George crushed his uneasy thoughts, trying to dwell instead on the idea that he was going back to the normal, but all at once he experienced a dread of the normal, perhaps, because he was no longer normal himself. Could he limp before Sylvia with his old assurance? Would people pity him, or would he irritate them because he had a disability? And snatches of his talks at the front with Wandel etched themselves sharply against his chaotic recollections of those days. Was Wandel fair? Was it, indeed, the original George Morton people had always liked? Here, apart from the turmoil, he didn't believe it, didn't dare believe it. Those people wouldn't have cared for him except for his assumption of qualities which he had chosen as from a counter display. Yet was it the real George Morton that made him in superlative moments break the traces of his acquired judgments, as he had done at New Haven, in the Argonne, to dash selflessly into the service of others? Rotten inside, indeed! Even in the hospital he set out to crush that impulsive, dangerous part of him.

But the nearer he drew to home the more he suffered from a depression that he could only define as homesickness—homesickness for the old ways, the old habits, the old thoughts; and the memory of his temerity with Sylvia at the moment of their parting was like a great cloud threatening the future with destructive storm.

Lambert, wearing a contrivance the doctors had given him in place of what the country had taken away, accompanied by Betty and the Baillys, met the transport. Betty and Mrs. Bailly cried, and George shook his heavy stick at them.

"See here! I'm not going to limp like this always."

Bailly encircled him with his thin arms.

"You're too old to play football, anyway, George."

George found himself wanting Betty's arms, their forgetfulness, their understanding, their tenderness.

"When are you two going to be married?" he forced himself to ask.

Betty looked away, her white cheeks flushing, but Lambert hurried an answer.

"As soon as you're able to get to Princeton. You're to be best man."

"Honoured."

So Lambert's crippling hadn't made any difference to Betty, but how did Sylvia take it? He wanted to ask Lambert where she was, if anything had happened to her, any other mad affair, now that the war was over, like the one with Blodgett; but he couldn't ask, and no one volunteered to tell him, and it wasn't until his visit to Oakmont, on his first leave from the hospital, that he learned anything whatever about her, and that was only what his eyes in a moment told him.

Lambert drove over and got George, explaining that his mother wanted to see him.

"She'd have come to the dock," he said, "but Father these days is rather hard to leave."

George went reluctantly, belligerently, for since his landing his feeling of homesickness had increased with the realization that his victorious country was more radically altered than he had fancied. The ride, however, had the advantage of an uninterrupted talk with Lambert which developed gossip that Blodgett, stuffed with business, hadn't yet given him.

Goodhue and Wandel, for instance, were still abroad, holding down showy jobs at the peace conference. Dalrymple, on the other hand, had been home for months.

"Most successful war," Lambert told George. "Scarcely smelled fire, but got a couple foreign decorations, and a promotion—my poor old leg wasn't worth it, or yours, George, but what odds now? And as soon as the show stopped at Sedan he was trotting back. Can't help admiring him, for that sort of thing spells success, and he's steady as a church. Try to realize that, and take a new start with him, for he's really likeable when he keeps to the straight and narrow. Prohibition's going to fit in very well, although I believe he's got himself in hand."

George stared at the ugly, familiar landscape, trying not to listen, particularly to the rest. Why should the Planters have taken Dalrymple into the marble temple?

"A small start," Lambert was saying, "but if he makes the grade there's a big future for him there. I fancy he's anxious to meet you halfway. How about you, George?"

"I'll make no promises," George said. "It depends entirely on Dalrymple."

Lambert didn't warn him, so he didn't expect to find Dalrymple enjoying the early spring graces of Oakmont. He managed the moment of meeting, however, without disclosing anything. Dalrymple, for the time, was quite unimportant. It was Sylvia he was anxious about, Sylvia who undoubtedly nursed a sort of horror of what he had ventured to do and say at Upton. Everyone else was outside, as if making a special effort to welcome him. Where was she?

He resented the worshipful attentions of the servants.

"I'm quite capable of managing myself," he said, as he motioned them aside and lowered himself from the automobile.

He disliked old Planter's heartiness, although he could see the physical effort it cost, for the once-threatening eyes were nearly dark; and the big shoulders stooped forward as if in a constant effort to escape a pursuing pain; and the voice, which talked about heroes and the country's debt and the Planters' debt, quavered and once or twice broke altogether, then groped doubtfully ahead in an effort to recover the propelling thought.

Mrs. Planter, at least, spared him any sentimental gratitude. She was rather grayer and had in her face some unremembered lines, but those were the only changes George could detect. As far as her manner went this greeting might have followed the farewell at Upton after only a day or so.

"I hope your wound isn't very painful."

"My limping," he answered, "is simply bad habit. I'm overcoming it."

"That's nice. Then you'll be able to play polo again!"

"I should hope so, as long as ponies have four good legs."

He wished other people could be like her, so unobtrusively, unannoyingly primeval.

As he entered the hall he saw Sylvia without warning, and he caught his breath and watched her as she came slowly down the stairs. He tried to realize that this was that coveted moment he had so frequently fancied the war would deny him—the moment that brought him face to face with Sylvia again, to witness her enmity, to desire to break it down, to want her more than he had ever done.

She came straight to him, but even in the presence of the others she didn't offer her hand, and all she said was:

"I was quite sure you would come back."

"You knew I had to," he laughed.

Then he sharpened his ears, for she was telling her brother something about Betty's having telephoned she was driving over to take Lambert, Dalrymple, and herself to Princeton.

No. The war had changed her less than any one George had seen. She was as beautiful, as unforgiving, as intolerant; and he guessed that it was she and not Betty who had made the arrangement which would take her away from him.

"George will come, too," Lambert began.

"Afraid I'm not up to it," George refused, dryly.

At Betty's wedding, however, she would have to be with him, for it developed during this nervous chatter that they would share the honours of the bridal party.

So, helplessly, he had to watch her go, and for a moment he felt as if he had had a strong tonic, for she alone had been able to give him an impression that the world hadn't altered much, after all.

The reaction came in the quiet hours following. He was at first resentful that Mrs. Planter should accompany him on the painful walk the doctors had ordered him, like Old Planter, to take daily. He had wanted to go back to the little house, highest barrier of all which Sylvia would never let him climb. Then, glancing at the quiet woman, he squared his shoulders. Suppose Wandel had been right! Here was a test. At any rate, the war was a pretty large and black background for so tiny a high light. Purposefully, therefore, he carried out his original purpose. By the side of Mrs. Planter he limped toward the little house. They didn't say much. It wasn't easy for him to talk while he exercised, and perhaps she understood that.

Even before the clean white building shone in the sun through the trees he heard a sound that made him wince. It was like a distant drum, badly played. Then he understood what it was, and his boyhood, and the day of awakening and revolt, submerged him in a hot wave of shame. He could see his mother rising and bending rhythmically over fine linen which emerged from dirty water, making her arms look too red and swollen. He glanced quickly at Mrs. Planter to whose serenity had gone the upward effort of many generations. Just how appalling, now that war had mocked life so dreadfully, now that a pitiless hand had a moment ago stripped all pretence from the world, was the difference between them?

It was the woman at the tub, curiously enough, who seemed trying to tell him, trying to warn him to keep his mouth shut. Then the house was visible through the trees. He raised his stick.

"I wanted to see it again," he said, defiantly, "because I was born there. I lived there."

She paused and stared with him, without saying anything, without any change of expression. After a time she turned.

"Have you looked enough? Shall we go back, George?"

He nodded, glancing at her wonderingly. After all, he had had very little love in his life. Mrs. Bailly, Betty——

He had never dreamed of such gratitude as this. Lambert, home with his war madness fresh upon him, must have told her, as an example of what a man might do. But was her action all gratitude? Rather wasn't it a signpost at the parting of two ages?

If that were so, he told himself, the world had left Sylvia hopelessly behind.

II

The memory of that unguarded moment remained in his mind uncomfortably. He carried it finally from the hospital to his musty apartment, where he stripped off his uniform and looked in the glass, for the first time in nearly two years his own master, no man's servant.

Was he his own master as long as he could commit such sentimental follies, as long as he could suspect that he had told Wandel the truth on the Vesle? This nostalgia must be the rebound from the war, of which he had heard so much, which made men weak, or lazy, or indifferent.

He continued to stare in the glass, angry, amazed. He had to overcome this homesick feeling. He had to prepare himself for harder battles than he had ever fought. He had had plenty of warning of the selfishness that was creeping over the world like a black pestilence. Where was his own self-will that had carried him so far?

He locked himself, as it were, in his apartment. He sat down and called on his will. With a systematic brutality he got himself in hand. He reviewed his aims: to make more money, to get Sylvia. He emerged at last, hard and uncompromising, ready for the selfish ones, and went down town. Blodgett greeted him with a cheer.

"Miracles! For the first time since you got back you look yourself again."

"I am," George answered, "all but the limp. That will go some day maybe."

He wanted it to go. He desired enormously to rid himself of the last reminder of his service.

Lambert was definitely caught by the marble temple, but Goodhue and he would stay together, more or less tied to Blodgett, to accept the opportunities George foresaw for dragging money by sharp reasoning from the reconstruction period. He applied himself to exchange. From their position they could run wild in the stock market at little risk, but there were big things to be made out of exchange, about which the cleverest men didn't seem to know anything worth a penny in any currency.

Everyone noticed his recovery, and everyone congratulated him except Bailly. When George went down to Betty's wedding the long tutor met him at the station, crying out querulously:

"What's happened to you?"

George laughed.

"Got over the war reaction, I guess."

"What the deuce did you go to war for at all then?" Bailly asked.

"Haven't found that out myself yet," George answered, "but I know I wouldn't go to another, even if they'd have me."

He grimaced at his injured foot.

"And they're going to give you some kind of a medal!" Bailly cried.

"I didn't ask for it," George said, "but I daresay a lot of people, you among them, went down to Washington and did."

Bailly was a trifle uncomfortable.

"See here," George said. "I don't want your old medal, and I don't intend to be scolded about it. I suppose I've got to rush right out to the Alstons."

"Let's stop at the club," Bailly proposed. "People want to see you. We'll fight the war over with the veterans."

"Damn the war!" George said.

Mrs. Bailly, when he paused for a moment at the house in Dickinson Street, attacked him, and quite innocently, from a different direction.

"It was the wish of my life, George, that you should have Betty, and you might have had. I can't help feeling that."

"You're prejudiced," George laughed.

He went to the Alstons, nevertheless, almost unwillingly, and he delayed his arrival until the last minute. The intimate party had gathered for a dinner and a rehearsal that night. The wedding was set for the next evening.

The Tudor house had an unfamiliar air, as though Betty already had taken from it every feature that had given it distinction in George's mind. And Betty herself was caught by all those detailed considerations that surround a girl, at this vital moment of her life, with an atmosphere regal, mysterious, a little sacred. So George didn't see her until just before dinner, or Sylvia, who was upstairs with her. Lambert and Blodgett were about, however, and so was Dalrymple. George was glad Lambert had asked Blodgett to usher; he owed it to him, but he was annoyed that Dalrymple should have been included in the party, for it was another mark, on top of his presence in the marble temple, of a tightening bond of intimacy between him and the Planters. George examined the man, therefore, with an eager curiosity. He looked well enough, but George remained unconvinced by his apparent reformation, suspecting its real purpose was to impress a willing public, for he had studied Dalrymple during many years without uncovering any real strength, or any disposition not to answer gladly to every appeal of the senses. At least he was restless, rising from his chair too often to wander about the room, but George conceded with a smile that his own arrival might be responsible for that. The matter of the notes hadn't been mentioned, but they existed undoubtedly even in Dalrymple's careless mind, which must have forecasted an uncomfortable day of payment.

Lambert seemed sure enough of his friend.

"Dolly's sticking to the job like a leech," he said to George when they went upstairs to dress.

"I've no faith in him," George answered, shortly.

"You're an unforgiving brute," Lambert said.

George hastened away from the subject.

"I'm not chameleon, at least," he admitted with a smile, "which reminds me. I don't see any of your dearly beloved brothers of the ranks in your bridal party. Have you put private Oscar Liporowski up for any of your clubs yet?"

"Unforgiving and unforgetting!" Lambert laughed.

"Then you acknowledge that talk in the Argonne was war madness?"

"By no means," Lambert answered, suddenly serious. "Let me get married, will you? I can't bother with anything else now. Sylvia, whose mind isn't filled with romance, threatens to become the socialist of the family."

George stared at him.

"What are you talking about?"

"About what Sylvia's talking about," Lambert answered.

"Now I know you're mad," George said.

Lambert shook his head.

"But I don't take her very seriously. It's a nice game to seek beauties in Bolshevism. It's played in some of the best houses. You must have observed it—how wonderfully it helps get through a tea or a dinner."

III

George went to his own room, amused and curious. Could Sylvia talk communism, even parrot-like, and deny him the rights of a brother? He became more anxious than before to see her. He shrank, on the other hand, from facing Betty who was about to take this enormous step permanently away from him. Out of his window he could see the tree beneath which he had made his confession in an effort to kill Betty's kindness. If he had followed her to the castle then Lambert wouldn't be limping about exposing a happiness that made George envious and discontented. It was a reminder with a vengeance that his friends were mating. Was he, like Blodgett, doomed to a revolting celibacy?

Blodgett, as far as that went, seemed quite to have recovered from the blow Sylvia had given his pride and heart. With his increasing fortune his girth had increased, his cheeks grown fuller, his eyes smaller.

He was chatting, when George came down, with Old Planter, who sat slouched in an easy chair in the library, and Mr. Alston. It was evident that the occasion was not a joyous one for Betty's father.

"I've half a mind to sell out here," George heard him say, "and take a share in a coÖperative apartment in town. Without Betty the house will be like a world without a sun."

Blodgett, George guessed, was tottering on the threshold of expansive sympathy. He drew back, beckoning George.

"Here's your purchaser, Alston. I never knew a half back stay single so long. And now he's a hero. He's bound to need a nest soon."

Mr. Alston smiled at him.

"Is there anything in that, George?"

George wanted to tell Blodgett to mind his own business. How could the man, after his recent experience, make cumbersome jokes of that colour?

"There was a time," Mr. Alston went on, "when I fancied you were going to ask me for Betty. The thought of refusing used to worry me."

George laughed uncomfortably.

"So you would have refused?"

"Naturally. I don't think I could have said yes to Lambert if it hadn't been for the war. If you ever have a daughter—just one—you'll know what I mean."

From the three men George received an impression of imminence, shared it himself. They talked merely to cover their suspense. They were like people in a throne room, attentive for the entrance of a figure, exalted, powerful, nearly legendary. Betty, he reflected, had become that because she was about to marry. He found himself fascinated, too, looking at the door, waiting with a choked feeling for that girl who had unconsciously tempted him from their first meeting. Her arrival, indeed, had about it something of the processional. Mrs. Planter entered the doorway first, nodding absent-mindedly to the men. Betty's mother followed, as imperial as ever, more so, if anything, George thought, and quite unaffected by the deeper elements that gave to this quiet wedding in a country house a breath of tragedy. Betty Alston Planter! That evolution clearly meant happiness for her. She tried to express it through vivacious gestures and cheerful, uncompleted sentences. Betty next—after a tiny interval, entering not without hesitation exposed in her walk, in her tall and graceful figure, in her face which was unaccustomedly colourful, in her eyes which turned from one to another, doubtful, apprehensive, groping. George didn't want to look at her; her appearance placed him too much in concord with her reluctant father; too much in the position of a man making a hurtful and unasked oblation.

Momentarily Betty, the portion of his past shared with her, its undeveloped possibilities, were swept from his brain. Last of all, fitting and brilliant close for the procession, came Sylvia between two bridesmaids. George scarcely saw the others. Sylvia filled his eyes, his heart, slowly crowded the dissatisfaction from his mind, centred again his thoughts and his ambitions. Nearly automatically he took Betty's hands, spoke to her a few formalities, yielded her to her father, and went on to Sylvia. For nearly two years he hadn't seen her in an evening gown. What secret did she possess that kept her constant? Already she was past the age at which most girls of her station marry, yet to him her beauty had only increased without quite maturing. And why had she calmly avoided during all these years the nets thrown perpetually by men? Only Blodgett had threatened to entangle her, and one day had found her fled. And she wasn't such a fool she didn't know the years were slipping by. More poignantly than ever he responded to a feeling of danger, imminent, unavoidable, fatal.

"My companion in the ceremonies," he said.

"I understood that was the arrangement," she answered, without looking at him.

"I'm glad," he said, "to draw even a reflection from the happiness of others."

"I often wonder," she remarked, "why people are so selfish."

"Do you mean me," he laughed, "or the leading man and lady?"

She spoke softly to avoid the possibility of anyone else hearing.

"I'm not sure, but I fancy you are the most selfish person I have ever met."

"That's a stupendous indictment these days," he said with a smile, but he didn't take her seriously at all, didn't apply her charge to his soul.

"I'm so glad you're here," he went on, "that we're to be together. I've wanted it for a long time. You must know that."

She gave him an uncomfortable sense of being captive, of seeking blindly any course to freedom.

"I no longer know anything about you. I don't care to know."

Lambert and Dalrymple strolled in. Dalrymple opened the cage. George moved away, aching to prevent such interference by any means he could. His emotion made him uneasy. To what resolution were his relations with Dalrymple drifting? How far was he capable of going to keep the other in his place?

