In the old days she had unconsciously offered him a pleasurable temptation, and he had been afraid of yielding to it because of its effect on his aim. Sylvia just now had tried to convince him that his aim was permanently turned aside. He knew with a hard strength of will that it wasn't. Nothing could tempt him from his path now—even Betty's kindness.

"Betty—have you heard anything of her getting married?"

She glanced at him, surprised.

"Who? Sylvia?"

He nodded.

"Only," she answered, "the rumours one always hears about a very popular girl. Why, George?"

"The rumours make one wonder. Nothing comes of them," he said, sorry he had spoken, seeking a safe withdrawal. "You know there's principally one about you. It persists."

There was a curious light in her eyes, reminiscent of something he had seen there the night of his confession.

"You've just remarked," she laughed, softly, "that rumours seldom materialize."

What did she mean by that? Before he could go after an answer Mrs. Sinclair came down, joined them, and explained that Sylvia was tired and didn't want any one bothered. George's exaltation increased. He hoped he had hurt her, as he had always wanted to. Blodgett, accompanied by Wandel and Dalrymple, wandered from the smoking-room, seeking news. George felt every muscle tighten, for Blodgett, at sight of Mrs. Sinclair, roared:

"Where is Sylvia?"

The gross familiarity held him momentarily convinced, then he remembered that Blodgett was eager to make progress with such people, quick to snatch at every advantage. Sylvia wasn't here to rebuke him. Under the circumstances, the others couldn't very well. As a matter of fact, they appeared to notice nothing. Of course it wasn't Blodgett.

"In her room with a headache," Mrs. Sinclair answered. "She may come down later."

"Headaches," Wandel said, "cover a multitude of whims."

George didn't like his tone. Wandel always gave you the impression of a vision subtle and disconcerting.

Dalrymple, in spite of his confused state, was caught rattling off questions at Mrs. Sinclair, too full of concern, while George watched him, wondering—wondering.

"Must have her own way," Blodgett interrupted. "Bridge! Let's cut in or make another table. George?"

George and Betty shook their heads, so Blodgett, with that air of a showman leading his spectators to some fresh surprise, hurried the others away. George didn't attempt to hide his distaste. He stared at the fire. Hang Blodgett and his familiarities!

"What are you thinking about, George?"

"Would you have come here, Betty, of your own wish?"

"Why not?"

"Blodgett."

"What about the old dear?"

George started, turned, and looked full at her. There was no question. She meant it, and earlier in the evening Lambert had said nearly any girl would marry Blodgett. What had become of his own judgment? He felt the necessity of defending it.

"He's too precious happy to have people like you in his house. You know perfectly well he hasn't always been able to do it."

"Isn't that why everyone likes him," she asked, "because he's so completely unaffected?"

George understood he was on thin ice. He didn't deviate.

"You mean he's all the more admirable because he hasn't plastered himself with veneer?"

Her white cheeks flushed. She was as nearly angry as he had ever seen her.

"I thought you'd never go back to that," she said. "Didn't I make it clear any mention of it in the first place was quite unnecessary?"

"I thought you had a reproof for me, Betty. You don't suppose I ever forget what I've had to do, what I still have to accomplish."

She half stretched out her hand.

"Why do you try to quarrel with me, George?"

"I wouldn't for the world," he denied, warmly.

"But you do. I told you once you were different. You shouldn't compare yourself with Mr. Blodgett or any one. What you set out for you always get."

He smiled a little. She was right, and he must never lose his sense of will, his confidence of success.

She started to speak, then hesitated. She wouldn't meet his glance.

"Why," she asked, "did you tell me that night?"

"Because," he answered, uncomfortably, "you were too good a friend to impose upon. I had to give you an opportunity to drive me away."

"I didn't take it," she said, quickly, "yet you went as thoroughly as if I had."

She spread her hands.

"You make me feel as if I'd done something awkward to you. It isn't fair."

Smiling wistfully, he touched her hand.

"Don't talk that way. Don't let us ever quarrel, Betty. You've never meant anything but kindness to me. I'd like to feel there's always a little kindness for me in your heart."

Her long lashes lowered slowly over her eyes.

"There is. There always will be, George."

X

For some time after Betty had left him George remained staring at the fire. The chatter and the intermittent banging of the piano made him long for quiet; but it was good discipline to stay downstairs, and Mrs. Sinclair had said Sylvia might show herself later. So he waited, struggling with his old doubt, asking himself if he had actually acquired anything genuine except his money.

Later he wandered again from room to room, seeking Sylvia, but she didn't appear, and he couldn't understand her failure. Had it any meaning for him? Why, for that matter, should she strike him before any other knew of the weapon in her hand? From time to time Dalrymple expressed a maudlin concern for her, and George's uncertainty increased. If it should turn out to be Dalrymple, he told himself hotly, he would be capable of killing.

The young man quite fulfilled his promise of the early evening. Long after the last of the women had retired he remained in the smoking-room. Rogers abetted him, glad, doubtless, to be sportive in such distinguished company. Wandel loitered, too, and was unusually flushed, refilling his glass rather often. Lambert, Blodgett, and he were at a final game of billiards.

"You've been with Dalrymple all evening," George said, significantly, to Wandel.

"My dear George," Wandel answered, easily, "I observe the habits of my fellow creatures. Be they good or bad I venture not to interfere."

"An easy creed," George said. "You're not your brother's keeper."

"Rather not. The man that keeps himself makes the world better."

George had a disturbing fancy that Wandel accused him.

"You don't mean that at all," he said. "When will you learn to say what you mean?"

"Perhaps," Wandel replied, sipping, "when I decide not to enter politics."

"Your shot," Blodgett called, and Wandel strolled to the table.

Dalrymple didn't play, his accuracy having diminished to the point of laughter. He edged across to George.

"Old George Morton!" he drawled. "Young George Croesus! And all that."

The slurred last phrase was as abhorrent as "why don't you stick to your laundry?" It carried much the same implication. But Dalrymple was up to something, wanted something. He came to it after a time with the air of one conferring a regal favour.

"Haven't got a hundred in your pocket, Croesus? Driggs and bridge have squeezed me dry. Blodgett's got bones. Never saw such a man. Has everything. Driggs is running out. Recoup at bones. Everybody shoot. Got the change, save me running upstairs? Bad for my heart, and all that."

He grinned. George grinned back. It was a small favour, but it was a start, for the other acquired bad habits readily. Ammunition against Dalrymple! He had always needed it, might want it more than ever now. At last Dalrymple himself put it in his hand.

He passed over the money, observing that the other moved so as to screen the transaction from those about the table.

"Little night-cap with me?" Dalrymple suggested as if by way of payment.

George laughed.

"Haven't you already protected the heads of the party?"

Dalrymple made a wry face.

"Do their heads a lot more good than mine."

The game ended.

Dalrymple turned away shouting.

"Bones! Bones!"

Blodgett produced a pair of dice with his air of giving each of his patrons his heart's desire. Wandel yawned. Dalrymple rattled the dice and slithered them across the billiard table.

"Coming in, George?" Blodgett roared.

"Thanks. I'm off to bed."

But he waited, curious as to the destination of the small loan he had just made.

Blodgett with tact threw for reasonable stakes. Roger's play was necessarily small, and he seemed ashamed of the fact. Lambert put plenty on the table, but urged no takers. Wandel varied his wagers. Dalrymple covered everything he could, and had luck.

George studied the intent figures, the eager eyes, as the dice flopped across the table; listened to the polished voices raised to these toys in childish supplications that sang with the petulant accents of negroes. Simultaneously he was irritated and entertained, experiencing a vague, uneasy fear that a requisite side of life, of which this folly might be taken as a symbol, had altogether escaped him. He laughed aloud when Wandel sang something about seven and eleven. His voice resembled a negro's as the peep of a sparrow approaches an eagle's scream.

