When the organ burst forth into the recessional hymn, Driscoll turned to his companion. "Come outside," he said. "I feel as if I had been drinking. And it was Algarcife—"

Half an hour later Father Algarcife left the church, and, crossing to Broadway, boarded a down-town car. At Twentieth Street he got out and turned eastward. He walked slowly, with long, almost mechanical strides. His head was bent and his shoulders stooped slightly, but there was a suggestion of latent vigor in his appearance, as if he carried a reserve fund of strength of which his brain had not yet taken account. Beneath the rich abundance of his hair his features struck one with peculiar force. They had the firm and compressed look which is the external mark of sterile emotions, and the traces of nervous wear on brow and lips showed like the scars of past experiences rather than the wounds of present ones. His complexion possessed that striking pallor resulting from long physical waste, a pallor warmed by tawny tones beneath the surface, deepening into bluish shadows about his closely shaven mouth and chin. In his long clerical coat he seemed to have gained in height, and the closest observer would perhaps have detected in his face only a physical illustration of the spiritual function he fulfilled. In another profession he would have suggested the possible priest—the priest unordained by circumstances. As it was, he presented the appearance of having been inserted in his ecclesiastical position from a mere Æsthetic sense of fitness on the part of Destiny.

Although it was an afternoon in early October, the winds, blowing from the river along the cross-town blocks, had an edge of frost. Overhead the sky was paling into tones of dull lavender that shaded into purple where the west was warmed by stray vestiges of the afterglow. Through the dusk the street lights flickered here and there like swarming fire-flies. As he passed the Post-graduate Hospital at the corner of Second Avenue a man came down the steps and joined him.

"Good-afternoon, father," he said. "Your charge is coming on finely. Going in?"

His name was Salvers, and he was a rising young specialist in pulmonary troubles. He had met Father Algarcife in his work among the poor on the East Side.

"Not to-day," responded the other; "but I am glad to have good news of the little fellow."

He was known to have endowed one of the babies' cots and to feel great interest in its occupant.

Dr. Salvers returned his quiet gaze with one of sudden admiration. "What a wonder you are!" he said. "If there is a man in New York who does your amount of work, I don't know him. But take my advice and slacken speed. You will kill yourself."

Into Father Algarcife's eyes a gleam of humor shot. It went out as suddenly as it had come, and a tinge of sadness rose to the surface.

"Perhaps I am trying to," he answered, lightly.

"It looks like it. Here's Sunday, and you've come from a half-dozen services to run at the call of a beggar or so who might have had the politeness to wait till week-day. How is the Bowery Mission?"

"Very well," responded the other, showing an interest for the first time. "I have persuaded ten converts to take the pledge of a daily bath. It was tough work."

Salvers laughed. "I should say so. But, you know, that is what I like about your mission. It has the virtue of confusing cleanliness with godliness. Are you still delivering your sermons on hygiene?"

"Yes. You know we have been sending out nurses to women in confinement in connection with those Sunday-night lectures on the care of children. The great question of the tenement-house is the one of the children it produces."

The light that fired his features had chased from them their habitual expression of lethargic calm.

"It is a great work," said the doctor, enthusiastically. "But, do you know, father, it seems to me odd that so intense a believer in the rules of the rubric should have been the first to put religion into practical use among the poor. It seems a direct contradiction to the assertion that the association of the love of beauty with the love of God destroys sympathy for poverty and disease."

A cloud passed over the other's face.

"My predecessor prepared the ground for me," he replied, constrainedly. "I hope to sow the seed for future usefulness."

"And capital seed it is. But, as I said, it saps the sower. You are running a race with Death. No man can work as you work and not pay the penalty. Get an extra assistant."

Father Algarcife shook his head.

"They cannot do my work," he answered. "That is for me. As for consequences—well, the race is worth them. If Death wins or I—who knows?"

His rich voice rang with an intonation that was almost reckless. Then his tone changed.

"I go a block or two farther," he said. "Good-day."

And he passed on, the old lethargy settling upon his face.

At some distance he stopped, and, entering a doorway, ascended the stairs to the second landing. A knock at the first door brought a blear-eyed child with straight wisps of hair and a chronic cold in the head. She looked at him with dull recognition.

"Is Mrs. Watson worse?" he asked, gently.

A voice from the room beyond reached him in the shrill tones of one unreconciled to continual suffering.

"Is it the father?" it said. "Show him in. Ain't I been lying here and expecting him all day?" The voice was querulous and sharp. Father Algarcife entered the room and crossed to where the woman lay.

The bed was squalid, and the unclean odors of the disease consuming her flesh hung about the quilt and the furniture. The yellow and haggard face upon the pillow was half-obscured by a bandage across the left cheek.

As he looked down at her there was neither pity nor repulsion in his glance. It was merely negative in quality.

"Has the nurse been here to-day?" he asked, in the same gentle voice.

The woman nodded, rolling her bandaged head upon the pillow. "Ain't you going to sit down, now you've come?" she said.

He drew a chair to the bedside and sat down, laying his hand on the burning one that played nervously upon the quilt.

"Are you in pain?"

"Always—night and day."

He looked at her for a moment in silence; then he spoke soothingly. "You sent for me," he said. "I came as soon as the services were over."

She answered timidly, with a faint deprecation:

"I thought I was going. It came all faint-like, and then it went away."

A compassion more mental than emotional awoke in his glance.

"It was weakness," he answered. "You know this is the tenth time in the last fortnight that you have felt it. When it comes, do you take the medicine?"

She stirred pettishly.

"I 'ain't no belief in drugs," she returned. "But I don't want to go alone, with nobody round but the child."

He held the withered hand in his as he rose. "Don't be afraid," he answered. "I will come if you want me. Has the milk been good? And do you remember to watch the unfolding of that bud on the geranium? It will soon blossom."

He descended the stairs and went out into the street. At Madison Avenue he took the car to Fortieth Street. Near the corner, on the west side, there was a large brown-stone house, with curtains showing like gossamer webs against the lighted interiors of the rooms. He mounted the steps, rang the bell, and entered through an archway of palms the carpeted hall.

"Say to Miss Vernish that it is Father Algarcife," he said, and passed into the drawing-room.

A woman, buried amid the pillows of a divan, rose as he entered and came towards him, her trailing skirts rustling over the velvet carpet. She was thin and gray-haired, with a faded beauty of face and a bitter mouth. She walked as if impatient of a slight lameness in her foot.

"So you got my message," she said. "I waited for you all day yesterday. I am ill—ill and chained to this couch. I have not been to church for eight weeks, and I have needed the confessional. See, my nerves are trying me. If you had only come sooner."

She threw herself upon the couch and he seated himself on a chair beside her. The heavily shaded lamplight fell over the richness of the room, over the Turkish rugs scattered upon the floor, over the hangings of old tapestries on the walls, and over the shining bric-À-brac reflected in long mirrors. As he leaned forward it fell upon his features and softened them to sudden beauty.

"I am sorry," he answered, "but I could not come yesterday, and to-day a woman dying of cancer sent for me."

She crushed a pillow beneath her arm, smiling a little bitterly.

"Oh, it is your poor!" she said. "It is always your poor! We rich must learn to yield precedence—"

"It is not a question of wealth or of poverty," he returned. "It is one of suffering. Can I help you?"

The bitterness faded from her mouth. "You can let me believe in you," she said. "Don't you know that it is because you despise my money that I call for you? I might have sent for a hundred persons yesterday who would have outrun my messenger. But I could not bring you an instant sooner for all my wealth—no, not even for the sake of the church you love."

"How do you know?" he asked, gravely. "Call no man unpurchasable until he has been bargained for."

She looked at him passionately. "That is why I give to your church," she went on; "because to you my thousand counts no more than my laundress's dime."

"But it does," he corrected; "and the church is grateful."

"But you?"

"I am the instrument of the church."

"The pillar, you mean."

He shook his head. There was no feeling in voice or eyes—but there was no hardness.

"I love your church," she went on, more gently. "I love what you have made of it. I love religion because it produces men like you—

"Stop," he said, in a voice that flinched slightly.

She raised her head with a gesture that had a touch of defiance. "Why should I stop?" she asked. "Do you think God will mind if I give His servant his due? Yesterday religion was nothing to me; to-day it is everything, and it is you who have been its revelation. Why should I not tell you so?"

He was regarding her with intentness.

"And you are happier?" he asked.

"Happier! It is an odd word for a woman like me. I am fifty years old, I am alone, I am loveless. It has given me something to hope for, that is all."

"Yes?"

With a sudden yearning she stretched out her thin, white hands in appeal.

"Talk to me," she said. "Make me feel it. I am so alone."

When Father Algarcife descended the brown-stone steps an hour later, his face was drawn and his lips firmly closed. The electric light, shining upon his resolute features, gave them the look of marble.

He turned into Fifth Avenue and continued his way to Fifty-eighth Street. Before the door of the rectory, which was at the distance of a stone's-throw from the church, a carriage was drawn up to the sidewalk, and as he passed his name was called softly in a woman's voice:

"It is I—Mrs. Bruce Ryder. I have been waiting in the hope of seeing you."

He paused on the sidewalk and his hand closed over the one she gave him. She was a large, fair woman, with a superb head and shoulders, and slow, massive movements, such as the women of the old masters must have had.

"It is to force a promise that you will dine with me to-morrow," she said. "You have disappointed me so often—and I must talk with you." Her voice had a caressing inflection akin to the maternal.

He smiled into her expectant face.

"Yes," he said. "To-morrow—yes; I will do so. That is, if you won't wait for me if I am detained."

"That is kind," she responded. "I know you hate it. And I won't wait. I remember that you don't eat oysters."

The maternal suggestion in her manner had deepened. She laughed softly, pleased at the knowledge of his trivial tastes her words betrayed.

"But I won't keep you," she went on, "Thank you again—and good-bye."

The carriage rolled into the street, and he drew out a latch-key and let himself in at the rectory door, which opened on the sidewalk.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. Bruce Ryder unfolded her napkin and cast a swift glance over the heavy damask, sparkling with glass and silver.

"Yes; he is late," she said; "but he doesn't like to be waited for."

From the foot of the table Mr. Bruce Ryder smiled complacently, his eye upon his Blue Points.

"And his wish is law, even unto the third and fourth courses," he responded, pleasantly. "As far as Mrs. Ryder is concerned, the pulpit of the Church of the Immaculate Conception is a modern Mount Sinai."

"Bruce, how can you?" remonstrated his wife, upbraiding him across the pink shades of candles and a centre-piece of orchids. "And you are so ignorant. There is no pulpit in the church."

"The metaphor holds. Translate pulpit into altar-step—and you have the Mount Sinai."

"Minus Jehovah," commented Claude Nevins, who sat between a tall, slight girl, fresh from boarding-school, and a stout lady with an enormous necklace.

Ryder shook his head with easy pleasantry. He had been handsome once, and was still well groomed. His figure had thickened, but was not unshapely, and had not lost a certain athletic grace. His face was fair, with a complexion that showed a faint purplish flush beneath the skin, paling where his smooth flaxen hair was parted upon his forehead. On the crown of his head there was a round bald spot which had the effect of transparency. His deceptive frankness of manner was contradicted by an expression of secretiveness in his light-blue eyes.

He lifted the slice of lemon from his plate, squeezing it with his ruddy and well-formed fingers.

"Oh, but he's a divinity in his own right!" he retorted. "Apollo turned celibate, you know. He is the Lothario of religions—"

"Bruce!" said his wife again. A vexed light was shining in her eyes, giving a girlish look to her full and mature beauty. She wore a dress of black gauze, cut low from her splendid shoulders, above which her head, with its ash-blond hair, rose with a poise that was almost pagan in its perfection.

"For my part," said a little lady upon Mr. Ryder's right, "Mount Sinai or not, I quite feel that he speaks with God."

Her name was Dubley, and she was round and soft and white, suggesting the sugar-coated dinner-pills which rested as the pedestal of her social position, since her father, with a genius for turning opportunities to account, had coined into gold the indigestion of his fellows.

"Ah! You are a woman," returned Ryder, smilingly. "You might as well ask a needle to resist a magnet as a woman to resist a priest. I wonder what the attraction is?"

"Aberration of the religious instinct," volunteered Nevins, who had not lost his youthful look with his youthful ardor, and whom success had appeared to settle without surfeiting.

"On the contrary," interposed a short-sighted gentleman in eye-glasses, who regarded the oyster upon his fork as if he expected to recognize an old acquaintance, "the religious instinct is entirely apart from the vapid feminine sentimentalizing over men in long coats and white neckties. Indeed, I question if woman has developed the true religious instinct. I am collecting notes for a treatise upon the subject."

He stopped breathlessly, swallowed his oyster, and looked gloomily at the table-cloth. His name was Layton, and he was a club-man who had turned criminologist for a whim. Having convinced himself by generalizations from experience of the total depravity of the female sex, he had entered upon his researches in the hope of verifying his deductions.

The point he advanced being called in question by a vivacious and pretty woman who sat next him, there followed a short debate upon the subject. When it was ended, John Driscoll looked up languidly from Mrs. Ryder's left hand.

"My dear Layton," he advised, "return to the race-course if you value your sanity. The enigma of the Sphinx is merely the woman question in antiquity and stone." Then he turned to Mrs. Ryder. "How is the renowned father?" he inquired. "I was decoyed into buying a volume of his sermons this morning."

A smile shone upon him from her large, pale eyes. "Oh yes," she responded, her beauty quickening from its repose. "They are in answer to those articles in the Scientific Weekly. Are they not magnificent?"

Driscoll assented amiably.

"Yes," he admitted. "He has the happy faculty of convincing those who already agree with him."

She reproached him in impulsive championship, looking hurt and a little displeased. "Why, the bishop was saying to me yesterday that never before had the arguments against the vital truths of Christianity been so forcibly refuted."

"May I presume that the bishop already agreed with him?"

Mrs. Ryder's full red lips closed firmly. Then she appealed to a small, dark man who sat near her. "Mr. Driscoll doesn't like Father Algarcife's sermons," she said. "I am disappointed."

"On the contrary," observed Driscoll, placidly, "I like them so well that I sent them to a missionary I am trying to convert—to atheism."

"But that is shocking," said Mrs. Dubley, in a low voice.

"Shocking," repeated Driscoll. "I should say so. Such an example of misdirected energy you never saw. Why, when I met that man in Japan he was actually hewing to pieces before the Lord one of the most adorable Kwannons I ever beheld. The treasures he had shattered in the name of religion were good ground for blasphemy. In the interest of art, I sought his conversion. At first I tried agnosticism, but that was not strong enough. He said that if he came to believe in an unknown god he should feel it his duty to smash all attempts to sculpture him. So I said: 'How about becoming an out-and-out infidel? Then you wouldn't care how many gods people made.' He admitted the possibility of such a state of mind, and I have been working on him ever since."

Mrs. Ryder looked slightly pained.

"If you only weren't so flippant," she said, gently. "I can't quite follow you."

Driscoll laughed softly.

"Flippant! My dear lady, thank your stars that I am. Flippant people don't go about knocking things to pieces for a principle. The religion of love is not nearly so much needed as the religion of letting alone."

"I am sure I shouldn't call Father Algarcife meddling," commented Mrs. Dubley, stiffly; "and I know that he opposes sending missionaries to Japan."

"As a priest he is perfection," broke in Mr. Layton, argumentatively.

"The chasuble does hang well on him," admitted Nevins in an aside.

Mr. Layton ignored the interruption. "As a priest," he went on, "there is nothing left to be desired. But I consider science entirely outside his domain. Why, on those questions, the Scientific Weekly articles do not leave him a—a leg to stand on."

"The truth is that, mentally, he is quite inferior to the writer of those articles," remarked the short, dark gentleman in a brusque voice. "By the way, I have heard that they were said to be posthumous papers of Professor Huxley's. An error, of course."

At that moment the door was opened and Father Algarcife was announced. An instant later he came into the room. He entered slowly, and crossed to Mrs. Ryder's chair, where he made his excuses in a low voice. Then he greeted the rest of the table indifferently. He wore his clerical dress, and the hair upon his forehead was slightly ruffled from the removal of his hat. About the temples there were dashes of gray and a few white hairs showed in his heavy eyebrows, but eyes and mouth blended the firmness of maturity with an expression of boyish vigor. As he was about to seat himself at Mrs. Ryder's right, his eye fell upon Driscoll, and he paled and drew back. Then he spoke stiffly.

"So it is you, John?"

"I had quite lost sight of you," responded Driscoll.

There followed an awkward silence, which was abridged by Mrs. Ryder's pleasant voice.

"I like to watch the meeting of old friends," she said; "especially when I believed them strangers. Were you at college together?"

"Yes," answered Driscoll, his assurance returning. "At college—well, let me see—not far from twenty years ago. Bless me! I am a middle-aged man. What a discovery!"

"You were in the Senior class," observed Father Algarcife, almost mechanically, and with little show of interest. "You were the pride of the faculty, I believe."

"I believe I was; and, like pride proverbial, I ended in a fall. Well, there have been many changes."

"A great many."

"And not the least surprising one is to find you in the fold. You were a lamb astray in my time. Indeed, I remember flattering myself in the fulness of my egoism that I had opened other channels for you. But a reaction came, I suppose."

"Yes," said Father Algarcife, slowly, "a reaction came."

"And my nourishing of the embryonic sceptic went for naught."

"Yes; it went for naught."

"Well, I am glad to see you, all the same."

"How serious you have become!" broke in Mrs. Ryder. "Don't let's call up old memories. I am sure Mr. Nevins will tell us that those college days weren't so solemn, after all."

Nevins, thus called upon, glanced up from his roast, with accustomed disregard of dangerous ground.

"I can't answer for Mr. Driscoll," he responded. "His fame preceded mine; but the first time I saw Father Algarcife he had just won a whiskey-punch at poker, and was celebrating."

Mrs. Ryder colored faintly in protest, and Driscoll cast an admonishing glance at Nevins, but Father Algarcife laughed good-naturedly, a humorous gleam in his eyes.

"So the sins of my youth are rising to confound me," he said. "Well, I make an honest confession. I was good at poker."

Nevins disregarded Driscoll's glance with unconcern.

"An honest confession may be good for the soul," he returned, "but it seldom redounds to the honor of the reputation."

"Happily, Father Algarcife is above suspicion," remarked Ryder, pleasantly. Then he changed the subject. "By the way, Mr. Nevins, I hear you have been displaying an unholy interest in the coming elections."

"Not a bit of it," protested Nevins, feelingly. "They might as well be electing the mayor of the moon for aught I care. But, you see, my friend Ardly has got himself on the Tammany ticket for alderman."

"What! You aren't working for Tammany?"

"Guess not. I am working for Ardly. The mayor is a mere incident."

"I wish he would remain one," announced the short, dark gentleman. "The Tammany tiger has gorged itself on the city government long enough."

"Oh, it has its uses," reasoned Driscoll. "Tammany Hall makes a first-rate incubator for prematurely developed politicians."

