Claire felt, on this same day, like casting about in her mind for some pretext by which she might postpone her grand luncheon on the morrow. She had passed a sleepless night, having gone to bed without seeing Hollister. In the morning she had avoided meeting him. She had no comfort to administer, no reparation to offer. The mask had been stripped from her face; the comedy had been played to its end. She had a sense of worthlessness, depravity, sin. At the same time she recklessly told herself that no atonement was in her power. A woful weakness, which took the form of a woful strength, over-mastered her as the hours grew older. Her thirst for new excitements deepened with her misery and anxiety. But she sat in her dressing-room or paced the floor till past three in the afternoon. There were numberless people whom she might have visited; there were several receptions that afternoon at which her presence would have been held important by their respective givers. Even the known jeopardy of her husband's position would have heightened the value of her appearance, adding to her popularity the spice of curiosity as well.

More than once she said to herself: 'I will go to one of these places. I will show them how quietly I bear the strain. If by to-morrow no crash has come, they will admire my nerve and courage. For if I once went, they should never discover a trace of worriment or suspense. I think the fact of my being closely watched would even make me talk better and smile brighter. The wear and tear of the whole thing might make me forget a little, too. And I want so to forget, if I can!'

But she did not go. The morning papers lay on a near table. She had read every word that they had to tell her of the fierce financial turmoil. Some of the stern figures they quoted made her heart flutter with affright; some of their ominous and snarling editorials wrought an added discomfort.

If Hollister weathered the storm, she decided, all would remain as it had been before. Or, if not precisely that, the general outward effect would continue quite the same. She would shine among her courtiers; she would dazzle and rule. He would feel his wound, now that he knew the pitiless truth of her indifference, but he would make the engrossing ventures of his business-life drown its pain until this had perhaps ceased forever. They would drift further apart than they had ever done in recent months, but to the eye of the world there would be no severance. It was possible that he would vex her with no more reproaches. It was probable that as time passed he would forget that he had ever had any reproaches to offer.

While Claire's reflections, nervous and fitful, took by degrees some such shape as this, she found a desperate, yearning pleasure in the hope that she might still drink the vin capiteux of worldly success. She almost felt like flinging herself on her knees and praying that the delicious cup might not forever be dashed from her lips. To this stage had her triumphs brought her. She was the same woman who had made those resolves of abstinence and reformation which her biographer has already duly chronicled. She was the same woman whose conscience had smitten her with a sense of higher and purer things when the farewell of Thurston warned her by such appalling remonstrance, and when she found herself confronting her father's placid tomb amid the solemnities of Greenwood. And yet how abysmal was the difference between then and now! The chance of radical change in heart, aim, and ideal had then been given her; but now all thought of such change woke only a willful, imperious dissent. Her vision turned upon her own soul to-day, and showed her its mighty lapse from grace, its supine and incapable droop. The debasing spell had been woven; what counterspell was potent enough to break it? Occasional flashes of regret and aspiration might well assail her spirit, or of recognition that she had lost a high contentment in gaining a low one. This was natural enough. It has been aptly put into metaphor that the saddest place in Purgatory is that from which the walls of Paradise are visible.

By four o'clock Hollister had not returned. But Mrs. Diggs had made her appearance instead, and Claire welcomed it as a happy relief from the torment of her own thoughts. "My dear," said this lady, "there has been nothing so dreadful in Wall Street since the crisis of the famed Black Friday. My poor Manhattan came home at about three o'clock, utterly jaded out. I made him go to bed. He could scarcely speak to me. I asked him about your husband's affairs, but he gave me only mumbling answers; excitement had put him into a kind of stupor, don't you know?"

"Yes," assented Claire, understanding the nature of the collapse perfectly. "So he told you nothing of Herbert's affairs? Nothing whatever?"

"Nothing that I could really make out. I should be in a wild state, and have a feeling about the soles of my feet as if I were already going barefoot, don't you know, if I hadn't long ago insisted upon Manhattan's putting a very large and comfortable sum safely away in my name."

Claire thought of the house that had been assigned to her, of her jewels, of her costly apparel. But to remember these merely aggravated her distress. What a meagre wreck they would leave from the largess of her past prosperity!

"I wouldn't be awfully worried, if I were you," continued Mrs. Diggs. "If the worst should come, your husband will be sure to save something handsome. These great speculators always do. Some odd thousands always turn up after the storm has blown over. Perhaps he will begin again, and do grander things than ever before."

"That is cold consolation," said Claire, with a bitter smile.

