Ralston entered the library, as the room was called, although it did not contain many books. The house was an old-fashioned one in Clinton Place, which nowadays is West Eighth Street, between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue, a region respectable and full of boarding houses. In accordance with the customs of the times in which it had been built, the ground floor contained three good-sized rooms, known in all such houses as the library, the drawing-room or ‘parlour,’ and the dining-room, which was at the back and had windows upon the yard. The drawing-room, being under the middle of the house, had no windows at all, and was therefore really available only in the evening. The library, where Ralston waited, was on the front.

There was an air of gravity about the place which he had never liked. It was not exactly gloomy, for it was on too small a scale, nor vulgarly respectable, for such objects as were for ornament were in good taste, as a few engravings from serious pictures by great masters, a good portrait of the primeval Alexander Lauderdale, a small bronze reproduction of the Faun in the Naples museum, two or three fairly good water-colours, which were apparently views of Scotch scenery, and a big blue china vase with nothing in it. With a little better arrangement, these things might have gone far. But the engravings and pictures were hung with respect to symmetry rather than with regard to the light. The stiff furniture was stiffly placed against the wall. The books in the low shelves opposite to the fireplace were chiefly bound in black, in various stages of shabbiness, and Ralston knew that they were largely works on religion, and reports of institutions more or less educational or philanthropic. There was a writing table near the window, upon which a few papers and writing materials were arranged with a neatness not business-like, but systematically neat for its own sake—the note paper was piled with precision upon the middle of the blotter, upon which lay also the penwiper, and a perfectly new stick of bright red sealing-wax, so that everything would have to be moved before any one could possibly write a letter. The carpet was old, and had evidently been taken to pieces and the breadths refitted with a view to concealing the threadbare parts, but with effect disastrous to the continuity of the large green and black pattern. The house was heated by a furnace and there was no fire in the grim fireplace. That was for economy, as Ralston knew.

For the Lauderdales were evidently poor, though the old philanthropist who lived upstairs was the only living brother of the arch-millionaire. But Alexander Senior spent his life in getting as much as he could from Robert in order to put it into the education of idiots, and would cheerfully have fed his son and daughter-in-law and Katharine on bread and water for the sake of educating one idiot more. The same is a part of philanthropy when it becomes professional. Alexander Junior had a magnificent reputation for probity, and was concerned in business, being connected with the administration of a great Trust Company, which brought him a fixed salary. Beyond that he assured his family that he had never made a dollar in his life, and that only his health, which indeed was of iron, stood between them and starvation, an argument which he used with force to crush any frivolous tendency developed in his wife and daughter. He had dark hair just turning to a steely grey, steel-grey eyes, and a long, clean-shaven, steel-grey upper lip, but his eyebrows were still black. His teeth were magnificent, but he had so little vanity that he hardly ever smiled, except as a matter of politeness. He had looked pleased, however, when Benjamin Slayback of Nevada had led his daughter Charlotte from the altar. Slayback had loved the girl for her beauty and had taken her penniless; and uncle Robert had given her a few thousands for her bridal outfit. Alexander Junior had therefore been at no expense for her marriage, except for the cake and decorations, but it was long before he ceased to speak of his expenditure for those items. As for Alexander Senior, he really had no money except for idiots; he wore his clothes threadbare, had his overcoats turned, and secretly bought his shoes of a little Italian shoemaker in South Fifth Avenue. He was said to be over eighty years of age, but was in reality not much older than his rich brother Robert.