"And peoples the country with them," said Ryder. "I always look upon a politician as a decent citizen spoiled."

"And you really think they will elect Vaden?" asked the vivacious and pretty young woman at Layton's left. "It does seem a shame. Just after we have got clean streets and a respectable police force."

"But what does it matter?" argued Driscoll, reassuringly. "Turn about is fair play, and a party is merely a plaything for the people. In point of impartiality, I vote one ticket at one election and another at the next."

When Driscoll left, that evening, he joined Claude Nevins on the sidewalk, and they walked down the avenue together. For some blocks Nevins was silent, his face revealing rising perplexity. Then, as they paused to light cigars, he spoke:

"I believe Algarcife was a friend of yours at college?" he said.

Driscoll was holding his palm around the blue flame of the match. He drew in his breath slowly as he waited for a light.

"Yes," he responded, "for a time. But he has made his reputation since I knew him—and I have lost mine. By Jove, he is a power!"

"There is not a man of more influence in New York, and the odd part of it is that he does nothing to gain it—except work along his own way and not give a hang for opposition. I believe his indifference is a part of his attraction—for women especially."

"Ah, that reminds me," said Driscoll, holding his cigar between his fingers and slackening his pace. "I was under the impression that he married after leaving college."

Nevins's lips closed with sudden reserve. It was a moment before he replied.

"I believe I did hear something of the sort," he said.

When Mrs. Bruce Ryder turned back into the drawing-room, where Father Algarcife sat alone, the calm color faded from her face. "I am so glad," she said. "I have waited for this the whole evening."

She seated herself near him, resting one large, fair arm on the table beside her. With the closing of the door upon her guests she had thrown aside the social mask, and a passionate sadness had settled upon her face.

"I wanted to go to the sacristy on Friday," she went on, "but I could not. And I am so unhappy."

Brought face to face, as he often was, with the grinning skeleton that lies beneath the fleshly veil of many a woman's life, Father Algarcife had developed an almost intuitive conception of degrees in suffering. Above all, he had learned, as only a priest and a physician can learn, the measures of sorrow that Fate may dole out to the victim who writhes behind a smile.

The sympathetic quality in his voice deepened.

"Have you gained no strength," he asked, "no indifference?"

"I cannot! I have tried, tried, tried so long, but just when I think I have steeled myself something touches the old spring, and it all comes back. On Thursday I saw a woman who was happy. It has tortured me ever since."

"Perhaps she thought you happy."

"No; she knew and she pitied me. We had been at school together. I was romantic then, and she laughed at me. The tears came into her eyes when she recalled it. She is not a wealthy woman. The man she married works very hard, but I envy her."

"Of what use?"

She leaned nearer, resting her chin upon her clasped hands. The diamonds on her fingers blazed in the lamplight. "You don't know what it means to me," she said. "I am not a clever woman. I was made to be a happy one. I believe myself a good one, and yet there are days when I feel myself to be no better than a lost woman—when I would do anything—for love."

"You fight such thoughts?"

"I try to, but they haunt me."

"And there is no happiness for you in your marriage? None that you can wring from disappointment?"

"It is too late. He loved me in the beginning, as he has loved a dozen women since—as he loves a woman of the town—for an hour."

A shiver of disgust crossed her face.

"I know." He was familiar with the story. He had heard it from her lips before. He had seen the whole tragic outcome of man's and woman's ignorance—the ignorance of passion and the ignorance of innocence. He had seen it pityingly, condemning neither the one nor the other, neither the man surfeited with lust nor the woman famished for love.

"I cannot help you," he said. "I can only say what I have said before, and said badly. There is no happiness in the things you cry for. So long as self is self, gratification will fail it. When it has waded through one mirage it looks for another. Take your life as you find it, face it like a woman, make the best of what remains of it. The world is full of opportunities for usefulness—and you have your faith and your child."

She started. "Yes," she said. "The child is everything." Then she rose. "I want to show him to you," she said, "while he sleeps."

Father Algarcife made a sudden negative gesture; then, as she left the room, he followed her.

As they passed the billiard-room on their way up-stairs there was a sound of knocking balls, and Ryder's voice was heard in a laugh.

"This way," said Mrs. Ryder. They mounted the carpeted stairs and stopped before a door to the right. She turned the handle softly and entered. A night-lamp was burning in one corner, and on the hearth-rug a tub was prepared for the morning bath. On a chair, a little to one side, lay a pile of filmy, lace-trimmed linen.

In a small brass bedstead in the centre of the room a child of two or three years was sleeping, its soft hair falling upon the embroidered pillow. A warm, rosy flush was on its face, and the dimpled hands lay palms upward on the blanket.

Like a mounting flame the passion of motherhood illuminated the woman's face. She leaned over and kissed one of the pink hands.

"How quietly he sleeps!" she said.

The child stirred, opened its eyes, and smiled, stretching out its arms.

The mother drew back softly. Then she knelt down, and, raising the child with one hand, smoothed the pillow under its head. As she rose she pressed the blanket carefully over the tiny arms lying outside the cover.

When she turned to Father Algarcife she saw that he had grown suddenly haggard.

CHAPTER III

Father Algarcife withdrew the latch-key from the outer door and stopped in the hall to remove his hat and coat. He had just returned from a meeting of the wardens, called to discuss the finances of the church.

"Agnes!" he said.

A woman came from the dining-room at the end of the hall, and, taking his coat from his hands, hung it upon the rack. She was stout and middle-aged, with a face like a full-blown dahlia beneath her cap of frilled muslin. She had been house-keeper and upper servant to Father Speares, and had descended to his successor as a matter of course.

"Have there been any callers, Agnes?"

"Only two, sir. One of the sisters, who left word that she would return in the evening, and that same woman from Elizabeth Street, who wanted you to take charge of her husband who was drunk. I told her a policeman could manage him better, and she said she hadn't thought of that. She went to find one."

"Thank you, Agnes," replied Father Algarcife, with a laugh. "A policeman could manage him much better."

"So any fool might have known, sir; but those poor creatures seem kind of crazy. I believe they get you twisted with the Creator. They'll be asking you to bring back the dead next. Will you have dinner at eight?"

"Yes, at eight."

He passed into his study, closing the door after him. A shaggy little cur, lying on the hearth-rug, jumped up at his entrance, and came towards him, his tail cutting semicircles in the air.

"How are you, Comrade?" said the man, cheerfully. He bent over, running his fingers along the rough, yellow body of the dog. It was a vagrant that he had rescued from beneath a cable-car and brought home in his arms. His care had met its reward in gratitude, and the bond between them was perhaps the single emotion remaining in either life.

The room was small, and furnished in a manner that suggested luxurious comfort. It had been left thus by Father Speares, and the younger man, moved by a sense of loyalty, had guarded it unchanged. Over the high mantel one of Father Speares's ancestors looked down from a massive frame, and upon the top of the book-shelves lining the four walls there was the marble bust of another. Heavy curtains of russet-brown fell from the windows, and a portiÈre of the same material hung across the door. In the centre of the room, where the light fell full upon it while it was yet day, there was a quaint old desk of hand-carved mahogany. On the lid, covered by a white blotter, lay a number of unanswered letters, containing appeals for charities, the manuscript of an unfinished sermon, and the small black-velvet case in which the sermon would be placed upon its completion. In the open grate a fire burned brightly, and a table bearing an unlighted lamp was drawn into the glow.

The dog, trembling with welcome, curled upon the rug, and Father Algarcife, throwing himself into the easy-chair beside the table, stretched his hands towards the blaze. They were thin and virile hands, and the firelight, shining behind them, threw into relief the lines crossing and recrossing the palms, giving to them the look of hieroglyphics on old parchment. His face, across which the flickering shadows chased, assumed the effect of a drawing in strong black and white.

Before the intense heat of the grate, a languor crept over him, a sensation of comfort inspired by the firelight, the warmth, and the welcome of the fellow-mortal at his feet. Half yawning, his head fell back against the cushion of the chair and his thoughts stirred drowsily.

He thought of the ruddy reflection dancing on the carving of the desk, of the text of the unfinished sermon, of a pamphlet on the table beside the unlighted lamp, and of a letter to his lawyer that remained unwritten. Then he thought of Mrs. Ryder in her full and unsatisfied beauty, and then of a woman in his congregation who had given a thurible of gold to the church, and then of one of the members of the sisterhood. He wondered if it were Sister Agatha who had called, and if she wished to consult him about the home of which she had charge. He feared that the accommodations were too crowded, and questioned if the state of the finances justified moving into larger quarters. In the same connection, he remembered that he had intended mentioning to the sacristan the insufficient heating of the church during services. From this he passed suddenly to the memory of the face of the woman who had died of cancer that morning. He recalled the dirt and poverty and the whimpering of the blear-eyed child with the chronic cold.

"What a life!" he said, and he glanced about the luxurious room calmly, half disdainfully. His eyes fell on the arm of the sofa which was slightly worn as if from friction, and he remembered that he never used it, and that it was the one on which Father Speares had been accustomed to take his daily nap. He shivered faintly, brushed by that near association with the dead which trivialities invoke.

It seemed but yesterday, that morning eight years ago, when he had fainted in the crowded square. He could close his eyes now and review each detail with the dispassionateness of indifference. He could see the flaming blue of the sky, the statue of Horace Greeley across the way, and the confused blur of the bulletin-board before the World building. He could hear the incessant falling of the water in the fountain, and he could feel the old sensation of nausea that had blotted out the consciousness of place. He remembered the long convalescence from the fever that had followed—the trembling of his limbs when he moved and the weakness of his voice when he spoke—the utter vanquishment of his power of volition. He reviewed, almost methodically, that collapse into black despair and the mental and emotional stagnation that had covered all the crawling years. The fever, mounting to his brain, had left it seared of energy and had sapped the passion in his blood. It had consumed his old loves, with his old ambitions, and had left his emotions as sterile as his mind.

He remembered the struggle that had come, his resistance and his defeat, and he saw the joy in the older man's eyes when he had laid before him the remainder of his life—when he had said, "I no longer care. Make of me what you will."

The other had answered, "I will not take the sacrifice without sincerity or without the will of God."

"It is no sacrifice," he had replied. "It is a debt. If I can believe, I will."

And he had felt the words as a man half drugged by ether feels the first incision of the knife.

But he had not believed. Sitting now in his clerical dress, before the fire kindled by his ordination, he knew that it was his weakness, not his will, that had bent. Whether the motive was gratitude or despair he did not question. There had been a debt, and he had met it by the bond of flesh and blood. Yes, he had repaid it in full.

From the moment when he had been called into Father Speares's place he had striven untiringly to do honor to the dead. He had spared neither himself nor others. He had toiled night and day, as a man toils who loves a cause—or is mad. Though his heart was not in the work, his will was, and he was goaded to it by the knowledge that his intellect revolted. Because the life was loathsome to him he left not one detail unperformed. He had given a bond, and he fulfilled it, though his bond was a lie.

He lifted his head impatiently and looked before him. Then he smiled, half bitterly, in the flickering firelight. Across the drawn curtains at the window he could see the almost indistinguishable forms of people passing in the street. He felt suddenly that his whole existence was filled with such vague outlines, surrounded by gray dusk. The only thing that was real was the lie.

That was with him always, at every instant of the day. It lay in his coat, in his clothes, in his very necktie. It filled the book-shelves in the room and covered the closely written sheets upon his desk. It was in the cope and in the chasuble, in the paten and in the chalice, in the censer and in the Creed. Yes; he had sworn his faith to a myth, and had said "I believe—" to a fable.

The words of the Creed that he had chanted the day before rang suddenly in his ears:

What if he had lived a lie decently, what if he had fought a good fight for a cause he opposed, what if he, in the name of that cause, had closed his eyes and his nostrils to the things that repel and had labored to cleanse the sewer at his door, was it any the less a lie?

"Father, dinner is served."

He raised himself and stood upon the hearth-rug. The dog awoke and circled about his feet. Then together they passed into the dining-room.

For a moment he stood before his chair, silently making the sign of the cross. Then he sat down and unfolded his napkin. It was a simple meal, and he ate it in silence. When the soup was finished and the meat brought on, he cut up a portion for the dog at his side, placing the plate upon the floor. Then he pushed his own plate away, and sat looking into his glass of claret as it sparkled in the light.

The bell rang, and the maid went to answer it. In a moment she came back.

"It is the sister," she said. "She is in your study."

"Very well," Father Algarcife responded.

He laid his napkin upon the table and passed out.

CHAPTER IV

Jerome Ardly turned into one of the entrances leading to the Holbein studios, ascended the long flight of stairs, and paused before a door bearing a brass plate, on which was engraved

CLAUDE NEVINS

As the knocker fell beneath his touch the door swung open, revealing Nevins in a velvet smoking-jacket rather the worse for wear, his flaxen hair standing on end above his wrinkled brow.

"Hello!" was his greeting, taking the end of a camel's-hair brush from his mouth. "So you've turned up at last. I've been doing your dirty work all the morning."

Ardly entered with a swing, closing the door after him. He had grown handsomer in the last eight years, though the world had gone less well with him than with Nevins. His large brown eyes still held their old recklessness, and there had come into his voice a constant ring of bravado.

"Plenty for us both," he responded, blandly, throwing his hat on the divan and himself into a chair. "My hand hath found its share to do, and I have done it with all my might. I've been interviewing a lot of voters in the old Ninth Ward. If Tammany doesn't make a clean sweep of that district I'm a—a fool."

"I wish you were not. Then you wouldn't be polling round these confounded politicians. It seems to me your own district is more than you can manage, but somehow you seem to be attending to everybody else's. What under heaven does any self-respecting man want to be alderman for, anyway? I wouldn't look at it."

"My dear fellow, view it as a stepping-stone to greater glory."

"A deuced long step downward."

Ardly laughed, then, stretching himself, looked idly at the opening in the ceiling through which the daylight fell. It framed a square of blue sky across which a stray cloud drifted.

The room was large and oblong, and the atmosphere was heavy with the odors of oil and turpentine. The furniture consisted of a number of covered easels, several coarse hangings ornamented in bizarre designs, and a divan surmounted by an Oriental canopy. Over the door there was a row of death-masks in plaster, relieved against a strip of ebony, and from a pedestal in one corner a bust of Antinous smiled the world-worn smile of all the ages.

"Temper seems soured," remarked Ardly, raising himself and turning to survey Nevins. "What's up?"

Nevins smiled mysteriously, then waxed communicative.

"Saw Algarcife to-day," he said, carelessly.

"Oh! What did he say for himself?"

Nevins laughed.

"Does he ever say anything?" he demanded. "I asked him what he thought of the elections, and he replied that they did not come within the sphere of his profession."

Ardly grinned.

"Guess not," he ejaculated. "Was that all?"

"Oh, the rest was about as follows: I went to his house, you know, and told him I wanted his spiritual certificate as to your modesty and worth. I also observed that the newspapers had undertaken to throw moral search-lights indiscriminately around—"

"What did he say to that?" chuckled Ardly.

"He: 'Ardly can sustain them, I suppose.'

"I: 'Don't know, I'm sure. Would like to have your opinion.'

"He: 'It seems to me that you are in a better position to pass judgment on that point than I am.'

"I: 'But the standards are not the same, father.' (That 'father' ripped out as pat as possible.)

"He (rather bored): 'Oh, he is a fine fellow. I wish there were more like him.'"

"He is a fine fellow himself," retorted Ardly, loyally.

Nevins examined his brushes complacently. "If I were a Tammanyite," he said, "I'd post his certificate in the districts lying off the Bowery."

"It would be a shame," returned Ardly. Then he smiled. "By Jove! I believe if those districts knew Algarcife favored the little finger of a candidate, they would swallow the whole Tammany ticket."

"Queer influence, isn't it?"

"Well, I don't know. He works night and day over these people—and he knows how to deal with them. Leave it to the Bowery or to the ladies in his congregation, and he might turn this government into a despotism without a single dissenting vote."

"I believe you're right. By the way, you know he gave me that portrait of Father Speares to do for the church."

"Glad to hear it. But I never understood his conversion, somehow."

"Oh, I don't know. Men change like that every day."

"But not for logic. I say, it happened shortly after Mariana left, didn't it?"

"I think so."

"Heard anything of her?"

Nevins shook his head.

"Only what you know already," he answered.

"Deuced little, then."

"She came back, you know that, and went out West for a divorce. Then she married an ass of an Englishman, named the Honorable Cecil somebody."

"Good Lord! You've known that all these years?"

"Pretty nearly."

"Why in the devil didn't you tell me before?"

Nevins shrugged his shoulders. "My dear fellow, I don't feel the necessity to confide to you the secrets of my bosom."

"I call that a sneak."

"Why couldn't you find it out for yourself?"

"Because I don't go round diving into other people's affairs."

"Neither do I," responded Nevins, with dignity.

"How did you know, then?"

"It just came to me."

"Humph!" retorted Ardly, suspiciously.

Nevins squeezed a trifle of white-lead on his palette. Then he rose and drew the cord attached to the shade beneath the skylight. After which he stood to one side, studying the canvas with half-closed eyes, and shaking his dissatisfied head. As he returned to his seat he brushed the mouth of a tube of paint with his trousers, and swore softly. At last he spoke.

"I know something else," he volunteered, cautiously.

"About Mariana?"

"Yes."

"Let's have it, man."

Nevins laid his palette aside, and, seating himself astride the back of a chair, surveyed Ardly impressively.

"I can't see that there is any use," he remarked.

Ardly threw the end of a cigar at him and squared up wrathfully. "Are you a damned fool or a utilitarian?" he demanded.

"She left the Honorable somebody," said Nevins, slowly.

"By Jove! what a woman!"

"She came to America."

"You don't say so!"

"She is in New York."

"What!"

Ardly left his chair and straightened himself against the mantel.

"How do you know?" he asked.

"I have seen her."

"Seen her!"

"Her photograph," concluded Nevins, suavely.

"Where?"

"In Ponsonby's show-case, on Fifth Avenue, near Thirtieth Street."

"How do you know it is she?"

"Well, I'll be damned! Don't I know Mariana?"

"Is it like her?"

"It is a gem; but you know she always photographed well. She knew how to pose."

"Has she changed?"

"Fatter, a trifle; fairer, a trifle; better groomed, a great deal—older and graver, I fancy."

"Well, I never!" said Ardly, and he whistled a street song between half-closed lips.

Nevins spoke again.

"She is a kind of rage with a lot of club-men," he said, "but the women haven't taken her up. I heard Mrs. Ryder call her an adventuress. But Layton told me Ryder was mad about her."

"Queer creatures, women," said Ardly. "They have a margin of morality, and a woman's virtue is determined by its difference in degree from the lowest stage worth cultivating. They imagine her not worth cultivating, I suppose."

"Oh, Mariana is all right," rejoined Nevins. Then he went on, reflectively: "Odd thing about it is her reputation for beauty. Judge her calmly, and she isn't even pretty."

