Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

CHAPTER I
The Inward Light

ON the day that he returned to Botetourt, it seemed to Ordway that the last vestige of his youth dropped from him; and one afternoon six months later, as he passed some schoolboys who were playing ball in the street, he heard one of them remark in an audible whisper: "Just wait till that old fellow over there gets out of the way." Since coming home again his interests, as well as his power of usefulness, had been taken from him; and the time that he had spent in prison had aged him less than the three peaceful years which he had passed in Botetourt. All that suffering and experience could not destroy had withered and died in the monotonous daily round which carried him from his home to Richard's office and back again from Richard's office to his home.

Outwardly he had grown only more quiet and gentle, as people are apt to do who approach the middle years in a position of loneliness and dependence. To Richard and to Lydia, who had never entirely ceased to watch him, it appeared that he had at last "settled down," that he might be, perhaps, trusted to walk alone; and it was with a sensation of relief that his wife observed the intense youthful beam fade from his blue eyes. When his glance grew dull and lifeless, and his features fell gradually into the lines of placid repose which mark the body's contentment rather than the spirit's triumph, it seemed to her that she might at last lay aside the sleepless anxiety which had been her marriage portion.

"He has become quite like other people now," she said one day to Richard, "do you know that he has grown to take everything exactly as a matter of course, and I really believe he enjoys what he eats."

"I'm glad of that," returned Richard, "for I've noticed that he is looking very far from well. I advised him several weeks ago to take care of that cough, but he seems to have some difficulty in getting rid of it."

"He hasn't been well since Alice's marriage," observed Lydia, a little troubled. "You know he travelled home from Washington in wet clothes and had a spell of influenza afterward. He's had a cold ever since, for I hear him coughing a good deal after he first goes to bed."

"You'd better make him attend to it, I think, though with his fine chest there's little danger of anything serious."

"Do you suppose Alice's marriage could have sobered him? He's grown very quiet and grave, and I dare say it's a sign that his wildness has gone out of him, poor fellow. You remember how his laugh used to frighten me? Well, he never laughs like that now, though he sometimes stares hard at me as if he were looking directly through me, and didn't even know that he was doing it."

As she spoke she glanced out of the window and her eyes fell on Daniel, who came slowly up the gravelled walk, his head bent over an armful of old books he carried.

"He visits a great deal among the poor," remarked Richard, "and I think that's good for him, provided, of course, that he does it with discretion."

"I suppose it is," said Lydia, though she added immediately, "but aren't the poor often very immoral?"

A reply was on Richard's lips, but before he could utter it, the door opened and Daniel entered with the slow, almost timid, step into which he had schooled himself since his return to Botetourt. As he saw Richard a smile—his old boyish smile of peculiar sweetness—came to his lips, but without speaking, he crossed to the table and laid down the books he carried.

"If those are old books, won't you remember to take them up to your room, Daniel?" said Lydia, in her tone of aggrieved sweetness. "They make such a litter in the library."

He started slightly, a nervous affection which had increased in the last months, and looked at her with an apologetic glance. As he stood there she had again that singular sensation of which she had spoken to Richard, as if he were gazing through her and not at her.

"I beg your pardon," he answered, "I remember now that I left some here yesterday."

"Oh, it doesn't matter, of course," she responded pleasantly, "it's only that I like to keep the house tidy, you know."

"They do make rather a mess," he admitted, and gathering them up again, he carried them out of the room and up the staircase.

They watched his bent gray head disappear between the damask curtains in the doorway, and then listened almost unconsciously for the sound of his slow gentle tread on the floor above.

"There was always too much of the dreamer about him, even as a child," commented Richard, when the door was heard to close over their heads, "but he seems contented enough now with his old books, doesn't he?"

"Contented? Yes, I believe he is even happy. I never say much to him because, you see, there is so very little for us to talk about. It is a dreadful thing to confess," she concluded resolutely, "but the truth is I've been always a little afraid of him since—since——"

"Afraid?" he looked at her in astonishment.

"Well, not exactly afraid—but nervous with a kind of panic shudder at times—a dread of his coming close to me, of his touching me, of his wanting things of me." A shiver ran through her and she bit her lip as if to hide the expression of horror upon her face. "There's nobody else on earth that I would say it to, but when he first came back I used to have nightmares about it. I could never get it out of my mind a minute and if they left me alone with him, I wanted almost to scream with nervousness. It's silly I know, and I can't explain it even to you, but there were times when I shrieked aloud in my sleep because I dreamed that he had come into my room and touched me. I felt that I was wrong and foolish, but I couldn't help it, and I tried—tried—oh, so hard to bear things and to be brave and patient."

The tears fell from her eyes on her clasped hands, but her attitude of sorrow only made more appealing the Madonna-like loveliness of her features.