"What you laughing at, great man? One must talk to them. Otherwise they don't behave, and you see I rolled an eleven. Positive proof."

He gathered in the money he had won.

"Shooting fifty this time."

"Why not shoot?" Dalrymple asked George. "'Fraid you couldn't talk to 'em?"

"Thing doesn't interest me."

"No sport, George Morton."

It was the way it was said that arrested George. Trust Dalrymple when he had had enough to drink to air his dislikes. The others glanced up.

"How much have you got there?" George asked quietly.

With a slightly startled air Dalrymple ran over his money.

"Pretty nearly three. Why?"

"Call it three," George said.

He gathered the dice from the table. The others drew back, leaving, as it were, the ring clear.

"I'll throw you just once," George said, "for three hundred. High man to throw. On?"

"Sure," Dalrymple said, thickly.

George counted out his money and placed it on the table. He threw a five. Dalrymple couldn't do better than a four. George rattled the dice, and, rather craving some of the other's Senegambian chatter, rolled them. They rested six and four. Dalrymple didn't try to hide his delight.

"Stung, old George Morton! Never come a ten again."

"There'll come another ten," George promised.

He continued to roll, a trifle self-conscious in his silence, while Dalrymple bent over the table, desirous of a seven, while the others watched, absorbed.

Sixes and eights fell, and other numbers, but for half-a-dozen throws no seven or ten.

"Come you seven!" Dalrymple sang.

"You've luck, George," Lambert commented. "I wouldn't lay against you now. I'll go you fifty, Driggs, on his ten."

"Done!"

The next throw the dice turned up six and four.

"The very greatest of men," Wandel said, ruefully.

While George put the money in his pocket Dalrymple straightened, frowning.

"Double or quits! Revenge!"

"I said once," George reminded him. "I'm off to bed."

The others resumed their play. Dalrymple stared at George, an ugly light in his eyes. George nodded, and the other followed him to the door. George handed him a hundred dollars.

"Save you running upstairs. How much do you owe me now?"

"Couple hundred."

"I shouldn't worry about that," George laughed. "When you want a good deal more and it's inconvenient to run upstairs I might save you some trouble."

"Now that's white of you," Dalrymple condescended, and went, a trifle unsteadily, back to the table.

George carried to his room an impression that he had thoroughly soiled his hands at last, but unavoidably. Of course he had scorned Blodgett for involving Sinclair. His own case was very different. Besides, he hadn't actually involved Dalrymple yet, but he had made a start. Dalrymple had always gunned for him. More than ever since Sylvia's announcement, George felt the necessity of getting Dalrymple where he could handle him. If she had chosen Dalrymple, of course, money would serve only until the greedy youth could get his fingers in the Planter bags. He shook with a quick repugnance. No matter who won her it mustn't be Dalrymple. He would stop that at any cost.

He sat for some time on the edge of the bed, studying the pattern of the rug. Was Dalrymple the man to arouse a grand passion in her? She had said:

"I can't always be running away from you."

She had told him and no one else. Was the thing calculation, quite bereft of love? Oh, no. George couldn't imagine he was of such importance she would flee that far to be rid of him; but he went to bed at last, confessing the situation had elements he couldn't grasp. Perhaps, when he knew surely who the man was, they would become sufficiently ponderable.

XI

He was up early after a miserable night, and failed to rout his depression with a long ride over country roads. When he got back in search of breakfast he found the others straggling down. First of all he saw Dalrymple, white and unsteady; heard him asking for Sylvia. Sylvia hadn't appeared.

"Who's for church?" Blodgett roared.

Mrs. Sinclair offered to shepherd the devout. They weren't many. Men even called Blodgett names for this newest recreation he had appeared to offer.

"How late did you play?" George asked Blodgett.

"Until, when I looked at my watch, I thought it must be last evening. These young bloods are too keen for Papa Blodgett."

"Get into you?" George laughed.

"I usually manage to hang on to my money," Blodgett bragged, "but the stakes ran bigger and bigger. I'll say one thing for young Dalrymple. He's no piker. Wrote I. O. U's until he wore out his fountain pen. I could paper a room with what I got. I'd be ashamed to collect them."

"Why?" George asked, shortly. "When he wrote them he knew they had to be redeemed."

Blodgett grinned.

"I expect he was a little pickled. Probably's forgot he signed them. I won't make him unhappy with his little pieces of paper."

"Daresay he'll be grateful," George said, dryly.

His ride had brought no appetite. After breakfast he avoided people with a conviction that his only business here was to see Sylvia again, then to escape. It was noon before she appeared with Betty. He caught them walking from the hall to the library, and he studied Sylvia's face with anxious curiosity. It disappointed, repelled him. It was quite unchanged, as full of colour as usual, as full of unfriendliness. She nodded carelessly, quite as if nothing had happened—gave him the identical, remote greeting to which he had become too accustomed. And last evening he had fancied her nearer! He noticed, however, that she had put her hands behind her back.

"I hope you're feeling better."

"Better! I haven't been ill," she flashed.

Betty helped him out.

"Last night Mrs. Sinclair told us you had a headache."

"You ought to know, Betty, that means I was tired."

But George noticed she no longer looked at him. She hurried on.

"Dolly!" he heard her laugh. "You must have sat up rather late."

"Trying to forget my worry about you, Sylvia. Guess it gave me your headache."

George shrugged his shoulders and edged away, measuring his chances of seeing her alone. They were slender, for as usual she was a magnet, yet luck played for him and against her after luncheon, bringing them at the same moment from different directions to the empty hall. She wanted to hurry by, as if he were a disturbing shadow, but he barred her way.

"I suppose I should say I'm sorry I hurt you last night. I'll say it, if you wish, but I'm not particularly sorry."

She showed him her hands then, spread them before him. They trembled, but that was all. They recorded no marks of his precipitancy.

"I shouldn't expect you to be sorry. After that certainly you will never speak to me again."

"Will you tell me now who it is?" he asked.

Her temper blazed.

"I ought always to know what to expect from you."

She ran back to the door through which she had entered.

"Oh, Dolly!"

Dalrymple met her on the threshold.

"Take me for a walk," she said. "It won't hurt you."

Dalrymple indicated George.

"Morton coming?"

She shook her head and ran lightly upstairs.

"No, I'm not going," George said. "She's right. The fresh air will do you good."

"Thanks," Dalrymple answered, petulantly. "I'm quite capable of prescribing for myself."

He went out in search of his hat and coat.

George watched him, letting all his dislike escape. Continually they hovered on the edge of a break, but Dalrymple wouldn't quite permit it now. George was confident that the seed sown last night would flower.

He was glad when Mundy telephoned before dinner about some difficulties of transportation that might have been solved the next day. George sprang at the excuse, however, refused Blodgett's offer of a car to town, and drove to the station.

Dalrymple and Sylvia hadn't returned.

In town Goodhue, too, read his discontent.

"You look tired out, George," he said the next morning. "Evidently Blodgett's party wasn't much benefit."

"I'm learning to dislike parties," George answered. "You were wise to duck it. What was the matter? Didn't fancy the Blodgett brand of hospitality?"

"Promised my mother to spend the week-end at Westbury. I'd have enjoyed it. I'm really growing fond of Blodgett."

There it was again, and you couldn't question Goodhue. Always he said just what he meant, or he kept his opinions to himself. Every word of praise for Blodgett reached George as a direct charge of disloyalty, of bad judgment, of narrow-mindedness. His irritation increased. He was grateful for the mass of work in which he was involved. That chained his imagination by day, but at night he wearily reviewed the past five years, seeking his points of weakness, some fatal omission.