He stood by the mantel, speaking only when it was necessary and then without consciousness, his whole interest caught by the picture Dalrymple and Sylvia made, close together by the centre table in the soft light of a reading lamp.

A servant entered with cocktails. George's interest sharpened. Betty took hers with the others. Only Sylvia and Dalrymple shook their heads. Clearly it was an understanding between them—a little denial of hers to make his infinitely greater one less difficult. She smiled up at him, indeed, comprehendingly; but George's glance didn't waver from Dalrymple, and it caught an increase in the other's restlessness, a following nearly hypnotic, by thoughtful eyes, of the tray with the little glasses as it passed around the room. George relaxed. He was conscious enough of Blodgett's bellow:

"Here's to the blushing bride!"

What lack of taste! But how much greater the lack of taste that restless inheritor exposed! Couldn't even join a formal toast, didn't dare probably, or was it that he only dared not risk it in public, in front of Sylvia? And she pandered to his weakness, smiled upon it as if it were an epic strength. He was sufficiently glad now that Dalrymple had got into him for so much money.

IV

For George dinner was chiefly a sea of meaningless chatter continually ruffled by the storm of Blodgett's voice.

"Your brother tells me," he said to Sylvia, "that you're irritating yourself with socialism."

She looked at him with a little interest then.

"I've been reading. It's quite extraordinary. Odd I should have lived so long without really knowing anything about such things."

"Not odd at all," George contradicted her. "I should call it odd that you find any interest in them now. Why do you?"

"One has to occupy one's mind," she answered.

He glanced at her. Why did she have to occupy herself with matter she couldn't possibly understand, that she would interpret always in a wrong or unsafe manner? She, too, was restless.

That was the only possible explanation. From Blodgett she had sprung to war-time fads. From those she had leaped at this convenient one which tempted people to make sparkling and meaningless phrases.

"It doesn't strike you as at all amusing," he asked, "that you should be red, that I should be conservative?"

She didn't answer. Blodgett swept them out to sea again.

Later in the evening, however, George repeated his question, and demanded an answer. They had accomplished the farce of a rehearsal, source of cumbersome jokes for Blodgett and the clergyman; of doubts and dreary prospects for Mr. Alston, who had done his share as if submitting to an undreamed-of punishment.

There was the key-ring joke. It must be a part of the curriculum of all the theological seminaries. George acted up to it, promising to tie a string around his finger, or to pin the circlet to his waistcoat.

"Or," Blodgett roared, "at a pinch you might use the ring of the wedding bells."

George stared at him. How could the man, Sylvia within handgrasp, grin and feed such a mood? It suddenly occurred to him that once more he was reading Blodgett wrong, that the man was admirable, far more so than he could be under an equal trial. Would he, a little later, be asked to face such an ordeal?

With the departure of the clergyman a cloud of reaction descended upon the party. Some yawns were scarcely stifled. Sporadic attempts to dance to a victrola faded into dialogues carried on indifferently, lazily, where the dancers had chanced to stop with the music. Mr. Alston had relinquished Sylvia to George at the moment the record had stuttered out. They were left at a distance from any other couple. George pointed out a convenient chair, and she sat down and glanced about the room indifferently.

"At dinner," George said, "I asked you if it didn't impress you as strange that our social views should be what they are, and opposite."

She didn't answer.

"I mean," he went on, "that I should benefit by your alteration."

"How?" she asked, idly fingering a flower, not looking at him.

"I fancy," he said, "that you'll admit your chief objection to me has always been my origin, my ridiculous position trotting watchfully behind the most unsocial Miss Planter. Am I not right?"

"You are entirely wrong," she said, wearily. "That has never had anything to do with my—my dislike. I think I shall go——"

"Wait," he said. "You are not telling me the truth. If you are consistent you will turn your enmity to friendship at least. You will decide there was nothing unusual in my asking you to marry me. You will even find in that a reason for my anxiety at Upton. You will understand that it is quite inevitable I should ask you to marry me again."

She sprang up and hurried away from him.

"Put on another record, Dolly——"

And almost before he had realized it Betty had taken her away, and the evening's opportunities had closed.

V

For him the house became like a room at night out of which the only lamp has been carried.

The others drifted away. George tried to read in the library. His uneasiness, his anger, held him from bed. When at last he went upstairs he fancied everyone was asleep, but moving in the hall outside his room he saw a figure in a dressing gown. It paused as if it didn't care to be detected going in the direction of the stairs. George caught the figure's embarrassed hesitation, fancied a movement of retreat.

"Dalrymple!" he called, softly.

The other waited sullenly.

"What you up to?" George asked.

"Thought I'd explore downstairs for a book. Couldn't sleep. Nothing in my room worth bothering with."

George smiled, the memory of Blodgett's admirable behaviour crowding his mind. What better time than now to let his anger dictate to him, as it had done that day in his office?

"Come in for a minute," he proposed to Dalrymple, and opened his door.

Dalrymple shook his head, but George took his arm and led him, guessing that Dalrymple feared the subject of the notes.

"Bad humour!" George said. "You seem to be the only one up. I don't mind chatting with you before turning in. Fact is, these wedding parties are stupid, don't you think?"

Possibly George's manner was reassuring to Dalrymple. At any rate, he yielded. George took off his coat, sat in an easy chair, and pressed the call button.

"What's that for?" Dalrymple asked, uneasily.

"Sit down," George said. "Stupid and dry, these things! I'm going to try to raise a servant. I want to gossip over a drink before I go to bed. You'll join me?"

Dalrymple sat down. He moistened his lips.

"On the wagon," he muttered. "A long time on the wagon. Place to be, too, and all that."

George didn't believe the other. If Dalrymple cared to prove him right that was his own business.

"Before prohibition offers the steps?" he laughed.

"Nothing to do with it," Dalrymple muttered. "Got my reasons—good enough ones, too."

"Right!" George said. "Only don't leave me to myself until I've wet my whistle."

And when the sleepy servant had come George asked him for some whiskey and soda water. He talked of the Alstons, of the war, of anything to tide the wait for the caraffe and the bottles and glasses; and during that period Dalrymple's restlessness increased. Just what had he been sneaking downstairs for in the middle of the night? George watched the other's eyes drawn by the tray when the servant had set it down.

"Why did he bring two glasses?" Dalrymple asked, irritably.

"Oh," George said, carelessly, "I suppose he thought—naturally——Have a biscuit, anyway."

George poured a drink and supped contentedly.

"Dry rations—biscuits," Dalrymple complained.

He fingered the caraffe.

"I've an idea—wedding—special occasion, and all that. Change my mind—up here—one friendly drop——"

George watched the friendly drop expand to half a tumbler full, and he observed that the hand that poured was not quite steady. It wouldn't be long now before he would know whether or not Dalrymple's reformation was merely a pose in public, a pose for Sylvia.

Dalrymple sighed, sat down, and talked quite pleasantly about the horrors of Chaumont. After a time he refilled his glass, and repeated the performance a number of times with diminishing intervals. George smiled. A child could tell the other was breaking no extended abstinence. He drifted from war to New York and his apparent success with the house of Planter.

"Slavery, this office stuff!" he rattled on, "but good fun to get things done, to climb up on shoulders of men—oh, no idea how many, Morton—who're only good to push a pen or pound a typewriter. Of course, you know, though. Done plenty of climbing yourself."

His enunciation suffered and his assurance strengthened as the caraffe emptied. No extended abstinence, George reflected, but almost certainly a very painful one of a few days.

"Am making money, Morton—a little, not much," he said, confidentially, and with condescension. "Not enough by long shot to pay those beastly notes I owe you. Know they're over due. Don't think I'd ever forget that. Want to do right thing, Morton. You used hard words when I borrowed that money, but forget, and all that. White of you to let me have it, and I'll do right thing."

A sickly look of content overspread his face. He expanded. His assurance seemed to crowd the room.

"Wouldn't worry for a minute 'bout those notes if I were you."

He suddenly switched, shaking his finger at the caraffe.

"Very pleasant, little drop like this—night cap on the quiet. But not often."

His content sought expression in a smile.

"Dolly's off the hootch."

George lighted a cigarette. He noticed that his fingers were quite steady, yet he was perfectly conscious of each beat of his heart.

"May I ask," he said, "what possible connection there can be between my not worrying about your notes and your keeping off the hootch, as you call it?"

Dalrymple arose, finished the caraffe, and tapped George's shoulder.

"Every connection," he answered. "Expect you have a right to know. Don't you worry, old Shylock Morton. You're goin' to get your pound ah flesh."

"I fancy I am," George laughed. "What's your idea of it?"

Dalrymple waved his glass.

"Lady of my heart—surrender after long siege, but only brave deserve fair. Good thing college education. Congratulate me, Morton. But secret for you, 'cause you old Shylock. Wouldn't say anything to Sylvia till she lets it loose."

As George walked quietly to the door, which the servant a long time ago had left a trifle open, he heard Dalrymple mouthing disconnected words: "Model husband." "Can't be too soon for Dolly."

Then, as he closed the door, locked it, and put the key in his pocket, he heard Dalrymple say aloud, sharply:

"What the devil you doing, Morton?"

George turned. Ammunition against Dalrymple! He had been collecting it. Now, clearly, was the time to use it. In his mind the locked room held precariously all of Sylvia's happiness and his.

He didn't hesitate. He walked straight to the table. Dalrymple had slumped down in his chair, the content and triumph of his inflamed eyes replaced by a sullen fear.

VI

"What's the idea?" Dalrymple asked, uncertainly, watching George, grasping the arms of his chair preparatory to rising.

"Sit still, and I'll tell you," George answered.

"Why you lock the door?"

From Dalrymple's palpable fear George watched escape a reluctant and fascinated curiosity.

"No more of that strong-arm stuff with me——"

"I locked the door," George answered, "so that I could point out to you, quite undisturbed, just why you are going to leave Sylvia Planter alone."

Dalrymple relaxed. He commenced incredulously and nervously to laugh, but in his eyes, which followed George, the fear and the curiosity increased.

"What the devil are you talking about? Have you gone out of your head?"

George smiled confidently.

"It's an invariable rule, unless you have the strength to handle them, to give insane people their way. So you'll be nice and quiet; and I might remind you if you started a rumpus, the first questions the aroused house would ask would be, 'Why did Dolly fall off the wagon, and where did he get the edge?'"

He drew a chair close to Dalrymple and sat down. The other lay back, continuing to stare at him, quite unable to project the impression he undoubtedly sought of contemptuous amusement.

"We've waited a long time for this little chat," George said, quietly. "Sometimes I've hoped it wouldn't be necessary. Of course, sooner or later, it had to be."

His manner disclosed little of his anxiety, nothing whatever of his determination, through Dalrymple's weakness, to save Sylvia and himself, but his will had never been stronger.

"You may as well understand," he said, "that you shan't leave this room until you've agreed to give up any idea of this preposterous marriage you pretend to have arranged. Perhaps you have. That makes no difference. I'm quite satisfied its disarranging will break no hearts."

Dalrymple had a little controlled himself. George's brusque campaign had steadied him, had hastened a reaction that gave to his eyes an unhealthy and furtive look. He tried to grin.

"You must think you're God Almighty——"

"Let's get to business," George interrupted. "I once told you that what you borrow you have to pay back in one way or another. This is where we settle, and I've outlined the terms."

Dalrymple whistled.

"You complete rotter! You mean to blackmail—because you know I haven't got your filthy money, and can't raise it in a minute."

"Never mind that," George snapped. "Your opinion of what I'm doing doesn't interest me. I've thought it out. I know quite thoroughly what I'm about."

He did, and he was not without distaste for his methods, nor without realization that they might hurt him most of all with the very person they were designed to serve; yet he couldn't hesitate, because no other way offered.

"You're going to pay my notes, but not with money."

Dalrymple's grin exploded into a harsh sound resembling laughter.

"Are you—jealous? Do you fancy Sylvia would be affected by anything you'd do or say? See here! Good God! Are you mad enough to look at her? That's funny! That's a scream!"

There was, however, no conviction behind the pretended amazement and contempt; and George suspected that Dalrymple had all along sounded his chief ambition; had, in fact, made his secretive announcement just now, because, his judgment drugged, he had desired to call a rival's attention to his triumphant posture on the steps of attainment.

"I've no intention of discussing causes," George answered, evenly, "but I do imagine the entire family would be noticeably affected by my story."

"Which you couldn't tell," Dalrymple cried. "Which you couldn't possibly tell."

"Which I don't think I shall have to tell," George said with a smile. "Look at your position, Dalrymple. If you borrow money on the strength of this approaching marriage you announce its chief purpose quite distinctly. I fancy Old Planter, ill as he is, would want to take a club to you. You've always wished, haven't you, to keep your borrowings from Lambert? You can't do it if you persist in involving the Planters in your extravagances. And remember you gave me a pretty thorough list of your debtors—not reading for women, but Lambert would understand, and make its meaning clear. Then let us go back to that afternoon in my office, when you tried to say unspeakable things——"

Impulsively Dalrymple bared his teeth.

"Got you there, Morton! I told Lambert it was you who had been impertinent——"

All at once George felt better and cleaner. He whistled.

"When I let you off then I never dreamed you'd try to back that lie up."

"Will they believe me," the other asked, "or you, who come from God knows what; God knows where?"

"Fortunately," George said, "Lambert and his sister share that supernal knowledge. They'll believe me."

He stood up.

"That's all. You know what to expect. Just one thing more."

He spoke softly, without any apparent passion, but he displayed before the man in the chair his two hands.

"If necessary I'd stop you marrying Sylvia Planter with those."

Dalrymple got to his feet, struggled to assume a cloak of bravado.

"Won't put up with such threats. Actionable——"

"Give me your decision," George said, harshly. "Will you keep away from her? If there is really an understanding, will you so arrange things that she can destroy it immediately? Come. Yes or no?"

"Give me that key."

George shrugged his shoulders.

"I needn't trouble you."

He walked swiftly to the door, unlocked it, and drew it invitingly wide; but now that the way was clear Dalrymple hesitated. Again George shrugged his shoulders and stepped to the hall. Dalrymple, abruptly active, ran after him, grasping at his arm.

"Where you going?" he whispered.

"To Lambert's room."

"Not to-night," the other begged. "I don't admit you could make any real trouble, but I want to spare Sylvia any possible unpleasantness. Well! Don't you, too? You lost your temper. Maybe I did mine. Give us both a chance to think it over. Now see here, Morton, I won't ask you another favour, and I'll do nothing in the meantime. I couldn't very well. I mean, status quo, and all that——"

"Lambert, to-morrow," George said, "is going away for more than a month."

"But you could always get hold of him, at a pinch," Dalrymple urged. "Heaven knows I'm not likely to talk to Sylvia about what you've said. Let us both think it over until Lambert comes back."

George sighed, experiencing a glow of victory. The other's eagerness confessed at last an accurate measure of the power of his ammunition; and George didn't want to go to the Planters on such an errand as long as any other means existed. The more Dalrymple thought, the more thoroughly he must realize George had him. From the first George had manoeuvred to avoid the necessity of shocking habits of thought and action that were inborn in the Planters, so he gladly agreed.

"Meantime, you'll keep away from her?"

"Just as far as possible," Dalrymple answered. "You'll be able to see that for yourself."

"Then," George said, "you arrange to get yourself out of the way as soon as Lambert and Betty return. Meantime, if you go back on your word, I'll get hold of Lambert."

Dalrymple leant against the wall, morosely angry, restless, discouraged.

"I'll admit you could make some unpleasantness all around," he said, moistening his lips. "I wish I'd never touched your dirty money——"

George stepped into his room and closed the door.

VII

The awakening of the house to its most momentous day aroused George early, hurried him from his bed, sent him downstairs in a depressed, self-censorious mood, as if he and not Dalrymple had finished the caraffe. That necessary battle behind a locked door continued to fill his mind like the memory of a vivid and revolting nightmare. He fled from the increasing turmoil of an exceptional agitation, but he could not escape his own evil temper. Even the flowering lanes where Goodhue and he had run so frequently during their undergraduate days mocked his limping steps, his heavy cane; seemed asking him what there was in common between that eager youth and the man who had come back to share a definite farewell with Betty; to stand, stripped of his veneer, against a wall to avoid a more difficult parting from Sylvia. There was one thing: the determination of the boy lived in the man, become greater, more headstrong, more relentless.

He paused and, chin in hand, rested against a gate. What about Wandel, who had admired the original George Morton? Would he approve of his threats to Dalrymple, of his probable course with the Planters? If he were consistent he would have to; yet people were so seldom consistent. It was even likely that George's repetition of Dalrymple's shocking insults would be frowned upon more blackly than the original, unforgiveable wrong. George straightened and walked back toward the house. It made no difference what people thought. He was George Morton. Even at the cost of his own future he would keep Sylvia from joining her life to Dalrymple's, and certainly Lambert could be made to understand why that had to be.

The warm sun cheered him a little. Dalrymple was scared. He wouldn't make George take any further steps. It was going to be all right. But why didn't women see through Dalrymple, or rather why didn't he more thoroughly give himself away to them? Because, George decided, guarded women from their little windows failed to see the real world.

Dalrymple obsessed him even when, after luncheon, he sat with Lambert upstairs, discussing business chiefly. He wanted to burst out with:

"Why don't you wake up? How can you approve of this intimacy between your sister and a man like that?"

