The next day was a bright November Sunday, and after an early luncheon Baskerville started out for a walk into the country. Anne Clavering was much in his mind, and he was beginning to debate with himself in this wise: if Senator Clavering had no delicacy about inviting him to call, why should he be too delicate-minded to go? Which proves that Baskerville was in love with Anne Clavering, or he would have said that for him to go to a man’s house under the circumstances in which he would enter Senator Clavering’s was an outrageous breach of propriety.

When he got well out of the town, he met the scanty congregation of a small Episcopal chapel in the suburbs. Among those strolling homeward he speedily recognized General Brandon and Elizabeth Darrell—and with them Reginald Clavering. This only son of Senator Clavering’s was no more like him than Anne was, and, indeed, very much resembled Anne, except that he had neither her grace nor her intelligence. He had a good and affectionate heart, and in a foolish, blundering way was both an honest man and a gentleman. His life, however, was given over to small and futile things, and even his piety, which was genuine, embodied a childish worship of ecclesiastical trifles. He was the mainstay, chief financial backer, and clerical man-of-all-work in the little chapel, while his sisters, Élise and Lydia, fought with the Brentwood-Baldwins at St. John’s, and Anne, after going to an early morning service at the nearest church, devoted the rest of her Sunday to her mother.

Baskerville stopped and spoke with great cordiality to the party. He had known Elizabeth Darrell well in her girlhood, and there was a remote, seventeenth-cousin, Maryland-Virginia connection between the Baskervilles and the Brandons. His first glance at her in her mourning costume showed him that she had suffered much, and her beauty was partially eclipsed. She had gained interest, however, as the case often is, by learning the hard lessons of life, and Baskerville saw that she might regain all and more of her good looks with returning flesh and color, and a loss of the wearied and forlorn expression in her still glorious dark eyes. He asked permission to call upon her, and Elizabeth assented with outward grace and cheerfulness; but, in truth, it mattered little to her then whether she ever saw any one again, except her father, and—humiliating thought!—Pelham, once more. For, deeply incensed as she was with Pelham, the thought of ever again meeting him was profoundly agitating to her. She inquired of Baskerville about Mrs. Luttrell, and sent her a kind message; then they parted and went upon their several ways.

Half an hour afterwards, when Elizabeth Darrell was nearing her own door, Senator Clavering—who, sitting at his library window, caught sight of her graceful black figure as she stopped with her father and talked a few minutes with Reginald Clavering—started to his feet, his keen, handsome eyes fixed upon her with admiring approval. He remembered her perfectly well, that beautiful girl he had seen on the icy night ten years ago when he had watched the gay people flocking to the Charity Ball, and the little trinket he had unconsciously crushed under his foot. He had wondered a dozen times since he had been in Washington, and had often asked, what had become of General Brandon’s beautiful daughter, and was told that she had married a British Army man and had disappeared in the wilderness. He had never seen General Brandon from that hour, although they lived opposite, General Brandon’s hours being very different from Senator Clavering’s and their habits being as dissimilar as could possibly be imagined.

Clavering was a connoisseur in feminine beauty, and all forms of it appealed to him. He thought Elizabeth twice as beautiful as he had done in that passing glimpse of her, ten years before, in the bloom of her girlhood. Strange to say, the languid, interesting, and somewhat tragic type which Elizabeth Darrell now represented was the most attractive to him—perhaps because it is the rarest. “By Jove, what a woman! I must know her,” was his inward comment. He watched Elizabeth intently, her fragile figure, her peculiar grace of movement, the note of distinction in her whole person and air; and then and there he determined to resurrect his acquaintance with General Brandon, whose relationship to her was obvious, and whom Clavering had no more forgotten than General Brandon had forgotten him.

Presently Reginald Clavering entered the house, and the first sound that met his ears was something between a wail and a shout which came from the upper region. Reginald winced at the sound. His mother still held to her original Baptist faith—about the only thing pertaining to her early life which she had not meekly given up. She was at that moment enjoying the spiritual ministrations of a Baptist minister who came sometimes on Sundays to pray with her and sing camp-meeting hymns—to the intense diversion of the smart English footman and gay French maids, of whom Mrs. Clavering was in deadly fear. And to make it worse for Reginald, Anne Clavering, instead of setting her face against this unchurchmanlike proceeding, actually aided and abetted her mother in her plebeian sort of religion, and joined her clear note to the Rev. Mr. Smithers’ bellowing and Mrs. Clavering’s husky contralto. The whole thing offended Reginald Clavering’s Æsthetic sense; but it was a proof that he had much that was good in him that he bore these proceedings silently, as became a gentleman, a Christian, and an Anglican, and made no complaint to any one except Anne.