"But who could judge her calmly?" responded Ardly. He picked up his hat and moved towards the door. "Well, I'll be off," he said.

"To the club?"

"No, just a little stroll down the avenue."

Nevins smiled broadly.

"Don't forget that Ponsonby's window-case is on the avenue," he remarked, placidly.

"Oh; so it is!"

Ardly went out into the crisp sunshine, a rising glow in his face. He walked briskly, with an almost impatient buoyancy. Near Thirtieth Street he stopped before the window-case and looked in.

From a square of gray card-board Mariana smiled at him, the aureole of her hair defined against a dark background. For a moment he stared blankly, and then an expression of hunger crept into his eyes—the hunger of one who has never been satisfied.

She was fairer, older, graver, as Nevins had said. There was a wistful droop in her pose, and in the splendor of her half-closed eyes there was something the old Mariana had never known—something left by the gathering of experience and the memory of tears.

He turned abruptly away, his face darkening and the buoyancy failing his step. He knew suddenly that the world was very stale and flat, and politics unprofitable. He crossed to Broadway and a few blocks farther down met Father Algarcife, who stopped him.

"Nevins was talking to me about you this morning," he said. "And so you are taking the matter seriously."

"As seriously as one takes—castor-oil."

The other smiled.

"Why, I thought you liked the chase."

"Like it! My dear sir, life is not exactly a question of one's likes or dislikes."

Father Algarcife looked at him with intentness.

"What! has not the world served you well?" he asked.

Ardly laughed.

"As well as a flute serves a man who doesn't know how to play it," he answered. "I am a master of discords."

"And so journalism didn't fit you?"

"Oh, journalism led to this. I did the chief a good turn or two, and he doesn't forget."

"I see," said Father Algarcife. Then he laughed. "And here is the other side," he added. Across the street before them hung a flaunting banner of white bunting, ornamented in red letters. Half mechanically his eyes followed the words:

SAMUEL J. SLOANE SAYS,

If I am elected Mayor, the government of New York will be conducted upon the highest plane of

EFFICIENCY! JUSTICE! AND RIGHT!

The wind caught the bunting and it swelled out as if inflated by the pledges it bore.

Ardly laughed cynically.

"I wish he'd drop a few hints to Providence," he remarked. "It is certainly a plane upon which the universe has never been conducted."

Father Algarcife walked on in silence, making his way along the crowded street with a slow yet determined step. The people who knew him turned to look after him, and those who did not stepped from before his way, moved by the virile dignity in his carriage, which suggested a man possessed by an absorbing motive.

Ardly looked a little abashed, and laughed half apologetically.

"I have been in harness all my life," he said, "and now I'm doing a little kicking against the traces."

A boyish humor rushed to the other's lips.

"In that case, I can make but one recommendation," he replied: "if you kick against the traces—kick hard."

He drew out his watch and paused a moment as if in doubt.

"Yes, I'll go to the hospital," he said; "there is a half-hour before luncheon," and he turned into East Twentieth Street on his way to Second Avenue. When he reached the hospital, he entered the elevator upon the first floor and ascended to the babies' ward. As he stepped upon the landing, a calm-faced nurse in a fresh uniform passed him, holding a glass of milk in her white, capable hand.

His eyes brightened as he saw her, and under the serene system of the place he felt a sense of restfulness steal over him like warmth.

"How is my charge?" he asked.

A ripple of tenderness crossed the nurse's lips as she answered:

"He has been looking for you, and he is always better on the days that you come."

She passed along the hall and entered a large room into which the daylight fell like a bath of sunshine. In the centre of the room there was a tiny table around which a dozen children were sitting in small white chairs. Despite the bandaged heads and the weak limbs, there was no sign of suffering. It was all cheerfulness and sunshine, as if the transition from a tenement-house room to space and air had unfolded the shrunken little bodies into bloom.

In a cot near a window, where the sunlight flashed across the cover, a boy of three or four years lay with a strap beneath his small pink wrapper, fastening him to a board of wood. At the head of the bed was printed the name, and below:

"Pott's disease of the spine.

Received, October, 1896; discharged ..."

As he saw the priest he stretched out his pallid little hands with a gurgle of welcome, merriment overflowing his eyes.

Father Algarcife took the hands in his and sat down beside the cot. Since entering the room he seemed to have caught something of the infant stoicism surrounding him, for his face had lost its strained pallor and the lines about his mouth had softened.

"So it is a good day," he said. "The little man is better. He has been on the roof-garden."

The child laughed.

"It ith a good day," he made answer. "There ith the woof-garden and there ith ithe-cream."

"And which is the best?"

"Bofe," said the child.

"That's right, little soldier; and what did you do in the garden?"

The child clapped his hands.

"I played," he responded; "an' I'm goin' to play ball on my legs when I mend."

One of the nurses came and stood for a moment at the foot of the bed. "He has learned a hymn for you," she said. "He is teaching the other children to sing—aren't you, baby?"

"Yeth."

"And you'll sing for the father?"

The child's mouth quivered with pleasure and his eyes gleamed. Then his gay little voice rang out in a shrill treble:

"Yeth, Jesuth lovths me,

Yeth, Jesuth lovths me,

Yeth, Jesuth lovths me,

The Bible tells me so."

He ended with a triumphant little gasp and lay smiling at the sunshine.

A quarter of an hour later Father Algarcife returned to the street. It was Friday, and at two o'clock he was to be in the sacristy, where it was his custom to receive the members of his parish. It was the most irksome of his duties, and he fulfilled it with a repugnance that had not lessened with time. Now it represented even a greater strain than usual. He had been soothed by his visit to the hospital, and he dreaded the friction of the next few hours—the useless advice delivered, the trivialities responded to, the endless details of fashionable foibles that would be heard. He wondered, resentfully, if there were not some means by which this office might be abolished or delivered into the hands of an assistant. Then his eyes shot humor as he imagined Miss Vernish, Mrs. Ryder, or a dozen others consenting to receive spiritual instruction from a lesser priest with a snub-nose.

As he passed a book-shop in Union Square, a man reading the posters upon the outside attracted his notice.

"Oh, I say, Mr. Algarcife!"

He stopped abruptly, recognized the speaker, and nodded.

The other went on with a heated rush of words.

"Those are fine things of yours, those sermons. I congratulate you."

"Thank you."

"Yes, they are fine. But, I say, you got the better of the Scientific Weekly writer. It was good."

"I don't know," responded Father Algarcife. "It is a good deal in the way you look at it, I suppose."

"Not at all. I am not prejudiced—not in the least—never knew anybody less so. But he isn't your equal in controversy, by a long shot."

A sudden boyish laugh broke from Father Algarcife—a laugh wrung from him by the pressure of an overwhelming sense of humor. "I don't think it is a question of equality," he replied, "but of points of view."

CHAPTER V

The next afternoon Ardly burst into Nevins's studio without knocking, and paused in the centre of the floor to give dignity to his announcement.

"I have seen her," he said.

Nevins, who was stretched upon the divan, with his feet in the air and a cigarette in his mouth, rolled his eyes indolently in Ardly's direction.

"My dear fellow," he returned, "am I to presume that the pronoun 'her' refers to an individual or to a sex?"

"Don't be an ass," retorted Ardly. "I tell you I've seen Mariana."

Nevins turned upon his side and removed the cigarette from his lips.

"Where?" he responded, shortly.

"She was coming out of Thorley's. She wore an acre of violets. She has a footman in livery."

"How do you know it was she?"

"Well, I'll be damned! Don't I know Mariana?"

Nevins sat up and rested his head in his hands.

"How did she look?" he asked.

"Stunning. She has an air about her—"

"Always had."

"Oh, a new kind of air; the way a woman moves when she is all silk on the wrong side."

Nevins nodded.

"Speak to you?"

"I didn't give her a chance," returned Ardly, gloomily. "What's the use?"

The knocker rose and fell, and Mr. Paul entered, as unaltered as if he had stepped aside while the eight years slid by.

Nevins greeted him with a slight surprise, for they had drifted different ways.

"Glad to see you," he said, hospitably; "but this is an unusual honor."

"It is unusual," admitted Mr. Paul, seating himself stiffly on the edge of the divan.

"I am afraid to flatter myself with the hope that a whisper of my spreading fame has brought you," continued Nevins, nodding affably.

Mr. Paul looked up absently. "I have heard no such rumor," he replied, and regarded the floor as if impressed with facts of import.

"Perhaps it is your social charm," suggested Ardly; "or it may be that in passing along Fifty-fifth Street he felt my presence near."

Nevins frowned at him and lighted a fresh cigarette.

"I hope you are well, Mr. Paul," he remarked.

Mr. Paul looked up placidly.

"I may say," he returned, "that I am never well."

"Sorry to hear it."

There was a period of silence, which Mr. Paul broke at last in dry tones.

"I have occasion to know," he announced, "that the young woman whom we knew by the name of Mariana, to which I believe she had no legal title, has returned to the city."

Nevins jumped. "You don't say so!" he exclaimed.

"My information," returned Mr. Paul, "was obtained from the elevator boy who took her to the apartment of Miss Ramsey."

"Did she go to see Miss Ramsey?" demanded Nevins and Ardly in a breath.

Mr. Paul shook his head.

"I do not know her motive," he said, "but she has taken Miss Ramsey away. For three days we have had no news of her."

The knocker fell with a decisive sound. Nevins rose, went to the door, and opened it. Then he started back before the apparition of Mariana.

She was standing near the threshold, her hand raised as when the knocker had fallen, her head bent slightly forward.

With an impulsive gesture she held out her gloved hands, her eyes shining.

"Oh, I am so glad!" she said.

Nevins took her hands in his and held them while he looked at her. She was older and graver and changed in some vital way, as if the years or sorrow had mellowed the temperament of her youth. There was a deeper thrill to her voice, a softer light in her eyes, and a gentler curve to her mouth, and over all, in voice and eyes and mouth, there was the shadow of discontent.

She wore a coat of green velvet, with ruffles of white showing at the loosened front, where a bunch of violets was knotted, and over the brim of her hat a plume fell against the aureole of her hair.

"I am so glad," she repeated. Then she turned to Ardly with the same fervent pressure of the hands.

"It is too good to be true," she went on. "It is like dropping back into girlhood. Why, there is dear Mr. Paul!"

Mr. Paul rose and accepted the proffered hands.

"You have fattened, madam," he remarked, with a vague idea that she had in some way connected herself with a title.

Mariana's old laugh pealed out.

"Why, he is just as he used to be," she said, glancing brightly from Ardly to Nevins in pursuit of sympathy. "He hasn't changed a bit."

"The changes of eight years," returned Mr. Paul, "are not to be detected by a glance."

Mariana nodded smilingly and turned to Nevins.

"Now let me look at you," she said. "Come under the light. Ah! you haven't been dining at The Gotham."

"Took my last dinner there exactly six years ago next Thanksgiving Day," answered Nevins, cheerfully. "Turkey and pumpkin-pie."

She turned her eyes critically on Ardly.

"Well, he has survived his sentiment for me," she said.

Ardly protested.

"I don't keep that in the heart I wear on my sleeve," he returned. "You would need a plummet to sound the depths, I fancy."

Mariana blushed and laughed, the faint color warming the opaline pallor of her face. Then she glanced about the room.

"So this is the studio," she exclaimed, eagerly—"the studio we so often planned together—and there is the divan I begged for! Ah, and the dear adorable 'Antinous.' But what queer stuff for hangings!"

"If you had sent me word that you were coming," returned Nevins, apologetically, passing his hands over his hair in an endeavor to make it lie flat, "I'd have put the place to rights, and myself too."

"Oh, but I wanted to see you just as you are every day. It is so home-like—and what a delightful smell of paint! But do you always keep your boots above the canopy? They spoil the effect somehow."

"I tossed them up there to get rid of them," explained Nevins. "But tell me about yourself. You look as if you had just slid out of the lap of luxury."

"Without rumpling her gown," added Ardly.

"I was about to observe that she seemed in prosperous circumstances," remarked Mr. Paul.

"Oh, I am," responded Mariana. "Stupidly prosperous. But let me look at the paintings first, then I'll talk of myself. What is on the big easel, Mr. Nevins?"

"That's a portrait," said Nevins, drawing the curtain aside and revealing a lady in black. "I am only a photographer in oils. I am painting everybody's portrait."

"That means success, doesn't it? And success means money, and money means so many things. Yes, that's good. I like it."

Nevins smiled, enraptured.

"You were the beginning," he said. "It was the painting of you and—and the blue wrapper that did it. It gave me such a push uphill that I haven't stood still since."

The wistfulness beneath the surface in Mariana's eyes deepened suddenly. Her manner grew nervous.

"Oh yes," she said, turning away. "I remember."

Mr. Paul, who had watched her gloomily, with traces of disapprobation in his gaze, took his leave with a stilted good-bye, and Mariana threw herself upon the divan, while Ardly and Nevins seated themselves on footstools at her feet and looked into her eyes.

"I want to hear all—all," she said. "Are you happy?"

"Are you?" asked Ardly.

She shook her head impatiently. "I? Oh yes," she answered. "I have clothes, and a carriage, and even a few jewels."

She slipped the long glove from her hand, which came soft and white from its imprisonment, with the indentation of the buttons on the supple wrist. She held up her fingers, where a blaze of diamonds ran. Then she smiled.

"But I never sang with Alvary," she added.

"Where is the voice?"

"It is dead," she replied; "but it was only a skeleton when it lived. I learned that afterwards. I had the artistic temperament without the art."

Nevins and Ardly, watching the mobility of her face, saw the old half-disdainful weariness steal back.

"So you have learned that," said Nevins. "It is the greater wisdom—to learn what one has not."

"I don't idealize any longer," answered Mariana, playing with the glove in her lap. "I have lopped off an ideal every hour since I saw you."

"Sensible woman," returned Ardly. "We don't lop off our ideals—we distort them. Life is a continuous adjustment of the things that should be to the things that are."

"And middle-age shows the adjustment to be a misfit," added Nevins, his boyish face growing almost sad. "We grow tired of burnishing up the facts of life, and we leave the tarnish to mix with the triple-plate."

"Are you middle-aged?" asked Mariana.

"Not since you entered."

She smiled, pleased with the flattery. "So I am a restorer of youth. Do I look young?"

"There is a glass."

She turned towards it, catching the reflection of her face shadowed by the plume against her hair.

"Your eyes are older," said Nevins. "They look as if they had seen things, but your mouth is young. It could never hold an expression long enough for it to impress a line. Heavens! It is a mouth that would madden one to model, because of the impossibility! It is twenty mouths in one!"

"You never liked my nose," said Mariana, her eyes still on the glass. "Do you remember how you straightened it in the poster?"

"I have the poster still."

"And I have the nose."

Then she laughed. "It is so delightful to be here," she said.

Ardly and Nevins talked rapidly, running over the years one by one, giving glimpses of the changes in their lives, meeting Mariana's gay reserve with fuller confidence. They had both grown boyish and more buoyant, and as they spoke they felt like an incoming tide the warmth of Mariana's manner. She seemed more lovable to them, more generous, more utterly to be desired. Her nature had ripened amid the luxury of her life, which, instead of rendering her self-centred, as poverty had done, had left her more responsive to the needs of others. She threw herself into the records of their lives with an impulsive fervor, stopping them at intervals to question as to details, and covering the past eight years with sympathetic search-lights.

And yet beneath the superficial animation in her voice there was a restless thrill, and the eagerness with which she turned to trivial interests was but the nervous veil that hid the weariness in her heart. It was as if she plunged into the thoughts of others that she might put away the memory of herself.

"So you have become a politician?" she said to Ardly. "I am so interested!"

"You wouldn't be if you knew as much of it as I do," remarked Nevins. "You'd be ashamed. It makes me blush every time I see his name on a ticket. I consider it an offence against the paths of our fathers."

"Why, Mr. Ryder told me you were working for him," Mariana returned; "but he did say that he couldn't reconcile it with your common-sense. He's for the other side, you know."

"So am I!" groaned Nevins; "but what has a man's convictions to do with his vote?"

"Or with his election?" laughed Ardly. "But Nevins is an unwilling accomplice of my aspirations."

"I wouldn't call them aspirations," remonstrated Nevins.

Mariana buttoned her glove and rose. "I am going to work for you," she said, "and my influence is not to be scorned. I have not one vote, but dozens. I shall elect you."

"Don't," pleaded Nevins; "it will soil your hands!"

"Oh, I can wash them!" she laughed; "and it is worth a few smuts. I shall tell Mr. Ryder to canvass for you," she added.

Ardly shouted, "Good heavens! He is one of the best fighters the Republicans have!"

Mariana smiled inscrutably.

"But that was before I had a candidate," she answered.

They followed her to the sidewalk and tucked her carriage furs about her while the footman looked on.

"And you are coming to see me soon?" she insisted—"very soon?"

"We swear it!" they protested.

"And you will tell me all the news of the elections?"

"On our manly faith."

"That I will trust. Good-bye!"

"Good-bye!"

The carriage started, when suddenly she lowered the window and looked out, the plume in her hat waving black against the wind.

"I forgot to tell you," she said; "my name is Gore—Mrs. Cecil Gore."

With the light of audacity in his face, Nevins laid his hand upon the window.

"And where is the Honorable Cecil?" he asked.

A flash of irritation darkened Mariana's eyes. She laughed with a ring of recklessness.

"The Lord forbid that I should know!" she replied.

She motioned to the coachman, and the carriage rolled rapidly away. Nevins stood looking after it until it turned the corner. When the last wheel vanished, he spoke slowly:

"Well, I'll be blessed!" he said.

Ardly stooped and picked up a violet that lay upon the curbing.

"And so will I," he responded.

"Have a whiskey?"

"All right."

They entered the building and mounted the stairs in silence.

CHAPTER VI

The Reverend Anthony Algarcife had inspired his congregation with an almost romantic fervor.

When he had first appeared before them as assistant to Father Speares in his Bowery Mission, and a little later as server in the celebrations, they regarded him as a thoughtful-eyed young priest, whose appearance fitted into the general scheme of color in the chancel. When he read the lessons they noticed the richness of his voice, and when at last he came to the altar-step to deliver his first sermon they thrilled into the knowledge of his power.

But he turned from their adulations almost impatiently to throw himself into the mission in the slums. His eloquence had passed from the rich to the poor, and beyond an occasional sermon he became only a harmonious figure in the setting of the church. For the honors they meted out to him he had no glance, for their favors he had only indifference. He seemed as insensible to praise as to censure, and to the calls of ambition his ears were closed. He lived in the fevered haste of a man who has but one end remaining—to have life over.

But his indifference redounded to his honor. Because he shunned popularity, it fell upon him; because he put aside personal gains, he found them in the reverence of his people. His apathy was construed into humility, his compassion into loving-kindness, his endeavors to stifle memory into the fires of faith. At the end of six years his determination to remain a cipher in religion had made him the leader of his church, and the means which he had taken to annihilate self had drawn on him the wondering eyes of his world. Almost unconsciously he bowed his head to receive the yoke.

