Jesse's car looming suddenly upon her, instantly dissolved Louise's happy absorption and aroused within her the foreboding that she was upon the threshold of something sinister; and the premonition caused her to become physically and mentally tense as she ascended the steps.

The impact of the hall's stream of light slightly blinded and confused her as she entered; but she very soon discerned Jesse and Judd standing before the wide, brassy fireplace. Both were in shaggy automobile coats and plainly were about to leave the house. Judd, his burnished bald pate mottledly rosy from the heat of the blazing logs, was standing with his back to the fire, his hands thrust in the greatcoat pockets, his heavy under-shot jaw working upon an imaginary cud. Jesse, towering over the other man, but his own increasing over-bulkiness made more manifest by his bulging coat of fur, was the first to see Louise, who, with an inclination of the head, was for passing them to gain the stairs. Neither Jesse nor Judd intended that this should be. The two had dined together. The blitheness of their humor, therefore, contained also a seasoning of carelessness.

Without the least movement of his grotesquely-paunched body, Judd turned his head sidewise and viewed Louise quizzically through his sharp, red-rimmed, oddly small eyes.

"Evening—er—daughter," he said to her in an experimental but sufficiently matter-of-fact tone.

The greeting sounded so incredible that Louise, coming to a sudden halt, rested her hands on the back of a chair and stared curiously at him without a word. She felt very cold, in spite of the excessive heat of the hall; but she was amazed quite beyond the power of speech. While thus she stood, staring puzzledly at Judd, Jesse faced her, and, bringing his heels together with a click, made her a low bow accompanied by a sweeping cross-wise gesture with his cap of fur. It is a dangerous thing for a man to attempt the grand manner unless he is very sure of his practice or at least of the indulgence of his gallery. Louise, startled as she was, could not fail to notice the inadequacy of his attempt.

"Glad I haven't missed you, after all, Lou—Miss Treharne," said Jesse, catching himself before he had quite finished addressing her by her first name. His tone was grossly familiar; and Louise, merely glancing at him, saw that the question that was always in his eyes when he looked at her now was made more searching and persistent by his potations. "I've been dallying a-purpose. I came to offer you the use of my box for 'Pelleas and Melisande'—it's being done at the Manhattan tonight for the first time here, of course you know. They're repeating it Friday night, though. Mary Garden's a dream in it, they say—she's a dream in any old thing—or hardly anything, when it comes to that," and he laughed boldly at the suggestiveness of the remark. "The box is yours for Friday night. May I hope to join——"

Louise, as he spoke, had been steadying herself to make reply. Now she raised a hand for him to desist. The gesture was simple, but he obeyed the implied command. Perhaps it was the picture that she made in her anger that warned him. She stood straight, shoulders back, head up, eyes gazing unflinchingly into his; a moving figure of womanly dauntlessness, had there been eyes there thus to appraise her attitude.

"Mr. Jesse," she said in a clear tone, picking her words with a cutting deliberation, "you are not, I have heard, deficient in intelligence. A very short time ago you had the hardihood to proffer me the use of one of your cars. I declined for the same reason that I now repeat in refusing your proffer of the use of your opera box. There is no imaginable reason why I should accept such favors at your hands. I told you that before. And you knew it before I told you. My acquaintanceship with you is merely casual. But, since you force me to it by disregarding what I said before, permit me to say now, explicitly and I hope finally, that I am not conscious of the least desire to become further acquainted with you."

Judd choked on a gloatful cough. While Louise had been speaking he had been grinning malevolently at Jesse, the grin saying, as plainly as words: "Well, I was right, wasn't I? You're properly shrivelled, aren't you?"

Jesse smiled chagrinedly and, as he imagined, conciliatingly. But he evaded her direct gaze, and his wholly unconvincing assumption of the grand manner had quite departed. He was not, however, appreciably disturbed. Jesse had a habit of discounting such setbacks in advance. The stock market and women required deft manipulation, he considered, and his fame as a manipulator was established. The citadel, finally scaled, would be the more inviting for the difficulty of the besiegement. He entertained no doubts as to the outcome. In the meantime Louise could enjoy her schoolgirl heroics. He was not unfamiliar with that sort of thing. But in time they all sensed the glamour of the advantages he so well knew how to dangle before them. These thoughts danced agreeably before Jesse's mental vision even at the moment when he felt himself, with no sense of degradation, to be the target of Louise's scorn.