It would be hard to imagine surroundings more uncongenial to Mrs. Alexander Junior, as Katharine Lauderdale’s mother was generally called. An ardent Roman Catholic, she was bound to a family of rigid Presbyterians; a woman of keen artistic sense, she was wedded to a man whose only measure of things was their money-value; a nature originally susceptible to the charm of all outward surroundings, and inclining to a taste for modest luxury rather than to excessive economy, she had married one whom she in her heart believed to be miserly. She admitted, indeed, that she would probably have married her husband again, under like circumstances. The child of a ruined Southern family, loyal during the Civil War, she had been brought early to New York, and almost as soon as she was seen in society, Alexander Lauderdale had fallen in love with her. He had seemed to her, as indeed he was still, a splendid specimen of manhood; he was not rich, but was industrious and was the nephew of the great Robert Lauderdale. Even her fastidious people could not say that he was not, from a social point of view, of the best in New York. She had loved him in a girlish fashion, and they had been married at once. It was all very natural, and the union might assuredly have turned out worse than it did.

Seeing that according to her husband’s continual assurances they were growing poorer and poorer, Mrs. Alexander had long ago begun to turn her natural gifts to account, with a view to making a little money wherewith to provide herself and her daughters with a few harmless luxuries. She had tried writing and had failed, but she had been more successful with painting, and had produced some excellent miniatures. Alexander Junior had at first protested, fearing the artistic tribe as a whole, and dreading lest his wife should develop a taste for things Bohemian, such as palms in the drawing-room, and going to the opera in the gallery rather than not going at all. He did not think of anything else Bohemian within the range of possibilities, except, perhaps, dirty fingers, which disgusted him, and unpunctuality, which drove him mad. But when he saw that his wife earned money, and ceased to ask him for small sums to be spent on gloves and perishable hats, he rejoiced greatly, and began to suggest that she should invest her savings, placing them in his hands at five per cent interest. But poor Mrs. Alexander never was so successful as to have any savings to invest. Her husband accepted gratefully a miniature of the two girls which she once painted as a surprise and gave him at Christmas, and he secretly priced it during the following week at a dealer’s, and was pleased when the man offered him fifty dollars for it,—which illustrates Alexander’s thoughtful disposition.

This was the household in which Katharine Lauderdale had grown up, and these were the people whose characters, temperaments, and looks had mingled in her own. So far as the latter point was concerned, she had nothing to complain of. It was not to be expected that the children of two such handsome people should be anything but beautiful, and Charlotte and Katharine had plenty of beauty of different types, fair and dark respectively. Charlotte was most like her mother in appearance, but more closely resembled her father in nature. Katharine had inherited her father’s face and strength of constitution with many of her mother’s gifts, more or less modified and, perhaps, diminished in value. At the time when this history begins, she was nineteen years old, and had been what is called ‘out’ in society for more than a year. She therefore, according to the customs of the country and age, enjoyed the privilege of receiving alone the young gentlemen of her set who either admired her or found pleasure in her conversation. Of the former there were many; of the latter, a few.

Ralston stood with his back to the empty fireplace, staring at the dark mahogany door which led to the regions of the staircase. He had only waited five minutes, but he was in an impulsive frame of mind, and it had seemed a very long time. At last the door opened. Katharine entered the room, smiled and nodded to him, and then turned and shut the door carefully before she came forward.

She was a very beautiful girl. No one could have denied that, in the main. Yet there was something puzzling in the face, primarily due, perhaps, to the mixture of races. The features were harmonious, strong and, on the whole, noble and classic in outline, the mouth especially being of a very pure type, and the curved lips of that creamy, salmon rose-colour occasionally seen in dark persons—neither red, nor pink nor pale. The very broadly marked dark eyebrows gave the face strength, and the deep grey eyes, almost black at times, had an oddly fixed and earnest look. In them there was no softness on ordinary occasions. They expressed rather a determination to penetrate what they saw, not altogether unmixed with wonder at the discoveries they made. The whole face was boldly outlined, but by no means thin, and the skin was perceptibly freckled, which is unusual with dark people, and is the consequence of a red-haired strain in the inheritance. The primeval Alexander had been a red-haired man, and Robert the Rich had resembled him before he had grown grey. Charlotte Slayback had christened the latter by that name. She had a sharp tongue, and called the primeval one Alexander the Great, her grandfather Alexander the Idiot, and her father Alexander the Safe. Katharine had her own opinions about most of the family, but she did not express them so plainly.

