Katharine’s mood had changed very much since she had entered the Crowdies’ house. She had felt then a certain sense of strength which had been familiar to her all her life, but which had never before seemed so real and serviceable. She had been sure that she could defy the world—in that black frock she wore—and that her face would be of marble and her heart of steel under all imaginable circumstances. She had carried her head high and had walked with a firm tread. She had felt that if she met John Ralston she could tell him what she thought of him, and hurt him, so that in his suffering, at least, he should repent of what he had done.

It was different now. She did not attempt to find reasons for the difference, and they would have been hard to discover. But she knew that she had been exposed to a sort of test of her strength, and had broken down, and that Hester Crowdie had seen her defeat. Possibly it was the knowledge that Hester had seen and understood which was the most immediately painful circumstance at the present moment; but it was not the most important one, for she was really quite as brave as she had believed herself, and what suffered most in her was not her vanity.

The conversation at table had somehow brought the whole truth more clearly before her, as the developer brings out the picture on a photographer’s plate. The facts were fixed now, and she could not hide them nor turn from them at will.

Whether she were mistaken or not, the position was bad enough. As she saw it, it was intolerable. By her own act, by the exercise of her own will, and by nothing else, she had been secretly married to John Ralston. She had counted with certainty upon old Robert Lauderdale to provide her husband with some occupation immediately, feeling sure that within a few days she should be able to acknowledge the marriage and assume her position before the world as a married woman. But Robert Lauderdale had demonstrated to her that this was impossible under the conditions she required, namely, that John should support himself. He had indeed offered to make her independent, but that solution of the difficulty was not acceptable. To obtain what she and Ralston had both desired, it was necessary, and she admitted the fact, that John should work regularly in some office for a certain time. Robert Lauderdale himself could not take an idle man from a fashionable club and suddenly turn him into a partner in a house of business or a firm of lawyers, if the idle man himself refused to accept money in any shape. Even if he had accepted it, such a proceeding would have been criticised and laughed at as a piece of plutocratic juggling. It would have made John contemptible. Therefore it was impossible that John and Katharine should have a house of their own and appear as a married couple for some time, for at least a year, and probably for a longer period. Under such circumstances to declare the marriage would have been to make themselves the laughing-stock of society, so long as John continued to live under his mother’s roof, and Katharine with her father. The secret marriage would have to be kept a secret, except, perhaps, from the more discreet members of the family. Alexander Lauderdale would have to be told, and life would not be very pleasant for Katharine until she could leave the paternal dwelling. She knew that, but she would have been able to bear it, to look upon the next year or two as years of betrothal, and to give her whole heart and soul to help John in his work. It was the worst contingency which she had foreseen when she had persuaded him to take the step with her, and she had certainly not expected that it could arise; but since it had arisen, she was ready to meet it. There was nothing within the limits of reason which she would not have done for John, and she had driven those limits as far from ordinary common sense as was possible, to rashness, even to the verge of things desperate in their folly.

She knew that. But she had counted on John Ralston with that singularly whole-hearted faith which characterizes very refined women. Many years ago, when analytical fiction was in its infancy, Charles de Bernard made the very wise and true observation that no women abandon themselves more completely in thought and deed to the men they love, or make such real slaves of themselves, as those whom he calls ‘great ladies,’—that is, as we should say, women of the highest refinement, the most unassailable social position, and the most rigid traditions. The remark is a very profound one. The explanation of the fact is very simple. Women who have grown up in surroundings wherein the letter of honour is rigidly observed, and in which the spirit of virtue prevails for honour’s sake, readily believe that the men they love are as honourable as they seem, and more virtuous in all ways than sinful man is likely to be. The man whom such a woman loves with all her heart, before she has met truth face to face, cannot possibly be as worthy as she imagines that he is; and if he be an honest man, he must be aware of the fact, and must constantly suffer by the ever present knowledge that he is casting a shadow greater than himself, so to say—and to push the simile further, it is true that in attempting to overtake that shadow of himself, he often deliberately walks away from the light which makes him cast it.

John Ralston could never, under any circumstances, have done all that Katharine had expected of him, although she had professed to expect so little. Woman fills the hours of her lover’s absence with scenes from her own sweet dreamland. In nine cases out of ten, when she has the chance of comparing what she has learned with what she has imagined, she has a moment of sickening disappointment. Later in life there is an adjustment, and at forty years of age she merely warns her daughter vaguely that she must not believe too much in men. That is the usual sequence of events.