When, at the death of Father Speares, he was called to the charge, he accepted it without a struggle and without emotion. He saw in it but an opening to heavier labor and an opportunity to hasten the progress of his slow suicide.

So he took the work from the failing hands and devoted to it the fulness of his own frenzied vigor. The ritual which his predecessor loved became sacred to him, and the most trivial ceremonials grew mighty with memory of the dead. Each candle upon the altar, each silken thread in the embroidered vestments he wore, was a tribute to a sincerity which was not his.

He lent a sudden fervor to the decoration of the church and to the training of his choristers, passionately reviving lost and languishing rites of religion, and silencing the faint protests of his more conservative parishioners by an arrogant appeal to the "Ornaments Rubric" of the Prayer-book. In defiance of the possible opposition of the bishop, he transposed the "Gloria" to its old place in the Catholic Mass, hurling, like an avenging thunderbolt, at a priestly objector to the good old rule of St. Vincent, "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus."

"My dear father," his senior warden had once said to him, "I doubt if most priests put as much work into their whole lives as you do into one celebration."

"I know," replied Father Algarcife slowly. "If I have left anything undone it has been from oversight, not fear of labor."

The warden smiled.

"Your life is a proof of your industry as well as your faith," he responded. "Only a man who loves his religion better than his life would risk himself daily. It is your great hold upon your people. They believe in you."

"Yes, yes," said the other.

"But I have wanted to warn you," continued the warden. "It cannot last. Give yourself rest."

Father Algarcife shook his head.

"I rest only when I am working," he answered, and he added, a little wistfully, "The parish bears witness that I have done my best by the charge."

The warden, touched by the wistfulness, lowered his eyes. "That you have done any man's best," he returned.

"Thank you," said Father Algarcife. Then he passed into the sacristy to listen to the confession of a parishioner.

It was a tedious complaint, and he followed it abstractedly—winding through the sick imaginings of a nervous woman and administering well-worn advice in his rich voice, which lent a charm to the truisms. When it was over, he advised physical exercise, and, closing the door, seated himself to await the next comer.

It was Miss Vernish, and as she entered, with her impatient limp, the bitterness of her mouth relaxed. She was supervising the embroidering of the vestments to be worn at Easter, and in a spirit of devotion she had sacrificed her diamonds to their ornamentation. Her eyes grew bright as she talked, and a religious warmth softened her manner.

"It has made me so happy," she said, "to feel that I can give something beautiful to the service. It is the sincerest pleasure I have known for years."

She left, and her place was taken by a young divinity student who had been drawn from law to theology by the eloquence of Father Algarcife. He had come to obtain the priest's advice upon a matter of principle, and departed with a quickening of his religious tendencies.

Then came several women, entering with a great deal of rustling and no evident object in view. Then a vestryman to talk over a point in business; then the wife of a well-known politician, to ask if she should consent to her husband's accepting a foreign appointment; then a man who wished to be confirmed in his church; and, after all, Mrs. Ryder, large and warm and white, to say that since the last communion she had felt herself stronger to contend with disappointment.

When it was over and he came out into the evening light, he drew himself together with a quick movement, as if he had knelt in a strained position for hours. Vaguely he wondered how his nerves had sustained it, and he smiled half bitterly as he admitted that eight years ago he would have succumbed.

"It is because my nerves are dead," he said; "as dead as my emotions."

He knew that since the pressure of feeling had been lifted the things which would have overwhelmed him in the past had lost the power to thrill his supine sensations, that from a mere jangled structure of nerve wires he had become a physical being—a creature who ate and drank and slept, but did not feel.

He went about his daily life as methodically as if it were mapped out for him by a larger hand. His very sermons came to him with no effort of will or of memory, but as thoughts long thought out and forgotten sometimes obtrude themselves upon the mind that has passed into other channels. They were but twisted and matured phrases germinating since his college days. The old fatal facility for words remained with him, though the words had ceased to be symbols of honest thought. He could still speak, it was only the ability to think that the fever had drained—it was only the power to plod with mental patience in the pursuit of a single fact. Otherwise he was unchanged. But as every sensation is succeeded by a partial incapacity, so the strain of years had been followed by years of stagnation.

He went home to dinner with a physical zest.

"I believe I have one sentiment remaining," he said, "the last a man loses—the sentiment for food."

The next evening, which chanced to be that of Election Day, Dr. Salvers came to dine with him, and when dinner was over they went out to ascertain the returns. Salvers had entered the fight with an enthusiastic support of what he called "good government," and the other watched it with the interest of a man who looks on.

"Shall we cross to Broadway?" he asked; "the people are more interesting, after all, than the politicians."

"The politicians," responded Salvers, "are only interesting viewed through the eyes of the people. No, let's keep to the avenue for a while. I prefer scenting the battle from afar."

The sounds grew louder as they walked on, becoming, as they neared Madison Square, a tumultuous medley issuing from tin horns and human throats. Over the ever-moving throngs in the square a shower of sky-rockets shot upward at the overhanging clouds and descended in a rain of orange sparks. The streets were filled with a stream of crushed humanity, which struggled and pushed and panted, presenting to a distant view the effect of a writhing mass of dark-bodied insects. From the tower of the Garden a slender search-light pointed southward, a pale, still finger remaining motionless, while the crowd clamored below and the fireworks exploded in the blackness above.

Occasionally, as the white light fell on the moving throng, it exaggerated in distinctness a face here and there, which assumed the look of a grotesque mask, illuminated by an instantaneous flash and fading quickly into the half-light of surrounding shadows. Then another took its place, and the illumination played variations upon the changing features.

Suddenly a shrill cheer went up from the streets.

"That means Vaden," said Salvers. "Let's move on."

They left the square, making their way up Broadway. At the first corner a man offered them papier-machÉ tigers, at the second roosters, at the third chrysanthemums.

"Look at this," said Salvers, drawing aside. "Odd for women, isn't it? Half these girls don't know what they are shrieking about."

In the throng jostling past them there were a dozen school-girls, wearing yellow chrysanthemums in their button-holes and carrying small flags in their hands. The light from the windows fell upon their pretty faces, rosy from excitement. Behind them a gang of college students blew deafening blasts on tin trumpets, and on the other side a newsboy was yelling—

"Eve-ning Wor-ld! Vaden elected!—Va-den—!"

His voice was drowned in the rising cheers of men politically mad.

"I'll go to the club," said Salvers, presently; "this is too deuced democratic. Will you come?"

Father Algarcife shook his head.

"Not now," he replied. "I'll keep on to Herald Square, then I'll turn in. The fight is over."

And he passed on.

Upon a white sheet stretched along the side of the Herald building a stereopticon portrait of a candidate appeared, followed by a second, and then by the figures of the latest returns from the election boroughs. Here the crowd had stagnated, and he found difficulty in forcing his way. Then, as the mass swayed back, a woman fainted at his side and was carried into the nearest drug-store.

In the endeavor to reach Fifth Avenue he stepped into the centre of the street, where a cable car, a carriage, and a couple of hansom cabs were blocked. As he left the sidewalk the crowd divided, and the carriage started, while a horse attached to a cab shied suddenly. A woman stumbled beneath the carriage and he drew her away. As he did so the wheel of the cab struck him, stunning him for the moment.

"Look out, man!" called Nevins, who was seated beside the coachman upon the carriage-box; "that was an escape. Are you hurt? Here, hold on!"

At the same moment the door opened and a hand reached out.

"Come inside," said a woman's voice.

He shook his head, dizzy from the shock. Red lights flashed before his eyes, and he staggered.

Then the crowd pressed together, some one pushed him into the carriage, and the door closed.

"To Father Algarcife's house," said the voice. A moment more and the horses started. Consciousness escaped him, and he lay against the cushions with closed eyes. When he came to himself, it was to hear the breathing of the woman beside him—a faint insistence of sound that seemed a vital element in the surrounding atmosphere. For an instant it lulled him, and then, as reason returned, the sound brought in its train the pale survivals of old associations. Half stunned as he was, it was by feeling rather than conception that he became aware that the woman was Mariana. He was conscious of neither surprise nor emotion. There was merely a troublous sense of broken repose and a slight bitterness always connected with the thought of her—a bitterness that was but an after-taste of his portion of gall and wormwood.

He turned his head upon the cushions and looked at her as she sat beside him. She had not spoken, and she sat quite motionless, her fitful breathing alone betraying the animation of flesh. Her head was in the shadow, but a single ray of light fell across her lap, showing her folded hands in their long gloves. He smelled the fragrance of the violets she wore, but the darkness hid them.

Surging beneath that rising bitterness, the depths of his memory stirred in its sleep. He remembered the day that he had stood at the window of that Fourth Street tenement, watching the black-robed figure enter the carriage below. He saw the door close, the wheels turn, and the last upward glance she gave. Then he saw the long street flecked with sunshine stretching onward into the aridity of endless to-morrows.

Strange that he remembered it after these eight years. The woman beside him stirred, and he recalled in that same slow bitterness the last kiss he had put upon her mouth. Bah! It meant nothing.

But his apathy was rended by a sudden fury—an instinct of hate—of cruelty insatiable. An impulse to turn and strike her through the darkness—to strike her until he had appeased his thirst for blood.

The impulse passed as quickly as it came, fleeing like a phantom of delirium, and in its place the old unutterable bitterness welled back. His apathy reclosed upon him.

The carriage turned a corner, and a blaze of light fell upon the shadow of the seat. It swept the white profile and dark figure of Mariana, and he saw the wistfulness in her eyes and the maddening tremor of her mouth. But it did not move him. He was done with such things forever.

All at once she turned towards him.

"You are not hurt?"

"It was nothing."

She flinched at the sound of his voice, and the dusk of the cross-street shrouded them again. The hands in her lap fluttered nervously, running along the folds of her dress.

Suddenly the carriage stopped, and Nevins jumped down from the box and swung the door open.

"Are you all right?" he asked, and his voice was unsteady.

"All right," responded Father Algarcife, cheerfully. He stepped upon the sidewalk, staggered slightly, and caught Nevins's arm. Then he turned to the woman within the carriage. "I thank you," he said.

He entered the rectory, and Nevins came back and got inside the carriage.

"Will you go home?" he asked, with attempted lightness. "The returns from the Assembly districts won't be in till morning, but Ardly is sure."

Mariana smiled at him.

"Tell him to drive home," she answered. "I am very tired."

CHAPTER VII

The morning papers reported that the Reverend Anthony Algarcife had been struck by a cab while crossing Broadway, and as he left the breakfast-table Mrs. Ryder's carriage appeared at his door, quickly followed by that of Miss Vernish.

By ten o'clock the rectory was besieged and bunches of flowers, with cards attached, were scattered about the hall. Dr. Salvers, coming in a little later, stumbled over a pile of roses, and recovered himself, laughing.

"Looks as if they mean to bury you," he remarked. "But how are you feeling? Of course, I knew it was nothing serious or I should have heard."

Father Algarcife rose impatiently from his chair.

"Of course," he returned. "But all this fuss is sufficient to drive a man mad. Yes, Agnes," to the maid who entered with a tray of carnations and a solicitous inquiry as to his health. "Say I am perfectly well—and please have all these flowers sent to the hospital at once. No, I don't care for any on my desk. I dislike the perfume." Then he turned to Salvers. "I am going out to escape it," he said. "Will you walk with me to the church?"

"With pleasure," responded the doctor, cheerfully; and he added: "You will find the church a poor protection, I fancy."

As they left the rectory they met Claude Nevins upon the sidewalk.

"I wanted to assure myself that it was not a serious accident," he said. "Glad to see you out."

Father Algarcife frowned.

"If I hear another word of this affair," he replied, irritably, "I shall feel tempted to regret that there is not some cause for the alarm."

"And you are quite well?"

"Perfectly."

"By the way, I didn't know that you felt enough interest in the elections to induce you to parade the streets on their account."

"Oh, it was the doctor's fault. He got me into the medley, and then deserted because he found it too democratic."

"It is democracy turned upsidedown that I object to," remarked Salvers. "There seems a lack of decency about it—as if we were to awake some morning to find the statue of Liberty on its head, with its legs in the air. I believe in the old conservative goddess of our fathers—Freedom shackled by the chains of respectability."

"So did Father Algarcife once," said Nevins. "He had an oration entitled 'The Jeffersonian Principles' which he used to deliver before the mirror when he thought I was asleep."

"I believe in it still," interrupted Father Algarcife, "but I no longer deliver orations. Greater wisdom has made me silent. Well, I suppose the result of last night was hardly a surprise."

"Hardly," responded Nevins. "What can one expect when everybody who knows the value of an office is running for it, and everybody who doesn't is blowing horns about the runners. But I won't keep you. Good-day."

"Good-day."

Nevins turned back.

"By the way," he said to Father Algarcife, "I wish you would drop in and look at that portrait the first chance you have. I am waiting for your criticism."

"Very well. Congratulate Ardly for me."

And they separated, Salvers motioning to his coachman to follow him to the church.

Upon going inside, Father Algarcife found his principal assistant, a young fellow with a fair, fresh face, like a girl's, and a high forehead, surmounted by waves of flaxen hair. His name was Ellerslie, and his devotional sincerity was covered by a shy and nervous manner.

He greeted the elder priest with a furtive deprecation, the result of an innate humility of character.

"I went by the rectory as soon as I had seen the morning papers," he said. "Thank God you escaped unhurt!"

The irritation with which Father Algarcife had replied to Nevins's solicitude did not appear now.

"I hope you were not troubled by the report," he answered. "There was absolutely nothing in it except that I was struck by a vehicle and stunned slightly. But the exaggerated accounts have caused me a great deal of annoyance. By the way, John," and his face softened, "I have not told you how much I liked your last sermon."

The other flushed and shook his head. "They fall so far short," he returned, and his voice trembled. "I know now that I shall never be able to speak. When I face the people there is so much that I want to say that I grow dumb. My feeling is so strong that my words are weak."

"Time may change that."

"No," said Ellerslie; "but if I may listen to you I am content. I will serve God in humble ways. It is the service that I love, after all, and not the glory."

"Yes, yes," responded Father Algarcife, gently.

He went into the sacristy, where he sat for a few moments in reverie, his head resting upon his hand. Then he rose and shook himself free of the thought which haunted him.

For several weeks after this he paid no calls except among his poor. The houses of his richer parishioners he appeared to shun, and his days were spent in active work in the mission districts. At all hours his calm black figure and virile face might be seen passing in and out of the grimy tenements or along the narrow streets. He had opened, in connection with his mission-house, a lodging for waifs, and it was his custom to spend several evenings of the week among its inmates. The house had been founded by funds which, until his call to the church, had been expended in Asiatic missions, but which, before his indomitable opposition, had been withdrawn. As the work went on it became of special interest to him, and a good half of his personal income went yearly to its support.

"It is not a charity," he had once said to Salvers. "I disapprove of such charities. It is merely a house where lodgings are let in as business-like a manner as they are around the corner, for five cents a spot; only our lodgings are better, and there is a bath thrown in."

"And a dinner as well," Salvers had answered, "to say nothing of breakfast and a bed to one's self. By the way, is your system of serving newsboys and boot-blacks on credit successful?"

Father Algarcife smiled.

"I have found it so," he replied; "but, you know, our terms are long, and we give good measure for the money."

It was in this work that he was absorbing himself, when, one day in early December, he received a note from Mrs. Ryder:

He sent an acceptance, and the following day received an urgent request that he should dine quietly with Mr. Ryder and herself on Thursday evening. To this he consented, after some hesitation; and when the evening came he presented himself, to find Mrs. Ryder awaiting him with the pretty, vivacious young woman of the dinner-party, who was a guest in the house.

Mrs. Ryder crossed the room, with her large white hand outstretched, her satin gown rustling as she moved, and the lamplight shimmering over her massive shoulders in their setting of old lace. The vivacious young woman, whose name was Darcy, greeted him with a smile which seemed to blend in a flash of brightness her black eyes and white teeth.

"Mr. Ryder is a little late," his wife explained, "but he will not delay us long." And she passed to the subject of the Christmas services and the contralto she wished to secure.

While she was speaking, Ryder came in with his usual cordial pleasantries. He was looking fresh and a little flushed, as if he had just left a Turkish bath, and was dressed with an immaculateness of detail which carried a suggestion of careful polish. His sensitive skin, beneath which the purplish flush rose, was as fine as a child's, and his round, smooth hands had a suffusion of pink in the palms.

In a moment dinner was served, and they went into the dining-room. Ryder was easy and affable. He talked pleasantly about the events of the past few weeks, describing as if for the hundredth time the success of the Horse Show, and stating good-natured objections to the awards of the judges.

"It is a farce," he said—"a mere farce. They don't recognize the best horse-flesh when they see it." Then he smiled at his wife. "But who can blame them? It was really a puzzle to decide which were the most worth looking at, the horses or the women. It is hard to say where the blue ribbon belonged. Ah, father, you miss a great deal by being a saint."

Miss Darcy interrupted him with a pretty protest. "I am sure a saint may look at a horse," she said, "and a woman." And she added: "I have always forgotten to ask you who the lady in violet and silver-fox was who sat in Mr. Buisson's box? I did not recognize her."

Ryder's eyes narrowed slightly, but he answered easily, "Oh, that was Mrs. Gore, I believe."

Miss Darcy flashed a smile.

"The Englishwoman I have heard so much about? Why, I thought she was called a beauty!"

Ryder laughed.

"She is a beauty when you know her," he said, "or, rather, you get the idea that she is. But she isn't English, you know. She married an Englishman."

Then he changed the subject and drew Father Algarcife into a discussion of church decorations.

When dinner was over, Mrs. Ryder's maid appeared, bearing the opera-wraps, and the two women trailed down the steps and into the carriage. When Father Algarcife had stepped inside, Ryder closed the door and made his excuses.

"I'll look in a little later," he said; "but if Mr. Nevins finds you you won't need me, and a whole evening of it tires my nerves."

Then he lighted a cigar and strolled off leisurely, while the carriage started.

When they entered the opera-house the curtain had risen, and the tenor was singing his farewell to the swan.

As Father Algarcife seated himself in the shadow of the box and looked over Mrs. Ryder's superb shoulders at the stage and the glittering foot-lights, he felt a quick impulse to rush away from it all. He hated the noise and the heat and the glare. The heavy atmosphere seemed oppressive and unnatural, and the women, sparkling brilliantly in the tiers of boxes, looked like beautiful exotics, fragrant with the perishable bloom of a hot-house. It was with a sensation of relief that he recalled the dull mission in the slums, where he had spent the morning.

On the stage, Elsa had cast herself into the arms of Lohengrin, and the voice of love dominant was translated into song. The music filled the house with a throbbing ecstasy—an ecstasy that had captured in its notes the joys of all the senses—the light to the eye of a spring morning, the perfume to the nostrils of fresh meadows, the warmth to the touch of falling sunshine. It was the voice of love ethereal—of love triumphant over flesh, of love holding to its breast the phantom of its dreams. It was the old, ever-young voice of the human heart panting for the possession of its vision—the vision realized in the land of legends.

