The next night but one, Clavering had an appointment with General Brandon at the usual hour of half-past nine. And at nine o’clock promptly he was sitting with Elizabeth in the little study, waiting for General Brandon’s return.

The first thing he said to her was: “Of course that affair about the necklace must be straightened out at once. I can cable to my London agent, and he can find out all about it and recover it, for it can be easily traced and recovered. And leave me to deal with the solicitor on the quiet.”

“I hardly think you know what you are offering,” replied Elizabeth, with involuntary haughtiness. “I could not accept money or services from you. It is not to be thought of for a moment.”

“Then what are you going to do about it?” asked Clavering, coolly, in the words of a celebrated character.

Ah, what was she going to do about it? thought poor Elizabeth. Tell her father and see him turned out of the only shelter he had for his aged head? If only she had been more experienced, had known more! She had been so very, very ignorant in those London days. If Pelham had not behaved so basely to her!

Clavering talked on, quietly assuming that he would take charge of the matter for her; but Elizabeth, after listening to him in silence and even in weakness, suddenly and impulsively rose and said, “I desire you never to speak to me on that subject again.”

Then General Brandon’s step was heard upon the stair, and nothing more was said between them. Elizabeth remained in the room while Clavering was there, and he honestly thought he was progressing quite as fast as he had any right to expect.

It was now the middle of January, and the investigating committee continued to sit and the newspapers to print the proceedings. This did not tend to make it any pleasanter for Clavering’s family. Anne, with a touch of her father’s courage, continued to go out and to entertain, but it was with an aching heart. To add to her other anxieties, Mrs. Clavering was very ailing and unhappy. By some strange accident—for the poor lady never read the newspapers—she got an inkling that Clavering was under fire, and she often asked questions which Anne had difficulty in answering. Whatever love Mrs. Clavering had ever felt for Clavering had long since been cast out by fear; but she had the true feminine instinct which makes a dove fierce in the presence of the despoiler of her nest. Reginald Clavering redoubled his attention to his mother, and was of more help to Anne than she had thought possible.

It had been determined, chiefly at Clavering’s suggestion, that a grand musical, followed by a ball, should be given at the Clavering house on Shrove Tuesday, as a wind-up to the splendid entertainments for which the house had long been noted; and the undisguised intention was to eclipse everything that had hitherto been done in Washington in the way of entertaining. Anne opposed it, but Élise and Lydia carried the day, backed up by their father.

Only Clavering suspected that it was likely to be the last entertainment given there. He felt confident of knowing the decision of the committee before Shrove Tuesday, and he fully realized the possibility that it might mean expulsion from the Senate on his record alone; as, unluckily for him, there was a very complete and authentic legal record of his doings, which Baskerville had unearthed. So far Clavering had kept out of jail; but there had been more than one true bill found against him, and even verdicts in criminal cases, which had never been enforced. He was still fighting, and meant to go down fighting; but he devoted far more thought to planning what he would do if he were compelled to leave public life than if he were permitted to stay in it. He reckoned that by expediting matters he could get the divorce granted and the decree entered by the first of June, when he would marry Elizabeth Darrell, go abroad for the summer, and then arrange his life for the future. And while he was taking it for granted that he could marry Elizabeth, and was seeing her in private two or three times a week by General Brandon’s innocent connivance, Clavering had touched her hand but once and had never pressed his lips to her cheek, nor had she ever allowed him one word of acknowledged love-making. And this was a woman he was ready to dower with millions, which, as he grimly thought, a young husband, his successor, would get! Clavering concluded that some women were ungrateful. At the same time, he did not seriously doubt that he could marry Elizabeth in June.

He began to congratulate himself on his good luck in his constant presence at General Brandon’s house escaping notice. No one but himself, the General, and Elizabeth seemed to have any knowledge of his visits, although General Brandon, at his club, did some innocent bragging about the assistance he was giving to Senator Clavering “in the unholy warfare against a man incapable of the smallest dishonesty.” “Why, sir,” he would say to any one who would listen to him, “Senator Clavering has assured me, on his word of honor, that there is not one scintilla of truth in the shameful allegations brought against him in the public prints. Wait, however, until the senatorial committee has made its report. Then you will see Senator Clavering triumphantly vindicated; mark my words, sir, triumphantly vindicated.”

Nobody but General Brandon, however, really believed this. Certainly Anne Clavering did not, and every day that she read the newspaper accounts of what had occurred and what had not occurred at the meeting of the investigating committee, her heart sank lower. To keep her mother from suspecting anything, Anne pursued her usual course of life; but it required all her resolution to do it. Every time she entered a drawing-room she called up all her courage to meet an affront, if one should be offered her. Not one was passed upon her, but she lived in dread of it.