She was still smiling as she met Ralston in the middle of the room.

“You look happy, dear,” he said, kissing her forehead softly.

“I’m not,” she answered. “I’m glad to see you. There’s a difference. Sit down.”

“Has there been any trouble?” he asked, seating himself in a little low chair beside the corner of the sofa she had chosen.

“Not exactly trouble—no. It’s the old story—only it’s getting so old that I’m beginning to hate it. You understand.”

“Of course I do. I wish there were anything to be done—which you would consent to do.” He added the last words as though by an afterthought.

“I’ll consent to almost anything, Jack.”

The smile had vanished from her face and she spoke in a despairing tone, fixing her big eyes on his, and bending her heavy eyebrows as though in bodily pain. He took her hand—firm, well-grown and white—in his and laid it against his lean cheek.

“Dear!” he said.

His voice trembled a little, which was unusual. He felt unaccountably emotional and was more in love than usual. The tone in which he spoke the single word touched Katharine, and she leaned forward, laying her other hand upon his other one.

“You do love me, Jack,” she said.

“God knows I do,” he answered, very earnestly, and again his voice quavered.

It was very still in the room, and the dusk was creeping toward the high, narrow windows, filling the corners, and blackening the shadowy places, and then rising from the floor, almost like a tide, till only the faces of the two young people seemed to be above it, still palely visible in the twilight.

Suddenly Katharine rose to her feet, with a quick-drawn breath which was not quite a sigh.

“Pull down the shades, Jack,” she said, as she struck a match and lit the gas at one of the stiff brackets which flanked the mantelpiece.Ralston obeyed in silence. When he came back she had resumed her seat in the corner of the sofa, and he sat down beside her instead of taking the chair again.

He did not speak at once, though it seemed to him that his heart had never been so full before. As he looked at the lovely girl he felt a thrill of passionate delight that ran through him and almost hurt him, and left him at last with an odd sensation in the throat and a painful sinking at the heart. He did not reflect upon its meaning, and he certainly did not connect it with the reaction following what he had made his nerves bear during the day. He was sincerely conscious that he had never been so deeply, truly in love with Katharine before. She watched him, understanding what he felt, smiling into his eyes, but silent, too. They had known each other since they had been children, and had loved one another since Katharine had been sixteen years old,—more than three whole years, which is a long time for first love to endure, unless it means to be last as well as the first.

“You said you would consent to almost anything,” said Ralston, after a long pause. “It would be very simple for us to be married, in spite of everybody. Shall we? Shall we, dear?” he asked, repeating the question.

“I would almost do that—” She turned her face away and stared at the empty fireplace.

“Say, quite! After all, what can they all do? What is there so dreadful to face, if we do get married? We must, one of these days. Life’s not life without you—and death wouldn’t be death with you, darling,” he added.

“Are you in earnest, Jack,—or are you making love to me?”

She asked the question suddenly, catching his hands and holding them firmly together, and looking at him with eyes that were almost fierce. The passion rose in his own, with a dark light, and his face grew pale. Then he laughed nervously.

“I’m only laughing, of course—you see I am. Why must you take a fellow in earnest?”

But there was nothing in his words that jarred upon her. He could not laugh away the truth from his look, for truth it was at that moment, whatever its source.

“I know—I understand,” she said, in a low voice. “We can’t live apart, you and I.”

“It’s like tearing out fingers by the joints every time I leave you,” Ralston answered. “It’s the resurrection of the dead to see you—it’s the glory of heaven to kiss you.”

The words came to his lips ready, rough and strong, and when he had spoken them, hers sealed every one of them upon his own, believing every one of them, and trusting in the strength of him. Then she pushed him away and leaned back in her corner, with half-closed eyes.

