Laura, her face flushed from sleep and a cheerful awakening, her burnished black hair in two great plaits that fell forward on her shoulders far below the waist of her negligÉe, tiptoed early next morning into the room, next to her own, where she had put Louise. But her tiptoeing was a considerateness wasted. Louise was wide awake. She had scarcely slept at all. The shock of her experience had been heavier than her ensuing weariness, so that, for the greater part of the night, she had lain wide-eyed, gazing into the darkness; dozing once, she had been gripped by a hideous dream, in which she had stood paralyzed by terror, awaiting the approach, from opposite directions, of two gigantic reptiles, wearing the faces of Judd and Jesse. Laura noticed the dark rings under the girl's feverishly bright eyes, and her heart glowed at the thought that Louise, quite as a matter of course, had sought asylum with her.

When the girl had arrived at her apartment on the previous night Laura, far from questioning her, had pantomimed, finger at lip, that Louise was not to tell her anything then; and Louise had been grateful for the fine delicacy of the remission.

Finding Louise awake, Laura, smiling to match the sunlight that streamed through the curtains, and exhibiting none of the curiosity or jarring glumness of manner with which a woman of less tact might easily have intensified the misery of such a situation, sat on the edge of Louise's bed and began to chatter as gaily as if her listener's world had been swimming in rose.

"My dear," she said, stretching her satin-smooth arms high above her head in an abandonment of waking enjoyment, "I feel as chirpful this morning as a sparrow in a wistaria vine. Let's talk until we get hungry. Let's make plans and things. Plan number one: we are going abroad next week, instead of early in May. I can't wait for May. I need things to wear at once. I am positively in rags and tatters, the Cinderella of Central Park West. How is that for one gorgeous plan?" It might easily have been thought, listening to her and studying her enthusiasm, that she was the girl and Louise the woman. But Louise, for all of her still throbbing memory of the night before, was infected with the older woman's unquenchable cheerfulness.

"You talk of going to Europe as if it were a run out to the Bronx in your car, dear," she said, smiling. "And am I really to go with you? At any rate, of course I must ask——" She had meant to say that she must ask her mother's permission; but the thought rushed to her mind that in all likelihood her mother would be only too willing to let her go. Laura divined her thought and rushed to her aid.

"Oh, I shall do all the asking," she interposed. "That's another of my glittering specialties—asking. I'm the most immoderately successful asker, I think, in all North America; yes, and getter, too, I verily believe. Really, I can't remember when I was refused anything that I out-and-out asked for. So I'll arrange that. But with this stipulation: you'll have to ask Mr. Blythe yourself."

"Mr. Blythe?" said Louise, wonderingly. The sound of his name somehow gave her an immediate sense of uplift; but for the moment she failed to catch Laura's meaning. "What is it that I must ask Mr. Blythe about, dear?"

Laura gazed at her with skeptical eyes.

"What is it we were talking about, Louise?" she asked, mischievously. "The Relation of the Cosmic Forces to—er—Mental Healing? The Real Nub of the Suffragettes' Cause? Child, you don't really suppose that you could gallumph off to the continent of Europe with a frivolous, irresponsible, happy-go-lucky person like me without first asking the consent of your guardian—or, at any rate, your guardian-to-be?"

Louise's flush shone through her amused smile.

"That is true, isn't it?" she said simply. "Of course I must ask him."

"I am in a frenzy of fear, though," went on Laura, affecting an exaggerated solemnity, "that the ogre will flatly put his foot down and refuse to let you go. I know that I should if I were he."

"Why, Laura?" asked Louise with such genuine wide-eyed innocence that Laura laughed outright.

"Why?" she repeated in Louise's tone. "Well, I haven't the least doubt that I should be a great deal more selfish about it than he will be. Just because a man has to be such a horridly legal, dry-as-dust creature as a guardian, is that any particular reason why he should become incapable of experiencing the entirely human misery called lonesomeness?"

Louise had no reply for that except a little gesture of deprecation that quite failed to convince.

"How could we possibly get ready to go abroad in a week, Laura?" she covered her confusion by asking.