Perhaps his chief fault had been too self-centred a pursuit of Sylvia. Because of her he had repressed the instincts to which he saw other men pandering as a matter of course. Dalrymple did, yet she preferred him, perhaps to the point of making a gift of herself. He had avoided even those more legitimate pleasures of which the dice had appealed to him as a type. What was the use of it? Why had he done it? Yet even now, and still because of her, when you came to that, he had no desire to turn aside to the brighter places where plumed creatures flutter fatefully. It was a species of tragedy that he had to keep himself for one who didn't want him.

It stared at him at breakfast from the page of a newspaper. It was amazing that the journal saw nothing grotesque in such a union; found it, to the contrary, sensible and beneficial, not only to the persons involved, but to the entire country.

Planter, the article pointed out, was no longer capable of bringing a resistless energy to his house which was a notable stone in the country's financial structure. Should any chance weaken that the entire building would react. His son was at present too young and inexperienced to watch that stone, to keep it intact. Later, of course—but one had to consider the present. To be sure there were partners, but after the fashion of great egoists Mr. Planter had avoided admitting any outstanding personality to his firm. It was a happy circumstance that Cupid, and so forth—for the senior partner of Blodgett and Sinclair was more than an outstanding personality in Wall Street. Some of his recent achievements were comparable with Mr. Planter's earlier ones. The dissolution of his firm and his induction into the house of Planter and Company were prophesied.

George continued to eat his breakfast mechanically. At least it wasn't Dalrymple, yet that resolution would have been less astonishing. Josiah Blodgett, fat, middle-aged, of no family, married to the beautiful and brilliant Sylvia Planter! But was it grotesque? Wasn't the paper right? He had had plenty of proof that his own judgment of Blodgett was worthless. He crumpled the paper in his hand and stood up. His judgment was worth this: he was willing to swear Sylvia Planter didn't love the man she had elected to marry.

What did other people think?

Wandel was at hand. George stopped on his way out. The little man was still in bed, sipping coffee while he, too, studied that disturbing page; yet, when he had sent his man from the room, he didn't appear to find about it anything extraordinary.

"Good business all round," he commented, "although I must admit I'm surprised Sylvia had the common-sense to realize it. Impulsive sort, didn't you think, George, who would fly to some fellow because she'd taken a fancy to him? Phew! Planter plus Blodgett! It'll make her about the richest girl in America, why not say the world? Some households are uneasy this morning. Well! When you come down to it, what's the difference between railroads and mills? Between mines and real estate? One's about as useful as the others."

"It's revolting," George said.

Wandel glanced over his paper.

"What's up, great man? Nothing of the sort. Blodgett has his points."

"As usual, you don't mean what you say," George snapped.

"But I do, my dear George."

"Blodgett's not like the people he plays with."

"Isn't that a virtue?" Wandel asked. "Perhaps it's why those people like him."

"But do they really?"

"You're purposely blind if you don't see it," Wandel answered. "Why the deuce don't you?"

George feared he had let slip too much. With others he would have to guard his interest closer, and he would delay the final break he had quite decided upon with Blodgett.

"Just the same," he muttered, ill at ease, preparing to leave, "I'd like Lambert's opinion."

"You don't fancy this has happened," Wandel said, "without Lambert's knowing all about it?"

George left without answering. At least he knew. It was simpler, consequently, to discipline himself. His manner disclosed nothing when he made the necessary visit to Blodgett. The round face was radiant. The narrow eyes burned with happiness.

"You're a cagy old Brummell," George said. "I've just seen it in the paper with the rest of the world. When's it coming off?"

Blodgett's content faded a trifle.

"She says not for a long time yet, but we'll see. Trust Josiah to hurry things all he can."

"Congratulations, anyway," George said. "You know you're entitled to them."

But he couldn't offer his hand. With that he had an instinct to tear the happiness from the other's face.

"You bet I am," Blodgett was roaring. "Any fool can see I'm pleased as punch."

George couldn't stomach any more of it. He started out, but Blodgett, rather hesitatingly, summoned him back. George obeyed, annoyed and curious.

"A good many years ago, George," Blodgett began, "I was a damned idiot. I remember telling you that when Papa Blodgett got married it would be to the right girl."

"The convenient girl," George sneered. "Don't you think you're doing it?"

"Now see here, George. None of that. You forget it. I'm sorry I ever thought or said such stuff. You get it through your head just what this is—plain adoration."

He sprang to his feet in an emotional outburst that made George writhe.

"I don't see why God has been so good to me."

XIII

George escaped and hurried upstairs. Lambert was there, but he didn't mention the announcement, and George couldn't very well lead him. No one who did talk of it in his presence, however, shared his bitter disapproval. Most men dwelt as Wandel did on the material values of such a match, which, far from diminishing Sylvia's brilliancy, would make it burn brighter than ever.

Occasionally he saw Sylvia and Blodgett together. For him she had that air of seeking an unreal pleasure, but she was always considerate of Blodgett, who seemed perpetually on the point of clasping her publicly in his arms. A recurrent contact was impossible for George. He went to Blodgett finally, and over his spirited resistance broke the last tie.

"My remaining on your pay-roll," he complained, "is pure charity. I don't want it. I won't have it. God knows I'm grateful for all you've done for me. It's been a lot."

"Never forget you've done something for Blodgett," the stout man said, warmly. "There's no question but you've earned every penny you've had from me. We've played and worked together a long time, George. I don't see just because you've grown up too fast why you've got to make Papa Blodgett unhappy."

George had no answer, but he didn't have to see much of the beaming beau after that, nor for a long time did he encounter Sylvia at all intimately. Lambert, himself, unwittingly brought them together in the spring.

"Why not run down to Oakmont with me?" he said, casually, one Friday morning. "Father's always asking why you're never around."

"Your father might be pleased to know why," George said.

"Dark ages!" Lambert said. "We're in the present now. Come ahead."

The invitation to enter the gates! But it brought to George none of the glowing triumph he had anticipated. He knew why Lambert had offered it, because he considered Sylvia removed from any possible unpleasant aftermath of the dark ages. The man Morton didn't need any further chastisement; but he went, because he knew what Lambert didn't, that the man Morton wasn't through with Sylvia yet; that he was going to find out why she had chosen Blodgett when, except on the score of money, she might have beckoned better from nearly any direction; that he was curious why she had told the man Morton first of all.

They rolled in at the gate. There he had stood, and there she, when she had set her dog on him. Then around the curve to the great house and in at the front door with an aging Simpson and a younger servant to compete for his bag and his coat and hat. How Simpson scraped—Simpson who had ordered him to go where he belonged, to the back door. What was the matter with him that he couldn't experience the elation with which the moment was crowded?

Mrs. Planter met him with her serene manner of one beyond human frailties. You couldn't expect her to go back and remember. Such a return to her would be beyond belief.

"You've not been kind to us, Mr. Morton. You've never been here before."

And that night she had walked through the doorway treating him exactly as if he had been a piece of furniture which had annoyingly got itself out of place.

Lambert's eyes were quizzical.

Old Planter wasn't at all the bear, cracking cumbersome jokes about the young ferret that had stolen a march on the sly old foxes of Wall Street. So that was what his threats amounted to! Or was it because there was nothing whatever of the former George Morton left?

He examined curiously the bowed white head and the dim eyes in which some fire lingered. He could still approximate the emotions aroused by that interview in the library. He felt the old instinct to give this man every concession to a vast superiority. In a sense, he was still afraid of him. He had to get over that, for hadn't he come here to accomplish just that against which Old Planter had warned him?

"Where," Lambert asked, "is the blushing Josiah?"

George caught the irony of his voice, but his mother explained in her unemotional way that Sylvia and Blodgett were riding.