"Well, I am sorry, Miss Treharne, that you still seem to misunderstand me," said Jesse, attempting the tone of one whose sorrow overtops his mortification.

"It is because I do understand you that I speak as I do," replied Louise with perfect self-possession. Judd choked again in the gleefulness of his vindication and Jesse shot him a malignant glance. Then and there Jesse began to outline a little plan whereby, by means of "market" pressure, he calculated that he could promptly and effectually change Judd's attitude.

"I prefer to believe, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, "that you are indisposed and that upon reflection you will be sorry that——"

"I am perfectly well," interposed Louise in a tone of cold finality, "and I shall not be sorry." Then she passed up the stairs to her mother's apartments.

"Now will you be good!" broke out Judd, chuckling vindictively, when she had gone. "Say, Jesse, I wonder if you feel so much like a clipped and trimmed Lothario as you look?"

Jesse, his mask off, growled something inarticulate by way of reply. Then: "Are you for the club?" he asked Judd. He decided that he might as well test the strength of the screws upon Judd at once. They went out together.

Mrs. Treharne, dressed for a restaurant supper party that was to assemble at midnight, was reading, with the wistfulness of one debarred, the "society news" in a chattery and generally wrong weekly publication when Louise entered her sitting room. She was wonderfully coiffured, and encased in a dÉcollettÉ dress that somewhat too liberately exploited the chisellings of her still milky arms and shoulders. She stiffened slightly in her chair at the sight of Louise; and the dimplings which had been creasing her plastic face in her enjoyment of the publication's malevolent gossip gave way to the expression of peevishness with which her daughter was becoming all too well acquainted.

"Well, my dear," she started to say as Louise, in whose eyes the embers of the wrath Jesse's words had aroused still slumbered, "I must say that you have a cool way of walking off and——"

"No reproaches just now, mother, please," interposed Louise, sinking wearily into a chair. "I never had a happier day until, returning here——"

She paused, passing a hand before her eyes. She was loth to enter upon the topic of Judd and Jesse with her mother. But Mrs. Treharne, looking at her more closely, saw her perturbation.

"Oh, you met Mr. Judd and Mr. Jesse as you came in?" she asked, a note of slightly worried curiosity in her tone. "Were they——?" She broke off. "Men are men, my dear," she resumed, placatingly. "They had been dining—I noticed that. But of course they said nothing to——"

"Your business adviser," said Louise—she could not bring herself to mention Judd's name—"greeted me as 'daughter.' I remember now that I was too much startled to tell him that he must not repeat that."

"Tush, Louise—a slip of the tongue, of course," said Mrs. Treharne, appeasingly. Privately, however, she already began to contrive the things she intended to say to Judd on the morrow. "And Mr. Jesse—did he——"

"Mr. Jesse," interposed Louise, "caught himself as he was about to address me as Louise. He offered me the use of his box at the opera. Several days ago—I was too chagrined to tell you—he insisted upon my accepting the use of one of his automobiles. I hope I made it plain to him tonight—and I tried hard enough to make it plain to him before—that there is not the remotest chance that I shall ever accept his sinister civilities."

"Why 'sinister,' Louise?" put Mrs. Treharne, bridling. "How can you possibly put such a construction upon it when one of my friends generously extends to you courtesies that are commonly and with perfect propriety accepted by——"

Louise sighed wearily and held up a pleading hand.

"Don't ask me such a question—please, mother," she entreated. "You don't know how the subject revolts me."

"But, my dear," her mother persisted, "what is it that you have against Mr. Jesse? I am entitled to know."

"I am not sufficiently interested in the man to have anything against him," replied Louise. "Is it not enough that I loathe him?"

"No, Louise, it is not enough," pronounced her mother, plainly ready for argument on the subject. "You are too young a woman to be forming prejudices or leaping to conclusions. What do you know about Mr. Jesse that has caused you to form such an opinion of him?"