"My dear," replied Laura, convincingly, "I could and would start for the Straits of Sunda inside of twenty minutes if there were any possible reason why I should want to go there—if, for example, there happened to be a dressmaker or milliner there whose creations I particularly fancied. The voyage to Europe is now a mere ferry trip. You speak as if we were still living in the Victorian period. In those days folks 'made preparations' to go abroad—the dear, fussy, old-fashioned creatures! Now it is like riding to Staten Island, with the exception of the sleeps and meals in between. One of the most delightful men I know goes to Europe every year with no other impedimenta than a walking stick—he is so used to a cane that he must have it for his constitutionals on deck—and a toothbrush; he gets his changes of linen from the head steward—I believe he knows every head steward afloat; and he is such a cheerful steamer companion, because he is unhampered by luggage, that it is a delight to be his fellow voyager. Once, when I was a young woman ("You are so aged and decrepit now, aren't you?" murmured Louise.) I went on board a steamer to wish some friends bon voyage. It was rather a cheerless day in New York, with overcast skies. I thought of sunny Italy. And so I went along with them, in the clothes I was standing in, and I had the most enjoyable voyage of my life."

Thus Laura chattered on, eager to take Louise's mind off the previous night's experience which, even without having heard any of the details, she well knew must have been a trying one. During the night Laura had decided to start within the week on the trip to Europe which she made every year. The climactic turn in Louise's affairs, which had by no means been unexpected by Laura, had prodded her to this decision. She had meant to take Louise abroad with her early in May at any rate; now, however, that her young friend, whom she had come to regard with an encompassing affection, was in obvious distressing straits, an almost immediate withdrawal of her from painful scenes would, Laura felt, be at least an attempt at a solution. A few months abroad would enable Louise to shake off the bravely-borne but none the less wearing depression which had taken possession of her when she found herself so unexpectedly thrust into a horribly difficult situation—a situation which Laura now blamed herself for not having actively sought to terminate before the interposition of the incident, whatever had been its nature, which had caused the girl to leave the house on the Drive in the middle of the night. And Laura, meditating these things as she lay awake, declared in her heart that Louise should never again be subjected to a renewal of that ordeal.

Without any questioning, Louise, after a little actual planning with Laura for the early trip abroad, told the older woman what had happened at the house on the Drive on the previous night. She went over the details calmly enough, grouping Judd's brutal utterances into a few phrases which presented the picture almost as plainly to Laura's mental vision as if she had been actually present at what she knew must have been a scene sufficiently searing in its effect upon a girl yet under twenty and fresh from school. It was only when she came to her mother's flaccid, vacillating part in the affair that Louise's voice weakened a little.

"She disappointed me, Laura," said Louise, feelingly. "I would not say that to anybody else but you. But she did. I don't know just what to think. I thought that, having returned in time to hear at least some of the things that were said to me, she would come with me when she saw how impossible it was for me to stay there. I can't even guess why she did not. That was the worst part of it—her remaining there. And now I am afraid that I did wrong in leaving her. Perhaps there was something to prevent her leaving. It may be that if I had stayed on with her for a while longer she might have——"

Laura interrupted her with a gesture.

"Don't say that, Louise," she put in, earnestly. "You must not do yourself injustice. That wouldn't be fair. Your mother is one of my oldest friends; we were girls together. But right is right. Your mother should never have permitted you to so much as set foot in that house. I am not disloyal to her in saying that. She herself knows in her heart that it is true. But, having been allowed to go there, you did your part; you played the game, as one says, without complaint; and you stayed as long as you could. You have nothing to reproach yourself for. Your mother herself, I think, will be fair enough to acknowledge that. And you are never to go back there. That, of course, is settled. The situation must work itself out in some other way. I feel perfectly confident that your mother will see it all in the right light, and before very long; probably while you are abroad with me. She will miss you. And it is right that she should miss you. Missing you, she will come to a realization of what she is sacrificing for—what? That, dear, is my prediction as to the way it will all come out. But you must not think of reproaching yourself for the step you have taken, nor even dream of retracing that step."

During the forenoon Laura telephoned Blythe, giving him an outline of what had happened.