As he passed the open library door, Senator Clavering called out to him in that rich and melodious voice which the stenographers in the Senate gallery declared the most agreeable and easily followed voice of any member of the Senate: “Hello! What is the name of that infernally pretty woman whom you were escorting just now?”

“Mrs. Darrell, the widowed daughter of General Brandon. General Brandon is one of the vestrymen at St. Gabriel’s Chapel,” replied Reginald, stiffly.

“Yes, fine old fellow. I knew him more than thirty years ago when he was a captain of infantry out on the plains and I was a sutler, as it was called then. Handsome old chap still, and his daughter is like him. You show good taste, my boy. I thought you’d find something more entertaining than religion out at that chapel.”

Reginald Clavering scorned to reply to this, but went on to his study in another part of the house. In a few minutes he heard his father’s step on the stair, and dutifully opened the door for him. Clavering entered, threw himself in a great chair, and began to look around him with an amused smile. The room was a museum of ecclesiastical pictures and gimcracks.

“When I was your age,” said Clavering, laughing openly, “I hadn’t a room like this—I shared a board shanty with a fellow from God knows where, who had served a term in state’s prison. But he was the finest smelter expert I ever saw, and had the best eye for a pretty woman. You couldn’t see the boards in our walls for the pictures of ballet dancers and the like. Nothing in the least like this.” And he laughed.

Reginald’s pale face flushed with many emotions. His father’s tone and manner expressed a frank scorn for him and all his surroundings. Clavering kept on:—

“My roommate—nobody had a room to himself in those diggings—taught me how to differentiate among pretty women.” Clavering was diverted at the spectacle of a man shrinking from such a discussion. “Now, of your sisters, Anne is really the best looking—the most effective, that is. Élise and Lydia are of the tulip variety. Anne is something more and different.”

“Élise and Lydia are both of them strikingly like you, sir,” replied Reginald. It was the nearest approach to sarcasm he had ever made in his life. Clavering enjoyed the cut at himself immensely.

“Very neat; thank you. Now I should say that Mrs.—what’s her name?—old Brandon’s daughter is a remarkably attractive, even beautiful woman, although she strikes me at first glance as one of those women, not exactly young, who haven’t yet found themselves. Perhaps you’ll show the lady the way.”

“Sir,” said Reginald, after a pause, “you shock me!”

Clavering was not in the least annoyed at this. He looked at Reginald as one studies an amusing specimen, and said, as if to himself, “Good God! that you should be my son!” He then took up some of the books on the table and began to turn them over, laughing silently to himself the while. The books corresponded with the pictures and ornaments. Reginald Clavering found all of his family a cross, except his sister Anne, and his father the heaviest cross of all. He was sincerely relieved when Clavering took himself downstairs to his own library again.

It was a handsome library, and quite what the library of a senator, if not a statesman, should be. The walls were lined with encyclopÆdias, histories, and the English classics. Clavering, however, was a student of far more interesting documents than any ever printed in a book. He had studied unceasingly the human subject, and knew men and women as a Greek scholar knows his Sophocles. This knowledge of men had made him not only dazzlingly and superbly successful, but even happy in his way. The most saintly man on earth might have envied James Clavering his mind, ever at ease; for he knew no morals, and was unmoral rather than immoral.