He didn't believe the other knew that intimacy had progressed; and when Lambert spoke of Dalrymple, calling attention again to his apparent reformation, George cleansed his mind a trifle, placing, as it were, the foundation for a possible announcement of a more active enmity.

"Don't see why you admire anything he does, Lambert. It isn't particularly pleasant for me to have you, for I've been watching him, and I've quite made up my mind. You asked me when I first got home if I wouldn't meet him halfway. I don't fancy he'd ever start in my direction, but if he did I wouldn't meet him. Sorry. That's definite. I must use my own judgment even where it clashes with your admirations."

Lambert stared at him.

"You'll never cease being headstrong," he said. "It's rather safer to have any man for a friend."

George had an uncomfortable sense of having received a warning, but Blodgett blundered in just then with news from the feminine side of the house.

"Some people downstairs already, and I've just had word—from one of those little angels that talk like the devil—that Betty's got all her war-paint on."

"You have the ring?" Lambert asked George.

George laughed.

"Yes, I have the ring, and I shan't lose it, or drop it; and I'll keep you out of people's way, and tell you what to answer, and see generally you don't make an idiot of yourself. Josiah, if he faints, help me pick him up."

Blodgett's gardenia bobbed.

"Weddings make Josiah feel old. Say, George, you're no spring chicken yourself. I know lots of little girls who cry their eyes out for you."

"Shut up," George said. "How about a reconnaissance, Lambert?"

But they were summoned then, and crept down a side staircase, and heard music, and found themselves involved in Betty's great moment.

At first George could only think of Betty as she had stood long ago in the doorway of Bailly's study, and it was difficult to find in this white-clothed, veiled, and stately woman the girl he had seen first of all that night. This, after a fashion, was his last glimpse of her. She appeared to share that conception, for she carried to the improvised altar in the drawing-room an air of facing far places, divided by boundaries she couldn't possibly define from all that she had ever known. After the ceremony she smiled wonderingly at George while she absorbed the vapid and pattered remarks of, perhaps, a hundred old friends of the family. George, who knew most of them, resented their sympathy and curiosity.

"If they don't stop asking me about the war," he whispered to Blodgett during a lull, "I'm going to call for help."

Some, however, managed to interest him with remarks about the rebirth of football. Green had been at Princeton all along, Stringham was coming back in the fall, and there were brilliant team prospects. Would George be able to help with the coaching? He indicated his injured leg. He hadn't the time, anyway. He was going to stick closer than ever to Wall Street. He fancied that Sylvia, who stood near him, resented the lively interest of these people. She spoke to him only when she couldn't possibly avoid it, glancing, George noticed, at Dalrymple who rather pointedly kept away from her. So far so good. Then Dalrymple did realize George would have his way. George looked at Sylvia, thinking whimsically:

"I shan't let anybody put you where you wouldn't bother to hate me any more."

He spoke to her aloud.

"I believe we're to have a bite to eat."

She followed him reluctantly, and during the supper yielded of herself nothing whatever to him, chatting by preference with any one convenient, even with Blodgett whom she had treated so shabbily. Very early she left the room with Betty and Mrs. Alston, and George experienced a strong desire to escape also, to flee anywhere away from this house and the bitter dissatisfactions he had found within its familiar walls. He saw Mrs. Bailly and took her hand.

"I want to go home with you and Squibs to-night."

Mrs. Bailly smiled her gratitude, but as he was about to move away she stopped him with a curiosity he had not expected from her.

"Isn't Sylvia Planter beautiful? Why do you suppose she doesn't marry?"

George laughed shortly, shook his head, and hurried upstairs to Lambert's room; yet Mrs. Bailly had increased his uneasiness. Perhaps it was the too-frequent repetition of that question that had made Sylvia turn temporarily to Blodgett; that was, possibly, focussing her eyes on Dalrymple now; yet why, from such a field, did she choose these men? What was one to make of her mind and its unexpected reactions? The matter of marriage was, not unnaturally, in the air here. Lambert faced him with it.

"Josiah's right. When are you going to make a home, Apollo Morton?"

George turned on him angrily, not bothering to choose his words.

"Such a question from you is ridiculous. You've not forgotten the dark ages either."

Lambert looked at him for a moment affectionately, not without sympathy.

"Don't be an ass, George."

George's laughter was impatient.

"Don't forget, Lambert, your old friends, Corporal Sol Roseberg, and Bugler Ignatius Chronos. No men better! Chairs at the club! Legs under the table at Oakmont——"

Lambert put his hands on George's shoulders.

"It isn't that at all. You know it very well."

"What is it then?" George asked, sharply.

"Don't pretend ignorance," Lambert answered, "and it must be your own fault. Whose else could it possibly be? And I'm sorry, have been for years."

"It isn't my fault," George said. "The situation exists. I'm glad you recognize it. You'll understand it's a subject I can't let you joke about."

"All right," Lambert said, "but I wonder why you're always asking for trouble."

Betty had plenty of colour to-night. As she passed George, her head bent against the confetti, he managed to touch her hand, felt a quick responsive pressure, heard her say:

"Good-bye, George."

The whispered farewell was like a curtain, too heavy ever to be lifted again, abruptly let down between two fond people.

IX

Unexpectedly the companionships of the little house in Dickinson Street failed to lighten George's discontented humour. Mrs. Bailly's question lingered in his mind, coupling itself there with her disappointment that he, instead of Lambert, hadn't married Betty; and, when she retired, the tutor went back to his unwelcome demands of the day before. Hadn't George made anything of his great experience? Was it possible it had left him quite unchanged? What were his immediate plans, anyway?

"You may as well understand, sir," George broke in, impatiently, "that I am going to stay right in Wall Street and make as much money and get as much power as I can."

"Why? In the name of heaven, why?" Bailly asked, irritably. "You are already a very rich man. You've dug for treasure and found it, but can you tell me you've kept your hands clean? Money is merely a conception—a false one. Capitalism will pass from the world."

George grunted.

"With the last two surviving human beings."

"Mockery won't keep you blind always," Bailly said, "to the strivings of men in the mines and the factories——"

"And in the Senate and the House," George jeered, "and in Russia and Germany, and in little, ambitious corners. If you're against the League of Nations it's because, like all those people, you're willing Rome should burn as long as personal causes can be fostered and selfish schemes forwarded. No agitator, naturally, wants the suffering world given a sedative——"

Bailly smiled.

"Even if you're wrong-headed, I'm glad to hear you talk that way. At last you're thinking of humanity."

"I'm thinking of myself," George snapped.

Bailly shook his head.

"I believe you're talking from your heart."

"I'm talking from a smashed leg," George cried, "and I'm sleepy and tired and cross, and I guess I'd better go to bed."

"It all runs back to the beginning," Bailly said in a discouraged voice. "I'm afraid you'll never learn the meaning of service."

George sprang up, wincing. Bailly's wrinkled face softened; his young eyes filled with sympathy.

"Does that wound still bother you, George?"

"Yes, sir," George answered, softly. "I guess it bothers as much as it ever did."

X

One virtue of the restlessness of which Bailly had reminded him was its power to swing George's mind for a time from his unpleasant understanding with Dalrymple. It had got even into Blodgett's blood.

"About the honestest man I can think of these days," he complained to George one morning, "is the operator of a crooked racing stable. All the cards are marked. All the dice are loaded. If they didn't have to let us in on some of the tricks, we'd go bust, George, my boy."

"You mean we're crooked, too?" George asked.

"Only by infection," Blodgett defended himself, "but honest, George, I'd sell out if I could. I'm disgusted."

George couldn't hide a smile.

"In the old days when you were coming up, you never did anything the least bit out of line yourself?"

Blodgett mopped his face with one of his brilliant handkerchiefs. His eyes twinkled.

"I've been shrewd at times, George, but isn't that legitimate? I may have made some crowds pretty sick by cutting under them, but that's business. I won't say I haven't played some cute little tricks with stocks, but that's finesse, and the other fellow had the same chance. I'm not aware that I ever busted a bank, or held a loaded gun to a man's head and asked him to hand over his clothes as well as his cash. That's the spirit we're up against now. That's why Papa Blodgett advises selling out those mill stocks we kept big blocks of at the time of the armistice."

"They're making money," George said.

Blodgett tapped a file of reports.

"Have you read the opinions of the directors?"

"Yes," George answered, "and at a pinch they might have to go into coÖperation, but they'd still pay some dividends."

Blodgett puffed out his cheeks.

"You're sure the unions would want a share in the business?"

"Why not?" George asked. "Isn't that practical communism?"

"Hay! Here's a fellow believes there's something practical in the world nowadays! Sell out, son."

"Then who would run our mills?"

"Maybe some philanthropist with more money than brains."

"You mean," George asked, "that our products, unless conditions improve, will disappear from the world, because no one will be able to afford to manufacture them?"

Blodgett pursed his lips. George stared from the window at the forest of buildings which impressed him, indeed, as giant tree trunks from which all the foliage had been stripped. Had there been awakened in the world an illiberal individuality with the power to fell them every one, and to turn up the system out of which they had sprung as from a rich soil? Was that what he had helped fight the war for?

"You're talking about the dark ages," he said, feeling the necessity of faith and stability. "Sell your stocks if you want, I choose to keep mine."

Blodgett yawned.

"We'll go down together, George. I won't jump from a sinking ship as long as you cling to the bridge."

"The ship isn't sinking," George cried. "It's too buoyant."

XI

Wandel and Goodhue came home, suffering from this universal restlessness.

"Ah, mon brave!" Wandel greeted George. "Mon vieux Georges, grand et incomparable! So the country's dry! Jewels are cheaper than beefsteaks! Congress is building spite fences! None the less, I'm glad to be home."

"Glad enough to have you," George said. "I'm not sure we won't go back to our bargain pretty soon. I'm about ready for a pet politician."

"Let me get clean," Wandel laughed. "You must have a lot of money."

"I can control enough," George said, confidently.

"Bon! But don't send me to Washington at first. I don't want to put on skirts, use snuff, or practise gossiping."

For a time he refused to apply himself to anything that didn't lead to pleasure. Goodhue went at once to Rhode Island for a visit with his father and mother, while Wandel flitted from place to place, from house to house, as if driven by his restlessness to the play he had abandoned during five years. Once or twice George caught him with Rogers in town, and bluntly asked him why.

"An eye to the future, my dear George. Are you the most forgetful of class presidents? Perfect henchman type. When one goes into politics one must have henchmen."

But George had an unwelcome feeling that Rogers, eyes always open, was taking advantage, in his small way, of the world's unsettled condition. People were inclined to laugh at him, but they treated him well for Wandel's sake.

"Still in the bond business," he explained to George. "It isn't what it was befo' de war. I'm thinking of taking up oil stocks and corners in heaven, although I doubt if there are as many suckers as fell for P. T. B. Trouble nowadays is that the simplest of them are too busy trying to find somebody just a little simpler to sting. Darned if they don't usually hook one. Still bum securities are a great weakness with most people. Promise a man a hundred per cent. and he'll complain it isn't a hundred and fifty."

George reflected that Rogers was bound for disillusionment, then he wasn't so sure, for America seemed more than ever friendly to that brisk, insincere, back-bending type. Out of the sea of money formed by the war examples sprang up on nearly every side, scarcely troubled by racial, religious, or educational handicaps; loudly convinced that they could buy with money all at once every object of matter or spirit the centuries had painstakingly evolved. One night in the crowds of the theatre district, when with Wandel he had watched the hysterical competition for tickets, cabs, and tables in restaurants where the prices of indigestion had soared nearly beyond belief, he burst out angrily:

"The world is mad, Driggs. I wouldn't be surprised to hear these people cry for golden gondolas to float them home on rivers of money. Stark, raving mad, Driggs! The world's out of its head!"

Wandel smiled, twirling his cane.

"Just found it out, great man? Always has been; always will be—chronic! This happens to be a violent stage."

XII

It was Wandel, indeed, who drew George from his preoccupation, and reminded him that another world existed as yet scarcely more than threatened by the driving universal invaders. George had looked in at his apartment one night when Wandel was just back from a northern week-end.

"Saw Sylvia. You know, George, she's turning back the years and prancing like a dÉbutante."

George sat down, uneasy, wondering what the other's unprepared announcement was designed to convey.

"I'll lay you what you want," Wandel went on, lighting a cigar, "that she forgets the Blodgett fiasco, and marries before snow falls."

Had it been designed as a warning? George studied Wandel, trying to read his expression, but the light was restricted by heavy, valuable, and smothering shades; and Wandel sat at some distance from the nearest, close to a window to catch what breezes stole through. Confound the man! What was he after? He hadn't mentioned Sylvia that self-revealing day in France; but George had guessed then that he must have known of his persistent ambition, and had wondered why his unexpected communicativeness hadn't included it. At least a lack of curiosity now was valueless, so George said:

"Who's the man?"

"I don't suggest a name," Wandel drawled. "I merely call attention to a possibility. Perhaps discussing the charming lady at all we're a trifle out of bounds; but we've known the Planters many years; years enough to wonder why Sylvia hasn't been caught before, why Blodgett failed at the last minute."

George stirred impatiently.

"It was inevitable he should. I once disliked Josiah, but that was because I was too young to see quite straight. Just the same, he wasn't up to her. Most of all, he was too old."

"I daresay. I daresay," Wandel said. "So much for jolly Josiah. But the others? It isn't exaggeration to suggest that she might have had about any man in this country or England. She hasn't had. She's still the loveliest thing about, and how many years since she was introduced—many, many, isn't it, George?"

"What odds?" George muttered. "She's still young."

He felt self-conscious and warm. Was Wandel trying to make him say too much?

"Why do you ask me?"

Wandel yawned.

"Gossiping, George. Poking about in the dark. Thought you might have some light."

"How should I have?" George demanded.

"Because," Wandel drawled, "you're the greatest and most penetrating of men."

George's discomfort grew. He tried to turn Wandel's attack.

"How does it happen you've never entered the ring?"

Wandel laughed quietly.

"I did, during my school days. She was quite splendid about it. I mean, she said very splendidly that she couldn't abide little men; but any time since I'd have fallen cheerfully at her feet if I'd ever become a big man, a great man, like you."

Before he had weighed those words, unquestionably pointed and significant, George had let slip an impulsive question.

"Can you picture her fancying a figure like Dalrymple?"

He was sorry as soon as it was out. Anxiously he watched Wandel through the dusk of the room. The little man spoke with a troubled hesitation, as if for once he wasn't quite sure what he ought to reply.

"You acknowledged a moment ago that you had failed to see Josiah straight. Hasn't your view of Dolly always been from a prejudiced angle?"

"I've always disliked him," George said, frankly. "He's given me reasons enough. You know some of them."

"I know," Wandel drawled, "that he isn't what even Sylvia would call a little man, and he has the faculty of making himself exceptionally pleasant to the ladies."

"Yet he couldn't marry any one of mine," George said under his breath. "If I had a sister, I mean, I'd somehow stop him."

Wandel laughed on a sharp note, caught himself, went on with an amused tone:

"Forgive me, George. Somewhere in your pockets you carry the Pilgrim Fathers. Most men are shaggy birds of evil habit, while most young women are delicately feathered nestlings, and quite helpless; yet the two must mate. Dolly, by the way, drains a pitcher of water every time he sees a violation of prohibition."

"He drinks in sly places," George said.

"After all," Wandel said, slowly, "why do we cling to the suggestion of Dolly? Although I fancy he does figure—somewhere in the odds."

For a time George said nothing. He was quite convinced that Wandel had meant to warn him, and he had received that warning, straight and hard and painfully. During several weeks he hadn't seen Dalrymple, had been lulled into a sense of security, perhaps through the turmoil down town; and Lambert and Betty had lingered beyond their announced month. Clearly Wandel had sounded George's chief aim, as he had once satisfied himself of his origin; and just now had meant to say that since his return he had witnessed enough to be convinced that Dalrymple was still after Sylvia, and with a chance of success. To George that meant that Dalrymple had broken the bargain. He felt himself drawn irresistibly back to his narrow, absorbing pursuit.

"You're becoming a hermit," Wandel was saying.

"You've become a butterfly," George countered.

"Ah," Wandel answered, "but the butterfly can touch with its wings the beautiful Sylvia Planter, and out of its eyes can watch her dÉbutante frivolities. Why not come away with me Friday?"

"Whither?"

"To the Sinclairs."

George got up and wandered to the door.

"By by, Driggs. I think I might slip off Friday. I've a mind to renounce the veil."

XIII

George fulfilled his resolution thoroughly. With the migratory bachelors he ran from house to house, found Sylvia or not, and so thought the effort worth while or not. The first time he saw her, indeed, he appreciated Wandel's wisdom, for she stood with Dalrymple at the edge of a high lawn that looked out over the sea. Her hair in the breeze was a little astray, her cheeks were flushed, and she bent if anything toward her companion who talked earnestly and with nervous gestures. George crushed his quick impulse to go down, to step between them, to have it out with Dalrymple then and there, even in Sylvia's presence; but they strolled back to the house almost immediately, and Sylvia lost her apparent good humour, and Dalrymple descended from satisfaction to a fidgety apprehension. Sylvia met George's hand briefly.

"You'll be here long?"

The question expressed a wish.

"Only until Monday. I wish it might be longer, for I'm glad to find you—and you, Dalrymple."

"Nobody said you were expected," Dalrymple grumbled. "Everybody said you were working like a horse."