Certainly all along those early days had been in Lambert's mind, for he led George to the scene of their fight. He faced him there, and he laughed.

"You remember?"

"Why not?" George said. "I was born that day."

"Morton! Morton!" Lambert mused.

George swung and caught Lambert's shoulders quickly. There was more than sentiment in his quick, reminiscent outburst. It seemed even to himself to carry another threat.

"You call me Mr. Morton, or just George, as if I were about as good as you."

Lambert laughed.

"We've had some fair battles since then, haven't we, George? You've done a lot you said you would that day."

"I've scarcely started," George answered. "I'm a dismal failure. Perhaps I'll brace up."

"You're hard to satisfy," Lambert said.

George dug at the ground with his heel.

"All the greater necessity to find ultimate satisfaction," he grumbled.

Lambert glanced at him inquiringly.

"I suppose," George continued, "I ought to thank you and your sister for not reminding your parents what I was some years ago, for not blurting it out to a lot of other people."

"You've shown me," Lambert said, "it would have been vicious to have put any stumbling blocks in your way. Driggs is right. He usually is. You're a very great man."

But George shook his head, and accompanied Lambert back to the house with the despondency of failure.

Sylvia and Blodgett were back, lounging with Mr. and Mrs. Planter about a tea table which servants had carried to a sunny spot on the lawn. At sight of George Sylvia's colour heightened. Momentarily she hesitated to take his offered hand, then bowed to the presence of the others.

"You didn't tell me, Lambert, you were bringing any one."

Blodgett's welcome was cordial enough to strike a balance.

"Never see anything of you these days, George. He makes money, Mrs. Planter, too fast to bother with an old plodder like me. Thank the Lord I've still got cash in his firm."

That he should ever call that quiet, assured figure mother-in-law! Mrs. Planter, however, showed no displeasure. She commenced to chat with Lambert. Sylvia, George reflected, might with profit have borrowed some of her mother's serenity. Still she managed to entertain him over the tea cups as if he had been any casual, uninteresting guest.

That hour, nevertheless, furnished George an ugly ordeal, for Blodgett's attentions were perpetual, and Sylvia appeared to appreciate them, treating him with a consideration that let through at least that affection the man had surprisingly drawn from so many of his acquaintances.

A secretary interrupted them, hurrying from the house with an abrupt concern stamped on his face, standing by awkwardly as if not knowing how to commence.

"What is it, Straker?" Mr. Planter asked.

"Mr. Brown's on the 'phone, sir. I think you'd better come. He said he didn't want to bother you until he was quite sure. There seems no doubt now."

"Of what, Straker?" Mr. Planter asked. "Wouldn't it have kept through tea time?"

The secretary seemed reluctant to speak. The women glanced at him uneasily. Lambert started to rise. In spite of his preoccupation George had a suspicion of the truth. All at once Blodgett half expressed it, bringing his fist noisily down on the table.

"The Huns have torpedoed an American boat!"

Straker blurted out the truth.

"Oh, no, Mr. Blodgett. It's the Lusitania, but apparently the losses are serious."

For a moment the silence was complete. Even the servants forgot their errands and remained immobile, with gaping faces. An evil premonition swept George. There were many Americans on the Lusitania. He knew a number quite well. Undoubtedly some had gone down. Which of his friends? One properly asked such questions only when one's country was at war. The United States wasn't at war with Germany. Would they be now? How was the sinking of the Lusitania going to effect him?

Old Planter, Blodgett, and Lambert were already on their feet, starting for the door. Mrs. Planter rose, but unhurriedly, and went close to her husband's side. In that movement George fancied he had caught at last something warm and human. Probably she had weighed the gravity of this announcement, and was determined to wheedle the old man from too much excitement, from too great a temper, from too thorough a preoccupation with the changes bound to reach Wall Street from this tragedy.

"I want to talk to Brown, too, if you please," Blodgett roared.

They crowded into the hall, all except Sylvia and George who had risen last. He had measured his movements by hers. They entered the library together while the others hurried through to Mr. Planter's study where the telephone stood, anxious to speak with Brown's voice. She wanted to follow, but he stopped her by the table where his cap had rested that night, from which he had taken her photograph.

"You might give me a minute," he said.

She faced him.

"What do you want? Why did you come here, Mr. Morton?"

"For this minute."

"You've heard what's happened," she said, scornfully, "and you can persist in such nonsense."

"Call it anything you please," he said. "To me such nonsense happens to be vital. It's your fault that I have to take every chance, even make one out of a tragedy like that."

He nodded toward the study door through which strained voices vibrated.

"Children, too!—Vanderbilt!—More than a thousand!—Good God, Brown!"

And Blodgett's roar, throaty with a new ferocity:

"We'll fight the swine now."

George experienced a fresh ill-feeling toward the man, who impressed him as possessing something of the attributes of such animals. He glanced at Sylvia's hands.

"You're not going to marry him."

She smiled at him pityingly, but her colour was fuller. He wondered why she should remain at all when it would be so easy to slip through the doorway to the protection of Blodgett and the others. Of course to hurt him again.

"I don't believe you love him. I'm sure you don't. You shan't throw yourself away."

Her foot tapped the rug. He watched her try to make her smile amused. Her failure, he told himself, offered proof that he was right.

"One can no longer even be angry with you," she said. "Who gave you a voice in my destiny?"

"You," he answered, quickly, "and I don't surrender my rights. If I can help it you're not going to throw away your youth. Why did you tell me first of all you were going to be married?"

She braced herself against the table, staring at him. In her eyes he caught a fleeting expression of fright. He believed she was held at last by a curiosity more absorbing than her temper.

"What do you mean?"

Old Planter's bass tones throbbed to them.

"Nothing can keep us out of the war now."

The words came to George as from a great distance, carrying no tremendous message. In the whole world there existed for him at that moment nothing half so important as the lively beauty of this woman whose intolerance he had just vanquished.

"Your youth belongs to youth," he hurried on, knowing she wouldn't answer his question. "I've told you this before. I won't see you turn your back on life. Fair warning! I'll fight any way I can to prevent it."

She straightened, showing him her hands.

"You're very brave. You fight by attacking a woman, by trying behind his back to injure a very dear man. And you've no excuse whatever for fighting, as you call it."

"Yes, I have," he said, quickly, "and you know perfectly well that I'm justified in attacking any man you threaten to marry."

"You're mad, or laughable," she said. "Why have you? Why?"

"Because long ago I told you I loved you. Whether it was really so then, or whether it is now, makes no difference. You said I shouldn't forget."

He stepped closer to her.

"You said other things that gave me, through pride if nothing else, a pretty big share in your life. You may as well understand that."

Her anger quite controlled her now. She raised her right hand in the old impulsive gesture to punish his presumption with the maximum of humiliation; and this time, also, he caught her wrist, but he didn't hold it away. He brought it closer, bent his head, and pressed his lips against her fingers.

He was startled by the retreat of colour from her face. He had never seen it so white. He let her wrist go. She grasped the table's edge. She commenced to laugh, but there was no laughter in her blank, colourless expression. A feminine voice without accent came to them:

"Sylvia! How can you laugh?"

He glanced up. Mrs. Planter stood in the study doorway. Sylvia straightened; apparently controlled herself. Her colour returned.

"It was Mr. Morton," she explained, unevenly. "He said something so absurdly funny. Perhaps he hasn't grasped this tragedy."

The others came in, a voluble, horrified group.

"What's the matter with you, George?" Blodgett bellowed. "Don't you understand what's happened?"

"Not quite," George said, looking at Sylvia, "but I intend to find out."

XIV

To find out, George appreciated at once, would be no simple task. Immediately Sylvia raised new defences. She seemed abetted by this incredible happening on a gray sea.

"I shall go," Lambert said. "How about you, George?"