Louise hesitated. Her intimacy with her mother had never been very great. There had never been any plain talk, or even mother-and-daughter confidences, between them. The theme as she had said, was revolting to her. But her mother deliberately chose to remain on that ground. There was no path around the point her mother dwelt upon. Louise entertained no thought of evading it.

"Mother," she said, leaning forward in her earnestness, "it is natural enough, I know, that you still regard me as a child. But, before I answer your question, are you willing to grant, at least for the time, that I am a woman?"

"Don't be so unmitigatedly solemn about it, Louise," demurred her mother, evasively. "My question was simple enough."

"Simple enough to put, but not so simple for me to answer," was Louise's quiet reply. "But I shall answer it nevertheless. The reason, then, why I do not intend to have any further contact with Langdon Jesse is that he is one of the most notorious libertines in New York; a man who regards women from a single angle—as his prey. Everybody seems to know that, mother, except you: and you don't know it, do you?" There was a pathos in the eagerness with which the girl asked the question; it spoke of a dim hope she yet had that perhaps, after all, her mother did not know about Langdon Jesse. Her mother's harsh, dodging reply quickly dashed that hope.

"Who has been telling you such scandalous things, child?" Mrs. Treharne demanded. "Laura Stedham?"

"You must not ask me that question," replied Louise, quietly firm. "But if nobody had told me about Langdon Jesse—and I shall not deny that I was told—I am sure my instinct would have taught me to suspect him of being—precisely what he is."

Mrs. Treharne shook her head dismally.

"It is exactly as I feared it would be, Louise," she said, sighing drearily. "You are narrow, restricted, pent-in; you haven't even a symptom of bigness of view; your horizon is no wider than the room in which you happen to be. I always feared they would make a prude of you. Now I see that my forebodings were right."

Louise, very much wrought upon, rose rather unsteadily and walked over to her mother's chair.

"You repel me a little, mother," she said in a low tone. "It hurts me to say that: but it is the truth. If I am a prude, then I am unconscious of it. It may be that I don't know your definition of the word." She paused and gazed about the room wearily. "If to be a prude," she resumed, "is to be conscious of the desire and the intention to be an honest woman, then, mother, I am a prude," her voice breaking a little. "And if one must be a prude to recoil from the hideous advances of a man like Langdon Jesse, then again I am a prude."

She had been unfairly placed on the defensive. She had not meant to wound. But, while her words cut her mother like the impact of thongs, they did not arouse within her a sense of the humiliation of her position.

"Louise," she asked, hoarsely, moistening her dry lips, "are you saying these—these stinging things with the deliberate purpose of reflecting upon your mother?"

Addressed to anybody else but Louise, the question would have been absurd in the opening it afforded.

"I should hate to have you think that," replied Louise, flushing hotly and taking her mother's hands. "You don't think such a thing, do you?"

"I don't know what to think," said her mother, taking the martyred tone, "when you say such horrid things. I never heard you say such—such flaying things before. I can't think what is coming over you."

"I am very lonesome, for one thing," said Louise, looking at her mother through suffused eyes. "I see so little of you. Perhaps I become moody. But I never mean, never meant, to say anything to hurt you, dear."

"But you see enough, if not too much, of—of others, Louise," put in her mother, slightly mollified. "You have been with Laura ever since early this morning?"

"Yes; with Laura—and another," replied Louise, unfailingly candid.

"Another?" said Mrs. Treharne, querulously. "Whom do you mean?"

"Mr. John Blythe," replied Louise, coloring.

"John Blythe?" said her mother, wonderingly. "You were with Laura and John Blythe? So that is the direction of the wind? Laura is trying to——" She broke off when she saw the expression of pain on her daughter's face.

"Please don't say that," said Louise, her face and forehead a vivid crimson. "I have often met Mr. Blythe at Laura's. I couldn't begin to tell you how I esteem him. And, mother, he is to be my guardian." She had meant to tell her mother that at a more fitting time; but, since Blythe's name had come up, she discerned that there could be no excuse for a postponement of the revelation.

Mrs. Treharne gazed at her daughter with mouth agape. When she finally spoke her words were almost inarticulate.

"Your guardian?" she gasped. "John Blythe is to be your guardian? At whose direction? Upon whose application?"

