THE clock in some invisible steeple struck one. The great snowflakes fell thickly, wavering and shrinking, delicate, barren seeds, conscious of their unfruitfulness. The sputter of the arc lights seemed explosive to the muffled silence of the street. With a bright corner at either end, the block was a canon, a passage in a nether world of lurking ghosts, where a frightened gaslight trembled, hesitated midway. And Noel Endicott conceived suddenly, between curb and curb, a sonnet, to be entitled “Dante in Tenth Street,” the appearance of it occupying, in black letter, a half page in the Monthly Illustrated, a gloomy pencilling above, and below it “Noel Endicott.” The noiselessness of his steps enlarged his imagination.

I walked in 19th Street, not the Florentine,

With ghosts more sad, and one like Beatrice

Laid on my lips the sanction of her kiss.

'Twas——

It should be in a purgatorial key, in effect something cold, white and spiritual, portraying “her” with Dantesque symbolism, a definite being, a vision with a name. “'Twas—” In fact, who was she?

He stopped. Tenth Street was worth more than a sonnet's confined austerity. It should be a story. Noel was one who beat tragic conceptions into manuscript, suffering rejection for improbability. Great actions thrilled him, great desires and despairs. The massive villainies of Borgia had fallen in days when art was strenuous. Of old, men threw a world away for a passion, an ambition. Intense and abundant life—one was compelled now to spin their symbols out of thin air, be rejected for improbability, and in the midst of a bold conception, in a snowstorm on canoned Tenth Street, be hungry and smitten with doubts of one's landlady.

Mrs. Tibbett had been sharp that morning relative to a bill, and he had remonstrated but too rashly: “Why discuss it, Mrs. Tibbett? It's a negative, an unfruitful subject.” And she had, in effect, raved, and without doubt now had locked the outer door. Her temper, roused at one o'clock, would be hasty in action, final in result.

He stood still and looked about him. Counting two half blocks as one, it was now one block to Mrs. Tibbett and that ambushed tragedy.

In his last novel, “The Sunless Treasure” (to his own mind his greatest), young Humphrey stands but a moment hesitating before the oaken door, believing his enemies to be behind it with ready daggers. He hesitates but a moment. The die is cast. He enters. His enemies are not there. But Mrs. Tibbett seemed different. For instance, she would be there.

The house frontage of this, like the house frontage of the fatal next block, was various, of brick, brownstone or dingy white surface, with doorways at the top of high steps, doorways on the ground level, doorways flush with the front, or sunken in pits. Not a light in any window, not a battlement that on its restless front bore a star, but each house stood grim as Child Roland's squat tower. The incessant snowflakes fell past, no motion or method of any Byzantine palace intrigue so silken, so noiseless, so mysterious in beginnings and results. All these locked caskets wedged together contained problems and solutions, to which Bassanio's was a simple chance of three with a pointed hint. Noel decided that Tenth Street was too large for a story. It was a literature. One must select.

Meanwhile the snow fell and lay thickly, and there was no doubt that by persistent standing in the snow one's feet became wet. He stepped into the nearest doorway, which was on the level of the street, one of three doorways alike, all low, arched and deep.

They would be less noticeable in the daytime than in the night, when their cavernous gaping and exact repetition seemed either ominous or grotesque, according to the observer. The outer door was open. He felt his way in beyond the drift to the hard footing of the vestibule, kicked his shoes free of snow and brushed his beard.

The heroes of novels were sometimes hungry and houseless, but it seemed to Noel that they seldom or never faced a problem such as Mrs. Tibbett presented. Desperate fortunes should be carried on the point of one's sword, but with Mrs. Tibbett the point was not to provoke her. She was incongruous. She must be thrust aside, put out of the plot. He made a gesture dismissing Mrs. Tibbett. His hand in the darkness struck the jamb of the inner door, which swung back with a click of the half-caught latch. His heart thumped, and he peered into the darkness, where a thin yellow pencil of light stretched level from a keyhole at the farther end of a long hall.

Dismissing Mrs. Tibbett, it was a position of dramatic advantage to stand in so dark and deep an arched entrance, between the silence and incessant motion of the snow on the one hand, and the yellow pencil of light, pointing significantly to something unknown, some crisis of fortune. He felt himself in a tale that had both force and form, responsible for its progress.

He stepped in, closed the half door behind him softly, and crept through the hall. The thin line of light barred the way, and seemed to say, “Here is the place. Be bold, ready-minded, full of subtlety and resource.” There was no sound within that he could hear, and no sound without, except his own oppressed breathing and pulses throbbing in his ears.