Two things only in life disturbed him. One was that he would have liked to get rid of his wife, whom he had married when he was barely twenty-one. She had served his turn. Although homely, shapeless, and stupid now, she had made him comfortable—in the days when his miner’s wages barely kept a humble roof over his head. She had brought her children up properly. Clavering had enough of justice in him not to hold her accountable for the fastness, the vagaries, the love of splendor, the lack of principle, that made his eldest and youngest daughters the subject of frequent paragraphs in scandalous newspapers, and had landed one in the divorce court. They were like him—so Clavering admitted to himself, without a blush. His one fear was that they would, as he expressed it, “make fools of themselves.” He admired chastity in women and even respected it, so far as he could feel respect for anything; and he would, if he could, have kept all the women in his family strictly virtuous. But he never was quite at ease about either Élise or Lydia; and when he saw the simple way in which Élise had slipped off the matrimonial fetters, Clavering had begun to fear greatly—those two girls were so extremely like himself!

He knew well enough from whom Reginald inherited his temperament. Mrs. Clavering’s father had been a weak, well-meaning Baptist preacher, and Reginald was a replica of him, plus a university education and a large allowance superadded. Where Anne came in Clavering frankly acknowledged himself beaten. She inherited his own strong will and her mother’s gentleness of address. But she had an innate delicacy, a singular degree of social sense, a power of making herself felt and respected, that Clavering admired but the origin of which he could not trace. She was the one person in the world whom he feared and respected. It was due to her that the Claverings had any real social status whatever. It was through her, and for her alone, that certain honest, dignified, and punctilious senators and public officials came to the grand Clavering dinners and musicals, and allowed their wives to come. It was Anne who would have to be vanquished when, as Clavering had always intended, he should get a divorce from his wife and marry again. He had not attempted this, merely because, so far, the women who would have married him he did not want or could get on easier terms, and the women he might have wanted would not have him at any price. Anne was known as her mother’s champion, and Clavering knew that she would fight the divorce with all the skill, courage, and pertinacity which, as Baskerville had truly said, was all she had inherited from her father. She had in her, disguised by much suavity and sweetness, a touch of aggressiveness, a noble wilfulness that would not be reasoned away. Clavering knew that the tussle of his life would come when the divorce was seriously mooted; but he was not the less ready for the tussle.

The first sight of Elizabeth Darrell had impressed him wonderfully, and the second vision of her had determined him to renew his acquaintance with General Brandon; and while he was turning the mode of this over in his mind he was summoned to luncheon. At luncheon all of the family assembled—Élise and Lydia in elaborate negligÉes, Anne simply but properly dressed. She sat next her mother at the table and was that poor creature’s only outspoken champion.

“So you had a nice morning, with the psalm-singing and all that,” said Élise to Anne.

“Very nice,” replied Anne. “Mamma seemed to enjoy it very much.”

“We had a nice morning, too,” replied Élise. “The Brentwood-Baldwins glared at us as we went into church; they will never forgive us for getting that pew in the middle aisle, so close to the President’s. Then, after church, Count Rosalka asked to walk home with me. Lydia got Laurison, the new British third secretary; so we sent the carriage on and walked out Connecticut Avenue with all the Seventh Street shopkeepers. It was very amusing, though.”

“It must have been,” said Clavering, gravely. “You must have recalled the time when you would have thought yourself as rich as Pierpont Morgan and Rockefeller combined if you had been as well dressed as a Seventh Street shopkeeper’s daughter. It was only twelve years ago, you remember, since I struck pay dirt in mines and politics.”

Élise and Lydia both smiled pleasantly. They were their father’s own daughters, and along with many of his vices they inherited his superb good humor, which never gave way except to a preconcerted burst of imposing wrath.

“I remember those days quite well,” said Anne. Her voice, as well as her looks, was quite different from her sisters’. Instead of their rich and sensuous tones, beautiful like their father’s, Anne’s voice had a dovelike quality of cooing softness; but she could always make herself heard. “I remember,” she continued, touching her mother’s coarse hand outspread on the table, “when mamma used to make our gowns, and we looked quite as nice as the girls who could afford to have their clothes made by a dressmaker.”

“Them was happy days,” said Mrs. Clavering. It was her only remark during luncheon.

They talked of their plans for the coming week, as people do to whom pleasure and leisure are new and intoxicating things. Anne was plied with questions about Mrs. Luttrell’s dinner. She told freely all about it, being secretive only concerning Baskerville, merely mentioning that he was present.

“A more toploftical, stuck-up F. F. V.—or F. F. M., I suppose he is—I never saw than this same Mr. Baskerville, and as dull as ditchwater besides,” said Lydia.