"It was inevitable, of course," was Blythe's brief comment over the 'phone. "Since it had to come, I am glad that it is over with—better now than later. May I come up to see you?"

"To see me—hypocrite!" Laura answered, laughing—and she could hear Blythe hastily and rather fumbling hanging up the receiver.

Blythe arrived at Laura's early in the afternoon and his arrival was a signal for Laura to profess burdensome housekeeping cares in a distant part of the apartment.

This time Louise's feeling in Blythe's presence was not a mere vague shyness, but genuine embarrassment. She had thought of him a great deal during the night, particularly of that which had passed between them during the ride in the Park. Now she flushed at the thought that she had even passively permitted such a thing, much less have seemed to invite it. Her mother's position, and the stigma which, she could not but feel, that position placed upon herself, now seemed, with the humiliating incident of the night before fresh in her mind, to forbid the continuation of any relationship between Blythe and herself other than that of guardian and ward. It was purely from a sense of consideration for Blythe, a man who had won his way in the world in the teeth of almost insuperable obstacles, that Louise resolved that there must be an abridgement of their gradually growing intimacy. She had sighed in making that mental decision, for the relationship had been very agreeable and—and something else which she could not quite analyze; but she shrank from certain intuitive forecastings involving Blythe's progress toward the goal he had set for himself, which she feared a continuation of their closer relationship might develop.

Blythe was quick to notice her altered manner, expressed by a reserve which, with the penetration of an alert mind, he could not but see was studied. He was puzzled by it; but he attributed it, after a moment of rapid pondering, to the effect of the shock from which he knew she must still be suffering. Nevertheless he was conscious of a sudden depression which for a while he found it difficult to throw off.

Louise spared him the difficulty of making the first adversion to that which she knew was uppermost in his mind—her course, that is, now that she had voluntarily, but under the press of circumstance, detached herself from an impossible environment. More guardedly than she had related the incident to Laura, Louise told him of the affair; but he was more than able to fill in the grisly details.

"What I cannot understand," she said, not in any tone of reproach, but earnestly enough, "is the fact that I was not told, particularly after I left school, that I was so intolerably indebted to—to that man. My impression always was so different. I never doubted that my father was providing for me. I was given to understand that when I was a young girl, and I never thought anything different. It would have been difficult, of course I know, to tell me any such a thing while I was at school; but I can't help but believe that I should have been told when I went to live in that house. I doubt if I could have stayed there had I known, even to be near my mother; I should have found some other way of meeting her. It is unthinkable that I should be in that man's debt. I shall not remain in his debt, at any rate, to the extent of the amount my father sent me recently. I shall use that, at all events, to help rid myself of such an intolerable obligation."

Blythe then explained it all to her: how her father had never ceased to make provision for her, even after Blythe had informed him that his remittances were being rejected; how, when he had seen her father in Honolulu, he had been instructed to deposit the remittances as a fund for Louise's future use, and he named the amount which he was holding for her. Louise's eyes lighted up when she heard this.

"I shall send the entire amount to that man," she said, in precipitate decision, "to reimburse him for what he has expended for me."

Blythe was forced to repress a smile.

"That decision does you credit, Louise," he said quietly. "But it is out of the question. The man not only would not accept the reimbursement, but, in offering it, you would simply give him another opportunity to mortify you by returning it. That is what he would do. He is very rich, and he has the porcine pride of riches. He would keenly enjoy the flourish of thrusting back at you the offered reimbursement, just enjoy as he enjoyed—I hate to say it, but I must to make matters clear—thrusting back the quarterly remittances of your father."

"But why did you not tell me these things when my father asked you to become my guardian?" Louise asked him. A natural curiosity, but no reproof, marked her tone.

"Because I did not feel up to it," Blythe replied plainly enough. "That would have involved telling you the whole miserable story. I could not do that. Nor could Laura. We talked it over and we found that neither of us was equal to so gruelling a task. It seemed better to let you gradually grasp the facts yourself. Our telling you would not have helped matters. Moreover, so far as I was concerned, I did not feel that I had the right to touch upon matters so intimate. It is different now—today. The proscription has been removed. I am now your guardian."