George glanced at Sylvia, smiling blandly.

"Every horse goes to grass occasionally."

He turned back to Dalrymple.

"I daresay you know Lambert and Betty are due back the first of the week?"

Sylvia nodded carelessly, and started along the verandah. Dalrymple, reddening, prepared to heel, but George beckoned him back.

"I'd like a word with you."

Sylvia glanced around, probably surprised at the sharp, authoritative tone.

"Just a minute, Sylvia," Dalrymple apologized uneasily. "Little business. Hard to catch Morton. Must grasp opportunity, and all that."

And when they were alone he went close to George eagerly.

"No need to wait for Betty and Lambert, Morton. It's done. Dolly's got himself thrown over——"

"I don't believe you," George said.

"Why not?"

"What are you doing here?" George asked. "It was understood you should avoid her."

Dalrymple's grin was sickly.

"Way she's tearing around now I'd have exactly no place to go."

"You seemed rather too friendly," George pointed out, "for parties to a broken engagement."

George fancied there was something of anger in the other's face.

"Must say I'm not flattered by that. Guess you were right. One heart's not smashed, anyway."

George turned on his heel. Dalrymple caught him.

"What about those notes?"

"I don't trust you, Dalrymple. I'll keep my eye on you yet awhile."

"Ask Sylvia if you want," Dalrymple cried.

George smiled.

"I wonder if I could."

He went to his room, trying to believe Dalrymple. Was that romance really in the same class as the one with Blodgett? If so, why did she involve herself in restive affairs with less obvious men? As best he could he tried to find out that night when she was a little off guard because of some unquiet statements she had just made of Russian rumours.

"You don't mean those things," he said, "or else you've no idea what they mean."

Through her quick resentment she let herself be caught in a corner, as it were. Everyone was preparing to leave the house for a dance in benefit of some local charity. Momentarily they were left alone. He indicated the over-luxurious and rather tasteless room.

"You're asking for the confiscation of all this, and your own Oakmont, and every delightful setting to which you've been accustomed all your life. You're asking for rationed food; for a shakedown, maybe, in a garret. You're asking for a task in a kitchen or a field. Why not a negro's kitchen; a Chinaman's field?"

He looked at her, asking gravely:

"Do you quite understand the principles of communism as they affect women?"

He fancied a heightening of her colour.

"You of all men," she said, "ought to understand the strivings of the people."

He shook his head vehemently.

"I'm for the palace," he laughed, "and I fancy it means more to me than it could to a man who's never used his brain. Let those stay in the hovel who haven't the courage to climb out."

"And you're one of the people!" she murmured. "One of the people!"

"You don't say that," he answered, quickly, "to tell me it makes me admirable in your eyes. You say it to hurt, as you used to call me, 'groom'. It doesn't inflict the least pain."

There was no question about her flush now.

"Tell me," he urged, "why you permit your brain such inconsistencies, why you accept such a patent fad, why you need fads at all?"

"Why won't you leave me alone?" she asked, harshly.

"You're always asking that," he smiled, "and you see I never do. Why are you unlike these other women? Why did you turn to Blodgett? Why have you made a fool of Dalrymple?"

She stared at him.

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying, why don't you come to me?"

He watched the angry challenge in her eyes, the deliberate stiffening of her entire body as if to a defensive attitude. He held out his hand to her.

"Sylvia! We are growing old."

Yet in her radiant presence it was preposterous to speak of age. She drew away with a sort of shudder.

"You wouldn't dare touch me again——"

He captured her glance. He felt that from his own eyes he failed to keep the unsatisfied desire of years.

"I haven't forgotten Upton, either. When will you give me what I want, Sylvia?"

Her glance eluded him. Swiftly she receded. Through the open door drifted a growing medley of voices. She hurried to the door, but he followed her, and purposefully climbed into the automobile she had entered, but they were no longer alone. Only once, when he made her dance with him in a huge, over-decorated tent, did he manage a whisper.

"No more nonsense with Dalrymple or anybody. Please stop making unhappiness."

XIV

George returned to New York with an uneasy spirit, filled with doubt as to Dalrymple's statement of renunciation, and of his own course in saying what he had of Dalrymple to Sylvia. Mightn't that very expression of disapproval, indeed, tend to swing her back to the man? When Lambert walked in a day or two later George looked at the happy, bronzed face, recalling his assurance that Betty wasn't one to give by halves. Through eyes clouded by such happiness Lambert couldn't be expected to see very far into the dangerous and avaricious discontent of the majority. How much less time, then, would he have for George's personal worries? George, nevertheless, guided the conversation to Dalrymple.

"He's running down to Oakmont with me to-night," Lambert said, carelessly. "You know Betty's there with the family for a few days."

George hid his temper. There was no possible chance about this. Would Dalrymple go to Oakmont after the breaking off of even a secret engagement; or, defeated in his main purpose, was he hanging about for what crumbs might yet fall from the Planters' table. Nearly without reflection he burst out with:

"It's inconceivable you should permit that man about your sister."

Probably Lambert's great content forbade an answer equally angry.

"Still at it! See here. Sylvia doesn't care for you."

"I'm not talking of myself," George said. "I'm talking of Dalrymple."

With an air of kindness, undoubtedly borrowed from Betty, Lambert said easily:

"Stop worrying about him, then. Giving a friend encouragement doesn't mean asking him into the family. That idea seems to obsess you. What difference does it make to you, anyway, what man Sylvia marries? I'll say this, if you wish: Since I've had Betty I see things a bit clearer. I really shouldn't care to have Dolly the man. I don't think there's a chance of it."

"You mean," George asked, eagerly, "if there were you'd stop it?"

"I shouldn't like it," Lambert answered. "Naturally, I'd express myself."

"See here. Dalrymple isn't to be trusted. You've been too occupied. You haven't watched your sister. How can you tell what's in her mind? You didn't forecast the affair with Josiah, eh? There's only one way I can play my game—the thorough way. If it came to a real engagement I should have to say things, Lambert—things I'd hate myself for; things that would hurt me, perhaps, more than any one else. If necessary I shall say them. Will you tell me, if—if——"

Lambert smiled uneasily.

"You're shying at phantoms, but you've always played every game to that point, and perhaps you're justified. I'll come to you if circumstances ever promise to prove you right."

"Thanks," George said, infinitely relieved; yet he had an unpleasant feeling that Lambert had held his temper and had agreed because he was aware of the existence of a great debt, one that he could never quite pay.

XV

This creation of a check on Dalrymple and the assurance that Lambert would warn him of danger came at a useful time for George, since the market-place more and more demanded an undisturbed mind. He conceded that Blodgett's earlier pessimism bade fair to be justified. He watched a succession of industrial upheavals, seeking a safe course among innumerable and perilous shoals that seemed to defy charting; conquering whatever instinct he might have had to sympathize with the men, since he judged their methods as hysterical, grabbing, and wasteful.

"But I don't believe," he told Blodgett, "these strikes have been ordered from the Kremlin; still, other colours may quite easily combine to form red."

"God help the employers. God help the employees," Blodgett grumbled.

"And most of all, may God help the great public," George suggested.

But Blodgett was preoccupied these days with an Oakmont stripped of passion. George knew that Old Planter had sent for him, and he found something quite pitiful in that final surrender of the great man who was now worse off than the youngest, grimiest groveller in the furnaces; so he was not surprised when it was announced that Blodgett would shortly move over to the marble temple, a partner at last with individuality and initiative, one, in fact, who would control everything for Old Planter and his heirs until Lambert should be older. Lambert was sufficiently unhappy over the change, because it painted so clearly the inevitable end. The Fifth Avenue house was opened early that fall as if the old man desired to get as close as possible to the centre of turbulent events, hoping that so his waning sight might serve.

Consequently George had more opportunities of meeting Sylvia; did meet her from time to time in the evenings, and watched her gaiety which frequently impressed him as a too noticeably moulded posture. It served, nevertheless, admirably with the men of all ages who flocked about her as if, indeed, she were a dÉbutante once more.

In these groups George was glad not to see Dalrymple often, but he noticed that Goodhue was near rather more than he had been formerly, and he experienced a sharp uneasiness, an instinct to go to Goodhue and say:

"Don't. Keep away. She's caused enough unhappiness."

Still you couldn't tell about Goodhue. The very fact that he fluttered near Sylvia might indicate that his real interest lay carefully concealed, some distance away. He had, moreover, always stood singularly aside from the pursuit of the feminine.

George's first meeting with Betty since her return was coloured by a frank acceptance on her part of new conditions that revived his sense of a sombre and helpless nostalgia. All was well with Betty. If there had ever been any doubt in her Lambert had swept it away. Whatever emotion she experienced for George was, in fact, that of a fond sister for a brother; and George, studying her and Lambert, longed as he had never done to find some such eager and confident content. The propulsion of pure ambition slipped from his desire for Sylvia. With a growing wonder he found himself craving through her just the satisfied simplicity so clearly experienced by Lambert and Betty. Could anything make her brilliancy less hard, less headstrong, less cruel?

George cast about for the means. Lambert was on watch. There was still time—plenty of time.

He hadn't spoken again to Lambert about Dalrymple. There hadn't seemed any point, for Lambert was entirely trustworthy, and, since Betty and he lived for the present in the Fifth Avenue house, he saw Sylvia constantly. Their conversation instead when they met for luncheon, as they did frequently, revolved about threats which a few years back they hadn't dreamed would ever face them. Blodgett, George noticed, didn't point the finger of scorn at him for holding on to the mill stocks. George wouldn't have minded if he had. They had originally cost him little, their total loss would not materially affect his fortune, and he was glad through them to have a personal share in the irritating and absorbing evolution in the mills. He heard of Allen frequently as a fiery and fairly successful organizer of trouble, and he sent for him when he thought the situation warranted it. Allen came readily enough, walking into the office, shorn of his London frills, but evidently retentive of the habit of keeping neat and clean. The eyes, too, had altered, but not obviously, letting through, perhaps, a certain disillusionment.

"What are you doing to my mills?" George wanted to know.

Allen, surprisingly, didn't once lose his temper, listening to George's complaints without change of expression while he wandered about, his eyes taking in each detail of the richly furnished office.

"The directors report that the men have refused to enter into a fair and above-board coÖperative arrangement, and we've figured all along it was turning the business over to them; taking money out of our own pockets. It's a form of communism, and they throw it down. Why, Allen? I want this straight."

Allen paused in his walk, and looked closely at George. There was no change in his face even when he commenced to speak.

"A share in a business," he said, softly, "carries uncomfortable responsibilities. You can't go to yourself, for instance, and say: 'Give me more wages—more than the traffic will bear; then you sweat about it in your office, but don't bother me in my cottage.'"

"You acknowledge it!" George cried.

Allen's face at last became a trifle animated.

"Why not—to you? Everybody's out to get it—the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. The capitalist most of all. Why not the man that turns the wheels?"

George whistled.

"You'd crush essential industries off the face of the earth! You'd go back to the stone age!"

"Not," Allen answered, slowly, "as long as the profits of the past can be got out of somebody's pockets."

"You'd grab capital!"

"Like a flash; and what are you going to do about it?"

"I'll tell you what I am going to do," George answered, "and I fancy a lot of others will follow my example. I am going to get rid of those stocks if I have to throw them out of the window, then you'll have no gun to hold at my head."

"Throw too much away," Allen warned, "and you'll throw it all."

"The beautiful, pure social revolution!" George sneered. "You're less honest than you were when you dropped everything to go to London for me. What's the matter with you, Allen?"

Allen appraised again the comfortable room. Even now his expression didn't alter materially.

"Nothing. I don't know. Unless the universal spirit of grab has got in my own veins."

"Then, my friend," George said, pleasantly, "there's the door."

XVI

George found himself thinking and talking of Allen's views quite enough to please even Bailly. Blodgett, on the other hand, perhaps because of the heavy, settled atmosphere of the marble temple, had changed his tune.

"Things are bound to come right in the end."

As far as George was concerned he might as well have said:

"This marble surrounding me is so many feet thick. Who do you think is going to interfere with that?"

Something of quite a different nature bothered Lambert, and for a few days George thought it a not unnatural resentment at seeing Blodgett in his father's office, but Lambert took pains to awaken him to the truth, walking in one afternoon a few weeks after the Planters' move to town. He had an uncertain and discontented appearance.

"By the way, George," he said not without difficulty, "Dolly's about a good deal."

It was quite certain Lambert hadn't come to announce only that, so George shrank from his next words, confident that something definite must have happened. He controlled his anxiety with the thought that Lambert had, indeed, come to him, and that Dalrymple couldn't permit the announcement of an engagement without meeting the fulfilment of George's penalties.

"It's been on my mind for the past week," Lambert went on. "I mean, he hasn't been seeing her much in public, but he's been hanging around the house, and last night I spoke to Sylvia about it, told her I didn't think father would want him any more than I did, pointed out his financial record, and said I had gathered he owed you no small sum——"

"You blind idiot!" George cried. "Why did you have to say that? How did you even guess it? I've never opened my mouth."

"He'd milked everybody else dry," Lambert answered, "and Driggs mentioned a long time ago you'd had a curiously generous notion you'd like to help Dolly if he ever needed it."

"It wasn't generosity," George said, dryly. "Go ahead. Did you make any more blunders?"

"You're scarcely one to accuse," Lambert answered. "You put me up to it in the first place, although I'll admit now, I'd have spoken anyway. I don't want Sylvia marrying him. I don't want him down town as more than a salaried man, unless he changes more than he has. I didn't feel even last night that Sylvia really loved him, but I made her furious, and you're right. I shouldn't have said that. I daresay she guessed, too, it wasn't all generosity that had led you to pay Dolly's debts. Anyway, she wouldn't talk reasonably, said she'd marry any one she pleased—oh, quite the young lady who sent me after you with a horse whip, and I daresay she'd have been glad to do it again last night. I spoke to Mother. She said Sylvia hadn't said anything to her, but she added, if Sylvia wanted him, she wouldn't oppose her. Naturally she wouldn't, seeing only Dolly's good points, which are regularly displayed for the benefit of the ladies. Anyway, I agreed to tell you, and you promised, if it came to the point, you'd have some things to say to me——"

George nodded shortly.

"Yes, but I blame you for forcing me to say them. You've thrown them together——"

"I've always wanted to help Dolly as you would any old friend who had wandered a little to the side, and was anxious to get back on the path. I can't figure every man that comes about the place as a suitor for Sylvia. Let's forget all that. What are these important and unpleasant things you have to tell me? I daresay you know where the money you loaned Dolly went."

George pressed his lips tight. He frowned. Even now he hesitated to soil his hands, to divide himself, perhaps, permanently from Sylvia at the very moment of saving her; and he wasn't quite sure, in view of her pride and her quick temper, that his very effort wouldn't defeat its own purpose. If only Lambert hadn't made that worst of all possible blunders. He wondered how a man felt on the rack. He bent swiftly and picked up the telephone.

"I shall talk with Dalrymple first," he said. "I'm going to ask him to come over here at once. I think he'll come."

But Lambert shook his head, stopped him before he could take the receiver from the hook.

"Isn't in the office. Hasn't been back since luncheon. Left no word then."

"Perhaps since you've come away——" George hazarded.

He telephoned, while Lambert wandered about the room, or paused to slip through his fingers the tape that emerged like a long and listless serpent from the now silent ticker. After a question or two George replaced the receiver and glanced at Lambert.

"You're right. Sticks to the job, doesn't he?"

"He isn't exactly an ordinary clerk," Lambert offered.

George walked to a window. For a long time he gazed over the lower city, turned singularly unreal by the early dusk, while it outlined itself little by little in yellow points of light which gave to the clouds and the circling columns of steam a mauve quality as if the world, instead of night, faced the birth of a dawn, new, abnormal, frightening.

He had to make one more effort with Dalrymple before sending Lambert to Sylvia with his reasons why she shouldn't marry the man. In the singular, unreal light he glanced at his hands. He had to see Dalrymple once more first——

He turned and snapped on the lights.

"What are you going to do?" Lambert asked. "There's no likely way to catch him down town."

A clerk tip-toed in. George swung sharply.

"What is it, Carson?"

"Mr. Dalrymple's outside, sir. It's so late I hesitated to bother you, but he said it was very important he should see you, sir."

George sighed.

"Wait outside, Carson. I'll call you in a moment."

And when the door was closed he turned to Lambert.

"I'm going to see him here—alone."

"Why?" Lambert asked, uneasily. "I don't quite see what you're up to. No more battles of the ink pots!"

"Please get out, Lambert; but maybe you'd better hang about the office. I think Dicky's gone for the night. Wait in his room."

"All right," Lambert agreed.

George opened the door, and, as Lambert went through reluctantly, beckoned the clerk.

"Send Mr. Dalrymple in, Carson."

He stood behind his desk, facing the open door. Almost immediately the doorway was blocked by Dalrymple. George stared, trying to value the alteration in the man. The weak, rather handsome face was bold and contemptuous. Clearly he had come here for blows of his own choosing, and had just now borrowed courage from some illicit bar, but he had taken only enough, George gathered, to make him assured and not too calculating. He was clothed as if he had returned from an affair, with a flower in his buttonhole, and a top hat held in the hand with his stick and gloves.

"Come in!"

Dalrymple closed the door and advanced, smiling.

Not for a moment did George's glance leave the other. He felt taut, hard to the point of brittleness.