"I know it is for you, Claire, dear, who have been tossing away hundreds to my dimes. I might say horrid things, but I won't. I might talk of retribution for your extravagances, and all that. But I so detest the je vous l'avais bien dit style of rebuke. And I don't want to rebuke you a bit. You have your faults, of course. But you're always my sweet, beautiful Claire. My heart will ache for you if anything frightful should happen. I say it to your face, dear, as I would say it behind your back, that you are the one woman of all others whom money perfectly adorns. You spent it like a queen, and you looked like a queen while you spent it. You remember how I used to gush over Cornelia Van Horn's grand manner? It could never hold a candle to yours. I'm afraid I abused you like a regular pickpocket the other night. Oh, yes, I pitched into you just as hard as I could. But at the same time I was thinking how well you carried your worldliness—what a kind of a beau rÔle you made of it, don't you know? And whatever should come, Claire, always recollect that I'll stick to you, my dear, through thick and thin!"

The vernacular turn taken by Mrs. Diggs during this eager outburst gave it a spontaneity and naturalness that more than once brought the mist to Claire's eyes. She felt the true ring of friendly sympathy in every word that was spoken; the touches of slang pleased her; they were like the angularities of the lady's physical shape, severe and yet not ungraceful. She was sorry when her visitor rose to go, and had a sense of dreary loneliness after she had departed.

It would soon be the hour for dinner. But she could not dine. She knew that the decorous butler who waited on her would perceive her efforts to choke down the proffered food. Perhaps he would tingle with secret dread regarding his next wages. He read the newspapers, of course; everybody read them nowadays; and her husband's impending ruin had been their chief and hideous topic.

As the chill winter light in the room turned blue before it wholly died, she sat and thought of how many people would be glad to hear the very worst. They seemed to her a pitiless legion. Then, as she thought of how many would be sorry, three names rose uppermost in her mind: Mrs. Diggs, Thurston, and Stuart Goldwin. Yes, Goldwin surely would have no exultant feeling. He was full of arts and falsities, but he could not fail to regret any calamity that brought with it her own sharp discomfiture.

'He has lately been Herbert's rival in finance,' she told her own thoughts. 'Circumstance has in a manner pitted them against each other. Herbert rose so quickly. They have not been enemies, but they have stood on opposite sides in not a few matters of speculation. Still, I am sure he will lament the downfall, if it really comes. He will do so for my sake, if for no other reason. I should have questioned him more closely last night at the opera. I am sure he wanted me to speak with more freedom of the threatening disaster. I should have asked him'—

And then Claire's distressed ruminations were cut short by the quiet entrance of her husband. The door of the chamber had been ajar. Hollister simply pushed it a little further open, and crossed the threshold.

The dusk had begun, but it was still far from making his face in any way obscure to her. As she looked at it, while slowly rising from her chair, she saw that it had never, to her knowledge, been so wan and worn as now. He paused before her, and at once spoke.

"Have you heard?" he said.

She felt herself grow cold. "What?" she asked.

"I'm cleaned out. Everything has gone. I thought you might have seen the evening papers. They are full of it. Of course they don't know the real truth. Some of them say that I have five millions hidden away." He laughed here, and the laugh was bleak though low. "But I tell you the plain truth, Claire—there's nothing left. The truth is best; don't you think so?"

He was steadily watching her, as he thus spoke, and the detected irony of his words pierced her like a knife. A wistful distress was in the frank blue of his eyes; they seemed to reflect from her own spirit the wrong that she had done him.

"Yes, Herbert," she answered, still keeping her seat, "I think that the truth is always best."

A great sigh left his lips. He put both hands behind him, and began slowly pacing the floor, with lowered head. While thus engaged, he went on speaking.

"I can't think how I ever shot up as I did. I never was a very bright fellow at Dartmouth. I always had pluck enough, but I never showed any great nerve. Wall Street brought out a new set of faculties, somehow. And then everybody liked me; I was popular; that had a great deal to do with it, I suppose—that and a wonderful run of luck at the start. And then there was one thing more—one very important thing, too. I see now what a tremendous incentive it really was. I mean your wish to rise and rule people. If it hadn't been for that, I'd have let many a big chance slip."

He paused now, standing close beside his wife's chair. "I was always weak where you were concerned," he said, regarding her very intently, and with a cloud on his usually clear brow that bespoke suffering rather than sternness. "You know that, Claire. I yielded always; I let you wind me round your finger—I was so fond of the finger. If you had said, 'Herbert, do this or that folly,' I'd have done it, and it wouldn't have seemed half so much a folly because of your loved command. Is not this true?"