"My father's, mother."

"But are you sure that you are not being tricked—that——"

"John Blythe is not the man to trick anybody, dear—everybody, of course, knows that," said Louise, very prompt to a defense in that quarter. "Moreover, I saw the letters from my father. One of them is to me. So there is no mistake about it."

"What does your father say in his letter?" asked Mrs. Treharne, suspiciously. "Does he mention me? say anything to my detriment?"

"Nothing of that sort, mother," replied Louise, disliking exceedingly the drift of the conversation. "Mr. Blythe's guardianship is to be largely a matter of form. I—I am glad the arrangement has been made. There are times when I feel that I need guidance. You are so busy and I so much dislike to worry you. Often, since I came home, I've found myself wishing that I had a brother." She stopped, her voice faltering.

Mrs. Treharne started slightly, swept by the thought of how often she had wished that Louise herself had been a son. Now, for the moment, she repented that thought; the dignity and strength of her daughter were making their appeal to her. She had her periods of fairness, and she could not throttle her consciousness of the wretchedness of Louise's position under that roof nor subdue the accusing inner voice that held her solely responsible for it. She trembled with indignation when she remembered that Judd had dared to address Louise as "daughter." She raged at herself for not possessing the strength to cast the Judd incubus from her once and forever. And she ended, as usual, by giving way to an effusion of dismal tears and by promising herself that "some time—some day——"

Louise went to bed with a disturbed mind. She was trying not to face the indubitable fact that her mother was proving herself but a reed to lean upon. Then her drowsy thoughts wandered to the fire-lit dining-room of the serene old house in the country in and around which she had spent a day marked by a sort of placid happiness which she could not quite analyze; and her last thought, before succumbing to unquiet dreams based upon the events at the end of the day, were of a rugged, kindly-faced man quietly watching her as she read her father's letter by the flickering light of the droning logs.

Judd, still chuckling viciously, continued to taunt the rebuked but by no means cast-down Jesse after the two had got into Jesse's car.

"Not saying much, are you, old top?" he gurgled joyously as the car throbbed away from the curb. "Well, I don't blame you. Not, of course, that I didn't give you fair warning. I told you you'd be frozen stiff if you tried on any of your Don Juanish airs and graces in that quarter. But don't take it to heart—don't grieve over it. You'll thaw out again in time. Right now I wouldn't dare take a chance on touching you for fear one of your arms or something'd drop off. But you'll thaw—you'll thaw," and he squirmed and wabbled around in his seat in the excess of his mirth.

Jesse, gnawing on an unlighted cigar as was his wont when temporarily eclipsed or engaged in blocking out a campaign, listened in silence. When it becomes the unfailing habit of a man to enjoy the last laugh he learns to pay little heed to the too-previous chirrupings of those over whom he feels confident of eventually triumphing. So he permitted Judd to enjoy himself. When the chuckles of his companion gradually ceased, however, he said, drily enough:

"To all intents and purposes she's a dependent of yours, isn't she?"

Judd parried the question. He was indifferent enough as to what might happen to Louise Treharne: he regarded her as an interloper, and he was disgruntled over her studiously aloof treatment of him. But it had become a habit with him to parry Jesse's questions since the occasion when his over-expansiveness in replying to a few seemingly innocent and unmeditated questions from Jesse had resulted in the sound "market" trouncing which his one-time pupil had inflicted upon him.

"What the devil difference does it make?" was Judd's reply. "She has your number all right, and that's all you need to know, isn't it?" and he chuckled again.

Jesse waited again until Judd's glee had subsided, then resumed.

"She has to look to you to make provision for her needs—clothes, hats, ribbons, furbelows, that sort of thing—doesn't she?" he inquired with the coolness of one who does not mean to be rebuffed.

"Oh, forget it," said Judd, a little grumpily now. "Don't try to pin me, Jesse. I don't spout about these things. She's living under one of my roofs, is a member of one of my households. And she regards you as—well, as a considerably-drowned water-bug. Why don't you let it go at that? There are more women in the world than there are red ants or railroad ties. Can't you take your medicine—stand for the defeat?"