"You've been a saint, Lydia," he answered, patting her drooping shoulder as he rose to his feet. "Poor girl, poor girl! and no daughter of my own could be dearer to me," he added in his austere sincerity of manner.

"I have tried to do right," replied Lydia, lifting her pure eyes to his in an overflow of religious emotion.

Meanwhile the harmless object of their anxiety sat alone in his room under a green lamp, with one of the musty books he had bought open upon his knees. He was not reading, for his gaze was fixed on the opposite wall, and there was in his eyes something of the abstracted vision which Lydia dreaded. It was as if his intellect, forced from the outward experience back into the inner world of thought, had ended by projecting an image of itself into the space at which he looked. While he sat there the patient, apologetic smile with which he had answered to his wife was still on his lips.

"I suppose it's because I'm getting old that people and things no longer make me suffer," he said to himself, "it's because I'm getting old that I can look at Lydia unmoved, that I can feel tenderness for her even while I see the repulsion creep into her eyes. It isn't her fault, after all, that she loathes me, nor is it mine. Yes, I'm certainly an old fellow, the boy was right. At any rate, it's pleasanter, on the whole, than being young."

Closing the book, he laid it on the table, and leaned forward with his chin on his hands. "But if I'd only known when I was young!" he added, "if I'd only known!" His past life rose before him as a picture that he had seen, rather than as a road along which he had travelled; and he found himself regarding it almost as impersonally as he might have regarded the drawing upon the canvas. The peril of the inner life had already begun to beset him—that mysterious power of reliving one's experience with an intensity which makes the objective world appear dull and colourless by contrast. It was with an effort at times that he was able to detach his mind from the contemplative habit into which he had fallen. Between him and his surroundings there existed but a single bond, and this was the sympathy which went out of him when he was permitted to reach the poor and the afflicted. To them he could still speak, with them he could still be mirthful; but from his wife, his uncle, and the members of his own class, he was divided by that impenetrable wall of social tradition. In his home he had ceased to laugh, as Lydia had said; but he could still laugh in the humbler houses of the poor. They had received him as one of themselves, and for this reason alone he could remember how to be merry when he was with them. To the others, to his own people, he felt himself to be always an outsider, a reclaimed castaway, a philanthropic case instead of an individual; and he knew that if there was one proof the more to Lydia that he was in the end a redeemed character, it was the single fact that he no longer laughed in her presence. It was, he could almost hear her say, unbecoming, if not positively improper, that a person who had spent five years in prison should be able to laugh immoderately afterward; and the gravity of his lips was in her eyes, he understood, the most satisfactory testimony to the regeneration of his heart.

And yet Lydia, according to her vision, was a kind, as well as a conscientious woman. The pity of it was that if he were to die now, three years after his homecoming, she would probably reconstruct an imaginary figure of him in her memory, and wear crape for it with appropriate grace and dignity. The works of the imagination are manifold, he thought with a grim humour, even in a dull woman.

But as there was not likely to occur anything so dramatic, in the immediate present, as his death, he wondered vaguely what particular form of aversion his wife's attitude would next express. Or could it be that since he had effaced himself so utterly, he hardly dared to listen to the sound of his footsteps in the house, she had grown to regard him with a kind of quiet tolerance, as an object which was unnecessary, perhaps, yet entirely inoffensive? He remembered now that during those terrible first years in prison he had pursued the thought of her with a kind of hopeless violence, yet to-day he could look back upon her desertion of him in his need with a compassion which forgave the weakness that it could not comprehend. That, too, he supposed was a part of the increasing listlessness of middle age. In a little while he would look forward, it might be, to the coming years without dread—to the long dinners when he sat opposite to her with the festive bowl of flowers between them, to the quiet evenings when she lingered for a few minutes under the lamp before going to her room—those evenings which are the supreme hours of love or of despair. Oh, well, he would grow indifferent to the horror of these things, as he had already grown indifferent to the soft curves of her body. Yes, it was a thrice blessed thing, this old age to which he was coming!

Then another memory flooded his heart with the glow of youth, and he saw Emily, as she had appeared to him that night in the barn more than six years ago, when she had stood with the lantern held high above her head and the red cape slipping back from her upraised arm. A sharp pain shot through him, and he dropped his eyes as if he had met a blow. That was youth at which he had looked for one longing instant—that was youth and happiness and inextinguishable desire.

For a moment he sat with bent head; then with an effort he put the memory from him, and opened his book at the page where he had left off. As he did so there was a tap at his door, and when he had spoken, Lydia came in timidly with a letter in her hand.

"This was put into Uncle Richard's box by mistake," she said, "and he has just sent it over."

He took it from her and seeing that it was addressed in Baxter's handwriting, laid it, still unopened, upon the table. "Won't you sit down?" he asked, pushing forward the chair from which he had risen.