He came still closer to her after he had uttered the last sentence. He was so close that his person grazed her dress.

Claire was very pale, and her eyes were shining. "It is perfectly true," she answered him.

Hollister's tones instantly changed. They were broken, hoarse, and of fervid melancholy. "Perfectly true. Yes, you admit it. You know that I am right. I gave you everything—love, interest, energy, respect, obedience. And what did you give me? Your marriage-vows, Claire!—were those falsehoods? Speak and tell me! I never thought so till yesterday. Good God, woman! I never thought about it at all. You were my wife; you were my Claire. You were stronger in nature than I, and I loved your strength. I loved to have you lead, and to follow where you led. But your love—oh, I counted on that as securely as we count on the sun in heaven! And yesterday the truth burst on me! It wasn't I that you had cared for. It was the high place I could put you in, the dresses and diamonds I could buy for you, the"—

He suddenly broke off. A great excitement was now in his visage, his voice, his whole manner. Whether from pain or wrath, it seemed to her that his eyes had taken a much darker tint, and that an unwonted spark, chill and keen, lit them.

"If it all is true," he went on, speaking much more slowly, and like a man who breathes hard without openly showing it, "then I thank God that no child has been born of you and me!"

She sat quite still. She was utterly conscience-stricken. From all the facile vocabulary of feminine self-excuse her bewildered and shamed soul could shape no sentence either of propitiation or denial. At such a time she felt the infamy, even the farce of lying to him. And how could she respond with any sufficiency, any gleam of comforting assurance, unless she did lie?

"You say that I led you into this disaster, Herbert," she presently responded, with an effort, and more than a successful one, to steady her voice. "I don't deny it, but at the same time remember that my forethought provided for us both in a case of just the present sort. I have the other house, you know. Its sale will bring us something. And then there are all my jewels—and"—

His eyes flashed and his lip curled. "You talk in that business-like style," he cried, "when I am asking you if you ever really loved me! Is your evasion an answer, Claire? Were your marriage-vows falsehoods?"

His hand grasped her wrist, though not with violence. She rose, unsteadily, and shook the grasp off.

"Oh, Herbert," she said, "I never saw you like this before! Let us think of what we can do in case all is really lost."

He withdrew from her, breaking into a hollow laugh. He stared at her with dilated, accusing eyes.

"You don't dare tell me. But I read it, as I read it yesterday.... What can we do? Ah! you're not the woman to live on a thousand or two a year. You want fine things to wear and to eat. You want your jewels, too—don't sell them, for you couldn't get along without them, now." He kept silence for a moment, and then hurried with swift steps toward the door, again pausing. A kind of madness, that was born of an agony, possessed him and visibly showed its sway. "Get some one else to put you back into luxury," he went on, lifting one hand toward his throat, as though to make the words less husky that were leaping from his lips. "Get Goldwin to do it. Yes, Goldwin. You've only to nod and he'll kneel to you—as I knelt. Perhaps he's got from you what I never could get. You know what I mean—I've told you."

He passed at once from the room, flinging the door shut behind him. The room was in dimness by this time. Claire almost staggered to a lounge, and sank within it. His wild insult had dizzied her.

He had not meant a word of it. He was tortured by the thought that she had never cared for him. He had used the first fierce reproach that his sorrow and exasperation could hit upon. He went to his own apartments, dressed, and then left the house. He forgot that he had not dined, but remembered only that there might be some sort of forlorn financial hope discovered by a certain assemblage of men less deeply involved than himself, yet all sufferers in a similar way, which would take place privately that same evening at a popular hotel not far distant. All recollection of having suggested an infidelity to Claire quite escaped from his perturbed and over-wrought brain. The piercing realization that she had never loved him still continued its torment. But he failed to recall that the desperate sarcasm of his mood had ever hurled at her the name of Goldwin.

A knock at the door of the darkened room waked Claire from a kind of stupor. The knock came from her maid, and it acted with decisive arousing force. Lights were soon lit, and dinner, that evening, was ordered to become a canceled ceremony.

"You may bring me some bouillon, Marie," Claire directed. "That, and nothing else."

She drank the beverage when it was brought, and changed her dress. The glass showed her a pale but tranquil face.

'I would have clung to him if he would have let me,' incessantly passed through her thoughts. 'But now he tells me that another can give me the luxury that I have lost. He is right. Goldwin will come this evening; I am sure of it.'