During this time Baskerville had gone everywhere he thought it likely that he should meet Anne Clavering, but so far he had not been fortunate. He did not repeat his visit to Clavering’s house. He had doubted the propriety of his going in the first instance, and he doubted it still more as time passed on. But it did not keep him from falling deeper and deeper in love with the image of Anne Clavering in his mind. On the Thursday which was Constance Thorndyke’s day at home, he felt tolerably confident that Anne Clavering would be paying her dinner call; and so on the stroke of four he presented himself, armed and equipped as the law directs, at Mrs. Luttrell’s door, to accompany that redoubtable person upon a round of Thursday visits.

After several perfunctory calls where Baskerville was bored to death but behaved himself beautifully, he arrived with Mrs. Luttrell at Constance Thorndyke’s door precisely at five o’clock. Constance Thorndyke received them with the same charming grace and cordiality which always distinguished her and which was powerful enough to draw within her circle, as her guest on her reception day, her husband. Thorndyke never felt so proud of his wife as when he saw her in his own drawing-room, and she collected about her, from the wide field of Washington, persons who made her drawing-room shine. He frankly admitted to Constance that hers were the only receptions in Washington which he really enjoyed. He was delighted to see Baskerville and Mrs. Luttrell, the latter being to him, as to most men, an ever blooming tree of delight. He came up and established Mrs. Luttrell in a chair by the fireside, with a good cup of tea and with a man on each side of her; and Mrs. Luttrell found herself as happy as it is given to mortals to be on this distressful planet. Thorndyke’s conversation interested her on the one side, and Admiral Prendergast, a superb specimen of the old-time chivalrous naval officer, with whom Mrs. Luttrell had had an intermittent flirtation for not less than forty years, on her other side.

“What a blessed comfort it is,” sighed Mrs. Luttrell to a listening group, “to be able to come into a drawing-room like this and have a good cup of tea, with some cups and saucers and tea-spoons that did not come out of a curio shop, and some honest bread and butter. I declare I am tired to death of these brazen retired tradespeople who have come to this town and undertaken to receive in their Louis Quinze drawing-rooms, and in their English dining rooms, with a great big table full of pink and green kickshaws, and candelabra three feet high all over it, and a big placque of roses just like an old-fashioned feather bed.”

“Will you listen to Sara?” asked her dutiful nephew. “She has hauled me about this day from one retired tradesman’s house to another, scattering compliments as she went, and embracing every man, woman, and child she met of the smart set—the smarter the better. She couldn’t be kept from going with those people unless she were chained up.”

“Well,” faintly replied Mrs. Luttrell, “one has to be a hypocrite in this world; but I do say, Constance, that next my own yours is the best drawing-room in Washington.”

“That is indeed high praise,” replied Constance Thorndyke, smiling, “and I am vain enough to believe it is sincere, especially when I can get my own husband to come home early Thursday afternoon.”

Mrs. Thorndyke had never been strictly beautiful nor even remarkably pretty before her marriage, but since then she had developed a late-flowering loveliness which was much more than beauty. She was happy, she loved and was beloved; she had it in her power to assist the man she loved without making him hate her; she had, in fact, all that she had ever asked of high heaven, except one thing—she was childless. But that one supreme disappointment gave to her face and to her soul a touch of softness, of resignation, that disarmed fate. With a tender feminine superstition, she believed that, this last gift having been denied her, she would be suffered to retain the happiness already hers. Thorndyke himself had to be both husband and children to her, and on him she concentrated all the love and solicitude of her nature. That he was happy there could be no doubt. In Constance he had all that he had ever wished for.

The Thorndyke house was one of the few in Washington which Baskerville could enter with a clear conscience in the matter of duty calls. He always paid them promptly to Constance Thorndyke, and often went when there was no obligation for him to go. He had some one besides Constance Thorndyke in view, however, in paying that particular visit; it was Anne Clavering whom he had really come to see. Mrs. Thorndyke found means to let him know that Anne had not been there yet; and while Baskerville was taking what comfort he could out of this Anne walked into the drawing-room. She looked pale and worn and much older than she really was. Baskerville’s keen eye took this in at a glance; but like a sincere lover he admired her none the less for not being in a flush of spirits, and felt an increased tenderness for her. A delicate rosy color flooded her face when she saw who was present, and rosier still when Baskerville established her in a corner, that he might have a monopoly of her sweet company.

Bearing in mind his promise to discipline his aunt, almost the first words Baskerville said to Anne were: “I hear my aunt was quite impertinent to you the other night; but before I slept I made her promise to apologize to you.”