A brief hesitation showed in her face; then as he turned away from her to pick up some scattered papers from the floor, she sat down with a tentative, nervous manner.

"Are you quite sure that you're well, Daniel?" she inquired. "Uncle Richard noticed to-day that you coughed a good deal in the office. I wonder if you get exactly the proper kind of food?"

He nodded, smiling. "Oh, I'm all right," he responded, "I'm as hard as nails, you know, and always have been."

"Even hard people break down sometimes. I wish you would take a tonic or see a doctor."

Her solicitude surprised him, until he remembered that she had never failed in sympathy for purely physical ailments. If he had needed bodily healing instead of mental, she would probably have applied it with a conscientious devotedness.

"I am much obliged to you, but I'm really not sick," he insisted, "it is very good of you, however."

"It is nothing more than my duty," she rejoined, sweetly.

"Well, that may be, but there's nothing to prevent my being obliged to you for doing your duty."

Puzzled as always by his whimsical tone, she sat looking at him with her gentle, uncomprehending glance. "I wish, all the same," she murmured, "that you would let me send you a mustard plaster to put on your chest."

He shook his head without replying in words to her suggestion.

"Do you know it is three months since we had a letter from Alice," he said, "and six since she went away?"

"Oh, it's that then? You have been worrying about Alice?"

"How can I help it? We hardly know even that she is living."

"I've thought of her day and night since her marriage, though it's just as likely, isn't it, that she's taken up with the new countries and her new clothes?"

"Oh, of course, it may be that, but it is the awful uncertainty that kills."

With a sigh she looked down at her slippered feet. "I was thinking to-day what a comfort Dick is to me—to us all," she said, "one is so sure of him and he is doing so splendidly at college."

"Yes," he agreed, "Dick is a comfort. I wish poor Alice was more like him."

"She was always wild, you remember, never like other children, and it was impossible to make her understand that some things were right and some wrong. Yet I never thought that she would care for such a loud, vulgar creature as Geoffrey Heath."

"Did she care for him?" asked Daniel, almost in a whisper, "or was it only that she wanted to see Paris?"

"Well, she may have improved him a little—at least let us hope so," she remarked as if she had not heard his question. "He has money, at any rate, and that is what she has always wanted, though I fear even Geoffrey's income will be strained by her ceaseless extravagance."

As she finished he thought of her own youth, which she had evidently forgotten, and it seemed to him that the faults she blamed most in Alice were those which she had overcome patiently in her own nature.

"I could stand anything better than this long suspense," he said gently.

"It does wear one out," she rejoined. "I am very, very sorry for you."

Some unaccustomed tone in her voice—a more human quality, a deeper cadence, made him wonder in an impulse of self-reproach if, after all, the breach between them was in part of his own making? Was it still possible to save from the ruin, if not love, at least human companionship?

"Lydia," he said, "it isn't Alice, it is mostly loneliness, I think."

Rising from her chair she stood before him with her vague, sweet smile playing about her lips.

"It is natural that you should feel depressed with that cough," she remarked, "I really wish you would let me send you a mustard plaster."

As the cough broke out again, he strangled it hilariously in a laugh. "Oh, well, if it's any comfort to you, I don't mind," he responded.

When she had gone he picked up Baxter's letter from the table and opened it with trembling fingers. What he had expected to find, he hardly knew, but as he read the words, written so laboriously in Baxter's big scrawling writing, he felt that his energy returned to him with the demand for action—for personal responsibility.

"I don't know whether or not you heard of Mrs. Brooke's death three months ago," the letter ran, "but this is to say that Mr. Beverly dropped down with a paralytic stroke last week; and now since he's dead and buried, the place is to be sold for debt and the children sent off to school to a friend of Miss Emily's where they can go cheap. Miss Emily has a good place now in the Tappahannock Bank, but she's going North before Christmas to some big boarding school where they teach riding. There are a lot of things to be settled about the sale, and I thought that, being convenient, you might take the trouble to run down for a day and help us with your advice, which is of the best always.

"Hoping that you are in good health, I am at present,

Baxter."

As he folded the letter a flush overspread his face. "I'll go," he said, with a new energy in his voice, "I'll go to-morrow."

Then turning in response to a knock, he opened the door and received the mustard plaster which Lydia had made.

CHAPTER II
At Tappahannock Again

HE had sent a telegram to Banks, and as the train pulled into the station, he saw the familiar sandy head and freckled face awaiting him upon the platform.

"By George, this is a bully sight, Smith," was the first shout that reached his ears.

"You're not a bit more pleased than I am," he returned laughing with pleasure, as he glanced from the station, crowded with noisy Negroes, up the dusty street into which they were about to turn. "It's like coming home again, and upon my word, I wish I were never to leave here. But how are you, Banks? So you are married to Milly and going to live contented forever afterward."