"Not in this particular case," was Jesse's perfectly frank reply; he could be frank when there was no possibility of a "come-back." "What's more, I don't intend to. Just make up your mind to that, will you?"

"Oho!" said Judd, struck by the intentional rawness which Jesse had put into his last phrase. "That's the tune, is it?"

"That house of yours on the Drive isn't the place for the young woman," said Jesse. Judd knew that he wasn't assuming any virtuous strain, but merely leading up to a point. "You ought to know that—as the father of a family."

"You're becoming confoundedly erect in your ideas, aren't you?" snorted Judd. "And I've told you before that I won't have you dabbling in my private affairs. Just cut out your harpings, in this connection, upon my family and all of that sort of thing, understand?"

"Damn your private affairs," said Jesse, quietly, but with a note of meaningfulness in his tone that caused Judd to sit up and take immediate notice. "I am no more interested in your private affairs than I am in the transactions of the Congo Missionary Society. But I repeat that your—er—that Mrs. Treharne's daughter doesn't belong under that Riverside Drive roof. Do you understand me?"

"No," said Judd, "I don't," nor did he. But he no longer chuckled.

"I think you've told me several times," Jesse went on calmly, "that the young woman flaunts you?"

Judd made some inarticulate reply which Jesse took for an affirmative.

"That being the case," inquired Jesse, "why do you keep her around the place?"

"What's your idea—that I should turn her into the street?" asked Judd, gradually getting a hold on Jesse's thread.

"Oh, she wouldn't be in the street very long," said Jesse with significant emphasis. "But, since on your own say-so she scarcely even nods to you, and you are paying the freight, what's the answer? Doesn't she know that she's dependent upon you?"

"How the devil could she help knowing it?" broke out Judd impatiently. "She has eyes and what belongs to her by way of brains, I suppose."

"Well," said Jesse, "if she cuts in on your—your game, and is such a nuisance to you, why don't you exert your authority—the authority of the provider—and——" He hesitated.

"And what?" inquired Judd, proddingly.

"Make provision for her—not necessarily luxurious provision—under some other roof?" said Jesse. "In a modest little apartment, for example, with just the necessaries and that sort of thing. That would alter her demeanor toward you—and toward others. Once they've enjoyed the gewgaws of life the other thing is a come-down and they feel the sordid misery of it."

Judd studied.

"You're a deep sort of a reprobate, Jesse," he said, musingly, after a pause. "I don't profess to be able to plumb some features of your scoundrelism, and yet I've never been accused of being uncommonly dense. How the devil would my planting the young woman in a miserable little six-by-eight flat help your case?"

"That," coolly replied Jesse, "is my affair; but you exhibit your denseness, at that, in asking such a fool question. It wouldn't take her long to begin to pine for the light and laughter and lavishness of life after she'd had a taste of the miserable little six-by-eight flat as you call it, would it?"

"And when she did begin to pine that's where you'd come in, eh?" said Judd. "Yes, it was pretty thick of me not to catch your drift, I'll admit. But I guess I'll keep out of it. You can conduct your own damned round-ups. You've got your nerve with you to ask me to figure in any such a dirty subtle scheme as that, haven't you?" He spoke more in resentment of Jesse's overbearing tone than from any profound sense of the contemptibleness of Jesse's suggestion.

Jesse lit his cigar and said nothing for a while. Then, puffing hard so that the glow of his cigar lit up his stolid waxy face, he said:

"I hear you're carrying a pretty nifty line of cotton, Judd, and that you're still buying. Waiting for cotton to touch sixteen cents, eh?"

Judd cocked his ears.

"Well," he said, moistening his lips, "I haven't got anything on you. You're carrying ten bales when I'm only carrying one."

"Is that so?" lied Jesse with perfect serenity. "Well, you're entitled to have your dream out, of course. But it so happens that I am not carrying even one bale."

Judd sat up straight in his seat.

"Well?" he asked, huskily.

"Well, what?" asked Jesse.

"What are you shooting at?" inquired Judd. "Do you mean to say you're going to take the bear end of it?"

"I don't mean to say anything of the sort," replied Jesse. "And you don't suppose I'd go around placarding the fact if that was my intention, do you? I'm merely out of the market for the present, that's all. But you're in, eh, and waiting for sixteen cent cotton?"