The curtain was rung down, and in a moment Nevins came in and they fell to talking. They spoke of the tenor, of the fact that the prima donna's voice had strengthened, and of Madame Cambria, the contralto, who was a little hoarse. Then they spoke of the people in the boxes and of the absence of several whose names they mentioned.

Father Algarcife was silent, and he only aroused himself to attention when Miss Darcy, lowering her opera-glass, turned to Nevins inquiringly.

"Do tell me if that is Mrs. Gore across from us—the one in green and violets?"

Nevins replied constrainedly. "Yes," he said; "I think so. The other is Miss Ramsey, I believe—a friend who lives with her."

Miss Darcy smiled.

"Why, I thought she lived alone," she returned; "but I have heard so many odd things about her that I may be mistaken in this one. She is evidently the kind of person that nobody possesses any positive information about."

"Perhaps it is as well," observed Mrs. Ryder, stiffly. "It is better to know too little on such subjects than too much."

Nevins was writhing in his chair, his mouth half open, when Father Algarcife spoke.

"In this case," he said, and his voice sounded cold and firm, "what is not known seems to be incorrectly surmised. I knew Mrs. Gore—before—before her marriage. She is a Southerner."

Mrs. Ryder looked up.

"Yes?" she interrogated, as he paused.

"And, although I cannot vouch for her discretion, I can for her innate purity of character."

Mrs. Ryder flushed, and spoke with a beautiful contrition in her eyes.

"I was wrong," she said, "to trust rumor. It makes me ashamed of myself—of my lack of generosity."

The curtain rose, and Father Algarcife turned to the stage. But he did not see it. The figures were blurred before his eyes and the glare tortured him. Across the circle of space he knew that Mariana was sitting, her head upraised, her cheek resting upon her hand, her face in the shadow. He could almost see her eyes growing rich and soft like green velvet.

Then, as the voice of the soprano rang out, he started slightly. Beneath the song of love he heard the cry of ambition—a cry that said:

"I would give half my life for this—to sing with Alvary."

Whence the words came he did not know. He had no memory of them in time or place, but they struggled in the throat of the soprano and filled the air.

He turned and looked at her as she sat across from him, her cheek resting in her hand against a blaze of diamonds. She looked white, he thought, and wistful and unsatisfied. Then a fierce joy took possession of him—a joy akin to the gloating of a savage cruelty. She had failed. Yes, in spite of the brocade of her gown, in spite of the diamonds in her hair, in spite of the homage in the eyes of men that followed her—she had failed.

The blood rushed into his temples, and he felt it beating in his pulses. He was glad—glad that she was unsatisfied—glad of the struggle and of the failure—glad of the slow torture of famished aspirations.

And from the throat of the soprano the words rang heavy with throbs of unfulfilment:

"I would give half my life for this—to sing with Alvary."

Then as he looked at her she stirred restlessly, and their eyes met. It was a blank look, such as two strangers might have interchanged, but suddenly he remembered the night they came together and sat in the fifth gallery. A dozen details of that evening flickered in his memory and reddened into life. He remembered the splendors of her eyes, the thrill in her voice, the nervous tremor of her hands. He remembered the violets in her bonnet, created from nothing after a chapter of Mill—and the worn gloves with the stains inside, which benzine had not taken away. He remembered her faintness when the opera was over, and the grocery-shop across from The Gotham, where they had bought ale and crackers. He saw her figure as she sat on the hearth-rug in her white gown, her hair hanging loose about her shoulders, her eyes drowsy with sleep. He saw her hands—bare then of jewels—as she unfastened the parcels, and heard her laugh as he drew the cork and the ale spilled upon the crackers. Good God! He had forgotten these things eight years ago.

Again he looked across at her and their eyes met. He turned to the stage and listened to the faltering of love as it struggled with doubt. The music had changed. It had deepened in color and a new note had throbbed into it—a note of flesh that weighed upon spirit—of disbelief that shadowed faith. The ideal was singing the old lesson of the real found wanting—of passion tarnished by the touch of clay. The ecstasy had fled. Love was not satisfied with itself. It craved knowledge, and the vision beautiful was fading before the eyes of earth. It was the song of the eternal vanquishment of love by distrust, of the eternal failure of faith.

When the curtain fell Ryder came into the box. He was looking depressed, and lines of irritation had gathered about his mouth. He pulled his fair mustache nervously. His wife rose and looked at him with a frank smile in her eyes.

"I have been watching Mrs. Gore," she said, "and she is very lovely. Will you take me to her box for a moment?"

Nevins looked up with quick gratitude, and Ryder grew radiant. He smiled on his wife in affectionate admiration.

"Of course I will," he answered, and as they left the box he added: "You are magnificent. There is not a woman in town with your neck and arms."

She smiled faintly, unmoved by his words. She had learned long since that he still admired though he no longer desired her—and desire was the loadstar of his life.

Father Algarcife, looking at the box across from him, saw Mariana start suddenly and rise with an impulsive welcome as Mrs. Ryder entered. He could see the light on her face, and the frank pleasure of her greeting. Then, as the two women stood together, he saw Ryder glance from one to the other with his pleasant smile and turn to speak to Miss Ramsey. He heard Nevins breathing behind him, and he was conscious of a strange feeling of irritation against him. Why should he, who was at enmity with no man, cherish that curious dislike for one who was his friend?

"Mrs. Ryder is a creature to be adored," said Nevins to Miss Darcy. "She is Isis incarnate."

Miss Darcy responded with her flashing smile. "And Mrs. Gore's divinity?"

Nevins gave an embarrassed laugh.

"Oh, I am not sure that she is a goddess at all," he answered. "She is merely a woman."

CHAPTER VIII

As Mariana entered her house after the opera was over she unwound the lace scarf from her head, letting it trail like a silvery serpent on the floor behind her. Then she unfastened her long cloak, and threw it on a chair in the drawing-room.

"The fire is out," she said, looking at the ashes in the grate, "and I am cold—cold."

"Shall I start it?" asked Miss Ramsey, a little timidly, as she tugged awkwardly at her gloves, embarrassed by their length.

Mariana laughed absently.

"Start it? Why should you?" she questioned. "There are servants—or there ought to be—but no, I'll go up-stairs."

She went into the hall, and Miss Ramsey followed her. On the second landing they entered a large room, the floor of which was spread with white fur rugs, warmed by the reddish lights and shadows from an open fire.

Mariana crossed to the fire, and, drawing off her gloves, held her hands to the flames. There was a strained look in her eyes, as if she had not awaked to her surroundings.

Miss Ramsey raised the wick of the lamp, yawned behind her hand, and came to where Mariana was standing.

"Are you tired?" she asked. "The opera was very long."

Mariana started and looked at her.

"You poor little thing," she said. "It half killed you. No, don't go. Sit down for a moment. I want to talk to you."

As she spoke she unfastened her gown, slipped it off, and threw it across a chair. Then she put on a wrapper of white flannel, and, seating herself on the rug before the fire, loosened her heavy hair.

"I want to talk," she repeated.

Miss Ramsey drew a chair beside her and sat down. She laid her hand on Mariana's hair.

"Shall I braid it?" she asked.

Mariana shook her head.

"I don't want you to wait on me," she replied, half pettishly. "Janet can do that. I want you to love me."

Miss Ramsey smiled.

"How shall I begin?" she inquired.

But Mariana was silent, staring moodily into the fire, where the ruddy coals assumed sharp and bizarre designs. As the light flickered over her face it brought out the changes in her eyes and the warmth of her mouth.

"Do you see that head in the fire?" she asked, suddenly. "It is the head of the Sphinx—and before it there is a burning desert—do you see?"

Then she laid her head in Miss Ramsey's lap, and her voice sounded faint and far off.

"I want to be told that I am good," she said; "that I have been good all my life—that I am a saint, like that splendid creature who came to speak to me to-night. Am I as good as she?"

"I do not know her," responded Miss Ramsey.

Mariana raised her eyes to her face.

"Am I like I used to be—at The Gotham?"

Miss Ramsey smiled.

"You are older."

"And wiser?"

"I don't think you will ever be wise, my dear."

"I am afraid not," said Mariana. "I am wedded to folly." Then she sighed softly. "Am I better?" she asked.

"You are very good to me."

"Am I better—to look at?"

Miss Ramsey shook her head gently.

"Dress makes a good deal of difference," she returned, presently.

Mariana rose and kissed her good-night.

"Sleep well," she said. "And don't make your bed in the morning—please don't. Yes, I am very sleepy."

But when the door had closed after Miss Ramsey she sat looking into the grate until the crimson coals had waned to livid ashes. The room grew cold and the shadows deepened in the folds of the curtains at the windows, which were stirred by a faint draught. From the street below an occasional noise rose, vague, unseizable—the roll of a wagon or the tramp of a passer-by upon the sidewalk. In a distant room a clock struck twice, with a soft whirring sound. From her gown, thrown across the back of a chair, the bruised violets diffused a fading sweetness. The embers waned one by one, and the visions in the fire grew spectral, like living faces which the warm blood forsakes. As the last one died she rose and went to bed.

When she awoke in the morning it was to find Miss Ramsey standing beside her, holding her breakfast-tray.

"You were sleeping very soundly," she said. "Did you have a good night?"

"Oh yes," Mariana responded. She yawned and turned upon the pillows, stretching her arms above her head. The lace on her sleeves fell away from her bare elbows.

"I slept very soundly, and I am sleepy still. The mere fact of getting up in the morning makes life a failure. Until I have had my bath I am always a pessimist."

She sat up drowsily, running her hands through her hair. Then she turned to her tea, which was placed on a table beside her.

"There are your violets also," remarked Miss Ramsey, pointing to a couple of florist's boxes; and, as an afterthought, she added: "Men are odd creatures."

Mariana laughed.

"Oh, they imagine that they are laying up treasures on earth," she answered, stirring her tea. "And they have overlooked the fact that moths corrupt. I shall advise them to transfer their attentions to Heaven. Who was it that called me 'unpropitious'?"

"I don't like it," said Miss Ramsey. "I may be old-fashioned, but I don't approve of married men living as if they had no responsibilities."

"Nor do I," agreed Mariana. "It bores one awfully."

"And it makes people say unkind things of you, my dear. It is so hard for them to draw the distinction between imprudence and infamy."

"Yes," admitted Mariana, pushing her cup aside. "I suppose it is—and I suppose I am imprudent."

"I wish you would try to be a little more careful."

Mariana caught her hand and pulled her down on the bed beside her.

"What a treasure you are!" she said. "Do you know you are the one woman I absolutely believe in? You might have made a fortune by reporting scandals about me, and you haven't done so."

The maid brought in several letters, and Mariana took them from her and broke the seals carelessly.

"Mr. Gore is coming forward again," she remarked, tossing an open sheet on the counterpane. "You knew he did not like that worshipful old uncle of his leaving me his property. He says it has made me too independent. Well, it has made me independent of him, for which Heaven be praised. When I heard of it I repeated the Thirty-nine Articles, fifty Hail Mary's, and as much of the Shorter Catechism as I could think of. I feel so thankful."

"I am sorry for that, Mariana."

"You wouldn't be if you knew him. You are too economical to squander emotions."

"But it does seem rather hard on him," said Miss Ramsey.

Mariana laughed.

"It would have been worse on me had I stayed with him," she responded. "And now, if Janet has my bath ready, I think I'll get up."

An hour later she came down-stairs in her hat and coat, and went for her morning walk in the park. When she returned she ordered the carriage, and went shopping, accompanied by Miss Ramsey.

"You are to have a heliotrope satin," Mariana declared, in a burst of generosity, "and I am to have one that is all amber and dull gold."

As she stood in the centre of the costumer's show-room, surveying the lustrous folds of heliotrope and amber, her eyes shone with pleasure. Miss Ramsey protested faintly.

"My dear Mariana, I beg of you," she said, "leave me the black silk. Colors confuse me."

But Mariana was obdurate.

"No," she replied, "I have selected it. We will go to the milliner's."

They drove to the milliner's, where they remained for a couple of hours—Mariana finding difficulty in deciding upon a bonnet. When the choice was made Miss Ramsey was threatened with hysteria, and they went home.

"I quite forgot," said Mariana, as they entered the house, a small brown-stone one on Fifty-seventh Street, which she had leased—"I quite forgot that I was to have sat for Mr. Nevins this morning. How provoking I am! But it is too late now, and, besides, I am looking a fright. My dear, good Miss Ramsey, I do wish you would express yourself more about the purchases I make."

"I did express myself," protested Miss Ramsey, looking jaded and harassed. "I expressed myself against that heliotrope satin, but it did no good."

"But that was absurd," responded Mariana. "I do hope luncheon is ready," and she went up-stairs to change her dress.

After luncheon Mrs. Ryder called, and Mariana went in to see her, a flush of pleasure suffusing her face.

"How very kind of you!" she said, taking the proffered hand, and there was a thrill of gratitude in her voice. They seated themselves near together and talked of mutual acquaintances, principally men, of the weather, and of the opera the evening before—all with the flippancy with which society veils the primordial network of veins coursing beneath its bloodless surface. Then, when Mrs. Ryder rose to go, she hesitated an instant, looking down at the smaller woman.

"I should like to be your friend," she said at last. "Will you let me?"

Mariana raised her eyes.

"I need them," she answered; and then she added, impulsively: "Do you know all that has been said of me—all?"

Mrs. Ryder drew herself up with a slow, gracious movement.

"But it is not true," she said.

"No, it is not true," repeated Mariana.

The other smiled and held out her hand.

"I want you to come to luncheon with me," she said. "I shall be alone to-morrow. Will you come?"

"Yes," Mariana responded, "to-morrow."

And after Mrs. Ryder had gone she sat down at her desk and wrote a note.

"You must not talk to me again as you did last evening," it said. "I have told you so before, but I may not have seemed in earnest. Now I am in earnest, and you must not—you shall not do it. I know it has been a great deal my fault, and I am sorry for it. Indeed, you must believe that I did not think of its coming to this."

Then she sealed it and gave it to the servant to mail, after which she went up-stairs and talked to Miss Ramsey until dinner.

The next day she went to Mrs. Ryder's, and they sat down to luncheon at a small round table and talked as women talk in whom feeling is predominant over thought, and to whom life represents a rhythmic series of emotions rather than waves of mental evolution.

They spoke in low, almost affectionate voices, conscious of one of those sudden outreaches of sympathy to which women are subject. When luncheon was over they went up to the nursery, and Mariana knelt upon the floor and romped with the child, who pulled her loosened hair, uttering shrill shrieks of delight. At last she rose hurriedly, and Mrs. Ryder saw that a tear trembled on her lashes.

The elder woman's heart expanded.

"You have had a child?" she asked, softly.

"Yes."

"And lost it?"

"Yes, I lost it."

Mrs. Ryder's eyes grew soft.

"I am so sorry for you," she said. The tear on Mariana's lashes fell upon her hand.

"It was eight years ago," she said. "That is a long time, but I suppose one never entirely forgets."

"No," answered the other, "one never forgets."

She stooped suddenly, and, lifting her child, kissed it passionately.

Several mornings after this Mariana's carriage stopped before Nevins's studio, and Mariana got out and ascended the long flight of stairs. In response to the fall of the brass knocker, the door was opened and Nevins greeted her reproachfully. "Are you aware," he demanded, gravely, "that there has been sufficient time for the appearance of a wrinkle since your last sitting?"

"Portraits don't have wrinkles," returned Mariana, cheerfully, entering and unfastening her coat; "nor do I."

She removed her hat and gave an impatient little fluff to her hair.

"Do I look well?" she asked.

"Were you ever otherwise to me?" rejoined Nevins, in impassioned protest.

Mariana turned from him with a slight shrug of her shoulders.

"For the last week," she said, "I have had a horrible cold. It made my eyes red and my nose also. That is why I stayed away."

"And plunged me into a seven days' despair—for a cold."

"Oh, but such a cold!"

She seated herself on a low chair between two large curtained easels. Then she rose to examine the portrait.

"I suppose the touching-up makes a great deal of difference," she remarked.

"A great deal," assented Nevins; "but don't you like it?"

She hesitated, her head first on one side, then on the other.

"Oh yes," she said, "but I should like it to be ideal, you know."

"Nonsense! You don't need to be idealized. To idealize means to wipe out character with turpentine and put in inanity with a paint-brush." Then he added: "Sit down just as you are, and turn your head towards the purple curtain on that easel. A little farther—there. I must have that expression."

He picked up his brush and worked steadily for twenty minutes. Then he frowned.

"You have suffered twelve changes of expression within the last sixty seconds," he said. "What are you thinking of?"

"Oh, lots of things."

"Keep to one, please."

She smiled.

"Which shall it be?"

His eyes lingered upon her in sudden brightness.

"Think of me," he responded.

"I do," returned Mariana, amiably; "but when I think of you I think of Mr. Ardly, and when I think of Mr. Ardly I think of The Gotham, and when I think of The Gotham I think of—Mr. Paul."

"Confound Mr. Paul!" retorted Nevins, crossly.

"Please don't," protested Mariana; and she added, "you know he disapproves of me very much."

"The scoundrel!"

"But a great many people do that."

"The scoundrels!"

"Oh no," said Mariana, plaintively; "it is only your kindness of heart that makes you say so."

He laid down his brush and looked at her.

"My God!—Mariana!" he exclaimed.

"Nevins," said a voice in the doorway.

He turned abruptly. Mariana, behind the curtained easel, paled suddenly.

"I knocked, my dear fellow," the voice went on, "and I thought you answered. So you are alone. I came to look at the portrait."

"I am not alone," returned Nevins, awkwardly; "but come in, a—a—Algarcife."

Mariana rose from behind the easel and came forward. Her face was white, but she was smiling.

"He is painting every one's portrait," she said, "and I am one of everybody." She held out her hand. He took it limply, and it fell from his grasp.

"I beg your pardon," he said; "I did not know."

"Oh, it doesn't matter," responded Mariana. "Please look at the portrait. I want to—to rest."

He turned from her coldly.

"Since Mrs. Gore is so kind," he said to Nevins, "I will look at it. It will only detain you a moment."

He crossed the room and drew aside the curtain from a large canvas, then he fell back from the light and examined it carefully for a few seconds, suggesting an alteration or two, and making a favorable comment.

Mariana followed him with her eyes, her hands clasped before her, her face pallid, and the red of her lips shining like a scarlet thread. "It—it is very like," she said, suddenly.

He bowed quietly, showing a slight surprise, as he might have done at the remark of a stranger. Then he turned to the door.

"I am sorry to have interrupted you," he said. "Good-morning."

When the door closed upon him Mariana stood for an instant with her head bent as if listening to his footsteps on the stairs. Then she turned to Nevins, a smile flashing across her face.

"We must go back to the portrait," she said. "It must be finished quickly—quickly. I am afraid of wrinkles."