"Yes, I'm married," replied Banks, without enthusiasm, "and there's a baby about which Milly is clean crazy. Milly has got so fat," he added, "that you'd never believe I could have spanned her waist with my hands three years ago."

"Indeed? And is she as captivating as ever?"

"Well, I reckon she must be," said Banks, "but it doesn't seem so mysterious, somehow, as it used to." His silly, affectionate smile broke out as he looked at his companion. "To tell the truth," he confessed, "I've been missing you mighty hard, Smith, marriage or no marriage. It ain't anything against Milly, God knows, that she can't take your place, and it ain't anything against the baby. What I want is somebody I can sit down and look up to, and I don't seem to be exactly able to look up to Milly or to the baby."

"The trouble with you, my dear Banks, is that you are an incorrigible idealist and always will be. You were born to be a poet and I don't see to save my life how you escaped."

"I didn't. I used to write a poem every Sunday of my life when I first went into tobacco. But after that Milly came and I got used to spending all my Sundays with her."

"Well, now that you have her in the week, you might begin all over again."

They were walking rapidly up the long hill, and as Ordway passed, he nodded right and left to the familiar faces that looked out from the shop doors. They were all friendly, they were all smiling, they were all ready to welcome him back among them.

"The queer part is," observed Banks, with that stubborn vein of philosophy which accorded so oddly with his frivolous features, "that the thing you get doesn't ever seem to be the same as the thing you wanted. This Milly is kind to me and the other wasn't, but, somehow, that hasn't made me stop regretting the other one that I didn't marry—the Milly that banged and snapped at me about my clothes and things all day long. I don't know what it means, Smith, I've studied about it, but I can't understand."

"The meaning of it is, Banks, that you wanted not the woman, but the dream."

"Well, I didn't get it," rejoined Banks, gloomily.

"Yet Milly's a good wife and you're happy, aren't you?"

"I should be," replied Banks, "if I could forget how darn fascinating that other Milly was. Oh, yes, she's a good wife and a doting mother, and I'm happy enough, but it's a soft, squashy kind of happiness, not like the way I used to feel when I'd walk home with you after the preaching in the old field."

While he spoke they had reached Baxter's warehouse, and as Ordway was recognized, there was a quiver of excitement in the little crowd about the doorway. A moment later it had surrounded him with a shout of welcome. A dozen friendly hands were outstretched, a dozen breathless lips were calling his name. As the noise passed through the neighbouring windows, the throng was increased by a number of small storekeepers and a few straggling operatives from the cotton mills, until at last he stopped, half laughing, half crying, in their midst. Ten minutes afterward, when Baxter wedged his big person through the archway, he saw Ordway standing bareheaded in the street, his face suffused with a glow which seemed to give back to him a fleeting beam of the youth that he had lost.

"Well, I reckon it's my turn now. You can just step inside the office, Smith," remarked Baxter, while he grasped Ordway's arm and pulled him back into the warehouse. As they entered the little room, Daniel saw again the battered chair, the pile of Smith's Almanacs, and the paper weight, representing a gambolling kitten, upon the desk.

"I'm glad to see you—we're all glad to see you," said Baxter, shaking his hand for the third time with a grasp which made Ordway feel that he was in the clutch of a down cushion. "It isn't the way of Tappahannock to forget a friend, and she ain't forgotten you."

"It's like her," returned Ordway, and he added with a sigh, "I only wish I were coming back for good, Baxter."

"There now!" exclaimed Baxter, chuckling, "you don't, do you? Well, all I can say, my boy, is that you've got a powerful soft spot that you left here, and your old job in the warehouse is still waiting for you when you care to take it. I tell you what, Smith, you've surely spoiled me for any other bookkeeper, and I ain't so certain, when it comes to that, that you haven't spoiled me for myself."

He was larger, softer, more slovenly than ever, but he was so undeniably the perfect and inimitable Baxter, that Ordway felt his heart go out to him in a rush of sentiment. "Oh, Baxter, how is it possible that I've lived without you?" he asked.

"I don't know, Smith, but it's a plain fact that after my wife—and that's nature—there ain't anybody goin' that I set so much store by. Why, when I was in Botetourt last spring, I went so far as to put my right foot on your bottom step, but, somehow, the left never picked up the courage to follow it."

"Do you dare to tell me that you've been to Botetourt?" demanded Ordway with indignation.

"Well, I could have stood the house you live it, though it kind of took my breath away," replied Baxter, with an embarrassed and guilty air, "but when it came to facing that fellow at the door, then my courage gave out and I bolted. I studied him a long while, thinking I might get my eyes used to the sight of him, but it did no good. I declar', Smith, I could no more have put a word to him than I could to the undertaker at my own funeral. Bless my soul, suh, poor Mr. Beverly, when he was alive, didn't hold a tallow candle to that man."