"It's fortunate you've come," he said, quietly. "I've just been trying to get hold of you."

"Oh! Then Lambert's been here!" Dalrymple answered, jauntily.

George nodded.

"You've been crooked, Dalrymple. Now we'll have an accounting."

Dalrymple laughed.

"It's what I've come for; but first I advise you to hold your temper. It's late, but there are plenty of people still outside. Any more rough stuff and you'll spend the night in a cell, or under bail."

"If you lived nine lives," George commented, "you'd never be able to intimidate me."

Yet the other's manner troubled, and George's doubtful curiosity grew as he watched Dalrymple commence to draw the strings of the mask.

Dalrymple put down his hat and cane, bent swiftly, placed the palms of his hands on the desk, stared at George, his face inflamed, his eyes choked with malicious exultation.

"Your blackmail," he cried, "is knocked into a cocked hat. I married Sylvia half an hour ago."

Before George's response he lost some of his colour, drew back warily; but George had no thought of attacking him; it was too late now. That was why he experienced a dreadful realization of defeat, for a moment let through a flickering impression of the need for violence, but—and Dalrymple couldn't be expected to understand that—violence against George Morton who had let this situation materialize, who experienced, tumbling about his head, the magnificent but incomplete efforts of many years. That sensation of boundless, imponderable wreckage crushing upon him sent him back to his chair where for a moment he sat, sunk down, stripped of his power and his will.

And Dalrymple laughed, enjoying it.

In George's overwhelmed brain that laughter started an awakening clamour.

"What difference does the money make now?" Dalrymple jibed. "And she'll believe nothing else you may tell her, and violence would only make a laughing stock of you. It's done."

"How was it done?" George whispered.

"No objections to amusing you," Dalrymple mocked. "Lambert interfered last night, and spoiled his own game by dragging you in. By gad, she has got it in for you! Don't see why you ever thought——Anyway, she agreed right enough then, and I didn't need to explain it was wiser, seeing how Lambert felt about it, and her father, and you, of all people, to get the thing over without any brass bands. Had a bit of luck ducking the reporters at the license bureau. Tied the knot half an hour ago. She's gone home to break the glad news."

He grinned.

"But I thought it only decent to jump the subway and tell you your filthy money's all right and that you can plant a tombstone on your pound of flesh."

He laughed again.

In George's brain the echoes of Dalrymple's triumph reverberated more and more intelligibly. Little by little during the recital his slumped attitude had altered.

"In a way! In a way! In a way!" had sung through his brain, deriding him.

Then, as he had listened, had flashed the question: "Is it really too late?" And he had recalled his old determination that nothing—not even this—should bar the road to his pursuit. So, at the close of Dalrymple's explanation, he was straight in his chair, his hands grasping the arms, every muscle, every nerve, stretched tight, and in his brain, overcoming the boisterous resonance of Dalrymple's mirth, rang his old purposeful refrain: "I will! I will! I will!"

Dalrymple had married her, but it wasn't too late yet.

"Jealous old fellow!" Dalrymple chaffed. "No congratulations for Dolly. Blow up about your notes any time you please. I'll see they're paid."

He took up his hat and stick.

"Want to run along now and break the news to brother-in-law. Sure to find him. He's a late bird."

George stood up.

"Wait a minute," he said, quietly. "Got to say you've put one over, Dalrymple. It was crooked, but it's done. You've settled it, haven't you?"

"Glad you take it reasonably," Dalrymple laughed, turning for the door.

"Wait a minute," George repeated.

Dalrymple paused, apparently surprised at the tone, even and colourless.

"Lambert's somewheres about the place," George explained. "Just stay here, and I'll find him and send him in."

"Good business!" Dalrymple agreed, sitting down. "Through all the sooner."

He smiled.

"A little anxious to get home to my wife."

George tried to close his ears. He didn't dare look at the other. He hurried out, closed the door, and went to Goodhue's office. At sight of him Lambert sprang from his chair as if startled by an unforeseen record of catastrophe.

"What's happened?"

"Dalrymple's in my room," George answered without any expression. "He wants to see you. He'll tell you all about it."

He raised his hands, putting a stop to Lambert's alarmed questions.

"Can't wait. Do just one thing for me. Give me half an hour. Keep Dalrymple here for half an hour."

Still Lambert cried for reasons.

"Never mind why. You ought to interest each other for that long."

But Lambert tried to detain him.

"Where are you going? Why do you want me to keep him here? You look as if you'd been struck in the face! George! What goes on?"

George turned impatiently.

"Ask Dalrymple. Then do that one thing for me."

He ran out of the room, picked up his hat and coat, and hastened to the elevators.

He was caught by the high tide of the homeward rush, but his only thought was of the quickest way, so he let himself be swept into the maelstrom of the subway and was pounded aboard a Lexington Avenue express. All these people struggling frantically to get somewhere! The pleasures awaiting them at their journey's end should be colourful and compelling; yet it was clear to him sordid discontent lurked for some, and for others unavoidable sorrows. It was beyond belief that their self-centred haste should let creep in no knowledge of the destination and the purpose of this companion, even more eager than themselves, intimately crushed among them.

He managed to free his arm so he could glance at his watch, and he peered between bobbing heads through the windows at the station signs. At Eighty-sixth Street he escaped and tore, limping, up the stairs while people stared at him, or, if in his haste he had brushed unthinkingly against them, called out remarks angry or sarcastic. His leg commenced to ache, but he ran across to Fifth Avenue and down it to the Planter house. While he waited before the huge, heavy glass and iron doors he caught his breath, counting the seconds.

It was Simpson who opened.

"I'm not sure Miss Planter has returned, sir. If so, she would be upstairs. When she went out she said something about not being disturbed this evening. Yes, sir. She left with Mr. Dalrymple less than two hours ago."

George walked into the vast hall.

"I must see her, Simpson, at once."

He started toward hangings, half-drawn, through which he could see only partially a dimly lighted room.

"I will tell her, sir."

George swung.

"But not my name, Simpson. Tell her it is a message from her brother, of the greatest importance."

George held his breath.

"What is it, Simpson?"

The clear contralto voice steadied him. If she was alone in there he would have a better chance than he had hoped for, and he heard no other voice; but why should she be alone at this exciting hour in a dimly lighted room? Was it possible that she hadn't told any one yet what she had done, had returned to the house and chosen solitude, instead, in a dim light? Then why? Why?

He dismissed Simpson with a nod and entered between the hangings.

She was alone. She stood before a cold fireplace at the end of the room as if she had just risen from a chair near by. She was straight and motionless, but she projected an air of fright, as if she had been caught at an indiscretion; and, as George advanced, he thought her colour was too deep, and he believed she had been crying alone in the dusk of the room which was scarcely disturbed by one shaded lamp.

He paused and stared at her—no longer Sylvia Planter—Dalrymple's wife. All at once the appearance of modelled stone left her. Her entire body seemed in motion, surrendered to a neurotic and undirected energy. She started forward, paused, drew away. Her eyes turned from him to the door, then questioningly back again. She pulled at the gloves which she had kept in her hand. Her voice, when she spoke, was unsteady:

"What do you mean—coming in here—unannounced?"

His eyes held her.

"I've had enough of that," he said, harshly. "All I can think of is the vile name your husband would have called you once if I hadn't choked him half to death."

For a second her eyes blazed, then her shoulders drooped, and she covered her face with her hands. With a sharp regret it occurred to him that he could throw the broken crop away, for at last he had struck her—hard enough to hurt.

Her voice from behind her hands was uncertain and muffled.

"Who told you?"

"He did—naturally, that—that——"

He broke off, choking.

"By God, Sylvia! It isn't too late. You've got to understand that. Now. This minute. I tell you it isn't too late."

She lowered her hands. Her fear was sufficiently visible. Her attempt at a laugh was pitiful, resembled an escaping grief.

"Leave me alone. You have to leave me alone now."

Her brutal definition of the great wall suddenly raised between them swept his mind clean of everything except her lips, her beauty, cloistered with his interminable desire in this dim room.

He stumbled blindly forward to his final chance. With a great, unthinking, enveloping gesture he flung his arms about her drew her so close to his body that she couldn't resist; and, before she had time to cry out, pressed his mouth at last against her lips.

He saw her eyes close, guessed that she didn't attempt to struggle, experienced an intoxicating fancy she was content to have him fulfill his boast. He didn't try to measure the enormity of his action. Once more he was the George Morton who could plunge ahead, casting aside acquired judgments. Then he felt her shudder. She got her lips away. She tried to lift her hands. He heard her whisper:

"Let me go."

He stared, fascinated, at her lips, half parted, that had just now told him he had never really wanted anybody else, never could have.

"Sylvia! Forgive me. I didn't know. I've loved you—always; I've never dreamed how much. And I can't let you go."

He tried to find her lips again, but she fought, and he commenced to remember. From a point behind his back something held her incredulous attention. He turned quickly. Dalrymple stood between the hangings.

XVII

George experienced no fear, no impulse to release Sylvia. He was conscious merely of a sharp distaste that it should have turned out so, and a feeling of anger that Lambert was responsible through his failure to grant his request; but Lambert might have been shocked to forgetfulness by Dalrymple's announcement, or he might have had too sharp a doubt of George's intentions. Sylvia had become motionless, as if impressed by the futility of effort. In a moment would she cry out to Dalrymple just what he had done? He waited for her charge, her justification, while he continued to stare at Dalrymple's angry and unbelieving face which the gay flower in his button hole had an air of mocking. Dalrymple started forward.

"You see that, Lambert——"

Lambert, who must have been standing close behind him, walked into the room, as amazed as Dalrymple, nearly as shocked.

"Sylvia!"

George let Sylvia go. She sat down in the chair by the fireplace and looked straight ahead, her lips still half parted. Dalrymple hurried the length of the room and paused in front of her.

"Be careful what you say, Dalrymple," George warned him.

Dalrymple burst out:

"You'll not tell me what to say. What's this mean, Sylvia? Speak up, or——"

"Easy, Dolly," Lambert advised.

George waited. Sylvia did not cry out. He relaxed, hearing her say uncertainly:

"I don't know. I'm sorry. I——"

She paused, looked down, commenced pulling at her gloves again with the self-absorbed gestures of a somnambulist. George's heart leapt. She had not accused him, had really said nothing, from her attitude wouldn't just yet. Dalrymple swung furiously on Lambert.

"God! Am I to believe my eyes? Pretends to despise him, and I find her in his arms!"

Sylvia glanced up once then, her face crimson, her lips trembling, then she resumed her blank scrutiny of her gloves at which she still pulled. George stepped swiftly forward, fancying Dalrymple was going to threaten her with his hands.

"Why don't you talk up?" Dalrymple cried. "What you got to say? Don't see there's much? Never would have dreamed it of you. What a scandal!"

"Morton," Lambert said with a leashed fury in his quiet voice, "no one but you could have done this. Leave us alone now to see what we can make of it."

George laughed shortly.

"All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't budge me just yet. And I'll tell you what we'll make of it. Just what she wishes."

"Keep your mouth shut," Dalrymple said, shrilly. "You won't go. We'll go. Sylvia! Come with me. We'll talk it out alone."

She shrank back in her chair, grasped its arms, looked up startled, shaking her head.

"I can't go anywhere with you, Dolly," she said in a wondering voice.

"What you mean? You came to church right enough with me this afternoon. Don't you forget that."

She nodded.

"It was wrong of me," she whispered. "I lost my temper. I didn't know at all——"

"How did you find out?" Dalrymple sneered. "From him? But you're my wife. Come away with me——"

She stood up swiftly, facing him.

"You shan't say such things to me, and I am not coming with you. I don't know what's going to happen, but that—I know——"

She turned helplessly to Lambert.

"Make him understand."

Lambert took her hand and led her to the door.

"Go to Betty," he said.

"But make him understand," she pled.

"Why did you marry him if you didn't love him?" Lambert asked.

She turned and glanced at Dalrymple.

"I was fond of him. I didn't quite realize. There's a difference—he must see that I've done an impossible thing, and I won't go on with it."

They were at the door. Lambert led her through, returning immediately. George watched her go, blaming himself for her suffering. He had, indeed, dragged her from her high horse, but he had not realized he would bring her at once and starkly face to face with facts she had all along refused to recognize; yet, he was convinced from his long knowledge of her, she would not alter her decision, and he was happy, knowing that he had accomplished, after a fashion, what he had come here to do.

"You're married," Lambert was saying dryly to Dalrymple. "The problem seems to be how to get you unmarried."

"You shan't do that," Dalrymple cried, hotly. "You'll talk her around instead."

"Scarcely a chance," Lambert answered, "and really I don't see why I should try. You've played a slippery trick. You may have had an understanding with Sylvia, but I am perfectly convinced that she wouldn't have let anything come of it if you hadn't caught her at a moment when she couldn't judge reasonably. So it's entirely up to her."

"We'll see about it," Dalrymple said. "I have my side. You turn nasty. I turn nasty. You Planters want an annulment proceeding, or a public divorce with this rotter as co-respondent?"

"Dolly! You don't know what you're saying."

"I'll fight for my rights," Dalrymple persisted, sullenly.

"See here," George put in, "I stayed to say one thing. Sylvia had nothing to do with what you saw. She couldn't help herself. Your crookedness, Dalrymple, made me forget everything except that——Never mind. Lambert understands. Maybe I was out of my head. Anyway, I didn't give her a chance. She had to suffer it. Is that quite clear?"

Lambert smiled incredulously.

"That'll sound well in court, too," Dalrymple threatened.

"Drop that!" Lambert cried. "Think who you are; who Sylvia is."

"My wife," Dalrymple came back. "I'll have her or I'll go to court."

George started for the door.

"Don't fret, Lambert," he advised. "Money will go a long way with him. If I might, I'd like to know what the two of you settle. I mean, if you want to keep it away from your father and mother, my money's available. I haven't much use for it any more——"

He broke off. What had he just meant to say: that since he had held Sylvia in his arms all that had marked the progress of his ambition had become without value? He would have to find that out. Now he waited at the door, interested only in Dalrymple's response to his bald proposal. Dalrymple thrust his hands in his pockets, commenced to pace the room, but all he said was:

"Teach you all not to make a fool of Dolly."

"Remember," George said. "What she wants. And undesired scandals can be paid for in various ways."

He glanced at Lambert. Evidently Sylvia's brother on that ground would meet him as an ally. So he left the house and walked slowly through the eastern fringe of the park, wishing to avoid even the few people scattered along the pavements of the avenue, for the touch of Sylvia's lips was still warm on his mouth. He felt himself apart. He wanted to remain apart as long as possible with that absorbing memory.

Her angry responses in the past to his few daring gestures were submerged in the great, scarcely comprehensible fact that she had not rebuked him when he had tumbled over every barrier to take her in his arms; nor had she, when cornered by Dalrymple and Lambert, assumed her logical defence. Had that meant an awakening of a sort?

He smiled a little, thinking of her lips.

Their touch had sent to his brain flashes of pure illumination in which his once great fondness for Betty had stood stripped of the capacity for any such avid, confused emotions as Sylvia had compelled; flashes that had exposed also his apparent hatred of the girl Sylvia as an obstinate love, which, unable to express itself according to a common-place pattern, had shifted its violent desires to conceptions of wrongs and penalties. Blinded by that great light, he asked himself if his ambition, his strength, and his will had merely been expressions of his necessity for her.

Of her words and actions immediately afterward he didn't pretend to understand anything beyond their assurance that Dalrymple's romance was at an end. Not a doubt crept into his strange and passionate exaltation.

He was surprised to find himself at his destination. When he reached his apartment he got out the old photograph and the broken riding crop, and with them in his hands sat before the fire, dreaming of the long road over which they had consistently aided him. He compared Sylvia as he had just seen her with the girlish and intolerant Sylvia of the photograph, and he found he could still imagine the curved lips moving to form the words:

"You'll not forget."

He lowered his hands, and took a deep breath like one who has completed a journey. To-night, in a sense, he had reached the heights most carefully guarded of all.

XVIII

He heard the ringing of the door bell. His servant slipped in.

"Mr. Lambert Planter, sir."

George started, placed the crop and the photograph in a drawer, and looked at the man with an air of surprise.

"Of course, I should like to see him. And bring me something on a tray, here in front of the fire."

Lambert walked in.

"Don't mind my coming this way, George?"

"I'm glad I'm no longer 'Morton'," George said, dryly. "Sit down. I'm going to have a bite to eat."

He glanced at his watch.

"Good Lord! It's after ten o'clock."

"Yes," Lambert said, choosing a chair, "there was a lot to talk about."

Little of the trouble had left Lambert's face, but George fancied Sylvia's brother looked at him with curiosity, with a form of respect.

"I'm glad you've come," George said, "but I don't intend to apologize for what I did this evening. I think we all, no matter what our inheritance, fight without thought of affectations for our happiness. That's what I did. I love your sister, Lambert. Never dreamed how much until to-night. Not a great deal to say, but it's enormous beyond definition to think. You have Betty, so perhaps you can understand."

Lambert smiled in a superior fashion.

"I'm a little confused," he said. "She's led me to believe all along she's disliked you; has kept you away from Oakmont; has made it difficult from the start. Then I find her, whether willingly or not—at least not crying out for help—in your arms."

"I had to open her eyes to what she had done," George answered. "I wasn't exactly accountable, but I honestly believe I took the only possible means. I don't know whether I succeeded."