Faint heart never won anything, and as for luck, it belonged to those who adventured with various chances, and of the blind paths that led away from their feet into the future, chose one, and another, and so kept on good terms with possibility. If one but cried saucily, “Open this odd little box, you three gray women!” And this, and this the gray Fates smiled indulgently, showing a latent motherliness. How many destinies had been decided by the opening and shutting of a door, which to better or worse, never opened again for retreat? A touch on this door and Mrs. Tibbett might vanish from the story forever, to the benefit of the story.

He lifted his hand, having in mind to tap lightly, with tact and insinuation, but struck the door, in fact, nervously, with a bang that echoed in the hall. Some one spoke within. He opened and made entry in a prepared manner, which gave way to merely blinking wonder.

It was a large dining-room, brightly lit by a chandelier, warm from a glowing grate, sumptuous with pictures and hangings, on the table a glitter of glass and silver, with meat, cakes and wine.

On the farther side of the table stood a woman in a black evening dress, with jewels on her hair and bosom. She seemed to have just risen, and grasped the back of her chair with one hand, while the other held open a book on the table. The length of her white arm was in relief against her black dress.

Noel's artistic slouch hat, now taken off with uncertain hand, showed wavy brown hair over eyes not at all threatening, a beard pointed, somewhat profuse, a face interestingly featured and astonished. No mental preparation to meet whatever came, of Arabic or mediaeval incident, availed him. He felt dumb, futile, blinking. The lady's surprise, the startled fear on her face, was hardly seen before it changed to relief, as if the apparition of Noel, compared with some foreboding of her own, were a mild event. She half smiled when he began:—

“I am an intruder, madam,” and stopped with that embarrassed platitude. “I passed your first door by accident, and your second by impulse.”

“That doesn't explain why you stay.”

“May I stay to explain?”

When two have exchanged remarks that touch the borders of wit, they have passed a mental introduction. To each the mind of the other is a possible shade and bubbling spring by the dusty road of conversation. Noel felt the occasion. He bowed with a side sweep of his hat.

“Madam, I am a writer of poems, essays, stories. If you ask, What do I write in poems, essays, stories, I answer, My perception of things. If you ask, In what form would I cast my present perceptions of things, I say, Without doubt a poem.”

“You are able to carry both sides of a conversation. I have not asked any of these.”

“You have asked why I stay. I am explaining.”

The lady's attitude relaxed its stiffness by a shade, her half smile became a degree more balmy.

“I think you must be a successful writer.”

“You touch the point,” he said slowly. “I am not. I am hungry and probably houseless. And worse than that, I find hunger and houselessness are sordid, tame. The taste of them in the mouth is flat, like stale beer. It is not like the bitter tang of a new experience, but like something the world shows its weariness of in me.”

The amused smile vanished in large-eyed surprise, and something more than surprise, as if his words gave her some intimate, personal information.

“You say strange things in a very strange way. And you came in by an accident?”

“And an impulse?”

“I don't understand. But you must sit down, and I can find you more to eat, if this isn't enough.”

Noel could not have explained the strangeness of his language, if it was strange, further than that he felt the need of saying something in order to find an opportunity of saying something to the point, and so digplayed whatever came to his mind as likely to arrest attention. It was a critical lesson in vagabondage, as familiar there as hunger and houselessness. He attacked the cold meat, cakes and fruit with fervor, and the claret in the decanter. But what should be the next step in the pursuit of fortune? At this point should there not come some revelation?

The lady did not seem to think so, but sat looking now at Noel and now at her own white hands in her lap. That she should have youth and beauty seemed to Noel as native to the issue as her jewels, the heavy curtains, the silver and glass. As for youth, she might be twenty, twenty-one, two. All such ages, he observed to himself with a mental flourish, were one in beauty. It was not a rosy loveliness like the claret in the decanter, nor plump like the fruit in the silver basket, but dark-eyed, white and slender, with black hair drawn across the temples; of a fragile delicacy like the snowflakes, the frost flower of the century's culture, the symbol of its ultimate luxury. The rich room was her setting. She was the center and reason for it, and the yellow point of a diamond over her heart, glittering, but with a certain mellowness, was still more central, intimate, interpretative, symbolic of all desirable things. He began to see the story in it, to glow with the idea.

“Madam,” he said, “I am a writer of whose importance I have not as yet been able to persuade the public. The way I should naturally have gone to-night seemed to me something to avoid. I took another, which brought me here. The charm of existence—” She seemed curiously attentive. “The charm of existence is the unforeseen, and of all things our moods are the most unforeseen. One's plans are not always and altogether futile. If you propose to have salad for lunch, and see your way to it, it is not so improbable that you will have salad for lunch. But if you prefigure how it will all seem to you at lunch, you are never quite right. Man proposes and God disposes. I add that there is a third and final disposal, namely, what man is to think of the disposition after it is made. I hope, since you proposed or prefigured to-night, perhaps as I did, something different from this—this disposition”—he lifted his glass of claret between him and the light—“that your disposition what to think of it is, perhaps, something like mine.”