"You might have laid in wait for me in the street, then, that would have been only fair."

"But how did I know, Smith, that you wan't livin' up to the man at your door?"

"It wouldn't have taken you long to find out that I wasn't. So poor Mr. Beverly is dead and buried, then, is he?"

Baxter's face adopted instantly a funereal gloom, and his voice, when he spoke, held a quaver of regret.

"There wasn't a finer gentleman on earth than Mr. Beverly," he said, "and he would have given me his last blessed cent if he'd ever had one to give. I've lost a friend, Smith, there's no doubt of that, I've lost a friend. And poor Mrs. Brooke, too," he added sadly. "Many and many is the time I've heard Mr. Beverly grieven' over the way she worked. 'If things had only come out as I planned them, Baxter,' he'd say to me, 'my wife should never have raised her finger except to lift food to her lips.'"

"And yet I've seen him send her downstairs a dozen times a day to make him a lemonade," observed Ordway cynically.

"That wasn't his fault, suh, he was born like that—it was just his way. He was always obliged to have what he wanted."

"Well, I can forgive him for killing his wife, but I can't pardon him for the way he treated his sister. That girl used to work like a farm hand when I was out there."

"She was mighty fond of him all the same, was Miss Emily."

"Everybody was, that's what I'm quarreling about. He didn't deserve it."

"But he meant well in his heart, Smith, and it's by that that I'm judgin' him. It wasn't his fault, was it, if things never went just the way he had planned them out? I don't deny, of course, that he was sort of flighty at times, as when he made a will the week before he died and left five hundred dollars to the Tappahannock Orphan Asylum."

"To the Orphan Asylum? Why, his own children are orphans, and he didn't have five hundred dollars to his name!"

"Of course, he didn't, that's just the point," said Baxter with a placid tolerance which seemed largely the result of physical bulk, "and so they have had to sell most of the furniture to pay the bequest. You see, just the night before his stroke, he got himself considerably worked up over those orphans. So he just couldn't help hopin' he would have five hundred dollars to leave 'em when he came to die, an' in case he did have it he thought he might as well be prepared. Then he sat right down and wrote the bequest out, and the next day there came his stroke and carried him off."

"Oh, you're a first-rate advocate, Baxter, but that doesn't alter my opinion of Mr. Beverly. What about his own orphans now? How are they going to be provided for?"

"It seems Miss Emily is to board 'em out at some school she knows of, and I've settled it with her that she's to borrow enough from me to tide over any extra expenses until spring."

"Then we are to wind up the affairs of Cedar Hill, are we? I suppose it's best for everybody, but it makes me sad enough to think of it."

"And me, too, Smith," said Baxter, sentimentally. "I can see Mr. Beverly to the life now playin' with his dominoes on the front porch. But there's mighty little to wind up, when it comes to that. It's mortgaged pretty near to the last shingle, and when the bequest to the orphans is paid out of what's over, there'll be precious few dollars that Miss Emily can call her own. The reason I sent for you, Smith," he added in a solemn voice, "was that I thought you might be some comfort to that poor girl out there in her affliction. If you feel inclined, I hoped you'd walk out to Cedar Hill and read her a chapter or so in the Bible. I remembered how consolin' you used to be to people in trouble."

With a prodigious effort Ordway swallowed his irreverent mirth, while Baxter's pious tones sounded in his ears. "Of course I shall go out to Cedar Hill," he returned, "but I was wondering, Baxter," he broke off for a minute and then went on again with an embarrassed manner, "I was wondering if there was any way I could help those children without being found out? It would make me particularly happy to feel that I might share in giving them an education. Do you think you could smuggle the money for their school bills into their Christmas stockings?"

Baxter thought over it a moment. "I might manage it," he replied, "seein' that the bills are mostly to come through my hands, and I'm to settle all that I can out of what's left of the estate."

As he paused Daniel looked hastily away from him, fearful lest Baxter might be perplexed by the joy that shone in his face. To be connected, even so remotely, with Emily in the care of Beverly's children, was a happiness for which, a moment ago, he had not dared to hope.

"Let me deposit the amount with you twice a year," he said, "that will be both the easiest and the safest way."

"Maybe you're right. And now it's settled, ain't it, that you're to come to my house to stay?"

"I must go back on the night train, I'm sorry to say, but if you'll let me I'll drop in to supper. I remember your wife's biscuits of old," he added, smiling.

"You don't mean it! Well, it'll tickle her to death, I reckon. It ain't likely, by the way, that you'll find much to eat out at Cedar Hill, so you'd better remember to have a snack before you start."

"Oh, I can fast until supper," returned Daniel, rising.