But Katharine’s case just now was very much worse than the common. It is not necessary to recapitulate the evidence against John’s soberness on that memorable Thursday. It might have ruined the reputation of a Father of the Church. Up to one o’clock on the following day no one but Mrs. Ralston and Doctor Routh were aware that there was anything whatsoever to be said on the other side of the question. So far as Katharine or any one else could fairly judge, John had been through one of the most outrageous and complete sprees of which New York society had heard for a long time. A certain number of people knew that he had practically fought Hamilton Bright in the hall of his club, and had undoubtedly tripped him up and thrown him. Katharine, naturally enough, supposed that every one knew it, and in spite of Bright’s reassuring words on the previous night, she fully expected that John would have to withdraw from the club in question. Even she, girl as she was, knew that this was a sort of public disgrace.

There was no other word for it. The man she loved, and to whom she had been secretly married, had publicly disgraced himself on the very day of the marriage, had been tipsy in the club, had been seen drunk in the streets, had been in a light with a professional boxer, and had been incapable of getting home alone—much more of going to meet his wife at the Assembly ball.

If he had done such things on their wedding day, what might he not do hereafter? The question was a natural one. Katharine had bound herself to a hopeless drunkard. She had heard of such cases, unfortunately, though they have become rare enough in society, and she knew what it all meant. There would be years of a wretched existence, of a perfectly hopeless attempt to cure him. She had heard her father tell such stories, for Alexander Junior was not a peaceable abstainer like Griggs and Crowdie. He was not an abstainer at all—he was a man of ferocious moderation. She remembered painful details about the drunkard’s children. Then there was a story of a blow—and then a separation—a wife who, for her child’s sake, would not go to another State and be divorced—and the going back to the father’s house to live, while the husband sank from bad to worse, and his acquaintances avoided him in the street, till he had been seen hanging about low liquor saloons and telling drunken loafers the story of his married life—speaking to them of the pure and suffering woman who was still his lawful wife—and laughing about it. Alexander had told it all, as a wholesome lesson to his household, which, by the way, consisted of his aged father, his wife, and his two daughters, none of whom, one might have thought, could ever stand in need of such lessons. Charlotte had laughed then, and Katharine had been disgusted. Mrs. Lauderdale’s perfectly classical face had expressed nothing, for she had been thinking of something else, and the old philanthropist had made some remarks about the close connection between intemperance and idiocy. But the so-called lesson was telling heavily against John Ralston now, two or three years after it had been delivered.

It was clear to Katharine that her life was ruined before it had begun. In those first hours after the shock it did not occur to her that she could ever forgive John. She was therefore doubly sure that the ruin he had wrought was irretrievable. She could not naturally think now of the possibility of ever acknowledging her marriage. To proclaim it meant to attempt just such a life as she had heard her father describe. Unfortunately, too, in that very case, she knew the people, and knew that Alexander Junior, who never exaggerated anything but the terrors of the life to come, had kept within the truth rather than gone beyond it.

She did not even tell herself that matters would have been still worse if she had been made publicly John Ralston’s wife on the previous day. At that moment she did not seek to make things look more bearable, if they might. She had faced the situation and it was terrible—it justified anything she might choose to do. If she chose to do something desperate to free herself, she wished to be fully justified, and that desired justification would be weakened by anything which should make her position seem more easy to bear.

Indeed, she could hardly have been blamed, whatever she had done. She was bound without being united, married and yet not married, but necessarily shut off from all future thought of marriage, so long as John Ralston lived.

She had assumed duties, too, which she was far from wishing to avoid. In her girlish view, the difference between the married and the single state lay mainly in the loss of the individual liberty which seemed to belong to the latter. She had been brought up, as most American girls are, in old-fashioned ideas on the subject, which are good,—much better than European ideas,—though in extended practice they occasionally lead to some odd results, and are not always carried out in after life. In two words, our American idea is that, on being married, woman assumes certain responsibilities, and ceases, so to say, to be a free dancer in a ball-room. The general idea in Europe is that, at marriage, a woman gets rid of as many responsibilities as she can, and acquires the liberty to do as she pleases, which has been withheld from her before.