CHAPTER IX

Mariana was walking under the elms that skirt the park on Fifth Avenue. It was a mild December morning, and the sunshine fell in silvery waves through the bare branches of trees overhead and rippled lightly across the concrete sidewalk, while the slender shadows of the boughs assumed the effect of irregular lines drawn by crude fingers upon a slate. Far ahead, through the narrowing archway of naked elms, the perspective sloped in gradual incline, blending the changing shades of blue and gray into a vista of pale violet. On the low stone wall to her left the creepers showed occasional splashes of scarlet berries, glowing warm and vivid through the autumnal haze which tinted the atmosphere. December had reverted for a single day into the majesty of dead October.

Mariana walked slowly, the furs, which she found oppressive, open at the throat, and her muff hanging idly from her hand. There was a rapt expression upon her face, and her eyes were sombre. She had the strained and preoccupied air of one whose mind has winged back to long-past days, leaving the body adrift in its relation to present events. All at once a tiny child, rolling a toy along the sidewalk, stumbled and fell before her feet, uttering shrieks of dismay. The incident recalled her to herself, and, as she stooped to lift it, she smiled at the profuse apologies of the nurse. Then she glanced about her, as if uncertain of the number of blocks that she had walked.

Three aspens, standing together in the park, arrested her gaze, and she looked at them with momentary intentness. Their slender bodies shone like leprous fingers, pointing heavenward, and on the topmost point of one a broken spray of frosted leaves shivered whitely. They recalled to her with a shudder the little graveyard on the old plantation, where she had spent her earliest childhood, and she was seized with a spasm of memory. She saw the forgotten and deserted graves, with the rank periwinkle corroding the marble slabs, and she saw the little brown lizards that crept out to bask upon them in the summer sunshine. With the recollection, death appeared to her hideous and loathsome, and she walked on quickly, her eyes on the pavement. A group of street-cleaners were seated against the stone wall, eating their mid-day meal, and she looked at the hunks of bread and ham with a feeling of sympathy for the consumers. Then, as she passed, her thoughts swung to the owner of the house across the way whom she knew, and who was descending the front steps. At Sixty-seventh Street she turned into the park, her eyes drawn by the clump of pines darkly defined against the gray rock beyond. For the second time her errant thoughts went back to her childhood and to the great pine forest where the wind played lullabies through the white heat of August days. She felt a swift desire to throw herself beneath the little alien growth of pine, to lie on the soft grass, which was still like emerald deepened by bluish shadows, and to let the spicy needles fall upon her upturned face.

As she moved onward, a man crossing the park in a rapid walk approached her. It was Father Algarcife, and in a moment their glances met.

He raised his hat, and would have passed on, but she stopped him by a gesture.

"Won't you speak to me?" she asked, and her voice wavered like a harp over which the player has lost control.

As she looked at him she saw that he had grown thinner since she had last seen him, and that his eyes shone with an unnatural lustre.

"What is there for me to say?" he returned, arresting her wavering glance.

Her lips quivered.

"I may go away," she said, "and this is the last chance. There is something I must tell you. Will you turn and walk back with me?"

He shook his head.

"What is the use?" he asked, impatiently. "There is nothing to be said that cannot better be left—unsaid."

"No! No!" she said. "You must not think worse of me than—than I deserve."

He was smiling bitterly.

"What I think of you," he returned, "matters very little." Then the smile passed, and he looked at her gravely. "I have little time," he said. "My days are not my own." And he added, slowly: "If you wish it, I will walk back with you for a short distance."

"Thank you," she replied, and they passed the clump of pines on their way in the park.

For a time they were silent, he was looking ahead, and her eyes followed their shadows as they flitted before her on the ground. The two shadows drew nearer, almost melted into one, and fell away.

Suddenly he turned to her.

"There was something you wished to say?" he asked, as he had asked his parishioners a hundred times; then he added: "Even though it were better left unsaid?"

Her eyes left the shadows, and were raised to his face. She thought suddenly that there was a line of cruelty about his mouth, and shrank from him. Had she really seen that face illuminated by passion, or was memory a lie? She spoke rapidly, her words tripping upon one another.

"I want you to know," she said, "how it happened—how I did it—how—"

He looked at her again, and the mocking smile flamed in his eyes.

"What does it matter how it happened," he questioned, "since it did happen? In these days we have become impressionists in all things—even in our experiences. Details are tiresome." Then, as she was silent, he went on. "And these things are done with. There is nothing between Mrs.—Gore and the Reverend Anthony Algarcife except a meeting in a studio and a morning walk in the park. The air is spring-like."

"Don't," she said, suddenly. "You are hard."

He laughed shortly.

"Hard things survive," he answered. "They aren't easy to smash."

She looked at the shadows and then into his face.

"Have you ever forgiven me?" she asked.

He did not answer.

"I should like to feel," she went on, "that you see it was not my fault—that I was not to blame—that you forgive me for what you suffered."

But he looked ahead into the blue-gray distance and was silent.

"Tell me that I was not to blame," she said, again.

He turned to her.

"It was as much your fault," he said, slowly, "as it is the fault of that feather that the wind is blowing it into the lake. What are you that you should conquer the wind?"

She smiled sadly.

"And you have forgiven me?"

His eyes grew hard and his voice cut like steel.

"No."

"And yet you see that I was not to blame."

He smiled again.

"It is the difference," he answered, "between logic and life. What have they in common?"

She spoke almost passionately. "Do you think that I have not suffered?" she asked. "Do you think that you have had all—all the pain?"

He shook his head.

"I do not suffer," he replied. "My life is calm."

She paid no heed to him.

"I have been tortured," she went on; "tortured night and day with memory—and remorse."

His voice was cold, but a sudden anger blazed in his eyes.

"There are drugs for both," he said.

She shivered.

"I have tried to buy happiness as I bought diamonds," she continued. "I have gone from place to place in pursuit of it. I have cheated myself with the belief that I might find it. I did not know that the lack lay in myself—always in myself."

She was silent, and he softened suddenly. "And you have never found it?" he asked. "Of all the things that you craved in youth there is lacking to you now—only your ambition."

She raised her head.

"And love," she finished.

His voice grew hard again.

"We are speaking of realities," he returned, and added, bitterly: "Who should have had love—if not you?"

They had passed the lake, and were walking through the Ramble. The dead leaves rustled beneath their feet.

"It is not true," she said, passionately. "It is false."

"What is false?" he demanded, quietly. "That you have had opportunities for love?"

She did not reply. Her lips were trembling, and her hand played nervously with the ribbon on her muff.

Suddenly she looked up.

"When I left you," she said, slowly, "I went with the opera troupe abroad. For several years I was very successful, and I believed it would end well. I was given a leading part. Then one winter, when we were in Paris, I was taken ill. It was pneumonia. I was very ill, and the pain was frightful. They thought it would go to my heart. But when I grew better the troupe went on. I was left at the hotel, ill and alone—except for one friend—an Englishman—"

He interrupted her harshly.

"You have made a mistake," he said, and his voice was dull and lifeless. "I have no right to know your story. You are not of my parish—nor am I your confessor."

She flinched, but went on steadily, though her tones drooped.

"He had followed me for a long time. He loved me—or thought he did. When I was deserted by the troupe he stayed with me. He paid my bills and brought me back to life. I grew strong again, but—my voice was gone."

She paused as if in pain.

"Sit down," he said.

And they sat down on a bench beneath the naked branches of an oak.

"I was penniless, alone, and very weak. He wanted me even then. At first he did not want to marry me, but when I would not yield, he begged me to come back with him and secure a divorce. I think he was mad with passion."

She hesitated and glanced at him, but he was looking away.

"At last the end came. There was nothing else to do—and I wrote to you."

He moistened his lips as if they were parched from fever.

"Did you get the letter?"

"Yes," he answered, "I got it."

"And you did not answer?"

"What was there for me to say? You were free."

For an instant her eyes blazed.

"You never loved me," she said.

He smiled slightly.

"Do you think so?" he asked.

The anger died from her eyes and she spoke softly.

"I waited for the answer," she said; "waited months, and it did not come. Then I came back. We went out West. A divorce was very easy—and I married him. I owed him so much."

"Yes?"

"It was a mistake. I did not satisfy him. He thought me cold. We quarrelled, and he went to other women. He drank a great deal. I was much to blame, but I could not help it. I hated him. Then his uncle took my part and loved me—God bless him, he was a saint—and kind—oh, so kind. When he died he left me the money, and his nephew and I separated. I have not seen him since."

They were both silent. She could hear his heavy breathing, and her heart throbbed.

"It was all a mistake," she said. "My whole life has been a mistake. But there is no salvation for us who make mistakes."

His eyes grew dark as he looked at her.

"A mistake that one stands by may become the part of wisdom," he said. "Could you not go back to him and begin again?" His face had grown haggard.

Her wrath flamed out.

"If I begin again," she answered, "it must be from the beginning—to relive my whole life."

He looked at her restless hands.

"Then you must look to the future," he said, "since there is no present—and no past."

"There is a past," she returned, passionately.

He shook his head.

"A dead one."

Her mouth shone scarlet in the pallor of her face.

"And shall we forget our dead?" she asked.

His lips closed together with brutal force. His eyes were hot with self-control.

Then he stooped for her muff, which had rolled to the ground, brushing it lightly with his hand. As he gave it to her he rose to his feet.

"Shall we return?" he asked. "It has grown cloudy."

She rose also, but stood for an instant with her hand resting upon the back of the bench. Her lips opened, but closed again, and she turned and walked at his side in silence.

Suddenly he looked at her.

"It is late," he said, "as you doubtless know, and I have neglected a call. May I leave you to go on alone?" Then his voice softened. "Are you ill?" he asked—"or in pain?"

She laughed mirthlessly.

"You are too strong," she returned, "to stoop to irony."

"It was not irony," he answered, gently.

She smiled sadly, her eyes raised.

"Tell me that you will come to see me—once," she said.

He looked at her with sudden tenderness.

"Yes," he answered; "I will come. Good-bye!"

"Good-bye!"

And they went different ways.

CHAPTER X

Mariana went home with throbs of elation in her heart. She was thrilled with a strange, unreasoning joy—a sense of wonder and of mystery—that caused her pulses to quiver and her feet to hasten.

"I shall see him again," she thought—"I shall see him again."

She forgot the years of separation, her past indifference, the barriers between them. She forgot the coldness of his voice and his accusing glance. Her nature had leaped suddenly into fulness, and a storm of passion such as she had never known had seized her. The emotions of her girlhood seemed to her stale and bloodless beside the tempest which possessed her now. As she walked her lips trembled, and she thought, "I shall see him again."

At dinner Miss Ramsey noticed her flushed face, and, when they went into the drawing-room, took her hands. "You are feverish," she said, "and you ate nothing."

Mariana laughed excitedly.

"No," she answered, "I am well—very well."

They sat down together, and she looked at Miss Ramsey with quick tenderness.

"Am I good to you?" she asked. "Am I good to the servants?—to everybody?"

"What is it, dear?"

"Oh, I want to begin over again—all over again! It is but fair that one should have a second chance, is it not?"

Miss Ramsey smiled.

"Some of us never have a first," she said; and Mariana took her in her arms and kissed her. "You shall have yours," she declared. "I will give it to you."

When she went up-stairs a little later she took down an old square desk from a shelf in the dressing-room and brought it to the rug before the fire. Kneeling beside it, she turned the key and raised the narrow lid of ink-stained mahogany. It was like unlocking the past years to sit surrounded by these memories in tangible forms, to smell the close, musty odor which clings about the relics of a life or a love that is dead.

She drew them out one by one and laid them on the hearth-rug—these faded things that seemed in some way to waft with the scent of decay unseizable associations of long-gone joy or sorrow. The dust lay thickly over them, as the dust of forgetfulness lay over the memories they invoked. There was a letter from her mother written to her in her babyhood, and the fine, faded handwriting recalled to her the drooping figure—a slight and passionate woman, broken by poverty and disappointments, with vivacious lips and eyes of honest Irish blue. There was a handful of mouldered acorns, gathered by childish fingers on the old plantation; there was the scarlet handkerchief her mammy had worn, and the dance-card of her first ball, with a colorless silk tassel hanging from one end. Then she pushed these things hastily aside and looked for others, as one looks beneath the sentiments for the passions of one's life. She found a photograph of Anthony, pasted on cheap card-board—a face young and intolerant, with the fires of ambition in the eyes and the lines of self-absorption about the mouth. Still looking at the boyish face, she remembered the man that she had seen that morning—the fires of ambition burned to ashes, the self-absorption melted into pain.

With the photograph still in her hand, she turned back to the desk and took out a tiny cambric shirt with hemstitched edges, upon which the narrow lace was yellow and worn. As the little garment fell open in her lap she remembered the day she had worked the hemstitching—a hot August day before the child came, when she had lived like a prisoner in the close rooms, sewing for months upon the dainty slips, and dreaming in that subconscious existence in which women await the birth of a new life. She remembered the day of its coming, her agony, and the first cry of the child; then the weeks when she had lain watching the dressing and undressing of the soft, round body, and then the moist and feeble clutch upon her hand. She remembered the days when it did not leave her arms, the nights when she walked it to and fro, crooning the lullaby revived from her own infancy, and at last the hours when she sat in the half-darkness and watched the life flicker out from the little bluish face upon the pillow.

"Was that yesterday or eight years ago?"

Her tears fell fast upon the tiny shirt, and she folded it and laid it away with the photograph and the other relics—laid away side by side the relics and the recollections covered with dust.

She rose to her feet and carried the desk back to its place in the dressing-room. In a moment she returned and stood silently before the fire, her hand resting upon the mantel-piece, her head leaning upon her arm. She was thinking of the two things a woman never forgets—the voice of the man she has loved and the face of her dead child.

But when she went to bed an hour later there was a smile on her lips.

"I shall see him again," she said. "Perhaps to-morrow."

The next day she went to Nevins's studio and sat for the portrait. Her face was aglow and she talked nervously. He noticed that she started at a noise on the stair, and that her attention wandered from his words. He made daring, if delicate, love to her, but she seemed oblivious of it, and, when she rose to go, remarked that he was depressed. In return, he observed that she was feverish, and advised consulting her physician. "Your eyes are too bright," he said. "What is it?"

"Your reflected brilliancy, perhaps."

"By no means. The lustre is too unnatural."

"Then it is sleeplessness. I lay awake last night."

"Anything the matter? Can I help you?"

She shook her head, smiling.

"I am adjusting a few difficulties," she answered; "chiefly matrimonial, but they belong to my cook."

He looked at her attentively.

"Don't worry," he said. "It is not becoming. The flush is all right, but in time it will give place to discontent. You will sow perplexities to reap—"

"Furrows," finished Mariana. Then she nodded gayly. "What a pessimist you are!" she said. "No, I am going to use the best cosmetic—happiness."

And she lifted her skirts and descended the stairs.

That afternoon she remained in-doors, wandering aimlessly from room to room, opening a book to turn a page or two and to throw it aside for another.

In the evening she went out to dinner, and Ryder, who was among the guests, remarked that he had never seen her in better form. "If there was such a thing as eternally effervescent champagne, I'd compare you to it," he said. "Are you never out of spirits?"

She looked at him with sparkling eyes. "Oh, sometimes," she responded; "but as soon as I discover it, I jump in again."

"And I must believe," he returned, his gaze warming, "that your element is one that cheers but not inebriates."

"You are very charitable. I wonder if all my friends are?"

He lowered his voice and looked into her eyes. "Say all your worshippers," he corrected, and she turned from him to her left-hand neighbor.

She laughed and jested as lightly as if her heart were a feather, and went home at last to weep upon her pillow.

For the next few days she lived like one animated by an unnatural stimulant. She talked and moved nervously, and her eyes shone with suppressed excitement, but she had never appeared more brilliant, and her manner was charged with an irresistible vivacity. To Miss Ramsey she was unusually gentle and generous.

Each morning, on rising, the thought fired her, "He may come to-day"; each night the change was rung to, "He may come to-morrow"; and she would toss feverishly until daybreak, to dress and meet her engagement, with a laugh upon her lips. To a stranger she would have seemed to face pain as she faced joy, with a dauntless insolence to fate. To a closer observer there would have appeared, with the sharper gnawing at her heart, the dash of a freer grace to her gestures, a richer light to her eyes. It was as if she proposed to conquer destiny by the exercise of personal charm.

At the end of the week she came down to luncheon one day with a softer warmth in her face. When the meal was over she went up to her room and called her maid. "I want the gray dress," she said; but when it was laid on the bed she tossed it aside. "It is too gloomy," she complained. "Bring me the red;" and from the red she turned to the green.

She dressed herself with passionate haste, arranging and rearranging the coil of her hair, and altering with reckless fingers the lace at her throat. At last she drew back from the glass, throwing a dissatisfied glance at her reflection—at the green-clad figure and the small and brilliant face, surmounted by its coils of shining brown. Then she added a knot of violets to the old lace on her breast, and went down-stairs to walk the drawing-room floor. An instinctive belief in his coming possessed her. As she walked slowly up and down on the heavy carpet, the long mirrors suspended here and there threw back at her fugitive glimpses of her moving figure. In the dusk of the room beyond she saw herself irradiated by the glimmering firelight.

The hands of the clock upon the mantel travelled slowly round the lettered face. As she watched it she felt a sudden desire to shake them into swiftness. She touched the clock and drew back, laughing at her childishness. A carriage in the street caught her ears and she went to the window, glancing through the half-closed curtains. It passed by. Then a tall, black figure turning the corner arrested her gaze, and her heart leaped suddenly. The figure came on and she saw that it was an elderly clergyman with white hair and a benevolent face. She was seized with anger against him, and her impatience caused her to press her teeth into her trembling lip. In the street a light wind chased a cloud of dust along the sidewalk until it danced in little eddying waves into the gutter. An organ-grinder, passing below, looked up and lifted his hand. She took her purse from the drawer of the desk and threw him some change; but when the broken tune was ground out she shook her head and motioned him away. The sound grated upon her discordant nerves.

She left the window and crossed the room again. The hands of the clock had made a half-hour's progress in their tedious march.

A book of poems lay on the table, and she opened it idly, her mental fever excited by the lighter words of one who had sounded the depths and sunk beneath.

"If Midge will pine and curse its hours away,

Because Midge is not everything—for aye,

Poor Midge thus loses its one summer day,

Loses its all—and winneth what, I pray?"

She threw the book aside and turned away—back to the window where there was dust and wind—back into the still room where the monotonous tick of the clock maddened her quivering mood. She walked to and fro in that silent waiting which is the part of women, and beside which the action of battle is to be faced with a song of thanksgiving.

The trembling of her limbs frightened her, and she flung herself upon a divan. The weakness passed, and she got up again. Another half-hour had gone.

All at once there was a ring at the bell. For an instant she felt her heart contract, and then a delirious dash of blood through her veins to her temples. Her pulses fluttered like imprisoned birds.