The lady was leaning forward with parted lips, listening intently, absorbed in his words. For the life of him Noel could not see why she should be absorbed in his words, but the fact filled him with happy pride.

“Tell me,” she said quickly. “You speak so well—”

Noel filled in her pause of hesitation.

“That means that my wisdom may be all in my mouth.”

“No, indeed! I mean you must have experience. Will you tell me, is it so dreadful not to have money? People say different things.”

“They do.” He felt elevated, borne along on a wave of ornamental expression. “It is their salvation. Their common proverbs contradict each other. A man looks after his pence and trusts one proverb that the pounds will look after themselves, till presently he is called penny wise and pound foolish, and brought up by another. And consider how less noticeable life would be without its jostle of opinion, its conflicting lines of wisdom, its following of one truth to meet with another going a different way. Give me for finest companionship some half truth, some ironic veracity.”

She shook her head. It came to him with a shock that it was not his ornamental expression which interested her, but only as it might bear on something in her own mind more simple, direct and serious, something not yet disclosed. “In fact,” he thought, “she is right. One must get on with the plot” It was a grievous literary fault to break continuity, to be led away from the issue by niceties of expression. The proper issue of a plot was simple, direct, serious, drawn from the motive which began it. Why did she sit here with her jewels, her white arms and black dress these weird, still hours of the night? Propriety hinted his withdrawal, but one must resist the commonplace.

“The answer to the question does not satisfy you. But do you not see that I only enlarged on your own answer? People say different things because they are different. The answer depends on temperaments, more narrowly on moods; on tenses, too, whether it is present poverty and houselessness or past or future. And so it has to be answered particularly, and you haven't made me able to answer it particularly to you. And then one wouldn't imagine it could be a question particular to you.”

“You are very clever,” she murmured, half smiling again. “Are you not too clever for the purpose? You say so many things.”

“That is true,” said Noel plaintively. “The story has come to a standstill. It has all run out into diction.”

At that moment there was a loud noise in the hall.

The smile, which began hopefully, grew old while he watched it, and withered away. The noise that echoed in the hall was of a banging door, then of laden, dragging steps. The hall door was thrown open, and two snowy hackmen entered, holding up between them a man wearing a tall hat.

“He's some loaded, ma'am,” said one of them cheerfully. “I ain't seen him so chucked in six months.”

They dropped him in a chair, from which, after looking about him with half-open, glassy eyes, and closing them again, he slid limply to the floor. The hackman regarded that choice of position with sympathy.

“Wants to rest his load, he does,” and backed out of the door with his companion.

“It goes on the bill. Ain't seen him so chucked in six months.”

The lady had not moved from her chair, but had sat white and still, looking down into her lap. She gave a hard little laugh.

“Isn't it nice he's so 'chucked'? He would have acted dreadfully.” She was leaning on the table now, her dark eyes reading him intently. The man on the floor snorted and gurgled in his sleep.

“I couldn't kill anybody,” she said. “Could you?”

Noel shook his head.

“It's so funny,” she went on in a soft, speculative way, “one can't do it. I'm afraid to go away and be alone and poor. I wish he would die.”

“It wouldn't work out that way,” said Noel, struggling with his wits. “He's too healthy.”

It seemed to him immediately that the comment was not the right one. It was not even an impersonal fact to himself, an advantage merely to the plot, that the sleeper was unable to object to him and discard him from it, as he had resolved to discard Mrs. Tibbett, but with such brutal energy as the sleeper's face indicated. For it repelled not so much by its present relaxed degradation as by its power, its solidity of flesh, its intolerant self-assertion, the physical vigor of the short bull neck, bulky shoulders, heavy mustache, heavy cheeks and jaw, bluish with the shaving of a thick growth. He was dressed, barring his damp dishevelment, like a well-groomed clubman.

But the lady was looking Noel in the eyes, and her own seemed strangely large, but as if covering a spiritual rather than a physical space, settled in melancholy, full of clouds, moving lights and dusky distances.

“I was waiting for him because he ordered me. I'm so afraid of him,” she said, shrinking with the words. “He likes me to be here and afraid of him.”

“Tell me what I am to do?” he said eagerly.

“I suppose you are not to do anything.”