“I don’t know why I ever ask if you’re in earnest, dear,” she said. “I know you are. It would kill me to think that you’re playing. Women are always said to be foolish—perhaps it’s in that way—and I’m no better than the rest of them. But you don’t spoil me in that way. You don’t often say it as you did just now.”

“I never loved you as I do now,” said Ralston, simply.

“I feel it.”

“But I wish—well, impossibilities.”

“What? Tell me, Jack. I shall understand.”

“Oh—nothing. Only I wish I could find some way of proving it to you. But people always say that sort of thing. We don’t live in the middle ages.”

“I believe we do,” answered Katharine, thoughtfully. “I believe people will say that we did, hundreds of years hence, when they write about us. Besides—Jack—not that I want any proof, because I believe you—but there is something you could do, if you would. I know you wouldn’t like to do it.”

It flashed across Ralston’s mind that she was about to ask him to make a great sacrifice for her, to give up wine for her sake, having heard, perhaps—even probably—of some of his excesses. He was nervous, overwrought and full of wild impulses that day, but he knew what such a promise would mean in his simple code. He was not in any true sense degraded, beyond the weakening of his will. In an instant so brief that Katharine did not notice his hesitation he reviewed his whole life, so familiar to him in its worse light that it rose instantaneously before him as a complete picture. He felt positively sure of what she was about to ask him, and as he looked into her great grey eyes he believed that he could keep the pledge he was about to give her, that it would save him from destruction, and that he should thus owe his happiness to her more wholly than ever.

“I’ll do it,” he answered, and the fingers of his right hand slowly closed till his fist was clenched.

“Thank you, dear one,” answered Katharine, softly. “But you mustn’t promise until you know what it is.”

“I know what I’ve said.”

“But I won’t let you promise. You wouldn’t forgive me—you’d think that I had caught you—that it was a trap—all sorts of things.”

Ralston smiled and shook his head. He felt quite sure of her and of himself. And it would have been better for her and for him, if she had asked what he expected.

“Jack,” she said, lowering her voice almost to a whisper, “I want you to marry me privately—quite in secret—that’s what I mean. Not a human being must know, but you and I and the clergyman.”

John Ralston looked into her face in thunder-struck astonishment. It is doubtful whether anything natural or supernatural could have brought such a look into his eyes. Katharine smiled, for the idea had long been familiar to her.

“Confess that you were not prepared for that!” she said. “But you’ve confessed it already.”

“Well—hardly for that—no.”

The look of surprise in his face gradually changed into one of wondering curiosity, and his brows knit themselves into a sort of puzzled frown, as though he were trying to solve a difficult problem.

“You see why I didn’t want you to promise anything rashly,” said Katharine. “You couldn’t possibly foresee what I was going to ask any more than you can understand why I ask it. Could you?”

“No. Of course not. Who could?”

“I’m not going to ask any one else to, you may be sure. In the first place, do you think it wrong?”

“Wrong? That depends—there are so many things—” he hesitated.

“Say what you think, Jack. I want to know just what you think.”

“That’s the trouble. I hardly know myself. Of course there’s nothing absolutely wrong in a secret marriage. No marriage is wrong, exactly, if the people are free.”

“That’s the main thing I wanted to know,” said Katharine, quietly.

“Yes—but there are other things. Men don’t think it exactly honourable to persuade a girl to be married secretly, against the wishes of her people. A great many men would, but don’t. It’s somehow not quite fair to the girl. Running away is all fair and square, if people are ready to face the consequences. Perhaps it is that there are consequences to face—that makes it a sort of pitched battle, and the parents generally give in at the end, because there’s no other way out of it. But a secret marriage—well, it doesn’t exactly have consequences, in the ordinary way. The girl goes on living at home as though she were not married, deceiving everybody all round—and so must the man. In fact it’s a kind of lie, and I don’t like it.”

Ralston paused after this long speech, and was evidently deep in thought.