"Why should I go?" George asked. "I haven't thought about it yet."

The scorn in Sylvia's eyes made him uneasy. Why did people have to be so impulsive? That was the way wars were made.

During the days that followed he did think about it too absorbingly for comfort, weighing to the penny the sacrifice his unlikely going would involve. An inherent instinct for a fight could scarcely be satisfied at such a cost. Patriotism didn't enter his calculations at all. He believed it had resounding qualities only because it was hollow, being manufactured exactly as a drum is made. Surely there were enough impulsive and fairly useless people to do such a job.

Then without warning Wandel confused his apparently flawless logic. Certainly Wandel was the least impulsive of men and he was also capable of uncommon usefulness, yet within a week of the sinking he asked George if he didn't want to move to his apartment to keep things straight during a long absence.

"Where are you going, Driggs?"

"I've been drifting too long," Wandel answered. "Unless I go somewheres, do something, I'll become as mellow as Dolly. I've not been myself since the business started. I suppose it's because I happen to be fond of the French and the British and a few ideas of theirs. So I'm going to drive an ambulance for them."

George fancied Wandel's real motive wasn't so easily expressed. He longed to know it, but you couldn't pump Wandel.

"You're an ass," was all he said.

"Naturally," Wandel agreed. "Only asses go to war."

"Do you think it will help for you to get a piece of shell through your head?"

"Quite as much as for any other ass."

"Why don't you say what you mean?" George asked, irritably.

"Perhaps you ask that," Wandel drawled, "because you don't understand what I mean to say."

"I won't take care of your apartment," George snapped. "I won't have any hand in such a piece of foolishness."

With Goodhue, however, he went to the pier to see Wandel off; absorbed with the little man the sorrowful and apprehensive atmosphere of the odorous shed; listened to choked farewells; saw brimming eyes; shared the pallid anticipations of those about to venture forth upon an unnatural sea; touched at last the very fringe of war.

"Why is he doing it?" George asked as Goodhue and he drove across town to the subway. "I've never counted Driggs a sentimentalist."

"I'm not sure," Goodhue answered, "this doesn't prove he isn't. He's always had an acute appreciation of values. Don't you remember? We used to call him 'Spike'."

---

George let himself drift with events, but Wandel's departure increased his uneasiness. Suppose he should be forced by circumstances to abandon everything; against his better judgment to go? Automatically his thoughts turned to Squibs. He recalled his advice.

"Don't let your ideas smoulder in your head. Come home and talk them over."

He sent a telegram and followed it the next day. The Baillys met him at the station, affectionately, without any reproaches for his long absence. The menace was in the air here, too, for Mrs. Bailly's first question, sharply expressed, was:

"You're not going, if——"

"I don't want to go," he answered.

Bailly studied him, but he didn't say anything.

That afternoon there was a boat race on Lake Carnegie. The Alstons drove the Baillys and George down some hospitable resident's lane to an advantageous bank near the finish line. They spread rugs and made themselves comfortable there, but the party was subdued. Squibs and Mr. Alston didn't seem to care to talk. Betty asked Mrs. Bailly's question, received an identical answer, and fell silent, too. Only Mrs. Alston appeared to detect no change in the world, remaining cheerfully imperial as if alarms couldn't possibly approach her abruptly.

Even to George such a scene, sharing one planet with the violences of Europe, appeared contradictory. The fancifully garbed undergraduates, who ran along the bank; the string of automobiles on the towpath opposite; the white and gleaming pleasure boats in the canal; the shells themselves, with coloured oar-blades that flashed in the sunlight; most of all the green frame for this pleasantly exciting contest had an air of telling him that everything unseen was rumour, dream stuff; either that, or else that the seen was visionary, while in those remote places existed the only material world, the revolting and essential realities.

Bailly at last interrupted his revery, with his long, thin arm making a gesture that included the athletes; the running, youthful partisans.

"How many are we going to lose or get back with twisted minds?"

"Keep quiet," his wife said in a panic.

Mrs. Alston laughed pleasantly.

"Don't worry. Woodrow will keep us out of it."

XV

Back in the little study Bailly expressed his doubt.

"He may do it now, but later——"

"Remember you're not going, George," Mrs. Bailly cried.

"I think not."

She patted his hand, while Bailly looked on with his old expression of doubt and disapproval. When Mrs. Bailly had left them, George told the tutor of Wandel's surprising venture, asking his opinion.

"It's hard to form one," Bailly admitted. "He's always puzzled me. Would it surprise you if I said I think he at least has grafted on his brain some of Allen's generous views?"

"Oh, come, sir. You can't make war an ideal expression of the brotherhood of man. Far better that all men should be suspicious strangers."

Bailly drew noisily at his pipe.

"It often pleases you to misunderstand," he said. "Wandel, I fancy, would take Allen's theories and make something more practical of them. Understand I am a pacifist—thorough-paced. War is folly. War is dreadful. It cannot be conceived in a healthy brain. But when a fact rises up before you you'd better face it. Wandel probably does. The Allens probably don't—don't realize that we must win this war as the only alternative to the world pacing of an autocratic foot that would crush social progress like a serpent, that would boot back the brotherhood of man, since you seem to enjoy the phrase, unthinkable years."

"After admitting that," George asked, quickly, "you can still tell me that I ought to accept the point of view of your rotten, illogical Socialists?"

"Even in this war," Bailly confessed, "most socialists are pacifists. No, they're not an elastic crowd. It amuses me that a lot of the lords of the land, leading an unthinking portion of the proletariat, will permit them to carry on their work in spite of themselves."

"I despise such theorists," George burst out. "They are unsound. They are dangerous."

Bailly smiled.

"Just the same, the very ones they want to reform are going to give them the opportunity to do it."

"They're all like Allen," George sneered, "purchasable."

Bailly shook his head, waved his pipe vehemently.

"Virtue's flaws don't alter its really fundamental quality."

"Then you agree all Socialists are knaves or fools," George stormed.

"Perhaps, George," Bailly said, patiently, "you'll define a conservative for me. There. Never mind. Somewhere in between we may find an honest generosity, a wise sympathy. It may come from this war—a huge and wise balance of power of the right, an honest recognition of men as individuals rather than as members of classes. Perhaps your friend Wandel is on the track of something of the sort. I like to think it is really what the war is being fought for."

"The war," George said, "is being fought for men with fat paunches and pocket-books."

"Then you're quite sure you don't want to go?"

"Why should I as long as my stomach and my pocket-book are comfortable? But I'm not sure whether I'll go or not. That's what worries me."

"You've made," Bailly said, testily, "enough out of the war to warrant your giving it something."

George grinned. It was quite like old times.

"Even myself, on top of all the rest I might make out of it by staying back?"

"You're not as selfish as you'd have me believe," Bailly cried.

George quoted a phrase of Wandel's since Bailly seemed just now to approve of the adventurer.

"The man that keeps himself makes the world better."

Bailly drove him out of the room to dress for dinner.

"I won't talk to you any more," he said. "I won't curse the loiterer at the base until I am sure he isn't going to climb."

XVI

At least George wouldn't have to decide at once. When it became clear that for the present Mrs. Alston's optimism was justified he breathed easier. With Goodhue, Lambert, and Mundy he applied himself unreservedly to his work. Consequently he didn't visit much, didn't see Sylvia again until the fall when he met her at a dinner at the Goodhues'. She shrank from him perceptibly, but there was no escape. He studied her with an easier mind. No date for her wedding had been set. Until that moment should come there was nothing he could do. What he would be able to accomplish then was problematical. Something. She shouldn't throw herself away on Blodgett.

"It must be comforting," he heard her say to Goodhue, "to know if trouble comes your wonderful firm will be taken care of."

George guessed she had meant him to hear that.