"I fancy you succeeded," Lambert muttered.

George stretched out his hand, looked at Lambert appealingly.

"She didn't say so—she——"

Lambert shook his head.

"She wouldn't talk about you at all."

He waited while the servant entered and arranged George's tray.

"Of course you've dined?"

"After a fashion," Lambert answered. "Not hungry. You might give me a drink."

"I feel apologetic about eating," George said when they were alone again. "Don't see why I should have an appetite."

Lambert fingered his glass.

"Do you know why she didn't have you drawn and quartered?"

"No. Don't try to create happiness, Lambert, where there mayn't be any."

"I'm creating nothing. I'm asking a question, in an effort to understand why she won't, as I say, mention your name; why she can't bear to have it mentioned."

"If you were right, if things could be straightened out," George said, "you—you could put up with it?"

"Easily," Lambert answered, "and I'll confess I couldn't if it were Corporal John Smith. I've been fond of you for a long time, George, and I owe you a great deal, but that doesn't figure. You're worthy even of Sylvia; but I don't say I'm right. You can't count on Sylvia. And even if I were, I don't see any way to straighten things out."

George returned to his meal.

"If you had taken the proper attitude," he scolded, "you could have handled Dalrymple. He's weak, avaricious, cowardly."

"Oh, Dalrymple! I can handle him. It's Sylvia," Lambert said. "In the long run Dolly agreed to about everything. Of course he wanted money, and he'll have to have it; but heaven knows there's plenty of money. Trouble is, the wedding can't be hushed up. That's plain. It will be in every paper to-morrow. We arranged that Dolly was to live in the house for a time. They would have been together in public, and Dolly agreed eventually to let her go and get a quiet divorce—at a price. It sounds revolting, but to me it seemed the only way."

George became aware of an ugly and distorted intruder upon his happiness, yet Lambert was clearly right. Sylvia and Dalrymple, impulsively joined together, were nothing to each other, couldn't even resume their long friendship.

"Well?" George asked.

"Mother, Betty, and I talked it over with Sylvia," Lambert answered. "You see, we've kept Father in ignorance so far. He's scarcely up to such a row. Mother will make him wise very gently only when it becomes necessary."

"But what did Sylvia say?" George demanded, bending toward Lambert, his meal forgotten.

"Sylvia," Lambert replied, spreading his hands helplessly, "would agree to nothing. In the first place, she wouldn't consent to Dolly's staying in the house even to save appearances. I don't know what's the matter with her. She worried us all. She wasn't hysterical exactly, but she cried a good deal, which is quite unusual for her, and she seemed—frightened. She wouldn't let any one go near her—even Mother. I couldn't understand that."

George stared at the fire, his hands clasped. When at last he spoke he scarcely heard his own voice:

"She will get a divorce—as soon as possible?"

Lambert emptied his glass and set it down.

"That's just it," he answered, gloomily. "She won't listen to anything of the sort."

George glanced up.

"What is there left for her to do?"

Lambert frowned.

"Something seems to have changed her wholly. She declares she'll never see Dolly again, and in the same breath talks about the church and a horror of divorce, and the necessity of her suffering for her mistake; and she wants to pay her debt to Dolly by giving him, instead of herself, all of her money—a few such pleasant inconsistencies. See here. Why didn't you run wild yesterday, or the day before?"

"Do you think," George asked, softly, "it would have been quite the same thing, would have had quite the same effect?"

"I wonder," Lambert mused.

George arose and stood with his back to the fire.

"And of course," he said, thoughtfully, "you or I can't tell just what the effect has been. See here, Lambert. I have to find that out. I must see her once, if only for five minutes."

He watched Lambert, who didn't answer at first.

"I'll not run wild again," he promised. "If she'd only agree—just five minutes' talk."

"I told you," Lambert said at last, "she wouldn't mention your name or let any one else; but, on the theory that you are really responsible for what's happened, I'd like you to see her. You might persuade her that a divorce is absolutely necessary, the only way out. You might get her to understand that she can't go through life tied to a man she'll never see, while people will talk many times more than if she took a train quietly west."

"If she'll see me," George said, "I'll try to make it plain to her."

"Betty has a scheme——" Lambert began, and wouldn't grow more explicit beyond saying, "Betty'll probably let you hear from her in the morning. That's the reason I wanted you to know how things stand. I'm hurrying back now to our confused house."

George followed him to the door.

"Dalrymple—where is he?" he asked.

"Gone to his parents. He'll try to play the game for the present."

"At a price," George said.

Lambert nodded.

"Rather well-earned, too, on the whole," he answered, ironically.

XIX

George slept little that night. The fact that Lambert believed him responsible for the transformation in Sylvia was sufficiently exciting. In Sylvia's manner her brother must have read something he had not quite expressed to George. And why wouldn't she mention him? Why couldn't she bear to have the others mention him? With his head bowed on his hands he sat before the desk, staring at the diminishing fire, and in this posture he fell at last asleep to be startled by Wandel who had not troubled to have himself announced. The fire was quite dead. In the bright daylight streaming into the room George saw that the little man held a newspaper in his hand.

"Is it a habit of great men not to go to bed?"

George stood up and stretched. He indicated the newspaper.

"You've come with the evil tidings?"

"About Sylvia and Dolly," Wandel began.

George yawned.

"I must bathe and become presentable, for this is another day."

"You've already seen it?" Wandel asked, a trifle puzzled.

"No, but what else should there be in the paper?"

Wandel stared for a moment, then carefully folded the paper and tossed it in the fireplace.

"Nothing much," he answered, lighting a cigarette, "except hold-ups, murders, new strikes, fresh battles among our brethren of the Near East—nothing of the slightest consequence. By by. Make yourself, great man, fresh and beautiful for the new day."

XX

George wondered why Wandel should have come at all, or, having come, why he should have left in that manner; and he was sorry he had answered as he had, for Wandel invariably knew a great deal, more than most people. In this case he had probably come only to help, but in George's brain nothing could survive for long beyond hazards as to what the morning might develop. Betty was going to communicate with him, and she would naturally expect to find him at his office, so he hurried down town and waited, forcing himself to the necessary details of his work. For the first time the mechanics of making money seemed dreary and unprofitable.

Goodhue came in with a clearly designed lack of curiosity. Had his partner all along suspected the truth, or had Wandel been talking? For that matter, did Goodhue himself experience a sense of loss?

"Not so surprising, George. Dolly's always been after her—even back in the Princeton days, and she's played around with him since they were children; yet I was a little shocked. I never thought it would quite come off."

It was torture for George to listen, and he couldn't possibly talk about it, so he led Goodhue quite easily to the day's demands; but Blodgett appeared not long after with a drooping countenance. Why did they all have to come to him to discuss the unannounced wedding of Sylvia Planter?

"She ought to have done better," Blodgett disapproved funereally.

He fingered a gaudy handkerchief. He thrust it in his pocket, drew it forth again, folded it carefully with his pudgy hands.

"Don't think I've ever ceased to regret——" he started rather pitifully.

After a moment's absorbed scrutiny of George he went on.

"If she had picked somebody like you I wouldn't have minded. Papa Blodgett would have given you both his blessing."

So they had all guessed something! George questioned uneasily if Blodgett's suspicions had lived during the course of his own unfortunate romance, and he was sorrier than ever he had had to help destroy that. He got rid of Blodgett and refused to see any one else, but he had to answer the telephone, for that would almost certainly be Betty's means of communication. Each time the pleasant bell tinkled he seized the receiver, and each time cut short whatever masculine worries reached him. The uneven pounding of the ticker punctuated his suspense. It was a feverish morning in the market, but not once did he rise to glance at the tape which streamed neglected into the basket.

It was after one o'clock when he snatched the receiver from the hook again with a hopeless premonition of another disappointment. Then he heard Betty's voice, scarcely more than an anxious whisper "George!"

"Yes, yes, Betty."

"My car will be somewhere between Altman's and Tiffany's at two o'clock, as near the corner of Thirty-fifth Street as they'll let me get. Lambert knows. It's all right."

"But, Betty——"

"Just be there," she said, and must have hung up.

He glanced at his watch. He could start now. He hurried from the building, but there was no point in haste. He had plenty of time, too much time; and Betty hadn't said he would see Sylvia; hadn't given him time to ask; but she must have arranged an interview, else why should she care to see him at all, why her manner of a conspirator?

He reached the rendezvous well ahead of time, but he recognized Betty's car just beyond the corner, and saw her wave to him anxiously. He stepped in and sat at her side. She laughed nervously.

"I guessed you would be a little ahead," she said as the car commenced to crawl north.

"Am I to see Sylvia?"

Betty nodded.

"Just once. This noon, before I telephoned, she acknowledged that she wanted to see you—to talk to you for the last time. That's the way she put it."

Betty smiled sceptically.

"You know I don't believe anything of the sort."

"What do you think can be done?" George asked.

She didn't suggest anything, merely repeating her faith, going on while she looked at George curiously.

"So all the time, George—and I didn't really guess, but I might have known you would. I can remember now that day at Princeton when I asked you about her dog, and your anxiety one night at Josiah's when you wanted to know if she was going to be married—oh, plenty of hints now. George! Why did you let it go so far?"

"Couldn't help myself, Betty."

She looked at him helplessly.

"And what have you done to her?"

"If you can't guess——" George said.

Betty smiled reminiscently.

"Perhaps I can guess. You would do just that, George, when there was nothing else."

"You don't blame me?" he asked. "You don't ask, as Lambert did, why I waited so long?"

She shook her head.

"I'm sure," she said, "when you came last night you saw a Sylvia none of us had ever met before. Don't you think it had come upon her all at once that she was no longer Sylvia Planter, that in defeating you she had destroyed herself? If that is so, she has every bit of sympathy I'm capable of, and we must think first of all of her. The pride's still there, but quite a different thing. She's never known fear before, George, and now she's afraid, terribly afraid, most of all, I think, of herself."

George counted the corners, was relieved when beyond Fiftieth Street the traffic thinned and they went faster. He took Betty's hand, and found that the touch steadied and encouraged, because at last her fingers seemed to reach his mind again.

"Betty! Do you think she cares at all?"

"I'm prejudiced," Betty laughed, "but I think the harder she'd been the more she's cared; but she wouldn't talk about you except to say she would see you for a minute this once. Lambert's lunching with Dolly."

"We are conspirators," George said, "and I don't like it, but I must see her once."

They drew up at the curb, got out, and entered the hall. The house was peculiarly without sound. George glanced at the entrance to the room where he had found Sylvia last night.

"I think she's in Mr. Planter's study," Betty said. "He hasn't come downstairs yet."

She led him through the library to a small, square room—a quiet and comfortable book-lined retreat where Old Planter had been accustomed to supplement his work down town. George looked eagerly around, but the light wasn't very good, and he didn't at first see Sylvia.

"Sylvia!" Betty called softly. "I've brought George."

XXI

Almost before George realized it Betty was gone and the door was closed.

"Sylvia!"

Her low voice reached him from a large chair opposite the single, leaded, opaque window.

"I'm over here——"

Yes, there was fear in her enunciation, as if she groped through shadowy and hazardous places. It cautioned him. With a choked feeling, a racking effort after repression, he walked quietly around and stared down at her.

She looked up once quickly, then glanced away. He was grateful for her colour, but the fear was in her face, too, and the pride, as Betty had said, but a transformed pride that he couldn't quite understand. She lay back in the large chair, her head to one side resting against the protruding arm. Her eyes were bright with tears she had shed or wanted to shed.

"Please sit down."

The ring of exasperated contempt and challenge had gone from her voice. He hadn't known it could stir him so. He drew up a chair and sat close to her.

"You are not angry about what I did last night?" he whispered.

She shook her head.

"I am grateful. I wanted to see you to tell you that, and how sorry I am—so beastly sorry, George."

Her voice drifted away. It made him want his arms about her, made him want her lips again. The room became a black and restless background for this shadowy, desired, and forbidden figure.

Impulsively he slipped to his knees and placed his head against the side of her chair. Across his hair he fancied a fugitive brushing of fingers. She burst out with something of her former impetuous manner.

"I used to want that! Now you shan't!"

He arose, and she stooped swiftly forward, as if propelled objectively, and, before he realized what she was doing, touched the back of his hand with her lips.

She sprang upright and faced him from the mantel, more afraid than ever, staring at him, her cheeks wet with tears.

"That's all," she whispered. "It's what I wanted to tell you. Please go. We mustn't see each other again."

In the room he was aware only of her, but he knew, in spite of his own blind instinct, that between them was a wall as of transparent and heavy glass against which he would only break his strength.

"Sylvia," he whispered in spite of that knowledge, "I want to touch your lips."

"They've never been anybody else's," she cried in a sudden outburst. "Never could have been. I see that now. That's why I've hated you——"

"Yet you love me now. You do love me, Sylvia?"

"I love you, George," she said, wearily. "I think I always have."

"Then why—why——"

She turned on him, nearly angry.

"How can you ask that? You haven't forgotten that first day, either, have you? You took something of me then, and I couldn't forget it. That was what hurt and humiliated; I couldn't forget, couldn't get out of my mind what you—one of the—the stablemen—had taken of me, Sylvia Planter. And I thought you could never give it back, but last night you did, and I——Everything went to pieces——And it had to be last night, after I'd lost my temper. I see that. That's the tragedy of it."

"I don't quite understand, Sylvia."

She smiled a little through her tears.

"Betty would. Any woman would. You must go now—please."

"When will I see you again?" he asked.

"This way? Never."

"What nonsense! You'll get a divorce. You must."

She straightened. Her head went back.

"I won't lie that way."

"I'll hit on some means," he boasted. "You belong to me."

"And I've found it out too late," she said, "and I don't believe I could have found it out before. Think of that, George, when it seems too hard. I had to be caught by my own rotten temper before I'd let you wake me up."

She drew a little away, and when he started forward motioned him back. Her face flooded with colour, but she met his eyes bravely.

"That was something. I will never forget that, either, but it doesn't make me feel—unclean, as I did that day at Oakmont and afterward. I don't want to forget it ever. Now you understand."

She ran swiftly to the door and opened it. He followed her and saw Betty at the farther end of the room talking to Mr. Planter.

"Why do you do that?" he asked, desperately.

"I want to tell you why I'll never forget," she answered in a half whisper. "Because I love you. I love you. I want to say it. I think it every minute, so don't you see you have to help me keep it straight and beautiful always, George?"

XXII

"Who has made my little girl cry?"

The quavering tones reminded George. He walked from the little room toward the others, and he saw that Old Planter had caught Sylvia's hand, had drawn her to him, had felt the tears on her cheeks.

There rushed back to George that ancient interview in the library at Oakmont, and here he was back at it, even in Old Planter's presence, making her cry again. He wondered what Old Planter had said when Lambert had told him who George Morton really was.

"You see, sir," he said, moodily, "I haven't changed so much from the stable boy, Morton, you once threatened to send to smash if——"

Sylvia broke in sharply.

"He's never been told——"

"What are you talking about?" the old man quavered. "Was there ever a Morton on my place, Sylvia? An old man, yes. He's dead. A young one——"

Slowly he shook his head from side to side. He peered suspiciously at George out of his dim eyes.

"I don't remember."

Suddenly he cried out with a flash of the old authority:

"I'm growing sensitive, Morton. No jokes! What's he talking about?"

Sylvia took his hand. Her lips trembled.

"Never mind, Father. Come."

And as he let her guide him he drifted on.

"Sylvia! Have you got everything you want? I'll give you anything you want if only you won't cry."

Outside rain had commenced to drizzle. From a tree in the little yard yellow leaves fluttered down. Old Planter hobbled into his study, Sylvia at his side. Betty followed George to the hall.

"Tell Sylvia I am very happy," he said.

She pressed his hand, whispering:

"The great George Morton!"

XXIII

Again George walked to his apartment and sat brooding over the fire, trying to find a way; but Sylvia must have searched, too, and failed. There was no way, or none that she would take. He crushed his heady revolt at the realization, for he believed she had been right. Without her great mistake she couldn't have given him that obliterative moment last evening, or his glimpse this afternoon of happiness through heavy, transparent glass. So he could smile a little, nearly cheerfully. There was really a quality of happiness in his knowledge that she had never forgotten his tight clasping at Oakmont, his blurted love, his threat that he would teach her not to be afraid of his touch. How she must have despised herself in the great house, among her own kind, when she found she couldn't forget Morton, when she tried, perhaps, to escape the shame of wanting Morton! No wonder she had attempted through Blodgett and Dalrymple, men for whom she could have had no such urgent feeling, to divide herself from him, to prevent the fulfilment of his boasts of which he had perpetually reminded her. She must have looked at him a good deal more than he had guessed in those far days. And now his touch had taught her to be more afraid than ever, but not of him. With a growing wonder he recalled her surrender. Of course, Sylvia, like her placid mother, like everyone, was, beneath the veneer even of endless generations, necessarily primitive. For that discovery he could thank Dalrymple. He continued to dream.

What, indeed, lay ahead for him? In a sense he had already reached the summit which he had set out to find, and every thrilling mood of hers that afternoon flamed in his mind. He had a desolate feeling that there was no longer anything for him down town, or anywhere else beyond a wait, possibly endless, for Sylvia; and as he brooded there he longed for a mother to whom he could have gone with his happiness that was more than half pain. His mother had said that there were lots of girls too good for him. His father had added, "Sylvia Planter most of all." His father was dead. His mother might as well have been. All at once her swollen hands seemed to rest passively between him and the fire.