Louise gave a little start at his last words, and Blythe, trained in observation, did not fail to notice the increased lustre of her wide eyes, any more than he neglected to see that she was at some pains to quell words which he felt assured would have been phrases of gladness had she permitted herself to utter them. Why was she thus repressing her impulses? Blythe immediately concentrated an acute mentality upon the problem. The answer, and the right one, came to him in a flash, as if by telepathic revelation: he understood the reason underlying her new restraint, which he perceived, not without pleasure, she was having difficulty in maintaining. It was from a keener realization of her mother's position: Blythe felt so sure of it that he smiled inwardly and was comforted. Her mother's position was nothing to him! But how to convince Louise of that? He made poor progress of this factor of the problem in trying to study it while talking with Louise. He told her that he had only been notified that morning that the court had appointed him her guardian.

"Are you prepared to be severely disciplined?" he asked her. He felt in vastly better spirits since arriving at what he felt assured was the correct solution as to Louise's manifestly changed manner toward him. "I rather believe I shall insist upon your permitting me to pick out your frocks and hats. I think I shall have you change at once to Quaker garb."

Louise could not repress a smile at that. She caught herself longing to be on her former plane with him. But her fancied ineligibility, her somewhat morbid consciousness that she was hedged in by circumstances which she had no right even to tacitly ask him to share with her, put a damper upon her temptation to resume her former manner with him.

Blythe walked to the window and looked out over the Park for a silent moment. Then he thrust his hand into his breast pocket, brought out a photograph, and handed it to her.

"I came upon the picture this morning in rummaging through my safe," he said to her.

Louise gazed puzzledly at the photograph. It was that of a tall, distinguished-looking man with silvered hair and mustache, dressed in white linen; he was shown standing on the porch of a squat, wide, comfortable-looking bungalow, the open space in front of which was a riot of tropical verdure.

Louise glanced up at Blythe, and her eyes filled.

"You must not think it odd that I did not give it to you before this," said Blythe, fighting a bit of a lump in his throat. "I've been spending at least two hours every day searching for it ever since—well, ever since I met you on the train," he admitted, his cheeks tingling with the confession.

"When was it taken? And is he so—so glorious-looking as this?" asked Louise, her enthusiasm over her father's photograph—the first she had ever seen of him, for her mother had resentfully destroyed the earlier ones—overcoming her hardly-maintained restraint.

Blythe sat down beside her and told her about the picture. He had gotten it from her father upon the occasion of his visit to Honolulu nearly three years before. Blythe had been summoned to California on some legal business, and, a bit run down from over work, he had made the six-day cruise down to Honolulu, partly for recuperation and partly to go over some affairs with George Treharne. Treharne had come from his plantations on the Island of Maui to meet him in Honolulu. Louise sat rapt for more than half an hour while Blythe answered her eager questions about her father. He had felt a delicacy about expanding on that subject so long as the girl was domiciled with her mother; now, however, that Louise had been literally forced to the severance of at least her constant propinquity to her mother, and, now, too, that he was her guardian in fact instead of in prospect, he felt at liberty to throw off that reserve; and he keenly enjoyed the absorption with which she listened to his account of her father, nearly every detail of which was absolutely new to her.

"How I should love to see him!" Louise exclaimed, sighing, when at length Blythe rose to leave.

"I am promising myself the intense satisfaction and pleasure of taking you to see him, Louise—some day," Blythe said, tacking on the last two words when he caught her scarlet flush. It was not until after he had spoken that he reflected that what he had said might easily be open to one very lucid and palpable interpretation; but that interpretation so fitted in with what he meant to encompass, all conditions being fair and equal, that he refused to stultify himself by modifying or withdrawing his words. And Louise's beauty was heightened when she flushed in that way, anyhow!

Laura, with the skillfully-assumed air of one who had been excessively busy, came in at that moment.

"Well, Mr. Ogre-Guardian, are you going to be at the pier to wish us bon voyage?" she asked Blythe.

Blythe stared at her. Laura stared back at him.