"I'm sure I hope so," Goodhue answered her, "but what do you mean?"

"I heard Mr. Morton say once he didn't think he'd care to go to war. Didn't I, Mr. Morton?"

Goodhue, clearly puzzled by her manner, laughed.

"Give us something more useful, Sylvia. He's a born fighter."

"I believe I said it," George answered her. "There might be problems here I couldn't very well desert."

Her eyes wavered. He recalled her hysterical manner that evening at Oakmont. She still sought chances to hurt him. In spite of Blodgett, then, she recognized a state of contest between them. He smiled contentedly, for as long as that persisted his cause was alive.

XVII

It languished, however, during the winter as did Blodgett's hopes of a speedy wedding. The Planters' Fifth Avenue home remained closed, because of Mr. Planter's health. Sylvia and her mother went south with him. Blodgett made a number of flying trips, deserting his affairs to that extent to be with Sylvia. George was satisfied for the present to let things drift.

Dalrymple certainly had drifted with events. He had taken no pains to hide the shock of Sylvia's engagement. George of all people could understand his disappointment, his helpless rage; but Dalrymple hadn't bothered him, and he had about decided he never would.

One spring day, quite without warning, he appeared in George's office. It was not long after the Planters' return to Oakmont. What did he want here? Was there any point spending money on him as matters stood?

He looked at Dalrymple, a good deal surprised, reading the dissipation recorded in his face, the nervousness exposed by the mobile hands. All at once he understood why he had come at last. Dalrymple had wandered too far. The patience of his friends had been exhausted. Perhaps Wandel had taken George's hint. At any rate, he had let himself in for it.

"An opportunity to make a little money," Dalrymple was mumbling uneasily. "Need capital. Not much. You said at Blodgett's—just happened to remember it, and was near——"

"How much?" George demanded, stopping his feeble lies.

Dalrymple, George suspected, because of his manner, asked for less than half what he had come to get.

"What say to a couple thousand? Make it five hundred more if you can. Not much in the way of security."

"Never mind the security."

George pressed a button, and directed the clerk who responded to draw up a note.

"Got to sign something?" Dalrymple asked, suspiciously.

George smiled.

"Do you mind my keeping a little record of where my money goes—in place of security?"

Dalrymple was quite red.

"All right, if you insist."

"I insist. Care to change your mind?"

"No. Only thought it was just a little loan between—friends."

The word left his tongue with difficulty. George guessed that the other retained enough decency to loathe himself for having to use it. The nervousness of the long fingers increased while the clerk prepared the note and George wrote the check. George put a pen in the unsteady hand.

"Sign here, please."

Dalrymple obeyed with a signature, shaky, barely legible.

"Nice of you to do me a favour. Appreciate it. Thanks."

To George it would have been worth that money to find out just how Sylvia's extended engagement had affected Dalrymple. Was it responsible for his speeding up on the dangerous path of pleasure? Of that he could learn only what the other chose to disclose, probably nothing. But what was he waiting for now that he had the money? Why were his fingers twitching faster than ever?

"Didn't see Lambert when I came in," he managed.

"I daresay he's about," George said. "Want him?"

Dalrymple raised his hand.

"That's just it," he whispered. "Rather not see Lambert. Rather this little transaction were kept sub rosa. You understand. No point Lambert's knowing."

"Why not?" George asked, coolly, feeling himself on the edge of the truth.

"I'm a little off the Planters," Dalrymple said.

"Since when?"

Dalrymple's face became redder than ever. For a moment his nervousness abandoned him. He seemed to stiffen with violent thoughts.

"Don't like buying and selling of women in any family. Not as decent as slavery."

George rose quietly. He hadn't expected just this.

"Be careful," he warned. "What are you talking about?"

"What the whole town talks about," Dalrymple burst out. "You know her. I ask you. Hasn't she enough without selling herself, body and soul? No better than an unmentionable——"

George sprang. He didn't stop to tell himself that Dalrymple was unaccountable, in a sense, out of his head. He didn't dare stop, because he knew if Dalrymple finished that sentence he would try to kill him. Dalrymple's mouth fell open, in fact, before the unexpected attack. He couldn't complete the sentence, didn't try to; drew back against the desk instead; grasped a convenient ink container; threw it; called shrilly for help.

George shook the streaming black liquid from his face. With his stained hands he grasped Dalrymple. His fingers tightened with a feeling of profound satisfaction. No masks now! Finally the enmity of years was unleashed. He had Dalrymple where he had always wanted him.

"One more word——You been saying that kind of thing——"

The hurrying of many feet in the outer office recalled him. The impulsive George Morton crept back beneath the veneer. He let Dalrymple go, drew out his handkerchief, looked distastefully at the black stains on his clothing.

Lambert and Goodhue closed the door on the curious clerks.

"What in heaven's name——"

It was Lambert who had spoken. Goodhue merely shrugged his shoulders, as if he had all along expected such a culmination.

Dalrymple, fingering his throat spasmodically, sank in a chair. His face infused. His breath came audibly.

"Caught him harder than I realized," George reflected. He spoke aloud with his whimsical smile.

"Looks as if I'd lost my temper. I don't often do it."

He had no regret. He was happy. He believed himself nearer Sylvia than he had ever been. He felt in grasping Dalrymple's throat as if he had touched her hands.

He failed to give its true value, consequently, to Lambert's angry turning on him after Dalrymple's shaking accusation.

"Sorry, Lambert. Had to—to do what I could. He—he was rotten impertinent about—about—Sylvia."

XVIII

Goodhue caught Lambert's arm. In a flash George read the meaning of Dalrymple's charge. Naturally he was the one to do something of the sort, had to try it. He had been afraid of Lambert's knowing of the loan. How much less could he let Lambert learn why George had justifiably shut his mouth.

"Keep quiet," George warned Lambert. "Dicky! Can you get him out of here. He needs attention. I'm not a doctor. He hasn't been himself since he came."

But Lambert wouldn't have it.

"Repeat that, Dolly," he commanded.

George walked to Dalrymple.

"You'll not say another word."

Dalrymple stood up, weaving his fingers in and out; as it were, clasping his hands to George.

"I'm sorry, Morton. Damn sorry. Forget—forget——"

His voice wandered into a difficult silence, as if he had seen this way, too, a chance of implicating himself with Sylvia's brother; but his eyes continued to beg George. They were like the eyes of an animal, caught in a net, beseeching release.

Goodhue gave him his hat. He took it but drew away from the other's touch on his arm.

"Don't think I'm not all right," he said in a frightened voice. "Took me by surprise, but I'm all right—quite all right. Going home."

He glanced at Lambert and again at George, then left the room, pulling at his necktie, Goodhue anxiously at his heels.

"What about it?" Lambert asked George sharply.

George sat down, still trying to rid himself of the black souvenirs of the encounter.

"Don't be a fool. I said nothing about your sister—nothing whatever."

He couldn't get rid of Dalrymple's begging eyes, yet why should he spare him at all?

"The rest of it," he went on, easily, "is between Dalrymple and me."

"I'm not sure," Lambert challenged.

He reminded George of the younger Lambert who had advanced with a whip in his hand.

"See here," he said. "You can't make me talk about anything I don't care to. I've told you I didn't mention your sister. I couldn't to that fellow."

Lambert spread his hands.

"What is there about you and Sylvia—ever since that day? I believe you, but I tried to give you a licking for her sake once, and I'd do it again."

George laughed pleasantly.

"You make me feel young."

Clearly Lambert meant to warn him, for he went on, still aggressive:

"I care more for her than anybody in the world."

The laughter left George's face.

"Anybody?"

Lambert was self-conscious now.

"Just about. See here. What are you driving at?"

George yawned.

"I must wash up. I've a lot of work to do."