Here Reginald spoke. “Mr. Baskerville is very highly esteemed by the bishop of the diocese,” he said.

“And by people of a good deal more brains than the bishop of the diocese,” added Clavering. “Baskerville is one of the brainiest men of his age I ever knew. He is fighting me in this K. F. R. business; but all the same I have a high opinion of his gray matter, and I wish you two girls—Élise and Lydia—knew men like Baskerville instead of foreign rapscallions and fortune-hunters like Rosalka. And I wish you went to dinners such as Anne went to last night, instead of scampering over the town to all sorts of larky places with all sorts of larky people.”

To this Lydia replied. So far, she had achieved neither marriage nor divorce, but she was not averse to either. “I think the dinners Anne goes to must be precious dull. Now, our men and our parties, whatever they are, they aren’t dull. I never laughed so much in my life as I did at Rosalka’s stories.”

Clavering’s face grew black. He was no better than he should be himself, and ethically he made no objection to his daughters’ amusing themselves in any way but one; but old prejudices and superstitions made him delicate on the one point upon which he suspected two of his daughters were the least squeamish. He said nothing, however, nor did Anne or Reginald; it was a subject none of them cared to discuss. When luncheon was over, Mrs. Clavering and Anne made ready for their early Sunday afternoon walk—a time to which Mrs. Clavering looked forward all the week and with which Anne never allowed any of her own engagements to interfere.

Meanwhile Clavering himself, interested for the first time in the tall, shabby house across the way, walked out upon the broad stone steps of his own place and watched the windows opposite, hoping for a glimpse of Elizabeth Darrell’s face. While he stood there smoking and apparently engaged in the harmless enjoyment of a lovely autumn afternoon, Richard Baskerville approached. Baskerville denied himself the pleasure of seeking Anne in her own home, but he often found himself, without his own volition, in the places where he would be likely to meet her, and so he was walking along the street in which she lived. Seeing Clavering on the steps Baskerville would have passed with a cool nod, but Clavering stopped him; and the younger man, thinking Anne Clavering might be within sight or might appear, compromised with his conscience and entered into conversation with Clavering. It was always an effort on Baskerville’s part to avoid Clavering, whose extraordinary charm of manner and personality was a part of his capital. Baskerville, deep in the study of Clavering’s career, felt a genuine curiosity about the man and how he did things and what he really thought of himself and his own doings. He reckoned Clavering to be a colossal and very attractive scoundrel, whom he was earnestly seeking to destroy; and his relations were further complicated with Clavering by the fact that Anne Clavering was—a very interesting woman. This Baskerville admitted to himself; he had got that far on the road to love.

The Senator, with the brilliant smile which made him handsomer than ever, said to Baskerville, “We may as well enjoy the privilege of speaking before you do me up in the matter of the K. F. R. land grants.”

The younger man cleverly avoided shaking hands with Clavering, but replied, also smiling, “Your attorneys say we shan’t be able to ‘do you up,’ Senator.”

“I hope they’re right. I swear, in that business the amount of lying and perjury, if placed on end, would reach to the top of the Washington Monument. Have a cigar?”

Such indeed was Baskerville’s own view of the lying and perjury, but he opined that it was all on Senator Clavering’s side, and he was trying to prove it. He got out of taking one of Clavering’s cigars—for he was nice upon points of honor—by taking a cigarette out of his case.

“I don’t know what you youngsters are coming to,” said Clavering, as he smoked. “Cigarettes and vermouth, and that sort of thing, instead of a good strong cigar and four fingers of whiskey.”

“I was on the foot-ball team at the university for three terms, and we had to lead lives like boarding-school misses,” replied Baskerville, toying with his cigarette. “Our coach was about the stiffest man against whiskey and cigars I ever knew—and used to preach to us seven days in the week that a couple of cigars a day and four fingers of whiskey would shortly land any fellow at the undertaker’s. I fell from grace, it is true, directly I was graduated; but that coach’s gruesome predictions have stuck to me like the shirt of Nemesis, as your colleague, Senator Jephson, said the other day on the floor of the Senate.”

“Jephson’s an ass. He is the sort of man that would define a case of mixed property as a suit for a mule.”

“Hardly. And he’s an honest old blunderbuss.”