A footstep crossed the hall, and the door of the drawing-room opened.

"Mr. Ryder!"

She wavered for an instant and went forward to meet him with an hysterical laugh. Her eyes were like emeralds held before a blaze, and the intense, opaline pallor of her face was warm as if tinged by a flame.

He took her outstretched hand hungrily, his face flushing until the purplish tint rose to his smooth, white forehead.

"Were you expecting me?" he asked. "I would sell my soul to believe that you were—with that look in your eyes."

She shook her head impatiently.

"I was not," she answered. "I was expecting no one. It is very warm in here—that is all."

He looked disappointed.

"Have you ever expected me?" he questioned, moodily—"or thought of me when I was not with you?"

She smiled. "Oh yes!" she returned, lightly. "When I had a note from you saying that you were coming."

He set his teeth.

"You are as cruel as a—a devil, or a woman," he said.

"What you call cruelty," she answered, gently, "is merely a weapon which we sometimes thrust too far. When you talk to me in this way, you force me to use it." And she added, flippantly, "Some day I may thrust it to your heart."

"I wish to God you would!"

But she laughed merrily and led him to impersonal topics, talking rapidly, with a constant play of her slim, white hands. She allowed him no time for protestations. It was all bright, frivolous gossip of the day, with no hint of seriousness. As she talked, there was no sign that her ears were straining for an expected sound, or her flesh quivering with impatience.

At last he rose to go.

"You are the only woman I know," he remarked, as he looked at her with his easy and familiar glance, "who is never dull. How do you manage it?"

"Oh, it is not difficult," she answered. "To laugh is much easier than to cry."

"And much more agreeable. I detest a woman who weeps."

Her brilliant laugh rang out.

"And so do I," she said.

When he had gone, and the house door had closed after him, she crossed to the heavily hanging curtains, pushed them aside, and looked out.

Only dust and wind and gray streets and the sound of the footsteps of a passer-by. From out the blue mist a single light burst, then another and another. She held her head erect, a scornful smile curving her lips.

Again the bell rang, and again she quivered and started forward, listening to the steps that crossed the hall. The door opened.

"Mr. Buisson!"

She hesitated a moment, and then went forward with the same cordial gesture of her cold, white hand.

CHAPTER XI

Father Algarcife was working like a man spurred by an invisible lash. At the breaking of the cold winter dawns he might be seen on his rounds in the mission districts, which began before the early Mass, to end long after dusk, when the calls of his richer parishioners had been treated and dismissed. During the morning celebrations one of the younger priests often noticed that he appeared faint from exhaustion, and attributed it to the strain of several hours' work without nourishment.

One morning, shortly after New Year, John Ellerslie joined him and went in with him to breakfast. It was then he noticed that Father Algarcife ate only cold bread with his coffee, while he apologized for the scantiness of the fare. "It is lack of appetite with me," he explained, "not injudicious fasting;" and he turned to the maid: "Agnes, will you see that Father Ellerslie has something more substantial?" But when cakes and eggs were brought, he pushed them aside, and crumbled, without eating, his stale roll.

The younger man remonstrated, his face flushing from embarrassment.

"I am concerned for your health," he said. "Will you let me speak to Dr. Salvers?"

Father Algarcife shook his head.

"It is nothing," he answered. "But I expect to see Dr. Salvers later in the day, and I'll mention it to him."

Later in the day he did see Salvers, and as they were parting he alluded to the subject of his health.

"I am under a pledge to tell you," he said, lightly, "that I am suffering from loss of appetite and prolonged sleeplessness. I don't especially object to the absence of appetite, but there is something unpleasant about walking the floor all night. I don't want to become a chloral fiend. Can't you suggest a new opiate?"

"Rest," responded Salvers, shortly. "Take a holiday and cut for Florida."

"Impossible. Too much work on hand."

Salvers regarded him intently.

"The next thing, you'll take to bed," he said, irritably, "and I'll have all the ladies of your congregation besieging my office door." He added: "I am going to send you a prescription immediately."

"All right. Thanks. I stop at Brentano's."

He entered the book-shop, and came out in a few moments with a package under his arm. As he stepped to the sidewalk a lady in a rustling gown descended from her carriage and paused as she was passing him.

"I was just going in for a copy of your sermons," she said. "I am distributing quite a number. By the by, have you ever found out who the Scientific Weekly writer really is?"

He looked at her gravely.

"I have a suspicion," he answered, "but suspicions are unjustifiable things at best."

He walked home rapidly, unlatched his outer door, and entered his study. Going to his desk, he took a bunch of keys from his pocket, and, unlocking a drawer, drew out several manuscripts, which he glanced over with a half-humorous expression. One was the manuscript of the volume of addresses he had lately published, the other of the articles which had appeared in the pages of the Scientific Weekly. They were both in his handwriting, but one showed the impassioned strokes of a younger pen, and belonged to the time when he had written under the veil of anonymity, that it might not interfere with the plan of his great work. Now the great work lay at the bottom of the last drawer, with its half-finished sheets yellowed and sown with dust, while the lighter articles had risen after a silence of ten years to assault his unstable present with the convictions of his past.

He crossed to the fireplace and laid both manuscripts upon the coals. They caught, and the leaves curled upward like tongues of flame, illuminating the faded text with scrolls of fire. Then they smouldered to gray spectres and floated in slender spirals up the yawning chimney.

The next day a storm set in, and pearl-gray clouds swollen with snow drove from the northwest. The snow fell thickly through the day, as it had fallen through the night, blown before the wind in fluttering curtains of white, and coating the gray sidewalks, to drift in fleecy mounds into the gutters.

In the evening, when he came in to dinner, he received an urgent message from Mrs. Ryder, which had been sent in the morning and which he had missed by being absent from luncheon. Her child had died suddenly during the night from an attack of croup.

Without removing his coat, he turned and started to her at once, his heart torn by the thought of her suffering.

As he ascended the steps the door was opened by Ryder, who came out and grasped his hand, speaking hurriedly, with a slight huskiness in his voice.

"She has been expecting you," he said, leading him into the hall. "Come up to her immediately. I can do nothing with her. My God! I would have given my right hand to have spared her this." The sincerity in his voice rang true, and there were circles of red about his eyes.

They went up-stairs, and Ryder opened the door of the nursery, and, motioning him inside, closed it softly after him. The room was faintly lighted, the chill curtain of falling snow veiling the windows. On the little bed, where he had seen it sleeping several months ago, the child was lying, its flaxen curls massed upon the embroidered pillow; but the flush of health on the little face had given place to a waxen pallor, and the tiny hands that had tossed restlessly in sleep were still beneath white rose-buds. A faint odor of medicine clung about the room, but the disorder of dying had been succeeded by the order of death.

Mrs. Ryder, sitting near the window, her profile dark against the storm, turned her heavy eyes upon him, and then, rising, came towards him. He caught her extended hands and held them firmly in his own. At that instant the past seemed predominant over the present—and the grief more his own than another's.

"You have come at last," she said. "Help me. You must help me. I cannot live unless you do. Give me some comfort—anything!"

His face was almost as haggard as her own.

"What would comfort you?" he asked.

She turned from him towards the little bed, and, falling on her knees beside it, burst into passionate weeping.

"It was all I had!" she cried. "All I had! O God! How cruel!"

He laid his hand upon her shoulder, not to stay her tears, but to suggest sympathy. Beyond her the sweet, grave face of the dead child lay wreathed in rose-buds.

At his touch she rose and faced him.

"Tell me that I shall see him again!" she cried. "Tell me that he is not dead—that he is somewhere—somewhere! Tell me that God is just!"

His lips were blue, and he put up his hand imploring mercy; then he opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came.

She clung to him, sobbing.

"Pray to God for me," she said.

He staggered for a moment beneath her touch. Then he knelt with her beside the little bed and prayed.

When he walked home through the storm an hour later he reeled like a drunken man, and, despite the cold, his flesh was on fire.

As he entered his door the wind drove a drift of snow into the hall, and the water dripping from his coat made shining pools on the carpet.

He went into his study and slammed the door behind him. The little dog sleeping on the rug came to welcome him, and he patted it mechanically with a nerveless hand. His face was strained and set, and his breath came pantingly. In a sudden revolution the passion which he believed buried forever had risen, reincarnated, to overwhelm him. He lived again, more vitally because of the dead years, the death of a child who was his and the grief of a woman who was his also. He, who had believed himself arbiter of his fate, had awakened to find himself the slave of passion—a passion mighty in its decay, but all victorious in its resurrection. He shivered and looked about him. The room, the fire, the atmosphere seemed thrilled with an emotional essence. He felt it in his blood, and it warmed the falling snow beyond the window. Before the consuming flame the apathy of years was lost in smoke. A memory floated before him. He was sitting again in that silent room, driving the heavy pen, listening to the breathing of his dying child, watching the still droop of Mariana's profile, framed by dusk. He felt her sobbing upon his breast, her hands clinging in pain when he lifted her from beside her dead—and his. He heard again her cry: "Tell me that I shall see her! Tell me that God is just!" The eternal cry of stricken motherhood.

Whatever the present or the future held, these things were locked within the past. He might live them over or live them down, but unlive them he could not. They had been and they would be forever.

The door opened and the servant came in.

"If you please, father, there is a lady to see you."

He looked up, startled.

"A lady? On such a night?"

"She came in a carriage, but she is very wet. Will you see her at once?"

"Yes, at once."

He turned to the door. It opened and closed, and Mariana came towards him.

She came like a ghost, pale and still as he had seen her in his memory, with a veil of snow clinging to her coat and to the feathers in her hat. Her eyes alone were aflame.

He drew back and looked at her.

"You?" he said.

She was silent, holding out her gloved hand with an impulsive gesture. He did not take it. He had made a sudden clutch at self-control, and he clung to it desperately.

"Can I do anything for you?" he asked, and his voice rang hollow and without inflection.

She still held out her hand. Flecks of snow lay on her loosened hair, and the snow was hardly whiter than her face.

"You must speak to me," she said. "You promised to come, and I waited—and waited."

"I was busy," he returned, in the same voice.

"We cannot be as strangers," she went on, passionately. "We must be friends. Can you or I undo the past? Can you or I undo our love—or our child?"

"Hush!" he said, harshly.

"I came only to hear that you forgive me," she continued, a brave smile softening the intensity of her face. "Tell me that and I will go away."

He was silent for a moment; then he spoke.

"I forgive you."

She took a step towards the door and came back.

"And is that all?"

"That is all." Beneath the brutal pressure of his teeth a drop of blood rose to his lips. There was a wave of scarlet before his eyes, and he clinched his hands to keep them at his sides. A terrible force was drawing him to her, impelling him to fall upon her as she stood defenceless—to bear her away out of reach.

She looked at him, and a light flamed in her face.

"It is not all," she retorted, triumphantly. "You have not forgotten me."

He looked at her dully.

"I had—until to-night."

Tears rose to her eyes and fell upon her hands, while the snow on her hair melted and rained down until she seemed to weep from head to foot.

"I was never good enough," she said, brokenly. "I have always done wrong, even when I most wanted to be good." Then she raised her head proudly. "But I loved you," she added. "I never loved any one but you. Will you believe it?"

He shook his head, smiling bitterly. As he stood there in his priestly dress he looked like one in a mighty struggle between the calls of the flesh and of the spirit. The last wavering fires of anger flamed within him, and he took a step towards her.

"Do you think," he asked, slowly, forcing his words, "that I would have left you while there remained a crust to live on? Do you think that I would not have starved with you rather than have lived in luxury without you? Bah! It is all over!"

"I was too young," she answered—"too young. I did not know. I have learned since then."

His outburst had exhausted his bitterness, and a passionate tenderness was in his eyes.

"I would to God that you had been spared the knowledge," he said.

She shook her head.

"No," she responded. "Not that—not that."

She swayed, and he caught her in his arms. For an instant he held her—not in passion, but with a gentleness that was almost cold. Then he released her, and she moved away.

"Good-bye."

"Good-bye."

He followed her into the hall and opened the door. An icy draught blew past him.

"Wait a moment," he said. He took an umbrella from the rack, and, raising it, held it over her until she entered the carriage.

"I hope you will not take cold," he said, as he closed the door.

Then he went back into his study and walked the floor until dawn.

CHAPTER XII

One afternoon during the third week in January, Father Algarcife went to the studio of Claude Nevins, and found the artist smoking a moody pipe over a brandy-and-soda. His brush and palette lay upon the floor.

"How are you?" inquired Father Algarcife, with attempted lightness; "and what are you doing?"

Nevins looked up gloomily, blowing a wreath of gray smoke towards the skylight.

"Enjoying life," he responded.

The other laughed.

"It doesn't look exactly like enjoyment," he returned. "From a casual view, I should call it a condition of boredom."

He had aged ten years in the last fortnight, and his eyes had the shifting look of a man who flees an inward fear.

Nevins regarded him unsmilingly.

"Oh, I like it," he answered, lifting his glass. "Come and join me. I tell you I'd rather be drunk to-day than be President to-morrow."

"What's the matter?"

"Oh, nothing. I haven't done a damned stroke for a week; that's all. I am tired of painting people's portraits."

"Nonsense. Ten years ago you went on a spree because there were no portraits to paint."

"Yes," Nevins admitted, "history repeats itself—with variations. The truth is, Anthony, I can't work."

"Can't? Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"I am going to drink about it."

He drained his glass, laid his pipe aside, and rose, running his hand through his hair until it stood on end.

"Don't be an idiot. You gave all that up long ago."

Nevins filled his glass and looked up at the skylight.

"'Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before

I swore—but was I sober when I swore?'"

he retorted, with a laugh. Then he lowered his voice. "Between you and me," he said, "drinking is not what it is cracked up to be. To save my life, I can't detect a whiff of that old delicious savor of vice. I detect a twinge of gout instead. Coming conditions cast their claws before."

Father Algarcife glanced about the room impatiently.

"Come," he said, "I am hurried. Let's see the portrait."

Nevins tossed a silk scarf from a canvas in the corner, and the other regarded the work for a moment in silence.

"Yes, I like it," he said. "I like it very much indeed."

As he turned away, he stumbled against the easel containing the canvas on which Nevins had been working, and he started and drew back, his face paling. It was the portrait of Mariana, her profile drawn against the purple curtain.

Nevins, following him with his eyes, spoke suddenly.

"That also is good, is it not?" he asked.

Father Algarcife stared above the portrait to the row of death-masks on their ebony frame.

"Yes, that also is good," he repeated.

As he descended the stairs he met Ardly coming up, his eyes bright and his handsome face aglow.

They stopped and shook hands.

"Politics agree with you, I see," said Father Algarcife. "I am glad of it."

Ardly nodded animatedly.

"Yes, yes," he returned, "there is nothing like it, and we are going to give you the best government the city has ever seen. There is no doubt of that."

"All right," and he passed on. When he reached the street he turned westward. It was the brilliant hour of a changeable afternoon, the sunshine slanting across the sidewalks in sharp lights and shadows, and the river wind entering the lungs like the incision of a blade. The people he met wore their collars close about their throats, their faces blue from the cold.

Then, even as he watched the crisp sunshine, a cloud crossed the sky, its shade descending like a gray blotter upon the shivering city.

At first he walked rapidly, but a sudden fatigue seized him, and his pace slackened. He remembered that he had not rested for six hours. In a moment he saw the cross on the steeple of his church emblazoned in fire upon the heavens where the sun had burst forth, and, crossing the street, he pushed the swinging doors and entered softly. It was deserted. With a sensation of relief he passed along the right side aisle, and seated himself within the shadow of the little chapel.

Atmospheric waves of green and gold sifted through the windows and suffused the chancel. Beyond the dusk of the nave he saw the gilded vessels upon the altar and the high crucifix above. A crimson flame was burning in the sanctuary lamp, a symbol of the presence of the sacrament reserved. Above the chancel the figure of the Christ in red and purple was illuminated by the light of the world without.

Suddenly the sound of the organ broke the stillness, and he remembered that it was the day of the choir practising. The disturbance irritated him. During all the years of his priesthood he had not lost his old aversion to music. Now he felt that he loathed it—as he loathed the lie that he was living.

He raised his eyes to the stained-glass window, where the Christ in his purple robes smiled a changeless smile. A swift desire stung him to see the insipid smile strengthen into a frown—to behold an overthrow of the strained monotony. Change for the sake of change were preferable. Only let the still red flame in the sanctuary-lamp send up one fitful blaze, one shadow darken the gilded serenity of the altar. Would it forever face him with that bland assumption of the permanence of creed—the damnation of doubt? Would time never tarnish the blinding brightness of the brazen cross? He shivered as if from cold.

Then the voices of the choir swelled out in a song of exhortation—the passionate and profound exhortation of the "Elijah." In an instant it filled the church, flooding nave and chancel with its anthem of adoration:

Over and over again rang the promise of the prophet:

With the words in his ears he looked at the altar, the white altar-cloth, and the gilded vessels. He saw laid there as a sacrament the bonds of his service. He saw the obligations of a child to the one who had sheltered him, of a boy to the one who had shielded him, of a man to the one who had reached into the gutter and lifted him up. He saw the good he had done, the sick he had healed, the filthy he had made clean. He saw the love of his people—rich and poor—the faiths that would be shattered by the unsealing of his lips, the work of regeneration that would crumble to decay. Looking back, he saw the blessings he had left upon his pathway rotting to curses where they had fallen. Against all this he saw the lie.

But was it really a lie? He did not believe? No, but he begrudged no man his belief. He had extinguished the last embers of intolerance in his heart. The good that he had done in the name of a religion had endeared that religion to the mind that rejected it.

He had taken its armor upon him, and he had borne it victoriously. He had worn unsullied the badge of a creed emblazoned upon his breast, not upon his heart. Was not this justification?

Then, with his eyes upon the altar and the crucifix, beneath the changeless smile of the Christ in purple robes, he knew that it was not. He knew that he had sinned the one sin unpardonable in his own eyes; that he had taken the one step from which for him there was no returning—that the sin was insincerity, and the step the one that hid the face of truth.

He rose and left the church.

It was several days after this that, in unfolding the morning paper, his glance was arrested by the announcement, "The Honorable Mrs. Cecil Gore, who has been dangerously ill of pneumonia, is reported to be convalescent."

The paper shook in his hands, and he laid it hastily aside.

He went out and followed his customary duties, but the thought of Mariana's illness furrowed his mind with a slow fear. It seemed to him then that the mere fact of her existence was all he demanded from fate. Not to see her or to touch her, but to know that she filled a corner of space—that she had her part in the common daily life of the world.

It was Saturday, and the sermon for the next day lay upon his desk. He had written it carefully, with a certain interest in the fact that it would lend itself to oratorical effects—an art which still possessed a vague attraction for him. As he folded the manuscript and placed it in the small black case, the text caught his eye, and he repeated it with an enjoyment of the roll of the words. Then he rose and went out.