"I'd like to know what went on here," Lambert said.

"Why don't you ask Dalrymple, then?"

"Dolly isn't all bad," Lambert offered as he left. "He's been my friend a good many years."

"Then by all means keep him," George answered, "and keep him to yourself; but when he comes around hang on to the ink pots."

XIX

His apparent good humour didn't survive the closing of the door. His dislike of Dalrymple fattened on his memory of the incident. It had left a sting. He hadn't stopped the man in time. Selling herself! Was she? She appeared to his mind, no longer intolerant, rather with an air of shame-faced apology for all the world. That was what hurt. He hadn't stopped Dalrymple in time.

But there was no sale yet, nothing whatever, except an engagement which, after a year, showed no symptoms of fruition. Blodgett was aware of it, and couldn't hide his anxiety. Evidently he wanted to talk about it, did talk about it to George when he met him in the hall not long after Dalrymple's visit.

"Why don't you ever run down to Oakmont with Lambert?" he asked.

Only Blodgett would have put such a question, and perhaps even he designed it merely as an entrance to his favourite topic. George evaded with a fairly truthful account of office pressure.

"Old Planter asks after you," Blodgett went on, uncomfortably. "Admires you, because you've done about what he had at your age, and it was easier then. Old man's not well. That's tough on Josiah."

"Tough?"

Blodgett mopped his face with a brilliant handkerchief. His rotund stomach rose and fell with a sigh.

"His gout's worse—all sorts of complications. She's the apple of his eye. Guess you know that. Won't desert him now. Wants to wait till he's better, or—or——"

He added naÏvely:

"Hope to heaven he bucks up soon."

George watched Blodgett's hopes dwindle, for Old Planter didn't buck up, nor did he grow perceptibly worse. From time to time he visited his marble temple, but for the most part men went to him at Oakmont; Blodgett, of course, with his double errand of business and romance, most frequently of all. And Sylvia did cling to her father, but George's satisfaction increased, for he agreed with Wandel: she was capable of a feeling far more powerful than filial devotion. Blodgett, clearly, had failed to arouse it.

Her sense of duty, however, kept her nearly entirely away from George; for Lambert, either because Sylvia had spoken to him, or because he himself had sensed a false step, failed to repeat his invitation to Oakmont. The row with Dalrymple, although that had not been mentioned again, made it unlikely that he ever would.

Dalrymple had dropped out of sight. George heard vaguely that he was taking a rest cure in the northern part of the state. He couldn't fancy meeting him again without desiring to add to the punishment he had already given. The man was impossible. He had sneaked from that room, leaving the note in George's hands, the check in his own pocket. And the check had been cashed. No madness of excitement could account for that.

It wasn't until summer that he ran into him, and with a black temper saw Sylvia at his side. If she only knew! She ought to know. It increased his bad humour that he couldn't tell her.

He regretted the necessity that had made such a meeting possible. It had, however, for a long time impressed him. Even flabby old Blodgett had noticed, and had advised less work and more play. To combat his feeling of staleness, the relaxing of his long, carefully conditioned muscles, George had forced himself to play polo at a Long Island club into which he had hurried because of his skill at the game, or to take an occasional late round of golf, which he didn't care for particularly but which he managed very well in view of his inexperience. It was while he was ordering dinner with Goodhue one night at the Long Island club that Sylvia and Dalrymple drove up with the Sinclairs. The older pair came straight to the two, while Sylvia and Dalrymple followed with an obvious reluctance.

"We spirited her away for the night," Mrs. Sinclair explained.

She turned to Sylvia.

"My dear, I'll see that you don't cloister yourself any more. Your father's going on for years."

Yet it occurred to George, as he looked at her, that her cloistering had accomplished no change. The alteration in Dalrymple, on the other hand, was striking. George, as he met him with a difficult ease of manner, quite as if nothing had happened, couldn't account for it; for the light-headed look had gone from Dalrymple's eyes, and much of the stamp of dissipation from his face. His hands, too, were quiet. Was it credible he had forgotten the struggle in George's office? No. He had cashed the check; yet his manner suggested a blank memory except, perhaps, for its too-pronounced cordiality.

There was nothing for it but a dinner together. The Sinclairs expected it, and couldn't be made to understand why it should embarrass any one. Dalrymple really helped matters. His mind worked clearly, and he could, George had to acknowledge, exert a certain charm when he tried. Moreover, he didn't drink, even refusing the cocktail a waiter offered him just before they went inside.

As always George disliked speaking to Sylvia in casual tones of indifferent topics. She met him at first pleasantly enough on that ground—too pleasantly, so that he found himself waiting for some acknowledgment that she had not forgotten; that she still believed in their quarrel. It came at last rather sharply through the topic that was universal just then of General Wood's civilian training camps at Plattsburgh. Lambert had gone. Goodhue would follow the next month, having agreed to that arrangement for the sake of the office. Even Blodgett was there. Sylvia took a great pride in the fact, pointed it at George.

"Although," she laughed, "I'm told he's not popular with his tent mates. I hear he has a telephone fastened to his tent pole. I don't know whether that's true. He's never mentioned it. But I do know he has three secretaries in a house just off the reservation. Of course it's a sacrifice for him to be at Plattsburgh at all."

George stared at her. There was no question. Her voice, her face, expressed a tolerant liking for the man. The engagement had lasted considerably more than a year, and now she had an air of giving a public reminder of its ultimate outcome. Or was it for him alone, as her original announcement had been?

"I'm off next month," Goodhue said. "Lambert writes it's good fun and not at all uncomfortable."

"I'll be with you, Dicky," Dalrymple put in. "Beneficial affair, besides duty, and all that."

George experienced relief at the very moment he resented her attack most. It was still worth while trying to hurt him.

"Practically everyone has gone or is going. It's splendid. When are you booked for, Mr. Morton?"

Even the Sinclairs had silently asked that question. They looked at him expectantly.

"I'm not going at all," he answered, bluntly.

"I remember," she said. "You didn't believe in war or something, wasn't it? But this isn't exactly war."

George smiled.

"Scarcely," he said. "It's hiking, singing, playing cards, rattling off stories, largely done by some old men who couldn't get a job in the army of Methuselah. Why should I waste my time at that?"

"It's a start," Mr. Sinclair said, seriously. "We have to do something."

George hid his sneer. Everywhere the spirit was growing to make any kind of a drum that would bang.

"If you don't think Wilson will keep us out of it," he asked, earnestly, "why not get after Wilson and make him start something general, efficient, fundamental? I've never heard of a President who wasn't sensitive to the pressure of the country."

There was no use talking that way. These people were satisfied with the noise at Plattsburgh. He was glad when the meal ended, when he could get away.

At the automobile he managed to help Sylvia into her cloak, and he took the opportunity to whisper:

"When is the great event coming off?"

She turned, looked at him, and didn't answer. She mounted to the back seat beside Dalrymple.

XX

George didn't see her again until winter. He heard through the desolate Blodgett that she had gone with her parents to the Canadian Rockies.

Nearly everyone seemed to flee north that summer as if in a final effort to cajole play. The Alstons moved to Maine unusually early, and didn't return until late fall. Betty put it plainly enough to him then.

"I'm sorry to be back. Don't you feel the desire to get as far away as possible from things, to escape?"

"To escape what, Betty?"

"That's just it. One doesn't know. Something one doesn't want to know."

It was queer that Betty never asked why he hadn't been to Plattsburgh, never urged a definite decision as to what he would do if——

The "if" lost a little of its power with him. At times he was even inclined to share Mrs. Alston's optimism. It was easy to drift with Washington. Besides, he was too busy to worry about much except his growing accumulation of profits from bloodshed. He was brought back momentarily when Lambert and Goodhue received commissions as captains in the reserve corps. The Plattsburgh noise still echoed. He couldn't help a feeling of relief when people flocked back and the town became normal again, encouraging him to believe that nothing could happen to tear him away from this fascinating pursuit of getting rich for Sylvia while he waited for her next move.