"Do you mean to tell me," exclaimed Laura, laughing, "that, after you've been here more than a solid hour, Louise has not told you? In heaven's name, what else could you two have been talking about?"

"Don't keep me oscillating on this—this ten-thousand-revolutions-to-the-minute fly-wheel, please, Laura," said Blythe, blankly. "What are you talking about?"

"Then it is true that Louise hasn't told you we are going abroad next week?"

"Next week?" Blythe's jaw fell.

"Why, I thought surely she would have finished asking your guardianly permission—and everything by this time," said Laura, shaking a finger at Louise. "But I can see how it is going to be: she means to wheedle me into asking her guardian all the terribly difficult things."

"But are you really going so—so scandalously soon?" inquired Blythe, for a moment genuinely glum. "Why, New York will seem like some miserable tank town plunged in Stygian darkness without you and——"

"Oh, finish it!" dared Laura when he came to a sudden halt. But Blythe did not, for already his mind was grasping the fact that the plan was a good one, as Laura's plans generally were. He did not try to convince himself that he would not miss them both sorely; Laura for her cordial, unexacting friendship and camaraderie and Louise because——He knew equally well why he should miss Louise, but there was a shyness about this man even in his self-communings, and so he did not go to the bottom of that in his summary reflection on the project. Laura's keen eye detected that there was something distrait in Louise's manner with Blythe, and, wondering, she made another escape in order to permit Blythe to make his devoirs to one instead of to two. Blythe took Louise's hands in his and gradually, by mere silent compulsion, drew her averted eyes into a direct line with his own, which were smiling and alight with an utter frankness.

"Louise," he said, going straight to the point, "I know what is in your mind and why you are holding me at a little more than arm's length. I am glad to say, although I am a little sorry that you do not already know it, that you are absolutely wrong; not hopelessly wrong, because you are going to see the matter differently when you are less troubled in mind than you now are. I wish such an idea had not entered your mind. I believe it would not have entered your mind had you known me better."

Louise, startled that he should have read her so clearly as his words denoted, replied, with no great conviction that what she said was exactly true:

"Does not the very fact that you seem to understand so clearly furnish the best evidence?" But that sounded rather inconsequential to her, and she went on flurriedly: "I don't mean just that. Perhaps I do not know precisely what I do mean," averting her head again in her confusion, "now that you——" and she came to a futile end.

"Now that I read you aright, you were about to say," said Blythe, smiling gravely. "Well, I am not going to be ungenerous enough to triumph over you because you have virtually admitted that you were wrong—for you have so admitted, haven't you?"

Louise remained silent, her head still averted; but her hands still rested in Blythe's.

"Haven't you?" said Blythe; and she was conscious that his grasp upon her hands was tightening.

Blythe peered around to catch a view of her face, and he saw that she was faintly smiling. He did not let go of her hands, nor did she appear at all eager to have him do so.

"I have an appointment for which I am already late, and I am keen to have a look at my watch," went on Blythe, quite cheerfully, without in the least relaxing his possession of her hands. "But of course I can't look at it—I can't do anything but remain here for a week, say—until you tell me that you are wrong."

Louise turned her natural face upon him and nodded brightly—conquered, and willing to be; there was, she noticed, an inviting little hollow in his coat, between his left shoulder and the rise of his chest, which she vaguely imagined would be a very inviting spot upon which to rest, if even for a transitory moment, a tired head; Blythe was conscious of a decided response when he pressed her hands just before releasing them; and when he went out she felt that the room, somehow, had become a little darker than it had been. She knew that he had understood, and she appraised his fineness in telling her that she had been wrong at its true value; but she was not entirely convinced, and she recoiled from the thought of permitting him to make any sacrifice for her sake. But she was glad that he had divined what had been in her mind, and her heart gave a little leap when she thought that, if ever there was to be any computation of or allusion to a sacrifice, it would be on her side, and not on his; she knew now that he was above even the thought of entertaining, much less measuring, such a consideration.