He was glad when Wandel came in, even though he found him without lights, for the second time that day in an unaccustomed and reflective posture.

"Snap the lamps on, will you, Driggs?"

Wandel obeyed, and George blinked, laughing uncomfortably.

"You'll fancy I've caught the poet's mood."

"Not at all, my dear George," Wandel answered. "Why not say, thinking about the war? Nobody will let you talk about it, and I'm told if you write stories or books that mention it the editors turn their thumbs down. So much, says a grateful country, for the poor soldier. What more natural then than this really pitiful picture of the dejected veteran recalling his battles in a dusky solitude?"

"Oh, shut up, Driggs. Maybe you'll tell me why they ever called you 'Spike.'"

Wandel yawned.

"Certainly. Because, being small, I got hit on the head a great deal. I sometimes think it's why I'm too dull to make you understand what I mean to say."

George looked at him.

"I think I do, Driggs; and thanks."

"Then," Wandel said, brightly, "you'll come and dine with me."

"I will. I will. Where shall we go? Not to the club."

"I fancy one club wouldn't be pleasant for you this evening," Wandel said, quietly.

George caught his breath.

"Why not?"

But Wandel wouldn't satisfy him until they were in a small restaurant and seated at a wall table sufficiently far from people to make quiet tones safe.

"It's too bad," he said then, "that great men won't take warnings."

"I caught your warning," George answered, "and I acted on it as far as I could. I couldn't dream, knowing her, of a runaway marriage, and I'll guarantee you didn't, either."

"I once pointed out to you," Wandel objected, "that she was the impulsive sort who would fly to some man—only I fancied then it would ultimately be you."

"Why, Driggs?"

Wandel put his hand on George's knee.

"You don't mind my saying this? A long time ago I guessed she loved you. Even as far back as Betty's dÉbut, when I danced with her right after you two had had some kind of a rumpus, I saw she was a bundle of emotion and despised herself for it. Of course I hadn't observed then all that I have since."

"Why did you never warn me of that?" George asked.

Wandel laughed lightly.

"What absurd questions you ask! Because, being well acquainted with Sylvia, I couldn't see how she was to be made to realize she cared for you."

George crumbled a piece of bread.

"I daresay," he muttered, "you know everything that's happened. It's extraordinary the way you find out things—things you're not supposed to know at all."

Wandel laughed again, this time on a note of embarrassed disapproval.

"Not extraordinary in this case."

George glanced up.

"You said something about the club not being pleasant for me to-night——"

"Because," Wandel answered with brutal directness, "Dolly's been there."

George clenched his hands. Wandel looked at them amusedly.

"Very glad you weren't about, Hercules."

"It was that bad?" George asked.

"Why not," Wandel drawled, "say rather worse?"

"Drunk?" George whispered.

"A conservative diagnosis," Wandel answered. "His language sounded quite foreign, but with effort its sense could be had; and the rooms were fairly full. You know, just before dinner—the usual crowd."

"Somebody should have shut him up," George cried.

"We did, with difficulty, and not all at once," Wandel protested. "Dicky's taken him home with the aid of a pair of grinning hyenas. They did make one think of that."

"It's not to be borne," George muttered. "He ought to be killed."

"By all means, my dear George," Wandel agreed, "but we're back in New York. I mean, with the armistice murder ceased to be praiseworthy. They're punishing it in the usual fashion. You quite understand that, George?"

George tried to laugh.

"Quite. Go ahead."

"He really had some excuse," Wandel went on, "because when he first came in no one realized how bad he was—and they jumped him with congratulations and humour, and he went right out of his head—became stark, raving mad; or drunk, as you choose."

"What did he say?" George asked, softly.

Wandel half closed his eyes.

"Don't expect me to repeat any such crazy, disconnected stuff. It's enough that he let everybody guess Sylvia had sold him at the very moment he had fancied he had bought her. I've been thinking it over, and I'm not sure it isn't just as well he did. Everybody will talk his head off for a few days and drop it. Otherwise, curious things would have been noticed and suspected from time to time, and the talk, with fresh impetus, would have gone on forever. Besides, nobody's looking for much trouble with the Planters."

George had difficulty with his next question.

"He—he didn't mention me?"

"Why, yes," Wandel answered, gravely, "but rather incoherently."

"Rotten of him!"

"No direct accusations," Wandel hurried on, "just vile temper; and while it makes it temporarily more unpleasant that's just as well, too. The fact that people know what to expect kills more talk later. I suppose she'll manage a fairly quiet divorce."

"Won't listen to it," George snapped.

"How stupid of me!" Wandel drawled. "Of course she wouldn't."

He sighed.

"I mean to sympathize with you, my George, but all the time I envy you, and have to restrain myself from offering congratulations. Behold the oysters! They're really very good here."

George tried to smile.

"Then shall we talk about shell fish?"

"Bivalves, George. Or we might discuss the great strike. Which one? Take your choice. Or, by the way, have you received your shock yet? They're raising rents in our house more than a hundred per cent."

"The hell after war!" George grinned.

Wandel smiled back.

"Let us hope not a milestone on the road."

XXIV

Through pure will George resumed his routine, but it no longer had the power to capture him, becoming a drudgery without a clear purpose. Always he was conscious of the effort to force himself from recollection and imagination, to drive Sylvia from his mind; and, even so, he never quite succeeded. Were there then no heights beyond?

Lambert was painstakingly considerate, catching him for luncheon from time to time, or calling at unexpected moments at his office, and always he said something about Sylvia. She was well. Naturally she was keeping to herself. Betty and she were at Princeton, and Sylvia was going to stay on with the Alstons for a time. Once he let slip a sincere admiration, a real regret.

"It's extraordinary, George. You've very nearly made every word good."

George took the opening to ask a question that had been in his mind for many days.

"Where is he? What's he up to? I haven't seen him, but, naturally, I keep to myself, too, and Dicky, bless him, mentions nothing."

Lambert frowned.

"He hasn't been around the office much since. He's taking his own sweet will with himself now. He's gone away—to Canada. It's cold there, but it's also fairly wet."

"If one could only be sure he had the virtue of loving her!" George mused.

"He hasn't," Lambert said, impatiently. "Since I talked with him that hectic night I've admitted that Dolly's never had the capacity to love any one except himself. So he's probably happy in his own unpleasant way."

A thought came to George. He smiled a little.

"I've been wondering if Sylvia is going in harder than ever on the side of the downtrodden."

Lambert laughed.

"As far as I know, hasn't mentioned a cossack since that night; and I have to confess, hard-headed reactionary, the ranks are making me see too many bad qualities among the good."

"Perhaps," George suggested, "the ranks are saying something of the sort about us. Besides, I don't see why you call me reactionary."

"Would you have minded it a while back?" Lambert asked.

"Just the same," George answered, "I'd like to get their point of view."

What would Squibs say to that from him? Squibs, undoubtedly, would be pleased. After Lambert had gone he sat for a long time thinking. He was glad Lambert had come, for the other had suggested that in endeavouring to capture such a point of view, in pleasing Squibs, he might at last find a real interest, and one of use to somebody besides himself. If the men on the heights didn't get at it pretty soon, a different kind of climber would appear, with black hands, inflamed eyes, and a mind stripped, by passion, of all logic. Gladly he found it possible to bring to this new task the energy with which he had attacked the narrower puzzles of the university and Wall Street.

Sylvia had called him the most selfish person she had ever met, and, as he tried to strip from the facts of the world's disease the perpetual, clinging propaganda, he applied her charge to his soul. From the first he had been infected, yet his selfishness had been neither inefficient nor dangerous. This increasing pestilence was. Lambert guessed what he was at, and George jeered at him for his war madness, but Lambert had found again an absorbing interest. Because of his missing leg it was rather pitiful to watch his enthusiasm for a reawakened activity.

"You've got to see Harvard swallow your old Tiger, George," he said one Friday. "After all, why not? You don't need to come out to the Alstons, although I'm not sure there would be any harm in that. Talk's about done, I fancy."

George flushed.

"Do you know I'd love to spill you again, Lambert? I'd like to bring you down so hard the seismographs would make a record."

"Too bad we can't try to kill each other," Lambert said, regretfully. "Why not watch younger brutes?"

"I've wanted it for days," George acknowledged. "I'll wire Squibs."

George was perfectly sure that Squibs knew nothing, for he wasn't socially curious, and Betty would have hesitated to talk about what had happened even to Mrs. Squibs, yet he was conscious, after the first moment of meeting, of a continued scrutiny from Squibs, of a hesitancy of manner, of an unusually careful choice of words.

He had small opportunity to test this impression, for it was noon when he reached the house in Dickinson Street, and there were many of the tutor's products in the dining-room, snatching a cold bite while they roared confused pessimism about the game.

"You're going to the side-lines," Squibs said when they had climbed the ramp to their section of the stadium.

"I'd be in the way," George objected.

Bailly stared at him.

"George Morton on a football field could only be in the way of Harvard and Yale."

George experienced a quick, ardent wish for thick turf underfoot, for a seat on the bench among players exhaling a thick atmosphere of eager and absorbed excitement. So he let the tutor lead him down the steps. Squibs called to Green, who was distrait.

"What is it, Mr. Bailly?"

"I've got Morton."

Green sprang to life.

"Mr. Stringham! An omen! An omen!"

He met George at the gate and threw his arms around him. Stringham hurried up. Green crowed.

"I believe we'll lick these fellows or come mighty close to it."

"Of course you'll lick them, Green. Hello, Stringham! May I sit down?"

"The stadium's yours," Stringham said, simply.

As he walked along the line of eager players, smothered in blankets or sweaters, George caught snatches of the curiosity of youth, because of nervousness, too audibly expressed.

"Who's the big fellow?"

"That? Longest kicker, fastest man for his weight ever played the game. George Morton—the great Morton."

"He never played with that leg! What's the matter with his leg? Football?"

George caught no answer. He sat down among the respectful youths, thinking whimsically:

"The war's so soon over, but thank God they can't forget football!"

XXV

At the very end of the first half, when the Princeton sections experienced the unforeseen glow of a possible victory, George caught a glimpse of Lambert and Wandel close to the barrier, as if they had left their places to catch someone with the calling of time. Just then the horn scrunched its anxious message. George called.

"Lambert Planter!"

Stringham paused, grinning.

"Come over here, you biting bulldog."

Lambert made his way through the barrier and grasped Stringham's hand.

"Come along to the dressing-room," Stringham suggested, cordially. "Nice bulldog, although once I loved to see Morton chew you up."

Lambert glanced down.

"Thanks. I'd better stay here. One of my runners is off, Stringham."

"Then sit with the boys next half," Stringham said. "Coming, Morton?"

George shook his head, and urged the anxious coach away, for Wandel had caught his eye.

"Tell them to keep their heads," George called after Stringham. "If they keep their heads they've got Harvard beaten."

He glanced inquiringly at Wandel.

"Why not cease," Wandel said, "imagining yourself a giddy, heroic cub? Come up and sit with mature people the last half."

The invitation startled George. Then Sylvia wasn't there?

"Is Sylvia all right?" he asked Lambert under his breath.

Lambert was a trifle ill at ease.

"Oh, quite. Betty asked us to get you. Wants to see you. Have my place. I'm going to accept Stringham's fine invitation, and sit here with the young—a possible Yale scout on the Princeton side-lines."

"Stringham's no fool," George laughed. "Anyway, he has you fellows beaten right now."

Lambert thrust his hand in his pocket.

"How much you got?"

Wandel grasped George's arm.

"Come with me before you get in a college brawl."

"Plenty when we're not chaperoned, Lambert," George called, and followed Wandel through the restless crowd and up the concrete steps.

Was Sylvia really there? Was he going to see her? The idea of finding him had sprung from Betty, and Lambert had been ill at ease.

He saw Betty and her father and mother, then beyond them, a vacant place between, Sylvia to whom the open air and its chill had given back all her dark, flushed brilliancy. Wandel slid through first, and made himself comfortable at Sylvia's farther side. George followed, stopping to speak to the Alstons, to accept Betty's approving glance.

"Conspirator!" he whispered, and went on, and sat down close to Sylvia, and yielded himself to the delight of her proximity. She glanced at him, her colour deepening.

"Betty said it was all right, and I must. So many people——"

The air was sharp enough to make rugs comfortable. He couldn't see her hands because they were beneath the rug across her knees, a covering she shared with Wandel and him.

As he drew the rug up one of his hands touched hers, and his fingers, beyond his control, groped for her fingers. He detected a quick, nervous movement away; then it was stopped, and their hands met, clasped, and clung together.

For a moment they looked at each other, and knew they mustn't, since there were so many people; but the content of their clasped hands continued because it couldn't be observed.

The supreme football player sat there staring at a blur of autumn colour between the lake and the generous mouth of the stadium; and, when the second half commenced, saw, as if from an immeasurable distance, pygmy figures booting a football, or carrying it here and there, or throwing each other about; and he didn't know which were Harvard's men or which were Princeton's, and he didn't seem to care——

Vaguely he heard people suffering. A voice cut through a throaty and grieving murmur.

"Somebody's lost his head!"

"What's the matter?" he asked Sylvia.

"George! You're destroying my hand."

Momentarily he remembered, and relaxed his grasp, while she added quickly:

"But I don't mind at all, dear."

XXVI

Lambert stood in front of them, glancing down doubtfully. Evidently the game was over, for people were leaving, talking universally and discontentedly.

"Betty and I," Lambert said, dryly, "fancied we'd invented and patented that rug trick."

Sylvia stood up.

"Don't scold, Lambert."

She turned to George, trying to smile.

"I shall be happy as long as my hand hurts. Good-bye, George."

"You'd better go," Betty whispered as he lingered helplessly.

So he drifted aimlessly through the crowd, hearing only a confused murmur, seeing nothing beyond the backs directly in front of him, until he found the Baillys waiting at the ramp opening.

"If you'd only been there, George! Although this morning we'd have been glad enough to think of a tie score."

He submitted then to Bailly's wonder at each miracle; to his grief for each mistake; and little by little, as the complaining voice hurried on, the world assumed its familiar proportions and movements. He caught a glimpse of Allen walking slowly ahead. The angular man was alone, and projected even to George an air of profound dissatisfaction. Bailly caught his arm and shook hands with him.

"Whither away?" George asked.

"To the specials."

He fell in beside George, and for a time kept pace with him.

"What's bothering you, Allen?"

With a haggard air Allen turned his head from side to side, gazing at the hastening people.

"Lords of the land!" he muttered. "Lords of the land!"

"Why?" George asked. "Because they have an education? Well, so have you."

Allen nodded toward the emptying stadium.

"Lords of the land!" he repeated. "I've been sitting up there with them, but all alone. I wish I hadn't liked being with them. I wish I hadn't been sorry for myself because I was alone."

Allen's words, his manner of expressing them, defined a good deal for George, urged him to form a quick resolution.

"Catch your special," he said, "but come to my office Tuesday morning. I may have work for you that you can do with a clear conscience. If you must get, get something worth while."

Allen glanced at him quickly.

"Morton, you've changed," he said. "I'll come."

XXVII

Very slowly the excitement of the game cleared from Squibs' brain. That night he could talk of nothing else, begging George for an opinion of each player and his probable value against Yale the following Saturday. George, to cover his confusion, generalized.

"We'll beat Yale," he said, "as we ought to have beaten Harvard, because this team isn't afraid of colours and symbols. Most of these youngsters have been in the bigger game, so final football matches no longer appeal to them as matters of life and death and even of one's chances in the hereafter."

Bailly looked slightly sheepish.

"I'm afraid, George, I'm going to New Haven to look at a struggle of life and death, but then I was only in the Y. M. C. A. I'd feel many times better if you were sound and available."

"You might speak to the dean about me," George laughed.

By the next evening, however, the crowd had departed, and with Princeton's return to normal Squibs for the time overcame his anxieties. That night George and he sat in a corner of the lounge of the Nassau Club, waiting for Lambert and Wandel to drive in from the Alstons. George grew a trifle uncomfortable, because he suspected Squibs was staring at him with yesterday's curious scrutiny. Abruptly the tutor asked:

"What did you say to Allen after the game?"

"Offered him another job," George answered, shortly.

Bailly frowned.

"See here, George. What are you up to? Is that fair and decent? Allen is struggling—for the right."

"Allen," George answered, "has put some of his views to the test, and the results have made him discouraged and uneasy. He's been tainted by the very men he's tried to help. I've no idea of debauching him. Quite the reverse. Please listen."

And he entered upon a sort of penitence, speaking, while the tutor's wrinkled face flushed with pleasure, of his recent efforts to understand the industrial situation and its probable effects on society.

"I have to acknowledge," he said, softly, "that pure material success has completely altered its meaning for me. I'd like to use my share of it, and what small brains I have, to help set things straight; but I'm not so sure this generation won't have too sticky feet to drag itself out of the swamp of its own making."

Lambert and Wandel arrived just then, talking cheerfully about football.

"What do you mean to do?" Bailly asked George as the others sat down.

George smiled at Wandel.

"I'm not sure, Driggs, that the hour hasn't struck for you."

Wandel raised his hands.

"You mean politics!"

"I used to fancy," George said, "that I'd need you for my selfish interests. Now my idea is quite different."

He turned to Squibs.