That came with a stark brutality a few weeks after the holidays. He had seen her only the evening before, sitting next to Blodgett at dinner with a remote expression in her eyes that had made him hopeful. The article in the morning newspaper, consequently, took him more by surprise than the original announcement of the engagement had done. Sylvia and Blodgett would be married on the fifteenth of the following August.

On top of that shock events combined to rebuke his recent confidence. His desires had taken too much for granted. The folly of the Mrs. Alstons and the wisdom of the Baillys and Sinclairs were forced upon him. Wilson wasn't going to keep them out of it. George stood face to face with the decision he had shirked when the Lusitania had taken her fatal dive.

It couldn't be shirked again, for the declaration of war appeared to be a matter of days, weeks at the most. The drum was beginning to sound with a rising resonance. Lambert and Goodhue would be among the first to leave. Already they made their plans. They didn't seem to care what became of the business.

"What are you up to, George?" they asked.

He put them off. He wanted to think it out. He didn't care to have his decision blurred by the rattling of a drum. Yet it was patent to him if he should go at all it would be with his partners, among the first. The thought of such a triple desertion appalled him. Mundy was incomparable for system and routine, but if he had possessed the rare selective foresight demanded for the steering of a big business he would long since have been at the helm of his own house. It would be far better, if George had to go, to sell the stock and the mass of soaring securities the firm had acquired; in short, to close out before competitors could squeeze the abandoned ship from the channel.

Why dwell on so wasteful an alternative? Why not turn sanely from so sentimental a choice? It was clear enough to him that it would not long survive the war, all this singing and shouting, this driving forth by older people on the winds of a safe enthusiasm of countless young men to grotesque places of death.

He paced his room. That was just it. It was the present he had to consider, and the present thoughts of people who hadn't yet returned to their inevitable practicality, forgetfulness, and ingratitude; most of all to the present thoughts of Sylvia. To him she had made those thoughts sufficiently plain. Among non-combatant enthusiasts she would be the most exigent. Why swing from choice to choice any longer? To be as he had fancied she would wish, he had struggled, denied, kept himself clean, sought minutely for the proper veneer; and so far he had kept his record straight. With her it was his one weapon. He couldn't throw that away.

He stopped his pacing. He sat before his desk, his head in his hands, listening to the cacophanous beating of drums by the majority for the anxious marching of a few.

It was settled. He had always known it would be, in just that way.

XXI

George took his physical examination at Governor's Island with the earliest of the candidates for the First Officers' Training Camp. As soon as he had returned to his office he wrote to Bailly:

"I'm going to your cheerful war, after all. I'll drop in the end of the week."

He summoned Lambert and Goodhue. Until then he had told them nothing definite.

"Of course," he said, "we'll have a few months, but before we leave America everything will have to be settled. We'll have to know just where we stand."

Into the midst of their sombre discussion slipped the tinkling of the telephone. George answered. He glanced at the others.

"It's Blodgett. Wants me right away. Something important."

He hurried down, wondering what was up. Blodgett's voice had vibrated with an unaccustomed passion that had left with George an impression of whole-hearted revolt; and when he got in the massive, over-decorated office his curiosity grew, for Blodgett looked as if he had dressed against time and without valet or mirror. The straggly pale hair about the ears was rumpled. His necktie was awry. The pudgy hands shook a trifle. George's heart quickened. Blodgett had had bad news. What was the worst news Blodgett could have?

"I know," Blodgett began, "that you and your partners have passed and are going to Plattsburgh to become officers."

All at once George caught the meaning of Blodgett's disarray, and his hope was replaced by a mirth he had difficulty hiding.

"You don't mean you've been over to Governor's Island——"

Blodgett stood up.

"Yes," he confessed, solemnly. "Just got back from my physical examination. Would you believe it, George, the darned fools wouldn't have me, because I'm too fat? Called it obese, as if it was some kind of a disease, instead of just my natural inclination to fleshiness."

One of his pudgy hands struck his chest.

"Never stopped to see that my heart's all right, and that's what we want, people whose hearts are all right."

Momentarily the enmity aroused by circumstances fled from George. The man was genuine, suffering from a devastating disappointment; but surely he hadn't called him downstairs only to witness this outbreak.

Blodgett lowered himself to his chair. He wiped his face with one of his gay handkerchiefs. He spoke reasonably.

"My place is at home. All right. I'll make it easier then for the thin people that can go. I'm going to look after you boys. Mundy's not big enough. I've got a man in view I can keep tabs on, and Blodgett'll always be sitting down here seeing you don't get stung."

He sighed profoundly.

"Guess that'll have to be my share."

George would rather have had the man curse him. It struck directly at his pride to submit to this unmasking of his jealous opinion. He strangled his quick impulse to reach forward, to grasp Blodgett's hand, to beg his pardon. Instead he tried to find ways of avoiding the generous gift.

"We can't settle anything yet. A dozen circumstances may arise. The war may end——"

"When you go, George," Blodgett said, wistfully.

And George knew that in the end he couldn't refuse without disclosing everything; that his partners wouldn't let him. It added strangely enough to his discomfort that he should leave the disappointed man with a confident feeling that he need make no move to see Sylvia before going to Plattsburgh. In any case, the camp ought to be over before the fifteenth of August.

His partners were pleased enough by his recital, and determined to accept Blodgett's offer.

"He's the most generous soul that ever lived," Goodhue said, warmly.

Lambert agreed, but George thought he detected a troubled light in his eyes.

Blodgett's generosity continued to worry George, to accuse him. After all, Blodgett had accomplished a great deal more than he. With only one of the necessities he had made friends, had become engaged to Sylvia Planter. No. There was something besides that. He had had an unaffected personality to offer, and—he had said it himself—a heart that was all right.

George asked himself now if Blodgett had helped him in the first place, not because he had been Mr. Alston and Dicky Goodhue's friend, but simply because he had liked him. He was inclined to believe it. He had reached the point where he admitted that many people had been friendly and useful to him because he had what Blodgett lacked, an exceptional appearance, a rugged power behind acquired graces. Squibs, he realized, had put his finger on that long ago. He was glad he was going down. The tutor would give him his usual disciplinary tonic.

But it was a changed Squibs that met George; a nearly silent Squibs, who spoke only to praise; a slightly apprehensive Squibs. George tried to reassure Mrs. Bailly.

"Three months at Plattsburgh, then nobody knows how much longer to whip our division into shape. The war will probably be over before we get across."

But she didn't believe it, nor did her husband.

"You'll be in it, George, before the war's over. Do you know, you're nearer paying me back than you've ever been."

George was uncomfortable before such adulation.

"Please don't think," he protested, "that I'm going over for any tricky ideals or to save a lot of advanced thinkers from their utter folly."

"Then what are you going for?" Bailly asked.

George was surprised that he lacked an answer.

"Oh, because one has to go," he evaded.

Bailly's smile was contented.

"What better reason could any man want?"

They had an air of showing him about Princeton as if he must absorb its beauties for the last time. Their visit to the Alstons was shrouded with all the sullen accompaniments of a permanent farewell. George was inclined to smile. He hadn't got as far as weighing his chances of being hit; the present was too crowded, stretched too far; included Betty, for instance, and Lambert whom he was surprised to find in the Tudor house, prepared to remain evidently until he should leave for Plattsburgh. The Alstons misgivings centred rather obviously on Lambert. George, when he took Betty's hand to say good-bye that evening, felt with a desolate regret that for the first time in all their acquaintance her fingers failed to reach his mind.

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