This was quite loud enough for Mrs. Luttrell to hear, and she promptly turned her smiling, sharp old face toward Anne. “My dear, he did, as I am a sinner! Well, it’s a great thing at my time of life to discover a new sensation, and I’ve found one in the act of apology. Now listen, all of you—Constance, make these people stop chattering—Jack Prendergast, be quiet, and Senator Thorndyke, stop laughing. Miss Clavering, I was rather impertinent to you at Secretary Slater’s the other night, but I declare it was those two foolish women, Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor Baldwin, who were really to blame. However, I think you got the better of me—ha, ha! I always liked you, and like you better for your spirit. I offer you my sincere apologies—on condition that you never again make the least objection to anything I say or do—for, look you, Sara Luttrell has been used to speaking her mind too long to change. But I apologize.”

At which Admiral Prendergast remarked piously, “Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace.”

Anne rose and took Mrs. Luttrell’s hand in hers. “I’ll forgive you,” she said, smiling; “but don’t think I am afraid of you—I like you too much for that.”

“I know you’re not afraid of me—you and my nephew, Richard Baskerville, are the only two creatures yet who openly defy me—and when you join forces, as you have done to-day, you are too strong for me.”

This coupling of their names did not lose anything by Mrs. Luttrell’s emphatic manner of saying it, and it deepened the color in Anne’s face and brought the light to Baskerville’s eyes. And as if directly inspired by Satan, the old lady kept on:—

“You ought to have seen how angry my nephew was with me when he heard of my behavior—we were having a quiet chat in my bedroom while I was undressing, and he gave me such a rating as you never heard in your life. Oh! he took it to heart much more than you did. His language to me was something shocking. He threatened to tell my age all over town, and to throw my ermine cape into the fire if I ever misbehaved to you again. I never saw him in such a way before.”

How much inadvertence and how much malice aforethought there were in this speech only Sara Luttrell knew, but it was distinctly disconcerting to Anne Clavering, and visibly shortened her visit. Mrs. Luttrell went out at the same time, and, after being helped into her big coach by Baskerville, turned to speak to him as the carriage rolled off.

“Didn’t I do it handsomely? Why, he isn’t here!” And at that moment she caught sight of Baskerville sitting by Anne Clavering’s side in her brougham, then whirling around the corner. Mrs. Luttrell smiled and then sighed. “The scamp,” she said to herself. “I remember how once—” She took from her pocket the miniature which never left her, and her memory went back to the days when to recline in that man’s arms and to feel his kisses upon her lips were Paradise, a paradise to which the gate had been forever closed to any other man.

Baskerville had got into his present agreeable situation by simply not waiting for an invitation, and furthermore by saying authoritatively to the footman, “Miss Clavering wishes to drive out Connecticut Avenue until she directs you to turn.”

It was all done so suddenly that Anne did not realize it until it was over; but what woman who loves is averse to having the man of her choice sitting by her side in the intimate seclusion of a brougham at dusk of a winter’s evening? Baskerville, however, was there for a purpose—a purpose quickly formed but to be resolutely carried out. He said to Anne: “I saw that my aunt’s heedless words embarrassed you, and I felt sorry for you. But it was quite true—I made her promise to apologize to you; and as long as I live, as far as I have the power, I shall force everybody who injures you to make you amends.”

Baskerville’s eyes, fastened upon Anne, gave a deeper meaning to his words. The flush faded from Anne’s cheeks, and she looked at Baskerville with troubled eyes, knowing a crisis was at hand. “I am very bold in forcing myself on you,” he said, “but the time has come for me to speak. I have not the same chance as other men, because I can’t go to your father’s house. I went once upon your mother’s kind invitation, but I doubt whether I should have done so; I can only plead my desire to see you, and I feel I can’t go again. You know, perhaps, that I am one of the lawyers engaged in prosecuting this investigation before the Senate. If I had known you before I began it, I would have never gone into it. But being in it I can’t honorably withdraw. Perhaps you can’t forgive me for what I have done, but it has not kept me from loving you with all my soul.”

Anne shrank back in the carriage. At any other time she would have heard these words with palpitating joy; and even now they opened to her a momentary glimpse of Paradise. But the memory of all that was said and done about her father, the conviction of his impending disgrace, overwhelmed her. She sat silent and ashamed, longing to accept the sweetness of the love offered her, conscious of her own integrity, but with a primitive honest pride, reluctant to give any man the dower of disgrace which she felt went with her father’s daughter.