"Well, don't forget to give my respects to Miss Emily, and tell her I say not to worry, but to let the Lord take a turn. You'll find things pretty topsy-turvy out there, Smith," he added, "but if you don't happen to have your Bible handy, I'll lend you one and welcome. There's the big one with gilt clasps the boys gave me last Christmas right on top of my desk."

"Oh, they're sure to have one around," replied Ordway gravely, as he shook hands again before leaving the office.

From the top of the hill by the brick church, he caught a glimpse of the locust trees in Mrs. Twine's little yard, and turning in response to a remembered force of habit, he followed the board sidewalk to the whitewashed gate, which hung slightly open. In the street a small boy was busily flinging pebbles at the driver of a coal wagon, and calling the child to him, Ordway inquired if Mrs. Twine still lived in that house.

"Thar ain't no Mrs. Twine," replied the boy, "she's Mrs. Buzzy. She married my pa, that's why I'm here," he explained with a wink, as the door behind him flew open, and the lady in question rushed out to welcome her former lodger. "I hear her now—she's a-comin'. My, an' she's a tartar, she is!"

"It's the best sight I've laid eyes on sense I saw po', dear Bill on his deathbed," exclaimed the tartar, with delight. "Come right in, suh, come right in an' set down an' let me git a look at you. Thar ain't much cheer in the house now sence I've lost Bill an' his sprightly ways, but the welcome's warm if the house ain't."

She brought him ceremoniously into her closed parlour, and then at his request led him out of the stagnant air back into her comfortable, though untidy, kitchen. "I jest had my hand in the dough, suh, when I heard yo' voice," she observed apologetically, as she wiped off the bottom of a chair with her blue gingham apron. "I knew you'd be set back to find out I didn't stay long a widder."

"I hadn't even heard of Bill's death," he returned, "so it was something of a surprise to discover that you were no longer Mrs. Twine. Was it very sudden?"

"Yes, suh, 'twas tremens—delicious tremens—an' they took him off so quick we didn't even have the crape in the house to tie on the front do' knob. You could a heard him holler all the way down to the cotton mills. He al'ays had powerful fine lungs, had Bill, an' if he'd a-waited for his lungs to take him, he'd be settin' thar right now, as peart as life."

Her eyes filled with tears, but wiping them hastily away with her apron, she took up a pan of potatoes and began paring them with a handleless knife.

"After your former marriages," he remarked doubtful as to whether he should offer sympathy or congratulations, "I should have thought you would have rested free for a time at least."

"It warn't my way, Mr. Smith," she responded, with a mournful shake of her head. "To be sure I had a few peaceful months arter Bill was gone, but the queer thing is how powerful soon peace can begin to pall on yo' taste. Why, I hadn't been in mo'nin' for Bill goin' on to four months, when Silas Trimmer came along an' axed me, an' I said 'yes' as quick as that, jest out a the habit of it. I took off my mo'nin' an' kep' comp'ny with him for quite a while, but we had a quarrel over Bill's tombstone, suh, for, bein' a close-fisted man, he warn't willin' that I should put up as big a monument as I'd a mind to. Well, I broke off with him on that account, for when it comes to choosin' between respect to the dead an' marriage to the livin' Silas Trimmer, I told him 'I reckon it won't take long for you to find out which way my morals air set.' He got mad as a hornet and went off, and I put on mo'nin' agin an' wo' it steddy twil the year was up."

"And at the end of that time, I presume, you were wearied of widowhood and married Buzzy?"

"It's a queer thing, suh," she observed, as she picked up a fresh potato and inspected it as attentively as if it had been a new proposal, "it's a queer thing we ain't never so miserable in this world as when we ain't got the frazzle of an excuse to be so. Now, arter Bill went from me, thar was sech a quiet about that it began to git on my nerves, an' at last it got so that I couldn't sleep at nights because I was no longer obleeged to keep one ear open to hear if he was comin' upstairs drunk or sober. Bless yo' heart, thar's not a woman on earth that don't need some sort of distraction, an Bill was a long sight better at distractin' you than any circus I've ever seen. Why, I even stopped goin' to 'em as long as he was livin', for it was a question every minute as to whether he was goin' to chuck you under the chin or lam you on the head, an' thar was a mortal lot a sprightliness about it. I reckon I must have got sort a sp'iled by the excitement, for when 't was took away, I jest didn't seem to be able to settle down. But thar are mighty few men with the little ways that Bill had," she reflected sadly.

"Yet your present husband is kind to you, is he not?"

"Oh, he's kind enough, suh," she replied, with unutterable contempt, "but thar ain't nothin' in marriage that palls so soon as kindness. It's unexpectedness that keeps you from goin' plum crazy with the sameness of it, an' thar ain't a bit of unexpectedness about Jake. He does everything so regular that thar're times when I'd like to bust him open jest to see how he is wound up inside. Naw, suh, it ain't the blows that wears a woman out, it's the mortal sameness."