"See here, sir. You've got to admit that the soul of the whole thing is education. I don't mean education in the narrow sense that we know it here or in any other university. I mean the opening of eyes to real communal efficiency; the comprehension of the necessity of building instead of tearing down; the birth of the desire to climb one's self rather than to try to make stronger men descend."

Bailly's eyes sparkled.

"I don't say you're not right, George. You may be right."

A fire blazed comfortably in front of them. The chairs were deep. Through a window the Holder tower, for all its evening lack of definition, seemed an indestructible pointer of George's thoughts. For a long time he talked earnestly.

"I climbed," he ended. "So others can, and less selfishly and more usefully, if they're only told how; if they'll only really try."

"You're always right, great man," Wandel drawled, "but we mustn't forget you climbed from fundamentals. That's education—the teaching of the fundamentals."

"It means an equal chance for everybody," George said, "and then, by gad, we won't have the world held back by those who refuse to take their chance. We won't permit the congenitally unsound to set the pace for the healthy. We'll take care of the congenitally unsound."

He turned to Bailly.

"And you and your excitable socialists have got to realize that you can't make the world sane through makeshifts, or all at once, but with foresight it can be done. You've raised the devil with me ever since I was a sub-Freshman about service and the unsound and the virtue of soiled clothing. Now raise the devil with somebody else about the virtue of sound service and clean clothes. This education must start in the schools. We may be able to force it into public schools through the legislatures; but in Princeton and the other great universities it has to come from within, and that's hard; that, in a way, is up to you and other gentle sectarians like you. And your clubs have got to stand in some form—everywhere, if only as objectives of physical and intellectual content. Nothing good torn from the world! Only the evil——"

He tapped Wandel's arm.

"Driggs! If you want to go among the time-servers, to stand alone for the people; perhaps for people yet unborn——"

"For a long time," Wandel said, "I've been looking for something I could really want to do. I rather fancy you've found it for me, George. I want to climb, too, always have—not to the heights we once talked about at your unhealthy picnic, but to the furtherest heights of all, which are guarded by selfishness, servility, sin—past which people have to be led."

Squibs cried out enthusiastically.

"And from which you can look down with a clear conscience on the climbers to whom you will have pointed out the path."

"I see now," Lambert put in, "that that is the only way in which one with self-respect can look down on lesser men."

George laughed aloud.

"An ally that can't escape! Driggs is a witness. We'll hold that fine democracy of the Argonne over your head forever."

"You see," Wandel drawled, "that was bound to fail, because it was based on the ridiculous assumption that every man that fought was good and great."

"I fancy," George said, "we're commencing to find out why we went to war—To appreciate the world's and our own astigmatism."

As they walked back to the little house in Dickinson Street, Bailly tried to express something.

"I guess," he managed, "that I'll have to call it square, George."

"I'm glad," George said, quickly, "but you must give some of the credit to Lambert Planter's sister."

He smiled happily, wistfully.

"You know she's the most useful socialist of you all."

After a time he said under his breath:

"There are some things I never dreamed of being able to repay you, sir. For instance this—this feeling that one is walking home."

"That debt," Bailly said, brightly, "cancels itself."

His mood changed. He spoke with a stern personal regret.

"You young men! You young men! How much farther you see! How much more you can do!"

XXVIII

George returned to New York happy in his memory of his intimate hour on a crowded stand with Sylvia. Dalrymple had given him that, too. It amazed him that so much beauty could spring from so ugly a source.

He heard that Dalrymple was back from Canada, then that he had wandered away, pockets full, on another journey, pandering to his twisted conception of pleasure. One day George took his notes from the safe-deposit box and gave them to Lambert.

"Get them back to him," he said.

And Lambert must have understood that George would never let the Planters' money redeem them.

"It's pretty decent, George."

"It's nothing of the kind. They make my hands feel dirty, and I've lots of money, and I'm making more every day; yet I wonder if it's going to be enough, even with Driggs' and Blodgett's and yours, old Argonne democrat."

For he had spoken of his plans to Blodgett, and had been a little surprised to learn how much thought Blodgett had given the puzzle himself, although most of his searching had been for makeshifts, for anything to tide over immediate emergencies.

"I don't know," Blodgett roared, "whether this cleaning out the sore and getting to the bottom of it will work or not; but I'm inclined to look to the future with you for a permanent cure. Anyway, I'd help you finance a scheme to make the ocean dry, because you usually get what you're after. So we'll send Wandel and Allen and some more as a little leaven to Albany and to that quilting party in Washington. I don't envy them, though."

George realized that his content could be traced to this new interest, as that went back to Sylvia. He had at last consciously set out to explore the road of service. For the first time in his life, with his eyes open, he was working for others, yet he never got rid of the sense of a great personal need unfulfilled; always in his heart vibrated the cry for Sylvia, but he knew he mustn't try to see her, for Betty would have let him know, and Betty hadn't sent for him again.

After the holidays, at the urging of Wandel and Lambert, he showed himself here and there, received at first curious glances, fancied some people slightly self-conscious, then all at once found himself welcomed on the old frank and pleasant basis. Yes, the talk had pretty well died, and men and women were inclined to like Sylvia Planter and George Morton better than they did Dalrymple.

He saw Dalrymple in the club one stormy January evening. He hadn't heard he was in town, and examined him curiously as he sat alone in a corner, making a pretence of reading a newspaper, but really looking across the room at the fire with restless eyes. George, prepared as he had been, was surprised by the haggard, flushed countenance, and the neurotic symptoms, nearly uncontrollable.

Beyond question Dalrymple saw him, and pretended that he didn't. Heartily glad of that, George joined a group about the fireplace, and after a few minutes saw Dalrymple rise and wander unevenly from the room.

George met him several times afterward under similar circumstances, and always Dalrymple shortly disappeared, because, George thought, of his arrival; but other people tactfully put him straight. Dalrymple, it seemed, remained in no public place for long, as if there was something evilly secretive to call him perpetually away.

Wandel told him toward the end of the month that Dalrymple was about to make a trip to Havana for the remainder of the winter.

"Where there's horse-racing, gambling, and unlimited alcohol—where one may sin in public. Why talk about it? Although he doesn't mean to, George, he's in a fair way of doing you a favour."

But George didn't dream how close Dalrymple's offering was. His first thought, indeed, was for Sylvia when the influenza epidemic of January and February promised for a time to equal its previous ugly record. Lambert tried to laugh his worry away.

"She's going south with father and mother very soon. Anyway, she hasn't the habit of catching things."

And it was Lambert a day or two later who brought him the first indication of the only way out, and he tried to tell himself he mustn't want it. Even though he had always despised Dalrymple and his weakness, even though Dalrymple stood between him and his only possible happiness, he experienced a disagreeable and reluctant sense of danger in such a solution.

"All his life," Lambert was saying, "Dolly's done everything he could to make himself a victim."

"Where is he?" George asked.

"At his home. It's fortunate he hadn't started south."

"Or," George said, "he should have started sooner."

"I've an uncomfortable feeling," Lambert mused, "that he was planning to run away from this very chance. Put it off a little too long. Seems he went to bed four days ago. I didn't know until to-day because you see he's been a little outcast since that scene in the club. He sent for me this afternoon, and, curiously enough, asked for you. Will you go up? I really think you'd better."

But George shrank from the thought.

"I don't want to be scolded by a man who is possibly dying."

"Let's hope not," Lambert said. "You'll go. Around five o'clock."

George hesitated.

"Did he ask for Sylvia?"

"He didn't ask me, but I telephoned her."

"Why?" George asked, sharply.

"Every card on the table now, George!" Lambert warned. "We have to think of the future, in case——"

"Of course, you're right," George answered. "I'm sorry, and I'll go."

When he entered the Dalrymple house at five o'clock he came face to face with Sylvia in the hall. He had never seen her so controlled, and her quiet tensity frightened him.

"Lambert told me," she whispered, "you were coming now. Dolly hasn't asked for me, but I'd feel so much better—if things should turn out badly, for I'm thinking with all my heart of the boy I used to be so fond of, and it's, perhaps, my fault——"

"It is not your fault," George cried. "He's always asked for it. Lambert will tell you that."

George relaxed. Dalrymple's mother came down the stairs with the doctor, and George experienced a quick sympathy for the retiring, elderly woman he had scarcely seen before. She gave Sylvia her hand, while George stepped out with the physician. In reply to George's questions the quiet man shook his head and frowned.

"If it were any one else of the same age—I've attended in this house many years, Mr. Morton, and I've watched him since he was a child. I've marvelled how he's got so far."

He added brutally:

"Scarcely a chance with the turn its taking."

"If there's anything," George muttered, "any great specialist anywhere——Understand money doesn't figure——"

"Everything possible is being done, Mr. Morton. I'm truly sorry, but I can tell you it's quite his own fault."

So even this cold-blooded practitioner had heard the talk, and sympathized, and not with Dalrymple. A trifle dazed George reËntered the house.

"It's good of you to come, Mr. Morton," Mrs. Dalrymple said. "Shall we go upstairs now?"

There was no bitterness in her voice, and she had taken Sylvia's hand, yet undoubtedly she knew everything. Abruptly George felt sorrier for Dalrymple than he had ever done.

"Please wait, Sylvia," she said.

He followed Mrs. Dalrymple upstairs and into the sick-room.

"It's Mr. Morton, dear."

She beckoned to the nurse, and George remained in the room alone with the feverish man in the bed. He walked over and took the hot hand.

"Morton!" came Dalrymple's hoarse voice, "I believe you're sorry for me!"

"I am sorry," George said, quietly, "and you must get well."

Dalrymple shook his head.

"I know all the dope, and I guess I'm off in a few days. Not so bad now I can't talk a little and sorta clean one or two things up. No silly deathbed repentance. I'm jealous of you, Morton; always have been, because you were getting things I couldn't, and I figured from the first you were an outsider."

The dry lips smiled a little.

"When you get like this it makes a lot of difference, doesn't it, how you came into the world? I'll be the real outsider in a few days——"

"Don't talk that way."

A quick temper distorted Dalrymple's face.

"They oughtn't to bring a man into the world as I was brought, without money."

George couldn't think of anything to say, but Dalrymple hurried on:

"I wanted to thank you for the notes. Don't have to leave those to my family, anyway. And I'm not sure hadn't better apologize all 'round. I don't forget I've had raw deal—lots of ways; but no point not saying Sylvia had pretty raw one from Dolly. Lucky escape for her—mean Dolly's not domestic animal, and all that."

George was aware of a slight shiver as Dalrymple's hoarse voice slipped into its old, not quite controlled mannerisms.

"Mean," Dalrymple rambled on, "Dolly won't haunt anybody. Blessings 'n' sort of thing. Best thing, too. Sorry all 'round. That's all. Thanks coming, George."

And all George could say was:

"You have to get well, Dolly."

But Dalrymple turned his head away. After a moment George proposed tentatively:

"Sylvia's downstairs. She wants very much to see you."

Dalrymple shook his head.

"Catching."

"For her sake," George urged.

Dalrymple thought.

"All right," he said at last. "Long enough for me to tell her all right. But not near. Nurse in the room. Catching, and all that."

George clasped the hot hand.

"Thanks, Dolly. You've done a decent thing, and you're going to get well."

But as he left the room George felt that the physician had been right.

He spoke to the nurse, who sat in the upper hall, then he told Sylvia. She went up, and he waited for her. He felt he had to wait. He hoped Mrs. Dalrymple wouldn't appear again.

Sylvia wasn't long. She came down dry-eyed. She didn't speak even when George followed her to her automobile, even when he climbed in beside her; nor did he try to break a silence that he felt was curative. In the light and surrounded by a crowd they could clasp hands; in this obscure solitude there was nothing they could do or say. Only on the steps of her home she spoke.

"Good-night, George, and thank you."

"Good-night, dear Sylvia," he said, and returned to the automobile, and told the man to drive him to his apartment.

XXIX

George didn't hear from Dalrymple again, nor did he expect to, but he was quite aware five days later of Goodhue's absence from the office and of his black clothing when he came in during the late afternoon. He didn't need Goodhue's few words.

"It's hard not to feel sorry, to believe, on the whole, it's rather better. Still, when any familiar object is unexpectedly snatched away from one——"

"We had a talk the other evening," George began.

Goodhue's face lighted.

"I'm glad, George."

He sighed.

"I've got to try to catch up. Mundy says rails have taken a queer turn."

"When you think for a minute not so queer," George commenced to explain.

A few days later Lambert told him that Sylvia had gone to Florida.

"They'll probably stay until late in the spring. It agrees with Father."

"How did Sylvia seem?" George asked, anxiously.

"Wait awhile," Lambert advised, "but I don't think there are going to be any spectres."

He smiled engagingly.

"If there shouldn't be," he went on, "a few matters will have to be arranged, because Sylvia and I share alike. Josiah and I had a long, careful talk with Father last night about what we'd do with Sylvia's husband if she married. He left it to my judgment, advising that we might take him in if he were worth his salt. Josiah wanted to know with his bull voice what Father would think if it should turn out to be you. Very seriously, George, Father was pleased. He pointed out that you were a man who made things go, but that you would end by running us all, and he added that if we wanted that we would be lucky to get you as long as it made Sylvia happy. You know we want you, George."

George felt as he had that day on the Vesle when Wandel had praised him. No longer could Lambert charge him with having fulfilled his boasts, in a way; yet he hadn't consciously wanted this, nor was he quite sure that he did now.

"At least," George said, "you know what my policy would be to make Planter and Company something more than a money making machine."

Lambert imitated Blodgett's voice and manner.

"George, if you wanted to grow hair on a bald man's head I'd say go to it."

"And there must be room for Dicky," George went on.

"We've played together too long to break apart now; but why talk about it? It depends on Sylvia."

That was entirely true. For the present there was nothing whatever to be done. Constantly George conquered the impulse to write to Sylvia, but she didn't write or give any sign, unless Lambert's frequent quotations from her letters could be accepted as thoughtful messages.

He visited the Baillys frequently now, for it was stimulating to talk with Squibs, and he liked to sit quietly with Mrs. Bailly. She had an unstudied habit, nevertheless, of turning his thoughts to his mother. Sylvia had seen her. She knew all about her. After all, his mother had given him the life with which he had accomplished something. He couldn't bear that their continued separation should prove him inconsistent; so early in the spring he went west.

His mother was more than ever ill at ease before his success; more than ever appreciative of the comforts he had given her; even more than at Oakmont appalled at the prospect of change. She wouldn't go east. She couldn't very well, she explained; and, looking at her tired figure in the great chair before the fire which she seldom left, he had an impulse to shower upon her extravagant and fantastic gifts, because before long it would be too late to give her anything at all. The picture made him realize how quickly the generations pass away, drifting one into the other with the rapidity of our brief and colourful seasons. He nodded, satisfied, reflecting that the cure for everything lies in the future, although one must seek it in the diseased present.

He left her, promising to come back, but he carried away a sensation that he had intruded on a secluded content that couldn't possibly survive the presence of the one who had created it.

Lambert had no news for him on his return. It was late spring, in fact, before he told George the family had come north, pausing at a number of resorts on the way up.

"When am I to see Sylvia, Lambert?"

"How should I know?"

It was apparent that he really didn't, and George waited, with a growing doubt and fear, but on the following Friday he received a note from Betty, dated from Princeton. All it said was:

"Spring's at its best here. You'd better come to-morrow—Friday."

He hurried over to the marble temple.

"You didn't tell me Betty was in Princeton," he accused Lambert.

"Must I account to you for the movements of my wife?"

"Then Sylvia——" George began.

Lambert smiled.

"Maybe you'd better run down to Princeton with me this afternoon."

George glanced at his watch.

"First train's at four o'clock. Let Wall Street crash. I shan't wait another minute."

XXX

Betty had been right. Spring was fairly vibrant in Princeton, and for George, through its warm and languid power, it rolled back the years; choked him with a sensation of youth he had scarcely experienced since he had walked defiantly out of the gate of Sylvia's home to commence his journey.

Sylvia wasn't at the station. Neither was Betty. Abruptly uneasy, he drove with Lambert swiftly to the Alstons through riotous, youthful foliage out of which white towers rose with that reassuring illusion of a serene and unchangeable gesture. Undergraduates, surrendered to the new economic eccentricity of overalls, loafed past them, calling to each other contented and lazy greetings; but George glanced at them indifferently; he only wanted to hurry to his journey's end.

At the Tudor house Betty ran out to meet them, and Lambert grinned at George and kissed her, but evidently it was George that Betty thought of now, for she pointed, as if she had heard the question that repeated itself in his mind, to the house; and he entered, and breathlessly crossed the hall to the library, and saw Sylvia—the old Sylvia, it occurred to him—colourful, imperious, and without patience.

She stood in the centre of the room in an eager, arrested attitude, having, perhaps, restrained herself from impetuously following Betty. George paused, staring at her, suddenly hesitant before the culmination of his great desire.

"It's been so long," she whispered. "George, I'm not afraid to have you touch me——You mean I must come to you——"

He shook off his lassitude, but the wonder grew.

As in a dream he went to her, and her curved lips moved beneath his, but he pressed them closer so that she couldn't speak; for he felt encircling them in a breathless embrace, as his arms held her, something thrilling and rudimentary that neither of them had experienced before; something quite beyond the comprehension of Sylvia Planter and George Morton, that belonged wholly to the perplexing and abundant future.