Her mother came to Laura's late in the afternoon, very downcast, very plaintive on the subject of how terribly she already had missed Louise. Judd, with his customary morning penitence, had seen her at noon and made his usual abject apology; and he had endured the lash of her scornful tongue with a shaky consciousness that his conduct had been pretty outrageous even for him. He did not acknowledge how set back he was, however, when Mrs. Treharne, a tirade over, let fall the fact that Louise had gone to Laura's, and the additional fact that Louise, having been placed under John Blythe's guardianship at her father's direction, would be very well looked after and provided for. But Judd wondered, nevertheless, just how these facts would dovetail with Langdon Jesse's sweet scheme to have Louise relegated, under Judd's provision, to the depressing and chastening surroundings of a "five-by-eight flat."

Louise's heart went out to her mother when Mrs. Treharne, in an effusion of tears, told her how hideously lonesome the house on the Drive was and would continue to be without her; but the girl had difficulty in matching this with the undeniable fact that, when she told her mother that she would be sailing for Europe within a week, Mrs. Treharne, drying her tears, offhandedly pronounced that the plan was a very wise one and would be the best imaginable thing for Louise.

Louise, as often before, was stunned by the palpable contradiction afforded by her mother's tears over what she called her lonesomeness and, in the next moment, her dry-eyed approval of a trip that would place an ocean between them. She wanted to go with Laura and she meant to go; but she was conscious of a sinking of the heart when she found that, far from seeking to deter her, her mother appeared not only willing but anxious to have her go. Mrs. Treharne's one thought, of course, was that the trip would give her a breathing spell, "give her a chance to think," as she futilely expressed it to herself; for her life had become one continuous procrastination. Louise, she considered, would be "broadened by travel" and sheared of some of her "old-fashioned notions." And, while Louise was gone, she herself could "think things over" and block out a course. A misty, intangible idea of abandoning Judd already had crept into her mind, in her self-searching, self-contemning moments; perhaps, while Louise was across the sea, she might be able to evolve some plan whereby——And here her musings halted when she came plumb upon the thought of the surrender of luxuries that her abandonment of Judd would involve, the scrimping and saving of a "narrow, smug existence with smug, narrow people." Anyhow, Louise's absence from the scene would "give her time to think." That was the main point.

But Louise, who had been lonesome for her mother, now found herself lonesome in her mother's presence.

Judd met Langdon Jesse at the club a few nights later.

"Judd," Jesse sneered, "you are, all in all, about the most accomplished damned blunderer in the Western Hemisphere, aren't you?"

"That will be about all of that from you," growled Judd in reply. He had got out of the cotton market with, as he put it, an "unpunctured pelt," so that he had no present fear of the vindictive machinations of the younger man. "A civil tongue between your teeth henceforth in your dealings with me, or we don't deal. Do you get that?"

"Oh!" said Jesse, eloquently. He surrendered the whip hand with his customary deftness. "But you'll remember, I suppose," going on suavely, "that you told me that Miss Treharne was a virtual dependent of yours?"

"Well," snarled Judd, "supposing I really thought so? How about that?"

"Oh, if you really thought so, why of course that's different," said Jesse, graciously. "But you were pretty wrong, weren't you? You separated her from her mother on that presumption by bawling at her as if she had been a chambermaid; and all the time she was virtually, as she is now in fact, under the guardianship of that toploftical Blythe fellow; she is living with Mrs. Stedham, with whom she starts for Europe in a few days, and she is more than amply provided for by her father. In all candor, and between man and man, could you possibly have botched things worse than you did upon your mistaken premise?"

"You mean botched the thing so far as you are concerned, eh?" growled Judd. "Well, things were botched for you in that direction before you ever started. You've been kicking around long enough to know when you're left at the post; but you don't know it, all the same. Anyhow, count me out of your confounded woman-hunting schemes in future, understand? I've got enough to do to attend to my own game. Play your own hand. But you're butting your head against a stone wall in this one instance, let me tell you that."

"Is that so?" inquired Jesse, with no sign of perturbation or discouragement. "Well, to adopt your somewhat crude metaphor, I'll play the hand out, and I'll show you the cards after I've finished. Will you want to see them?"

"Oh, go to the devil," virtuously replied Judd.