In the afternoon, as he was coming out of the church after an interview with the sacristan, he caught sight of Ryder's figure crossing towards him from the opposite corner. He had always entertained a distrust of the man, and yet the anxiety upon his ruddy and well-groomed countenance was so real that he felt an instantaneous throb of sympathy.

Ryder, seeing him, stopped and spoke, "We have been looking for you," he said, "but I suppose you are as much occupied as usual."

"Yes—how is Mrs. Ryder?"

"Better, I think—I hope so. She is going to Florida for February and March. Beastly weather, isn't it? Nevins got off a good thing the other day, by the by. Somebody asked him what he thought of the New York climate, and he replied that New York didn't have a climate—it had unassorted samples of weather."

They walked on, talking composedly, with the same anxiety gnawing the hearts of both.

At the corner Ryder hailed the stage and got inside.

"Come to see Mrs. Ryder," were his parting words. "She depends on you."

Father Algarcife kept on his way to Fifty-seventh Street, where he walked several doors west, and stopped before a house with a brown-stone front.

As he laid his hand on the bell he paled slightly, but when the door was opened he regained his composure.

"I wish to ask how Mrs. Gore is to-day?" he said to the maid, giving his card.

She motioned him into the drawing-room and went up-stairs. In a few minutes she returned to say that Mrs. Gore would receive him, if he would walk up.

On the first landing she opened the door of a tiny sitting-room, closing it when he had entered. He took a step forward and paused. Before the burning grate, on a rug of white fur, Mariana was standing, and through the slender figure, in its blue wrapper, he seemed to see the flames of the fire beyond. She had just risen from a couch to one side, and the pillows still showed the impress of her form. An Oriental blanket lay on the floor, where it had fallen when she started at his entrance.

For a moment neither of them spoke. At the sight of her standing there, her thin hands clasped before her, her beauty broken and dimmed, his passion was softened into pity. In her hollow eyes and haggard cheeks he saw the ravage of pain; in the lines upon brow and temples he read the records of years.

Then a sudden tremor shook him. As she rose before him, shorn of her beauty, her scintillant charm extinguished, her ascendency over him was complete. Now that the brilliancy of her flesh had waned, it seemed to him that he saw shining in her faded eyes the clearer light of her spirit. Where another man would have beheld only a broken and defaced wreckage, he saw the woman who had inspired him with that persistence of passion which feeds upon the shadows as upon the lights, upon the lack as upon the fulfilment.

Mariana came forward and held out her hand.

"It was very kind of you to come," she said.

The rings slipped loosely over her thin fingers. Her touch was very light. He looked at her so fixedly that a pale flush rose to her face.

"You are better?" he asked, constrainedly. "Stronger?"

"Oh yes; I have been out twice—no, three times—in the sunshine."

She seated herself on the couch and motioned him to a chair, but he shook his head and stood looking down at her.

"You must be careful," he said, in the same forced tone. "The weather is uncertain."

"Yes. Dr. Salvers is sending me South."

"And when do you go?"

She turned her eyes away.

"He wishes me to go at once," she said, "but I do not know."

She rose suddenly, her lip quivering.

He drew back and she leaned upon the mantel, looking into the low mirror, which reflected her haggard eyes between two gilded urns.

"I was very ill," she went on. "It has left me so weak, and I—I am looking so badly."

"Mariana!"

She turned towards him, her face white, the lace on her breast fluttering as if from a rising wind.

"Mariana!" he said, again.

He was gazing at her with burning eyes. His hands were clinched at his sides, and the veins on his temples swelled like blue cords.

Then his look met hers and held it, and the desire in their eyes leaped out and closed together, drawing them slowly to each other.

Still they were silent, he standing straight and white in the centre of the room, she shrinking back against the mantel.

Suddenly he reached out.

"Mariana!"

"Anthony!"

She was sobbing upon his breast, his arms about her, her face hidden. The heavy sobs shook her frame like the lashing of a storm, and she braced herself against him to withstand the terrible weeping.

Presently she grew quiet, and he released her. Her face was suffused with a joy that shone through her tears.

"You love me?" she asked.

"I love you."

She smiled.

"I will stay near you," she said. "I will not go South."

For a moment he was silent, and when he spoke his voice rang with determination.

"You will go South," he said, "and I will go with you."

Her eyes shone.

"South? And you with me?"

He smiled into her upturned face.

"Do you think it could be otherwise?" he asked. "Do you think we could be near—and not together?"

"I—I had not thought," she answered.

He held her hands, looking passionately at her fragile fingers.

"You are mine," he said—"mine as you have been no other man's. Nature has joined us together. Who can put us asunder?" Then he held her from him in sudden fear. "But—but can you face poverty again?" he asked.

"What will matter," she replied, "so long as we are together?"

"You will leave all this," he went on. "We will start afresh. We will have a farm in the South. It will be bare and comfortless."

She smiled.

"There will be peach-trees," she said, "all pink in the spring-time, and there will be the sound of cow-bells across green pastures."

"I will turn farmer," he added. "I will wring a living from the soil."

She lifted her glowing eyes.

"And we will begin over again," she said—"begin from the beginning. Oh, my love, kiss me!"

He stooped and kissed her.

CHAPTER XIII

When Anthony descended Mariana's brown-stone steps the afterglow had faded from the west, and far down the street the electric lights shone coldly through frosted globes. He walked with a springing step, lifting his head as if impatient of restraint. His future was firm. There was no hesitancy, no possibility of retrenchment. In one breath he had pledged himself to break the bonds that held him, and this vow there was no undoing. He had sealed it with his passion for a woman. Already his mind was straining towards the freedom which he faced. The years of insincerity would fall away, and the lies which he had uttered would shrivel before one fearless blaze of truth. Fate had settled it. He was free, and deception was at an end. He was free!

In the effort to collect his thoughts before going to dinner he crossed to Broadway, walking several blocks amid the Saturday-evening crowd. He regarded the passing faces idly, as he had regarded them for twenty years. They were the same types, the invincible survivals from a wreck of individuals. He saw the dapper young fellow with the bloodless face, pale with the striving to ascend a rung in the social ladder; he saw the heavy features of the common laborer, the keen, quick glance of the mechanic, and the paint upon the haggard cheeks of the actress who was out of an engagement. They passed him rapidly, pallid, nervous, strung to the point of a breaking note, supine to placid pleasures, and alert to the eternal struggle of the race. When he had walked several blocks he turned and went back. The noise irritated him. He winced at the shrill voices and the insistent clanging of cable-car bells. He wanted to be alone—to think.

In the quiet of the side-street his thoughts assumed more definite shape. The mad thrill of impulse gave place to a rational joy. He possessed her, this was sufficient. She was his to be held forever, come what would. His in wealth and in poverty, in sickness and in health. His for better or for worse—eternally his.

He set his teeth sharply at the memory of her tear-wet face. He felt the trembling of her limbs, the burning pressure of her lips. Broken and worn and robbed of youth—was she not trebly to be desired? Was his the frail passion that exacts perfection? He had not loved beauty or youth; he had loved that impalpable something which resists all ravages of decay—which rises triumphant from death.

Yes, trebly to be desired! He remembered her as he had first seen her, lifting her head from her outstretched arms, her eyes scintillant with tears. He recalled the tremulous voice, the plaintive droop of the head. Then the night when he had held her in the shadow of the fire-escape, her loosened hair falling about him, her hands hot in his own. She had said: "I am yours—yours utterly," and the pledge had held. She was his, first and last. What if another man had embraced her body, from the beginning unto the end her heart was locked in his.

All the trivial details of their old life thronged back to him; struggle and poverty, birth and death, and the emptiness of the ensuing years yawned, chasm-like, before his feet. He was like a man suddenly recalled from the dead—a skeleton reclothed in flesh and reattuned to the changes of sensations. Yes, after eight years he was alive once more.

He entered the rectory, and in a few moments went in to dinner. To his surprise he found that he was hungry, and ate heartily. All instincts, even that for food, had quickened with the rebirth of emotion.

He drank his claret slowly, seeing Mariana seated across from him, and the vision showed her pale and still, as she had come to him the night of the storm, the snow powdering her hair. Then he banished the memory and invoked her image as he had seen her in the afternoon, wan and hollow-eyed, but faintly coloring and tremulous with passion. She would sit opposite him again, but not here.

He had a farm in the South, a valueless piece of land left him by a relative of his mother. It was there that they would go to begin life anew and to mend the faith that had been broken. He would till the land and drive the plough and take up the common round of life again—a life free from action as from failure, into which no changes might ring despair.

He left the table and went into his study, seating himself before the fire. The little dog, with that subtle perception of mental states possessed by animals, pressed his cold nose into the palm of his master's hand, whimpering softly, a wistful look in his warm, brown eyes. Then he lay down, and, resting his head upon his paws, stared into the fire—seeing in the flames his silent visions.

Anthony leaned back upon the cushions, and the face of Mariana looked at him from the vacant chair on the hearth-rug. The reddish shadows from the fire flitted across her features and across the slim, white hand that was half outstretched. He saw the slippered feet upon the rug and a filmy garment in her lap, as the work had fallen from her idle hands.

The maid came in with his coffee and he lighted his pipe. In a moment the bell rang and Ellerslie entered, his face flushed, his hands hanging nervously before him. He sat down in the chair, still warm from the vision of Mariana, and Father Algarcife looked at him with a sudden contraction of remorse. For the first time he winced before the glance of another—of a girlish-looking boy with a tremulous voice and an honest heart. He was looking into the fire when Ellerslie spoke.

"I want you to meet my mother," he said. "You know she is coming to town next week. She is very anxious to know you; I have written so often about you."

The other looked up.

"Next week—ah, yes," he responded. He was thinking that by that time he would have passed beyond the praise or blame of Ellerslie and his mother—he would be with Mariana.

The younger man went on, still flushing.

"She often sends you messages which I don't deliver. She has never forgotten that illness you nursed me through five years ago."

Father Algarcife shook his head slightly, his eyes on the flames that played among the coals.

"She must not exaggerate that," he answered.

Ellerslie opened his mouth, but closed it without speaking. His shyness had overcome him.

For a time they were silent, and then Father Algarcife looked up.

"John," he said.

"Yes?"

"If—if things should ever occur to—to shake your faith in me, you will always remember that I tried to do my best by the parish—that I tried to serve it as faithfully as Father Speares would have done?"

Ellerslie started.

"Of course," he answered—"of course. But why do you say this? Could anything shake my faith in you? I would take your word against—against the bishop's."

Father Algarcife smiled.

"And against myself?" he asked, but added, "I am grateful, John."

When Ellerslie had gone, a man from the Bowery came in to recount a story of suffering. He had just served a year in jail, and did not want to go back. He preferred to live straight. But it took money to do that. His wife, who made shirts, and belonged to Father Algarcife's mission, had sent him to the priest. As he told his story he squirmed uneasily on the edge of Mariana's chair, twirling his shapeless hat in the hands hanging between his knees. The dog crouched against his master's feet, growling suspiciously.

Father Algarcife rested his head against the cushioned back, and regarded the man absently. He believed the man's tale, and he sympathized with his philosophy. It was preferable to live straight, but it took money to do so. Indeed, the wisest of preachers had once remarked that "money answereth all things." He wondered how nearly the preacher spoke the truth, and if he would have recognized a demonstration of his text in the man before him with the shapeless hat.

Then he asked his caller a few questions, promised to look into his case on Monday, and dismissed him.

Next came Sister Agatha, to bring to his notice the name of a child on East Twentieth Street, whom they wished to receive into the orphanage. He promised to consider this also, and she rose to go, her grave lashes falling reverently before his glance. After she had gone he pushed his chair impatiently aside and went to his desk.

On the lid lay the completed sermon, and he realized suddenly that it must be delivered to-morrow—that he must play his part for a while longer. At the same instant he determined that on Monday he would deed over his property to the church. He would face his future with clean hands. He would start again as penniless as when he received the vestments of religion. Save for the farm in the South and a small sum of rental, he would have nothing. He would be free!

There was no hesitancy, and yet, mixed with the elation, there was pain. Beyond Mariana's eyes, beyond the desire for honest speech, he saw the girlish face of young Ellerslie, and the grave, reverential droop of Sister Agatha's lashes. He saw, following him through all his after-years, the reproach of the people who had believed in him and been betrayed. He saw it, and he accepted it in silence.

Raising his head, he encountered the eyes of the ancestor of Father Speares. For an instant he shivered from a sudden chill, and then met them fearlessly.

CHAPTER XIV

Through the long night Mariana lay with her hands clasped upon her breast and her eyes upon the ceiling. The electric light, sifting through the filmy curtains at the windows, cast spectral shadows over the pale-green surface. Sometimes the shadows, tracing the designs on the curtains, wreathed themselves into outlines of large poplar leaves and draped the chandeliers, and again they melted to indistinguishable dusk, leaving a vivid band of light around the cornice.

She did not stir, but she slept little.

In the morning, when Miss Ramsey came to her bedside, there was a flush in her face and she appeared stronger than she had done since her illness.

"Is it clear?" she asked, excitedly. "If it is clear, I must go out. I feel as if I were caged."

Miss Ramsey raised the shades, revealing the murky aspect of a variable day.

"It is not quite clear," she answered. "I don't think you had better venture out. There is a damp wind."

"Very well," responded Mariana. She rose and dressed herself hurriedly; then she sat down with Miss Ramsey to breakfast, but she had little appetite, and soon left the table, to wander about the house with a nervous step.

"I can't settle myself," she said, a little pettishly.

Going up-stairs to her room presently, she threw herself into a chair before the fire, and looked into the long mirror hanging on the opposite wall.

She was possessed with a pulsating memory of the evening before—of Anthony, and of the kiss he had left upon her lips. Then swift darts of fear shot through her that it might all be unreal—that, upon leaving her, he had yielded once more to the sway of his judgment. She did not want judgment, she wanted love.

As she looked at her image in the long mirror, meeting her haggard face and dilated eyes, she grew white with the foreboding of failure. What was there left in her that a man might love? What was she—the wreck of a woman's form—that she could immortalize a man's fugitive desire? Was it love, after all? Was it not pity, passing itself for passion? Her cheeks flamed and her pulses beat feverishly.

She turned from the glass and looked at her walking-gown lying upon the bed.

"I can't wait," she said, breathlessly. "I must see him. He must tell me with his own lips that it is true."

She dressed herself with quivering fingers, stumbling over the buttons of her coat. Then she put on her hat and tied a dark veil over her face.

As she came down-stairs she met Miss Ramsey in the hall.

"Mariana, you are not going out!" she exclaimed.

"Only a little way," said Mariana.

"But it has clouded. It may rain."

"Not before I return. Good-bye."

She opened the hall door. Pausing for an instant upon the threshold, a soft, damp air struck her, and overhead a ray of sunshine pierced the clouds.

She fastened the furs at her throat and descended to the street.

At first she had no definite end in view, but when she had walked a block the idea of seeing Anthony grew stronger, and she turned in the direction of his house. The contact of the moist air invigorated her, and she felt less weak than she had believed herself to be. When she reached the rectory she hesitated a moment with her hand upon the bell, trembling before the thought of seeing him—of hearing him speak. She rang, and the door was opened.

"Can I see Father Algarcife?" she asked.

Agnes eyed her curiously.

"Why, he's at church!" she responded. "He's been gone about a half-hour or so. Is it important?"

"No, no," answered Mariana, her voice recovering. "Don't say I called, please. I'll come again."

"Perhaps you'll step in and rest a bit. You look tired. You can sit in the study if you like."

"Oh no, I will go on. I will go to the church." She started, and then turned back. "I believe I will come in for a few minutes," she said.

She entered the house and passed through the open door into the study. A bright fire was burning, and the dog was lying before it. She seated herself in the easy-chair, resting her head against the cushions. Agnes stood on the rug and looked at her.

"You are the lady that came once in that terrible storm," she said.

"Yes, I am the one."

"Would you like a glass of water—or wine?"

Mariana looked up, in the hope of dismissing her.

"I should like some water, please," she said, and as Agnes went into the dining-room she looked about the luxurious study with passionate eyes.

It was so different from the one at The Gotham, that comfortless square of uncarpeted floor, with the pine book-shelves and the skull and cross-bones above the mantel.

The desk, with its hand-carving of old mahogany, recalled to her the one that he had used when she had first known him, with its green baize cover splotched with ink.

The swing of the rich curtains, the warmth of the Turkish rugs, the portraits in their massive frames, jarred her vibrant emotions. How could he pass from this to the farm in the South—to the old, old fight with poverty and the drama of self-denial? Would she not fail him again, as she had failed him once before? Would she not shatter his happiness in a second chance, as she had shattered it in the first?

The tears sprang to her eyes and scorched her lids. She rose hastily from her chair.

When the servant returned with the glass of water she drank a few swallows. "Thank you," she said, gently. "I will go now. Perhaps I will come again to-morrow."

She passed to the sidewalk and turned in the direction of the church, walking rapidly. She had not thought of his being at church. Indeed, until entering his study she had forgotten the office he held. She had remembered only that he loved her.

As she neared the building an impulse seized her to turn and go back—to wait for him at the rectory. The sound of the intoning of the gospel came to her like a lament. She felt suddenly afraid.

Then several persons brushed her in passing, and she entered the heavy doors, which closed behind her with a dull thud.

After the grayness of the day without, the warmth and color of the interior were as vivid as a revelation. They enveloped her like the perfumed air of a hot-house, heavy with the breath of rare exotics—exotics that had flowered amid the ardent glooms of mediÆvalism and the colorific visions of cloistered emotions. Entering a pew in the side-aisle, she leaned her head against a stone pillar and closed her eyes in sudden restfulness. That emotional, religious instinct which had always been a part of her artistic temperament was quickened in intensity. She felt a desire to worship—something—anything.

When she raised her lids the colors seemed to have settled into harmonious half-tones. The altar, which had at first showed blurred before her eyes, dawned through the rising clouds of incense. She saw the white of the altar-cloth, and the flaming candles, shivering from a slight draught, and above the crucifix the Christ in his purple robes, smiling his changeless smile.

Within the chancel, through the carving of the rood-screen, she saw the flutter of the white gowns of the choristers, and here and there the fair locks of a child.

Then the priest came to the middle of the altar, his figure softened by circles of incense, the sanctuary lamp burning above his head.

He sang the opening phrase of the Creed, and the choir joined in with a full, reverberating roll of male voices, while the heads of the people bowed.

Mariana did not leave her seat, but sat motionless, leaning against the pillar of stone.

From the first moment that she had seen him, wearing the honors of the creed he served, her heart had contracted with a throb of pain. This was his life, and what was hers? What had she that could recompense him for the sacrifice of the Eucharistic robes and the pride of the Cross?

He came slowly forward to the altar steps, his vestments defined against the carving of the screen, his face white beneath the darkness of his hair.

When the notices of the festivals and fasts were over, he lifted his head almost impatiently as he pronounced the text, his rich voice rolling sonorously through the church:

"For who knoweth what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow? For who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?"