Noel caught the thread of his fluency. He drew a ten-cent piece from his pocket, tossed it on the table, gestured toward it with one hand and swung the other over the back of his chair with an air of polished recklessness.

“But your case seems desperate to you. Is it more than mine? You have followed this thing about to 'the end of the passage,' and there is my last coin. My luck might change to-morrow. Who knows? Perhaps tonight. I would take it without question and full of hope. Will you experiment with fortune and—and me?”

The dark eyes neither consented nor refused. They looked at him gravely.

“It is a black, cold night. The snow is thick in the air and deep on the street Put it so at the worst, but fortune and wit will go far.”

“Your wit goes farther than your fortune, doesn't it?” she said, smiling.

“I don't conceal.”

“You don't conceal either of them, do you? You spread them both out,” and she laughed a pleasant little ripple of sound.

Noel rose with distinction and bent toward her across the table.

“My fortune is this ten-cent piece. As you see, on the front of it is stamped a throned woman.”

“Oh, how clever.” She laughed, and Noel flushed with the applause.

“Shall we trust fortune and spin the coin? Heads, the throned woman, I shall presently worship you, an earthly divinity. Tails, a barren wreath and the denomination of a money value, meaning I take my fortunes away, and you,” pointing in turn to the sleeper and the jewels, “put up with yours as you can.”

She seemed to shiver as he pointed. “No,” she said, “I couldn't do that. A woman never likes to spin a coin seriously.”

“Will you go, then?”

The sleeper grunted and turned over. She turned pale, put her hand to her throat, said hurriedly, “Wait here,” and left the room, lifting and drawing her skirt aside as she passed the sleeper.

She opened the door at last and came again, wrapped in a fur mantle, carrying a travelling case, and stood looking down at the sleeper as if with some struggle of the soul, some reluctant surrender.

They went out, shutting the door behind them.

The snow was falling still on Tenth Street, out of the crowding night. He held her hand on his arm close to him. She glided beside him noiselessly.

The express office was at the corner, a little dingy, gas-lit room.

“Carriage? Get it in a minute,” said the sleepy clerk. “It's just round the corner.”

They stood together by a window, half opaque with dust. Her face was turned away, and he watched the slant of her white cheek.

“You will have so much to tell me,” he whispered at last.

“I am really very grateful. You helped me to resolve.”

“Your carriage, sir.”

The electric light sputtered over them standing on the curb.

“But,” she said, smiling up at him, “I have nothing to tell you. There is nothing more. It ends here. Forgive me. It is my plot and it wouldn't work out your way. There are too many conflicting lines of wisdom in your way. My life lately has been what you would call, perhaps, a study in realism, and you want me to be, perhaps, a symbolic romance. I am sure you would express it very cleverly. But I think one lives by taking resolutions rather than by spinning coins, which promise either a throned woman, or a wreath and the denomination of a money value. One turns up so much that is none of these things. Men don't treat women that way. I married to be rich, and was very wretched, and perhaps your fame, when it comes, will be as sad to you. Perhaps the trouble lies in what you called 'the third disposal.' But I did not like being a study in realism. I should not mind being something symbolic, if I might prove my gratitude”—she took her hand from his arm, put one foot on the step and laughed, a pleasant little ripple of sound—“by becoming literary material.” The door shut to, and the carriage moved away into the storm with a muffled roll of wheels.

Noel stared after it blankly, and then looked around him. It was half a block now to Mrs. Tibbett. He walked on mechanically, and mounted the steps by habit. The outer door was not locked. A touch of compunction had visited Mrs. Tibbett.

He crept into his bed, and lay noting the growing warmth and sense of sleep, and wondering whether that arched doorway was the third of the three or the second. Strictly speaking he seemed to have gone in at the middle one and come out at the third, or was it not the first rather than the middle entrance that he had sheltered in? The three arched entrances capered and contorted before him in the dark, piled themselves into the portal of a Moorish palace, twisted themselves in a kind of mystical trinity and seal of Solomon, floated apart and became thin, filmy, crescent moons over a frozen sea. He sat up in bed and smote the coverlet.

“I don't know her name! She never told me!” He clutched his hair, and then released it cautiously. “It's Musidora! I forgot that sonnet!”

'Twas Musidora, whom the mystic nine

Gave to my soul to be forever mine,

And, as through shadows manifold of Dis,

Showed in her eyes, through dusky distances

And clouds, the moving lights about their shrine;

Now ever on my soul her touch shall be

As on the cheek are touches of the snow,

Incessant, cool, and gone; so guiding me

From sorrow's house and triple portico.

And prone recumbrance of brute tyranny,

In a strict path shall teach my feet to go.

The clock in the invisible steeple struck three.