“All you say is true enough—in a sense,” Katharine answered. “But when it’s the only way to get married at all, the case is different. Don’t you think so yourself? Wouldn’t you rather be secretly married than go on like this—as this may go on, for ten, fifteen, twenty years—all our lives?”

“Of course I would. But I don’t see why—”

“I do, and I want to make you see. Listen to my little speech, please. First, we are both of age—I am so far as being married is concerned, and we have an absolute right to do as we please about it—to be married in the teeth of the lions, if that’s not a false metaphor—or something—you know.”

“In the jaws of hell, for that matter,” said Ralston, fervently.

“Thank you for saying it. I’m only a girl and mustn’t use strong language. Very well, we have a perfect right to do as we please. That’s a great point. Then we have only to choose, and it becomes a matter of judgment.”

“You talk like print,” laughed Ralston.

“So much the better. We have made up our minds that we can’t live without each other, so we must be married somehow. You don’t think it’s not—what shall I say?—not quite like a girl for me to talk in this way, do you? We have talked of it so often, and we decided so long ago!”

“What nonsense! Be as plain as possible.”

“Because if you do—then I shall have to write it all to you, and I can’t write well.”

Ralston smiled.

“Go on,” he said. “I’m waiting for the reasons.”

“They could simply starve us, Jack. We’ve neither of us a dollar in the world.”

“Not a cent,” said Ralston, very emphatically. “If we had, we shouldn’t be where we are.”

“And your mother can’t give you any money, and my father won’t give me any.”

“And I’m a failure,” Ralston observed, with sudden grimness and hatred of himself.

“Hush! You’ll be a success some day. That’s not the question. The point is, if we tried to get married openly, there would be horrible scenes first, and then war, and starvation afterwards. It’s not a pretty prospect, but it’s true.”

“I suppose it is.”

“It’s so deadly true that it puts an open marriage out of the question altogether. If there were nothing else to be done, it would be different. I’d rather starve than give you up. But there is a way out of it. We can be married secretly. In that way we shall avoid the scenes and the war.”

“And then wait for something to happen? We should be just where we are now. To all intents and purposes you would be Spinster Lauderdale and I should be Bachelor Ralston. I don’t see that it would be the slightest improvement on the present situation—honestly, I don’t. I’m not romantic, as people are in books. I don’t think it would be sweeter than life to call you wife, and when we’re married I shall call you Katharine just the same. I don’t distrust you. You know I don’t. I’m not really afraid that you’ll go and marry Ham Bright, or Frank Miner, nor even the most desirable young man in New York, who has probably proposed to you already. I’m not vain, but I know you love me. I should be a brute if I doubted it—”

“Yes—I think you would, dear,” said Katharine, with great directness.

“So that since I’m to wait for you till ‘something happens’—never mind to whom, and long life to all of them!—I’d rather wait as we are than go through it with a pack of lies to carry.”

“I like you, Jack—besides loving you. It’s quite another feeling, you know. You’re such a man!”

“I wish I were half what you think I am.”

“I’ll think what I please. It’s none of your dear business. But you haven’t heard half I have to say yet. I’ll suppose that we’re married—secretly. Very well. That same day, or the next day, and as soon as possible, I shall go to uncle Robert and tell him the whole truth.”

“To uncle Robert!” exclaimed Ralston, who had not yet come to the end of the surprises in store for him. “And ask him for some money, I suppose? That won’t do, Katharine. Indeed it won’t. I should be letting you go begging for me. That’s the plain English of it. No, no! That can’t be done.”

“You’ll find it hard to prevent me from begging for you, or working for you either, if you ever need it,” said Katharine. There was a certain grand simplicity about the plain statement.

“You’re too good for me,” said Ralston, in a low voice, and for the third time there was a quiver in his tone. Moreover, he felt an unaccustomed moisture in his eyes which gave him pleasure, though he was ashamed of it.

“No, I’m not—not a bit too good for you. But I like to hear—I don’t know why it is, but your voice touches me to-day. It seems changed.”