“Still, he’s an ass, as I say. His honesty doesn’t prevent that.”

“Well, yes, in a way it does. I’m not a professional moralist, but I don’t believe there is any really good substitute for honesty.” Then Baskerville suddenly turned red; the discussion of honesty with a man whose dishonesty he firmly believed in, and was earnestly trying to prove, was a blunder into which he did not often fall. Clavering, who saw everything, noted the other’s flush, understood it perfectly, and smiled in appreciation of the joke. Baskerville did not propose to emphasize his mistake by running away, and was prepared to stay some minutes longer, when the entrance doors were swung open by the gorgeous footman, and Mrs. Clavering, leaning upon Anne’s arm, appeared for a walk. When he saw his wife, Clavering’s face grew dark; that old woman, with her bad grammar and her big hands, was always in his way. He said good morning abruptly and went indoors at once.

Anne greeted Baskerville with a charming smile, and introduced him at once to her mother. Something in his manner to Mrs. Clavering revealed the antique respect he had for every decent woman, no matter how unattractive she might be. He assisted Mrs. Clavering down the great stone steps as if she were a young and pretty girl instead of a lumbering, ignorant, elderly woman; and Mrs. Clavering found courage to address him, a thing she rarely did to strangers.

“I guess,” she said diffidently, “you’ve got an old mother of your own that you help up and down—you do it so easy.”

“No, I wish I had,” answered Baskerville, with a kindness in his voice that both the old woman and the young felt. “My mother has been dead a long time; but I have a fine old aunt, Mrs. Luttrell, who makes me fetch and carry like an expressman’s horse, and then she says I am not half so attentive to her as I ought to be. Perhaps Miss Clavering has told you about her—I had the pleasure of dining with Miss Clavering at my aunt’s last night.”

“Yes, she did, and she told me you were all real nice,” answered Mrs. Clavering—and was appalled at her own daring.

Anne and Baskerville talked about the dinner, as they walked along the sunny, quiet street. Anne had enjoyed every moment spent in Mrs. Luttrell’s house, and said so. Mrs. Clavering walked with difficulty, and the young man’s arm at the street crossings was a real assistance to her; and without talking down to Mrs. Clavering or embarrassing her by direct remarks, he skilfully included her in the conversation.

Mrs. Clavering felt increasingly comfortable. Here was a man who did not scorn a woman because she was old and plain. For once the poor woman did not feel in the way with another person besides Anne. She ventured several remarks, such as: “People ought to be kind to poor dumb brutes, who can’t tell what ails them,” and “Washington is a great deal prettier for having so many trees, because trees make any place pretty,”—to all of which Baskerville listened with pleasant courtesy. He began to see in this ordinary, uneducated woman a certain hint of attractiveness in her gentleness of voice and softness of eyes that were reflected and intensified in the slim and graceful daughter by her side. Anne turned her soft, expressive eyes—her only real beauty—on Baskerville with a look of gratitude in them. Her life at home was one long fight for the happiness and dignity of her mother, for whom no one of her family had the least respect, except herself and her brother Reginald; and Reginald was but a poor creature in many ways. If Baskerville had sat up all night for a month, trying to devise a plan to ingratiate himself with Anne Clavering, he could not have done it better than by his courtesy to her mother. And he, appreciating the strong affection, the courage, the absence of false pride, the unselfishness, of Anne Clavering in this particular, admired her the more.

As they walked slowly along and talked, a kind of intimacy seemed to spring into being between them. Gratitude is a strong incentive to regard on both sides, and Baskerville’s attitude toward Mrs. Clavering touched Anne to the heart. Their objective point was Dupont Circle, which at that hour was tolerably free from the colored gentry and the baby carriages which make it populous eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. But Mrs. Clavering was destined to receive further distinguished attentions during that episode of the walk. When she was seated comfortably on a bench Baskerville proposed to Anne that he show her, on the other side of the Circle, a silver maple tree in great autumnal glory.

“Now do go, my dear,” said Mrs. Clavering. “I’d like to set here awhile. Do, Mr. Baskerville, take her off—she ain’t left me an hour this day, and she oughter have a little pleasure.”

“Come, obey your mother,” Baskerville said; and Anne, smiling, walked off with him.