Goldwin did come, and she received him with a mien of ice. Underneath her coldness there was fire enough, but she kept its heat well hidden.

"I came to talk intimately with you," he at length said, "and you treat me as if we had once met, somewhere, for about ten minutes."

The smouldering force of Claire's inward excitement started into flame at these words. "I know with what intimate feelings you came," she replied, meeting his soft glance with one of cold opposition. "You want to tell me that you can set Herbert right with his creditors."

"Yes," he answered, slowly, averting his eyes, "I did have that desire. Is there anything wrong about it?"

"Yes. You should not have come to me. You should have gone to him."

"Why?" he asked.

"Why?" repeated Claire, breaking into a sharp laugh. A moment later she tossed her head with a careless disdain. "I'm not going to tell you why. You know well enough. See Herbert. Ask him if he will let you help him."

"You are very much excited."

"I have good reason to be."

"You mean this dreadful change in your husband's affairs?"

"Yes, I mean that, and I mean more. You mustn't question me."

"Very well, I won't."

But he soon did, breaking the silence that ensued between them with gently harmonious voice, and fixing on Claire's half-averted face a look that seemed to brim with sympathy.

"Would Hollister take my help if I offered it? Does he not dislike me? I believe so—I am nearly sure so. You tap the floor with your foot. You are miserable, and I understand your misery. So am I miserable—on your account. I know all the ins and outs of your distress ... ah, do not fancy that I fail to do so. He has said hard things—undeserved things. He has perhaps mixed my name with his ... what shall I call them? ... reproaches, impertinences? You have had a quarrel—a quarrel that has been wholly on his side. He has accused you of not caring enough for him. It may be that he has accused you of not caring at all. Of course he has dilated on your love for the pomp and glitter of things. As if he himself did not love them! As if he himself has not given all of us proof that he loved them very much! Well; let that pass. You are to renounce everything. You are to dine on humble fare, dress in plain clothes, sink into obscurity. This is what he demands. Or, if it is not demanded, it is implied. And for what reason? Because he still sees you are beautiful, attractive, one woman in ten thousand, and that having gambled away every other pleasure in life he can still retain you."

Claire rose from the sofa on which they were both seated. She did not look at Goldwin while she answered him. Her voice was so low that he just caught her words and no more.

"To what does all this tend? Tell me. Tell me at once."

Goldwin in turn slowly rose while he responded: "I will tell you, if you will tell me whether you love your husband well enough to share poverty with him after he has insulted you."

"I did not say that he had insulted me."

"I infer it. Am I right or wrong?"

Still not looking at him, she made an impatient gesture with both hands.

"Allowing you are right. What then?"

He did not reply for several minutes. He was stroking his amber mustache with one white, well-shaped hand; his eyes were now turned from hers, hers from him.

"I shall go abroad in a short time. I shall go in less than a fortnight," he said.

It was a most audacious thing to say, and he knew it thoroughly. It was the bold stroke that must either annul his hopes completely, or feed them with a fresh life.

Claire seemed to answer him only with the edges of her lips.

"How does that concern me?"

"In no way. I did not say it did. But you might choose to sail a week or two later. Alone, of course. It would be Paris, with me. You have told me that you wanted very much to see Paris."

She turned and faced him, then, more agitated than angry.

"You speak of my husband having insulted me. What are you doing now?"

"I am trying to save you."

"Good Heavens! from what?"

"From him. Listen. I did not mean for you to go directly to Paris. You would travel. But at a certain date I could meet you there. I could meet you with—well, with a document of importance."

"Explain. I don't understand you at all."

"Suppose I put the case in certain legal hands here. Suppose they worked it up with skill and shrewdness. Suppose they gained it. Suppose they secured a divorce between you and him on—grounds" ...

"Well? What grounds?"

"Of infidelity. You know the life he has lived. Or rather, you don't know. He has been so gay, so prominent, of late, that almost any well-feed lawyer could"—

Claire interrupted him, there. "Leave me at once," she said, pointing toward the door. "Leave me. I order you to do it!"

He obeyed her, but stopped when he had nearly reached the threshold.

"As my wife," he said, "you would reign more proudly than you have ever reigned yet. The moment you were free I would be so glad to make you mine—you, the loveliest woman I ever knew, and the most finely, strictly pure!"

"Leave me," she repeated; but he had quitted the room before her words were spoken.

She glanced in the direction whence his voice had come to her, and then, seeing that he was gone, she dropped back upon the sofa, and sat there, staring straight ahead at nothing, with tight-locked hands and colorless, alarmed face.