Katharine felt, therefore, even at that crisis, that she had forfeited her freedom, and, amidst all she felt, there was room for that bitter regret. A French girl could hardly understand her point of view; a certain number of English girls might appreciate it, and some might possibly feel as she did; to an American girl it will seem natural enough. It was not merely out of a feeling of self-respect that she looked upon a change as necessary, nor out of a blind reverence for the religious ceremony which had taken place. Every inborn and cultivated instinct and tradition told her that as a married woman, though the whole world should believe her to be a young girl, she could not behave as she had behaved formerly; that a certain form of perfectly innocent amusement would no longer be at all innocent now; that she had forfeited the right to look upon every man she met as a possible admirer—she went no further than that in her idea of flirtation—and finally that, somehow, she should feel out of place in the parties of very young people to which she was naturally invited.

She was a married woman, and she must behave as one, for the rest of her natural life, though no one was ever to know that she was married. It was a very general idea, with her, but it was a very strong one, and none the less so for its ingenuous simplicity.

But the fact that she regretted her liberty did not even distantly suggest that she might ever fall in love with any one but John Ralston. Her only wish was to make him feel bitterly what he had done, that he might regret it as long as he lived, just as she must regret her liberty. The offence was so monstrous that the possibility of forgiving it did not cross her mind. She did not, however, ask herself whether the love that still remained was making the injury he had done it seem yet more atrocious. Love was still in a state of suspended animation—there was no telling what he might do when he came to life again. For the time being he was not to be taken into consideration at all. If she were to love him during the coming years, that would only make matters much worse.

There is not, perhaps, in the yet comparatively passionless nature of most young girls so great a capacity for real suffering as there is in older women. But there is something else instead. There is a sensitiveness which most women lose by degrees to a certain point, though never altogether, the sensitiveness of the very young animal when it is roughly exposed to the first storm of its first winter, if it has been born under the spring breezes and reared amongst the flowers of summer.

It will suffer much more acutely later,—lash and spur, or shears and knife, sharper than wind and snow,—but it will never be so sensitive again. It will never forget how the cruel cold bit its young skin, and got into its delicate throat, and made its slender limbs tremble like the tendrils of a creeper.

It was snowing again, but Katharine walked slowly, and went out of her way in her unformulated wish to lose time, and to put off the moment at which she must meet the familiar faces and hear the well-known voices at home. Until Griggs had broached the fatal subject at table, she had been taken out of herself at the Crowdies’. She must go back to herself now, and she hated the thought as she hated all her own existence. But the regions between Clinton Place and Fourth Avenue are not the part of New York in which it is best for a young girl to walk about alone. She did not like to be stared at by the loafers at the corners, nor to be treated with too much familiarity by the patronizing policeman who saw her over the Broadway crossing. Then, too, she remembered that she had given no notice of her absence from luncheon, and that her mother might perhaps be anxious about her. There was nothing for it but to take courage and go home. She only hoped that Charlotte might not be there.

But Charlotte had come, in the hope of enjoying herself as she had done on the previous day. Katharine ascertained the fact from the girl who let her in, and went straight to her room, sending word to her mother that she had lunched with the Crowdies and would come down presently. Even as she went up the stairs she felt a sharp pain at the thought that her mother and sister were probably at that very moment discussing John’s mishaps, and comparing notes about the stories they had heard—and perhaps reading more paragraphs from the papers. The shame of the horrible publicity of it all overcame her, and she locked her door, and tried the handle to be sure that it was fast—with a woman’s distrust of all mechanical contrivances when she wishes to be quite sure of a situation. It was instinctive, and she had no second thought which she tried to hide from herself.

As she took off her hat and coat she grew very pale, and the deep shadows came under her eyes—so dark that she wondered at them vaguely as she glanced at herself in the mirror. She felt faint and sick. She drank a little water, and then, with a sudden impulse, threw herself upon her bed, and lay staring at the ceiling, as she had lain at dawn. The same glare still came in from the street and penetrated every corner, but not so vividly as before, for the snow was falling fast, and the mist of the whirling flakes softened the light.

It was a forlorn little room. Robert the Rich would have been very much surprised if he could have seen it. He was a generous man, and was very fond of his grand-niece, and if he had known exactly how she lived under her father’s roof it would have been like him to have interfered. All that he ever saw of the house was very different. There was great simplicity downstairs, and his practised eye detected the signs of a rigid economy—far too rigid, he thought, when he calculated what Alexander Junior must be worth; a ridiculously exaggerated economy, he considered, when he thought of his own wealth, and that his only surviving brother lived in the house in Clinton Place. But there was nothing squalid or mean about it all. The meanness was relative. It was like an aspersion upon the solidity of Robert’s fortune, and upon his intention of providing suitably for all his relations.