Ralston was truthful and honourable. If he had himself understood the causes of his increased emotion, he would have hanged himself rather than have let Katharine say what she did, without telling her what had happened. He drank, and he knew it, and of late he had been drinking hard, but it was the first time that he had ever spoken to Katharine Lauderdale when he had been drinking, and he was deceived by his own apparent soberness beyond the possibility of believing that he was on the verge of being slightly hysterical. Let them who doubt the possibility of such a case question those who have watched a thousand cases.

There was a little pause after Katharine’s last words. Then she went on,—explaining her project.

“Uncle Robert always says that nobody understands him as I do. I shall try and make him understand me, for a change. I shall tell him just what has happened, and I shall tell him that he must find work for you to do, since you’re perfectly capable of working if you only have a fair chance. You never had one. I don’t call it a chance to put an active man like you into a gloomy law office to copy fusty documents. And I don’t call it giving you a chance to glue you to a desk in Beman Brothers’ bank. You’re not made for that sort of work. Of course you were disgusted and refused to go on. I should have done just the same.”

“Oh, you would—I’m quite sure!” answered Ralston, with conviction.

“Naturally. Not but that I’m just as capable of working as you are, though. To go back to uncle Robert. It’s just impossible, with all his different interests, all over the country, and with his influence—and you know what that is—that he should not have something for you to do. Besides, he’ll understand us. He’s a great big man, on a big scale, a head and shoulders mentally bigger than all the rest of the family.”

“That’s true,” assented Ralston.

“And he knows that you don’t want to take money without giving an equivalent for it.”

“He’s known that all along. I don’t see why he should put himself out any more now—”

“Because I’ll make him,” said Katharine, firmly. “I can do that for you, and if you torture your code of honour into fits you can’t make it tell you that a wife should not do that sort of thing for her husband. Can you?”

“I don’t know,” answered Ralston, smiling. “I’ve tried it myself often enough with the old gentleman. He says I’ve had two chances and have thrown them up, and that, after all, my mother and I have quite enough to live on comfortably, so he supposes that I don’t care for work. I told him that enough was not nearly so good as a feast. He laughed and said he knew that, but that people couldn’t stand feasting unless they worked hard. The last time I saw him, he offered to make Beman try me again. But I couldn’t stand that.”

“Of course not.”

“I can’t stand anything where I produce no effect, and am not to earn my living for ever so long. I wasn’t to have any salary at Beman’s for a year, you know, because I knew nothing about the work. And it was the same at the lawyer’s office—only much longer to wait. I could work at anything I understood, of course. But I suppose I do know precious little that’s of any use. It can’t be helped, now.”

“Yes, it can. But you see my plan. Uncle Robert will be so taken off his feet that he’ll find you something. Then the whole thing will be settled. It will probably be something in the West. Then we’ll declare ourselves. There’ll be one stupendous crash, and we shall disappear from the scene, leaving the family to like it or not, as they please. In the end they will like it. There would be no lies to act—at least, not after two or three days. It wouldn’t take longer than that to arrange things.”

“It all depends on uncle Robert, it seems to me,” said Ralston, doubtfully. “A runaway match would come to about the same thing in the end. I’ll do that, if you like.”

“I won’t. It must be done in my way, or not at all. If we ran away we should have to come back to see uncle Robert, and we should find him furious. He’d tell us to go back to our homes, separately, till we had enough to live on—or to go and live with your mother. I won’t do that either. She’s not able to support us both.”

“No—frankly, she’s not.”

“And uncle Robert would be angry, wouldn’t he? He has a fearful temper, you know.”

“Yes—he probably would be raging.”

“Well, then?”

“I don’t like it, Katharine dear—I don’t like it.”

“Then you can never marry me at all, Jack. At least, I’m afraid not.”

“Never?” Ralston’s expression changed suddenly.

“There’s another reason, Jack dear. I didn’t want to speak of it—now.”