Silence on the part of the beloved usually augurs well to the lover, but when Anne’s silence was accentuated by two large tears that dropped upon her cheeks Baskerville realized that they were not happy tears. He would have soothed her with a lover’s tenderness, but Anne repulsed him with a strange pride. “You are not to blame for what you have done in my father’s case, but I know, as well as you do, that before this month is out my father may be a disgraced man. And although you may not believe it—you with your generations of ladies and gentlemen behind you”—she spoke with a certain bitterness—“may not believe that the daughter of people like my father and my mother can have any pride, yet I have—whether I am entitled to it or not. I would not take a disgraced name to any man.”

Baskerville’s answer to this was to take her two hands in his. It became difficult for her to be haughty to a man who plainly indicated that he meant to kiss her within five minutes. And he did.

Anne’s protests were not those of a woman meaning to yield; Baskerville saw that she felt a real shame, the genuine reluctance of a high and honorable spirit. But it was swept away in the torrent of a sincere and manly love. When they parted at Anne’s door Baskerville had wrung from her the confession of her love, and they were, to each other, acknowledged lovers.

That night Anne and her father dined alone. Élise and Lydia were dining out with some of their “larky” friends, and Reginald was out of town. Clavering noted that Anne was rather silent. Anne for her part looked at her father with a kind of resentment she had often felt before. What right had he to dower his children with his own evil deeds? Why, instead of acquiring a vast fortune, which he spent on them, as on himself, with lavishness, should he not have given them a decent inheritance. Was it not wholly through him that she had not been able to give herself freely and joyfully to the man who loved her and whom she loved? With these thoughts in her mind she sat through the dinner, silent and distrait; but she could not wholly subdue the happiness that Baskerville had given her, even though happiness with her could never be without alloy.

When dinner was over she went up to her mother’s room, and spent the rest of the evening cheering and comforting the poor soul. After Mrs. Clavering was in bed Anne came downstairs to remain until Élise and Lydia returned from their party. She sat in the library with a book in her hand, but her thoughts were on Baskerville. And, thinking of him, she fell into a soft, sweet sleep to dream of him. When she awakened it was almost midnight, and Élise and Lydia had not returned.

To keep herself from falling asleep again she took up at random one of a pile of periodicals on the table. It was a scurrilous newspaper which she loathed; but the first paragraph in it which, before she could lay it down, fell under her eye enchained her attention. An hour afterward Élise and Lydia came in and tiptoed softly up to their rooms; but Anne remained in the same position in the great library chair in which she had been for the last hour, still holding the newspaper in her hand.

Clavering had gone out directly after dinner, and after a visit to the club, which he found rather chilling, went to General Brandon’s house, as usual in advance of his appointment. It seemed to Clavering on that evening as if Elizabeth relaxed a little of her reserve, which was at the same time both timid and haughty. Later he went down town and managed to put up a tolerably stiff game of poker, and it was two o’clock in the morning before he found himself at his own door. He let himself in, and went into the vast, luxurious library, where the fire still glowed. He turned up the electric light in a superb bronze electrolier on his library table, stirred the fire, and then perceived Anne sitting in a chair drawn up to the fender.

“Why, what are you doing here?” asked Clavering, good-naturedly.

“I wanted to speak to you to-night,” Anne replied quietly.

“Go on,” said Clavering, seating himself and lighting a cigar. “Make it short, because when a woman wants to ‘speak’ to a man it always means a row.”

“I hope this does not,” replied Anne.

Her father looked at her closely. She had a wearied and anxious look, which belied her youth, and she had good cause to be both wearied and anxious a good part of the time. She handed him the newspaper which battened upon scandal, and the first paragraph in it announced the forthcoming divorce of Senator Clavering and his subsequent marriage to a Chicago widow, nearly his age, with a fortune almost as large as his own. Clavering’s strong-beating heart gave a jump when he began reading the paragraph, but when he found how far off the scent was the report his countenance cleared. It was as good an opportunity as he could have desired to have it out with Anne, and he was not sorry she had broached the subject.

“Well,” he said, laying the paper down, “are you surprised?”

“No,” replied Anne, looking at him steadily.

“Then we may proceed to discuss it,” said Clavering. “I intend to provide handsomely for your mother, and I dare say she will be a hundred times happier out in Iowa among her relations and friends than she can be here.”

“I hardly think my mother would look at it from that point of view,” said Anne. She controlled her agitation and her indignation admirably, and Clavering saw in her his own cool courage and resource. “Of course my mother has felt and known for years that you had no further use for her, now that her drudgery is not necessary to you. But she is, as you know, a very religious woman. She thinks divorces are wrong, and, timid as she is, I believe she would resist a divorce. She would, I am sure, be willing to go away from you and not trouble you any more—and I would go with her. But a divorce—no. And I have the same views that she has, and would urge her to resist to the last; and she will.”