Upstairs, however, and notably in Katharine’s room, things had a different aspect. Nothing had been done there since long before Charlotte had been married. The wall-paper was old-fashioned, faded, and badly damaged by generations of tacks and pins. The carpet was threadbare and patched, and there were holes where even a patch had not been attempted. The furniture was in the style of fifty years ago or more, veneered with dark mahogany, but the veneering was coming off in places, leaving bare little surfaces of dusty pine wood smeared with yellowish, hardened glue. Few objects can look more desperately shabby than veneered furniture which is coming to pieces. There was nothing in the room which Katharine could distinctly remember to have seen in good condition, except the old carpet, which had been put down when she and Charlotte had been little girls. To Charlotte herself, when she had come in on Wednesday afternoon, there had been something delightful in the renewal of acquaintance with all her old dinginess of intimate surroundings. Charlotte’s own life was almost oppressed with luxury, so that it destroyed her independence. But to Katharine, worn out and heartsore with the troubles of her darkening life, it was all inexpressibly depressing. She stared at the ceiling as she lay there, in order not to look at the room itself. She was very tired, too, and she would have given anything to go to sleep.

It was not merely sleep for which she longed. It was a going out. Again the thought crossed her mind, as it had that morning, that if the whole world were a single taper, she would extinguish the flame with one short breath, and everything would be over. And now, too, in her exhaustion, came the idea that something less complete, but quite as effectual, was in her power. It had passed through her brain half an hour previously, when she had bidden Hester Crowdie good-bye—with a sort of intuitive certainty that she was never to see her friend again. She had left Hester with a vague and sudden presentiment of darkness. She had assuredly not any intention of seeking death in any definite form, but it had seemed to be close to her as she had said those few words of farewell. It came nearer still as she lay alone in her own room. It came nearer, and hovered over her, and spoke to her.

It would be the instant solution of all difficulties, the end of all troubles. The deep calm against which no storm would have power any more. On the one hand, there was life in two aspects. Either to live an existence of misery and daily torture with the victim of a most degrading vice, a man openly disgraced, and at whom every one she respected would forever look askance. Or else to live out that other life of secret bondage, neither girl nor wife, so long as John Ralston was alive, suffering each time he was dragged lower, as she was suffering to-day, bound, tied in every way, beyond possibility of escaping. Why should she suffer less to-morrow than now? It would be the same, since all the conditions must remain unchanged. It would be the same always. Those were the two aspects of living on in the future which presented themselves. The torn carpet and the broken veneering of the furniture made them seem even more terrible. There may be a point at which the trivial has the power to push the tragic to the last extremity.

And on the other side stood death, the liberator, with his white smile and far-away eyes. The snow-glare was in his face, and he did not seem to feel it, but looked quietly into it, as though he saw something very peaceful beyond. It was a mere passing fancy that evoked the picture in the weary, restless mind, but it was pleasant to gaze at it, so long as it lasted. It was gone in a moment again, leaving, however, a new impression—that of light, rather than of darkness. She wished it would come back.

Possibly she had been almost or quite dozing, seeing that she was so much exhausted. But she was wide awake again now. She turned upon her side with a long-drawn sigh, and stared at the hideous furniture, the ragged carpet, and the dilapidated wall-paper. It was not that they meant anything of themselves—certainly not poverty, as they might have seemed to mean to any one else. They were the result of a curious combination of contradictory characters in one family, which ultimately produced stranger results than Katharine Lauderdale’s secret marriage, some of which shall be chronicled hereafter. The idea of poverty was not associated with the absence of money in Katharine’s mind. She might be in need of a pair of new gloves, and she and her mother might go to the opera upstairs, because the stalls were too dear. But poverty! How could it enter under the roof of any who bore the name of Lauderdale? If, yesterday, she had begged uncle Robert to give her half a million, instead of refusing a hundred thousand, it was quite within the bounds of possibility that he might have written the cheque there and then. No. The shabby furniture in Katharine’s room had nothing to do with poverty, nor with the absence of money, either. It was the fatal result of certain family peculiarities concerning which the public knew nothing, and it was there, and at that moment it had a strong effect upon Katharine’s mind. It represented the dilapidation of her life, the literal dilapidation, the tearing down of one stone after another from the crowning point she had reached yesterday to the deep foundation which was laid bare as an open tomb to-day. She dwelt on the idea now, and she stared at the forlorn objects, as she had at first avoided both.