Clearly there was no comfort to be afforded her, and after a few words of practical advice on the subject of the children's education, he shook hands with her and started again in the direction of Cedar Hill.

The road with its November colours brought back to him the many hours when he had tramped over it in cheerfulness or in despair. The dull brown stretches of broomsedge, rolling like a high sea, the humble cabins, nestling so close to the ground, the pale clay road winding under the half-bared trees, from which the bright leaves were fluttering downward—these things made the breach of the years close as suddenly as if the divided scenery upon a stage had rolled together. While he walked alone here it was impossible to believe in the reality of his life in Botetourt.

As he approached Cedar Hill, the long melancholy avenue appeared to him as an appropriate shelter for Beverly's gentle ghost. He was surprised to discover with what tenderness he was able to surround the memory of that poetic figure since he stood again in the atmosphere which had helped to cultivate his indefinable charm. In Tappahannock Beverly's life might still be read in the dry lines of prose, but beneath the historic influences of Cedar Hill it became, even in Ordway's eyes, a poem of sentiment.

Beyond the garden, he could see presently, through a gap in the trees, the silvery blur of life everlasting in the fallow land, which was steeped in afternoon sunshine. Somewhere from a nearer meadow there floated a faint call of "Coopee! Coopee! Coopee!" to the turkeys lost in the sassafras. Then as he reached the house Aunt Mehitable's face looked down at him from a window in the second story: and in response to her signs of welcome, he ascended the steps and entered the hall, where he stopped upon hearing a child's voice through the half open door of the dining-room.

"May I wear my coral beads even if I am in mourning, Aunt Emily?"

"Not yet, Bella," answered Emily's patient yet energetic tones. "Put them away awhile and they'll be all the prettier when you take them out again."

"But can't I mourn for papa and mamma just as well in my beads as I can without them?"

"That may be, dear, but we must consider what other people will say."

"What have other people got to do with my mourning, Aunt Emily?"

"I don't know, but when you grow up you'll find that they have something to do with everything that concerns you."

"Well, then, I shan't mourn at all," replied Bella, defiantly. "If you won't let me mourn in my coral beads, I shan't mourn a single bit without them."

"There, there, Bella, go on with your lesson," said Emily sternly, "you are a naughty girl."

At the sound of Ordway's step on the threshold, she rose to her feet, with a frightened movement, and stood, white and trembling, her hand pressed to her quivering bosom.

"You!" she cried out sharply, and there was a sound in her voice that brought him with a rush to her side. But as he reached her she drew quickly away, and hiding her face in her hands, broke into passionate weeping.

It was the first time that he had seen her lose her habit of self-command, and while he watched her, he felt that each of her broken sobs was wrung from his own heart.

"I was a fool not to prepare you," he said, as he placed a restraining hand on the awe-struck Bella. "You've had so many shocks I ought to have known—I ought to have foreseen——"

At his words she looked up instantly, drying her tears on a child's dress which she was mending. "You came so suddenly that it startled me, that is all," she answered. "I thought for a minute that something had happened to you—that you were an apparition instead of a reality. I've got into the habit of seeing ghosts of late."

"It's a bad habit," he replied, as he pushed Bella from the room and closed the door after her. "But I'm not a ghost, Emily, only a rough and common mortal. Baxter wrote me of Beverly's death, so I came thinking that I might be of some little use. Remember what you promised me in Botetourt."

As he looked at her now more closely, he saw that the clear brown of her skin had taken a sallow tinge, as if she were very weary, and that there were faint violet shadows in the hollows beneath her eyes. These outward signs of her weakness moved him to a passion deeper and tenderer than he had ever felt before.

"I have not forgotten," she responded, after a moment in which she had recovered her usual bright aspect, "but there is really nothing one can do, it is all so simple. The farm has already been sold for debt, and so I shall start in the world without burdens, if without wealth."

"And the children? What of them?"

"That is arranged, too, very easily. Blair is fifteen now, and he will be given a scholarship at college. The girls will go to a friend of mine, who has a boarding school and has made most reasonable terms."

"And you?" he asked in a voice that expressed something of the longing he could not keep back. "Is there to be nothing but hard work for you in the future?"

"I am not afraid of work," she rejoined, smiling, "I am afraid only of reaching a place where work does not count."

As he made no answer, she talked on brightly, telling him of her plans for the future, of the progress the children had shown at their lessons, of the arrangements she had made for Aunt Mehitable and Micah, and of the innumerable changes which had occurred since he went away. So full of life, of energy, of hopefulness, were her face and voice that but for her black dress he would not have suspected that she had stood recently beside a deathbed. Yet as he listened to her, his heart was torn by the sharp anguish of parting, and when presently she began to question him about his life in Botetourt, it was with difficulty that he forced himself to reply in a steady voice. All other memories of her would give way, he felt, before the picture of her in her black dress against the burning logs, with the red firelight playing over her white face and hands.