The screws were working all right. Jesse saw that. It was chilly in the automobile, but Judd was mopping a damp brow.

"If I ever do break into that market," Jesse went on clinchingly but in the same even tone he had been using, "you want to watch my smoke. That's all."

Judd, in a cold tremor, resolved to unload his line of cotton as soon as the market opened on the morrow. Also he decided that it wouldn't be any impolitic thing for him to placate Jesse in the immediate meanwhile.

"Well, if I have been dense, I'm not now," he said, reflectively. "I understand you all right."

"I thought you would," said Jesse, tossing his cigar out of the car window.

Despite her natural reserve and the reticence, born of keen humiliation, which she maintained in respect of her mother's affairs, Louise, feeling the need of an experienced woman's counsel, gave to Laura Stedham, her one woman friend in need, a somewhat guarded account of her meeting with Jesse and Judd upon her return from the day in the country. Laura listened to the story in a sort of silent rage. She was not a woman to rant, and even if she had been, the recital that Louise gave her, with the wretched details which Laura could guess at, of her gradual hemming in at the Riverside Drive house, filled the other woman with a sense of anger and disgust beyond the mere power of words. Louise had not previously told Laura of Langdon's proffering her the use of an automobile; she feared that Laura's wrath and alarm over that would be directed against her mother for having made such a situation possible; and her loyalty to her mother never wavered.

At the close of her story, which she gave to Laura in a quiet, rather hopeless way that the older woman found pathetic to a degree, Louise, in a moment of inadvertence, let fall how Judd had greeted her as "daughter." Laura flared at that. But she held herself in, and she asked Louise, quietly enough:

"My dear, there is one thing that I want to ask you. I hope you won't think me intrusive for asking it. It is this: Just why are you remaining at that house? You know the—the circumstances there. I am not trying to influence you. But I want you to tell me just why, since you cannot change the conditions, you deem it necessary to go on living there?"

Louise replied without hesitation.

"I don't lose hope that I may be able to change the conditions some time, dear," she replied. "There would be no use in my staying with my mother if I did not possess that hope."

"But," asked Laura, not pressingly, but with a grave, interested earnestness, "don't you think your chance to change the conditions is almost negligible? Just how can you possibly expect such a change ever to come about?"

"I am hoping," Louise answered bravely, but coloring, "that, if I stay on with my mother, sooner or later she will become ash——"; she could not finish the word "ashamed;"——"she will come to a realization of herself," she took up the thread, "of what the conditions in which she lives mean; of what, eventually, they must bring her to, and bring me to, also. Often I think that she doesn't view it as I do—as we do. She is drifting. She told me that she was. She has lost her moorings. I want to bring her back. I am the only one who could bring her back, am I not? And I can't leave her as long as there is a chance to do that."

"But your own life, dear?" interposed Laura. "You must consider that, you know. You are a very young woman. There is no reason why you should be dragged down."

"I shall not be," replied Louise. "And, if my mother is to be dragged down, if she is to continue in this way, of what use would my life ever be to me? I never could be happy with her in such surroundings, could I? There is only one thing for me to do, dear; stay with her until she sees it all. I know that she will understand sooner or later. She can't help it. She's bound to—to change. I want to help her. I don't ever say anything to her, of course. It would be impossible for me to do that. But she isn't happy as she is now. My mother and I will have a dear, cosy, happy life together yet, Laura, never fear."

Laura pretended that some pictures on a mantel needed straightening in order to hide her suffused eyes.

"All the same, Louise," she said, resuming her seat after a little while, "Mr. Blythe is entitled to know these things that you have told me. And you should have the benefit of his advice. He not only is your guardian, but he is a man—a regular man—and your—oh, well, I do not need to say that he is your friend, do I?" smiling.

"I meant to tell him," replied Louise, turning to gaze out of the window.

"Oh, you did, dear?" said Laura, teasingly. "Then my advising you to tell him was superfluous, wasn't it? I wonder why you decided to tell him, Louise?"

"Because——" Louise started to reply. But she did not finish, for at that instant John Blythe, in riding dress, walked into the room.