Death has a strange fascination, sometimes, both for young and old people. Men and women in the prime and strength of life rarely fall under its influence. It is the refuge of those who, having seen little, believe that there is little to see, and of the others who, having seen all, have died of the sight, inwardly, and desire bodily death as the completion of experience. Let one, or both, be wrong or right; it matters little, since the facts are there. But the fascination aforesaid is stronger upon the young than upon the old. They have fewer ties, and less to keep them with the living. For the ascendant bond is weaker than the descendant in humanity, and the love of the child for its mother is not as her love for the child. It is right that it should be so. In spite of many proverbs, we know that what the child owes the parent is as nothing compared with the parent’s debt to it. Have we all found it so easy to live that we should cast stones upon heart-broken youths and maidens who would fain give back the life thrust upon them without their consent?

Katharine clasped her hands together, as she lay on her side, and prayed fervently that she might die that day—at that very hour, if possible. It would be so very easy for God to let her die, she thought, since she was already so tired. Her heart had almost stopped beating, her hands were cold, and she felt numb, and weary, and miserable. The step was so short. She wondered whether it would hurt much if she took it herself, without waiting. There were things which made one go to sleep—without waking again. That must be very easy and quite, quite painless, she thought. She felt dizzy, and she closed her eyes again.

How good it would be! All alone, in the old room, while the snow was falling softly outside. She should not mind the snow-glare any more then. It would not tire her eyes. That white smile—it came back to her at last, and she felt it on her own face. It was very strange that she should be smiling now—for she was so near crying—nearer than she thought, indeed, for as the delicate lips parted with the slow, sighing breath, the heavy lids—darkened as though they had been hurt—were softly swelling a little, and then very suddenly and quickly two great tears gathered and dropped and ran and lost themselves upon the pillow.

Ah, how peaceful it would be—never to wake again, when the little step was passed! Perhaps, if she lay quite still, it would come. She had heard strange stories of people in the East, who let themselves die when they were weary. Surely, none of them had ever been as weary as she. Strange—she was always so strong! Every one used to say, ‘as strong as Katharine Lauderdale.’ If they could see her now!

She wanted to open her eyes, but the snow-glare must be still in the room, and she could not bear it—and the shabby furniture. She would breathe more slowly. It seemed as though with each quiet sigh the lingering life might float away into that dear, peaceful beyond—where there would be no snow-glare and the furniture would not be shabby—if there were any furniture at all—beyond—or any John Ralston—no ‘marriage nor giving in marriage’—all alone in the old room—

Two more tears gathered, more slowly this time, though they dropped and lost themselves just where the first had fallen, and then, somehow, it all stopped, for what seemed like one blessed instant, and then there came a loud knocking, with a strange, involved dream of carpenters and boxes and a journey and being late for something, and more knocking, and her mother’s voice calling to her through the door.

“Katharine, child! Wake up! Don’t forget that you’re to dine at the Van De Waters’ at eight! It’s half past six now!”

It was quite dark, save for the flickering light thrown upon the ceiling from the gas-lamp below. Katharine started up from her long sleep, hardly realizing where she was.

“All right, mother—I’m awake!” she answered sleepily.

As she listened to her mother’s departing footsteps, it all came back to her, and she felt faint again. She struggled to her feet in the gloom and groped about till she had found a match, and lit the gas and drew down the old brown shades of the window. The light hurt her eyes for a moment, and as she pressed her hands to them she felt that they were wet.

“I suppose I’ve been crying in my sleep!” she exclaimed aloud. “What a baby I am!”

She looked at herself in the mirror with some curiosity, before beginning to dress.

“I’m an object for men and angels to stare at!” she said, and tried to laugh at her dejected appearance. “However,” she added, “I suppose I must go. I’m Katharine Lauderdale—‘that nice girl who never has headaches and things’—so I have no excuse.”

She stopped for a moment, still looking at herself.

“But I’m not Katharine Lauderdale!” she said presently, whispering the words to herself. “I’m Katharine Ralston—if not, what am I? Ah, dear me!” she sighed. “I wonder how it will all end!”

At all events, Katharine Lauderdale, or Katharine Ralston, she was herself again, as she turned from the mirror and began to think of what she must wear at the Van De Waters’ dinner-party.