Mrs. Clavering, good soul, was like other mothers, and as her darling child went off with Baskerville she thought: “How nice them two look together! And he is such a civil-spoken, sensible young man. Anne deserves a good husband, and if—“

This train of thought was interrupted by General Brandon. He, too, after his luncheon, was out for a Sunday airing, and passing the bench on which Mrs. Clavering sat, the good woman, with new-found courage, looked up at him and actually ventured upon a timid bow. She had recognized him from the first time she had seen him, when she moved into their new and splendid house; and she had a perfectly clear recollection of the old sutler days, when General Brandon was a handsome young captain, who always had a polite word for the sutler’s wife. But she had never before, in the two years they had lived opposite each other, had the courage to speak to him. Her success with Baskerville emboldened her, and as General Brandon made her an elaborate, old-fashioned bow Mrs. Clavering said:—

“This used to be Cap’n Brandon—a long time ago, just before the war broke out.”

“Yes, madam,” replied General Brandon; “and you, I believe, are Mrs. Clavering. I remember quite well when Mr. Clavering brought you, a blooming bride, to the post.”

Mrs. Clavering sighed. She was so lonely in the big house, so continually snubbed by her husband, by her daughters Élise and Lydia, by the uppish footman and the giggling maids; she was so cut off from everything she had known before, that the sight of persons connected with those early days was like water in the desert to her. She smiled a deprecating smile, and answered: “I’ve seen you on the streets often enough. You live opposite our house, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said General Brandon. Then Mrs. Clavering made a faint indication that he should sit down, and he placed himself on the bench by her side. “I recognized both you and Senator Clavering,” he went on, “but as neither of you showed any recollection of me I hesitated to speak.”

Mrs. Clavering sighed. “You are the first person since I came to Washington that I ever seen as far back as them days at the army post.”

General Brandon, the most chivalrous of men, saw in Mrs. Clavering the timid longing to talk about old days and old ways, and he himself had a fondness for reminiscences; so the pair of old fogies entered into talk, feeling a greater degree of acquaintanceship in meeting after that long stretch of years than they had ever known before. When Anne and Baskerville returned, twenty minutes later, quite an active conversation was going on.

“Anne, my dear,” said Mrs. Clavering, actually in a self-possessed manner, “this is General Brandon, who lives opposite our house. I knew him in them old times at the army post; and he’s got a daughter, a widder, come home from England, to live with him. Anne, you must go and call on her.”

“I shall with much pleasure,” replied Anne, bestowing on General Brandon her charming smile. Then, after a little more talk, it was time to return. General Brandon gallantly offered Mrs. Clavering his arm, and the poor lady, embarrassed but pleased, was escorted with courtly grace to her door. Anne and Baskerville had meanwhile made vast strides in intimacy. It was not, however, enough for Anne to repeat her invitation to call, but Mrs. Clavering, when she arrived at the door which was by courtesy called hers, plucked up extraordinary courage and said:—

“I hope, Mr. Baskerville, you will favor us with your company on Thursday, which is our receiving day. General Brandon has promised to come, and I’ll be real disappointed if you don’t come, too.”

It was the first invitation that Mrs. Clavering had ever given on her own initiative, and she gave it so diffidently, and in such simple good faith, that a man would have been a brute to decline it. So Baskerville accepted it with thanks, wondering meanwhile whether he were not a rascal in so doing. But he wanted very much to see Anne Clavering as often as he could, and the Montague and Capulet act came to him quite naturally and agreeably—the more so when he saw the gleam of gratification in Anne’s eyes at his acceptance. She said simply:—

“I shall be glad to see you;” and then, turning to General Brandon, she added, “We shall, I hope, have the pleasure then of meeting Mrs. Darrell.”

“My dear young lady, you are most kind,” answered General Brandon, “but my daughter is so lately widowed—not yet a year and a half—that I feel sure it will be quite impossible to her feelings for her to appear at all in society now. Nevertheless, I shall give her your kind invitation, and she will be most gratified. I shall do myself the honor and pleasure of attending your Thursday reception.”

And then they parted, Anne and Baskerville each reckoning that day to have been one of the pleasantest of their lives, and wondering when they should have the good fortune to meet in that sweet, companionable manner again.