She had not raised her tones at all, but Clavering understood her words perfectly. She meant to fight for her mother. He smoked quietly for several minutes, and Anne knew too much to weaken her position by repeating her protest. Then Clavering leaned over to her and said: “I think, when you know the circumstances, you will be more than willing to let your mother get the divorce. We were never legally married.”

The blood poured into Anne’s face. She rose from her chair, and stood trembling with anger, but also with fear. “I don’t believe—I can’t believe—” She stopped, unable to go on.

“Oh, there’s no reflection on your mother or on me, either. We ran away to be married—a couple of young fools under twenty-one. I got the license in Kentucky, but we crossed the Ohio River into Ohio. There we found a minister, an ignorant old fellow and a rogue besides, who didn’t know enough to see that the license had no effect in Ohio. And then I found out afterwards that he had been prohibited from performing marriage services because of some of his illegal doings in that line. I knew all about it within a week of the marriage, but being ignorant then myself, I thought the best way was to say nothing. Afterward, when I came to man’s estate, I still thought it best to keep it quiet for the sake of you children. And I am willing to keep it quiet now—unless you force me to disclose it. But, understand me, I mean to be divorced in order to marry a lady to whom I am much attached—not this old whited sepulchre from Chicago”—for so Clavering alluded to the widow with millions—“but a lady without a penny. Have you any suspicion to whom I refer?”

“I have not the least suspicion of any one,” Anne replied, as haughtily as if she had all the blood of all the Howards, instead of being the nameless child she was.

Clavering was secretly surprised and relieved to know this. Then the tongue of gossip had not got hold of his attentions to Elizabeth Darrell. This was indeed rare good fortune. He spoke again. “So now you know exactly where you stand. If you will let me have my way, the thing can be managed quietly. If you oppose me, you will be sorry for it.”

“And you mean, if my mother doesn’t consent, that you will brand us all—us, your children—as—as—I can’t speak the word.” Anne fixed a pair of blazing eyes on her father, and Clavering never felt more uncomfortable in his life. He had no shame and no remorse, but he really wished that Anne Clavering would not gaze at him with those eyes sparkling with anger and disgust.

“I think you don’t exactly understand the masculine nature,” he said. “I simply mean that I shall have a divorce, and if you don’t choose to accept my terms—for, of course, I am dealing with you, not your mother—it will be you and not I who proclaim to the world what I have kept quiet for thirty-five years.”

The interview lasted barely ten minutes, but to Anne Clavering it seemed as if Æons of time separated her from the Anne Clavering of half an hour ago. Clavering was unshaken. He had been contemplating this event in his life ever since it happened, thirty-five years before, and had reckoned himself a magnanimous man in determining not to reveal the truth about his marriage unless he was compelled to—that is to say, unless he could not get the divorce by other means. But Anne had forced his hand, as it were; so let her take the consequences. The repudiation of his wife cost Clavering not a pang. He took no thought of her patience, her years of uncomplaining work for him, her silence under his neglect and abandonment. The thought, however, that he had admitted to any one the illegitimacy of his children, gave him a certain degree of discomfort; he felt an inward shock when he spoke the words. But it was not enough to turn him from his will.

Anne sat still for so long that Clavering did not know what to make of it. She had grown very pale, and Clavering suspected that she really had not the strength to rise, which was the truth. The room was so profoundly still that when a smouldering log in the fireplace broke in two and fell apart with a shower of sparks, the slight noise made both Clavering and Anne start.

Anne rose then, somewhat unsteadily. Clavering would have liked to offer his arm and to have assisted her to her bedroom, but he was afraid. She walked out of the room without looking at him or speaking to him again. Halfway up the broad and splendid staircase he heard her stop, and, looking out of the half-open door, he saw her shadowy figure sitting on the stairs. After a few moments more she went on up, and he could hear only the faint sound of her silken skirts as she moved. Opposite her mother’s door she stopped. There was no sound within, and she passed on.

It was one of Elizabeth Darrell’s sleepless and harassed nights. About three o’clock she rose from her bed and went to the window. In the great house opposite, Clavering’s library windows were lighted up, and so were the windows of Anne’s boudoir. A sudden suspicion of the truth flashed into Elizabeth’s mind.

“His daughter suspects something—has discovered something,” she thought to herself, panting and terrified. “They have had a scene.”

Neither Elizabeth nor Clavering nor Anne had any sleep that night.