An hour later, when he rose to go, he took both of her hands in his, and bending his head laid his burning forehead against her open palms.

"Emily," he said, "tell me that you understand."

For a moment she gazed down on him in silence. Then, as he raised his eyes, she kissed him so softly that it seemed as if a spirit had touched his lips.

"I understand—forever," she answered.

At her words he straightened himself, as though a burden had fallen from him, and turning slowly away he went out of the house and back in the direction of Tappahannock.

CHAPTER III
Alice's Marriage

IT was after ten o'clock when he returned to Botetourt, and he found upon reaching home that Lydia had already gone to bed, though a bottle of cough syrup, placed conspicuously upon his bureau, bore mute witness to the continuance of her solicitude. After so marked a consideration it seemed to him only decent that he should swallow a portion of the liquid; and he was in the act of filling the tablespoon she had left, when a ring at the door caused him to start until the medicine spilled from his hand. A moment later the ring was repeated more violently, and as he was aware that the servants had already left the house, he threw on his coat, and lighting a candle, went hurriedly out into the hall and down the dark staircase. The sound of a hand beating on the panels of the door quickened his steps almost into a run, and he was hardly surprised, when he had withdrawn the bolts, to find Alice's face looking at him from the darkness outside. She was pale and thin, he saw at the first glance, and there was an angry look in her eyes, which appeared unnaturally large in their violent circles.

"I thought you would never open to me, papa," she said fretfully as she crossed the threshold. "Oh, I am so glad to see you again! Feel how cold my hands are, I am half frozen."

Taking her into his arms, he kissed her face passionately as it rested for an instant against his shoulder.

"Are you alone, Alice? Where is your husband?"

Without answering, she raised her head, shivering slightly, and then turning away, entered the library where a log fire was smouldering to ashes. As he threw on more wood, she came over to the hearth, and stretched out her hands to the warmth with a nervous gesture. Then the flame shot up and he saw that her beauty had gained rather than lost by the change in her features. She appeared taller, slenderer, more distinguished, and the vivid black and white of her colouring was intensified by the perfect simplicity of the light cloth gown and dark furs she wore.

"Oh, he's at home," she answered, breaking the long silence. "I mean he's in the house in Henry Street, but we had a quarrel an hour after we got back, so I put on my hat again and came away. I'm not going back—not unless he makes it bearable for me to live with him. He's such—such a brute that it's as much as one can do to put up with it, and it's been killing me by inches for the last months. I meant to write you about it, but somehow I couldn't, and yet I knew that I couldn't write at all without letting you see it. Oh, he's unbearable!" she exclaimed, with a tremor of disgust. "You will never know—you will never be able to imagine all that I've been through!"

"But is he unkind to you, Alice? Is he cruel?"

She bared her arm with a superb disdainful gesture, and he saw three rapidly discolouring bruises on her delicate flesh. The sight filled him with loathing rather than anger, and he caught her to him almost fiercely as if he would hold her not only against Geoffrey Heath, but against herself.

"You shall not go back to him," he said, "I will not permit it!"

"The worst part is," she went on vehemently, as if he had not spoken, "that it is about money—money—always money. He has millions, his lawyers told me so, and yet he makes me give an account to him of every penny that I spend. I married him because I thought I should be rich and free, but he's been hardly better than a miser since the day of the wedding. He wants me to dress like a dowdy, for all his wealth, and I can't buy a ring that he doesn't raise a terrible fuss. I hate him more and more every day I live, but it makes no difference to him as long as he has me around to look at whenever he pleases. I have to pay him back for every dollar that he gives me, and if I keep away from him and get cross, he holds back my allowance. Oh, it's a dog's life!" she exclaimed wildly, "and it is killing me!"

"You shan't bear it, Alice. As long as I'm alive you are safe with me."

"For a time I could endure it because of the travelling and the strange countries," she resumed, ignoring the tenderness in his voice, "but Geoffrey was so frightfully jealous that if I so much as spoke to a man, he immediately flew into a rage. He even made me leave the opera one night in Paris because a Russian Grand Duke in the next box looked at me so hard."

Throwing herself into a chair, she let her furs slip from her shoulders, and sat staring moodily into the fire. "I've sworn a hundred times that I'd leave him," she said, "and yet I've never done it until to-night."

While she talked on feverishly, he untied her veil, which she had tossed back, and taking off her hat, pressed her gently against the cushions he had placed in her chair.

"You look so tired, darling, you must rest," he said.

"Rest! You may as well tell me to sleep!" she exclaimed. Then her tone altered abruptly, and for the first time, she seemed able to penetrate beyond her own selfish absorption. "Oh, you poor papa, how very old you look!" she said.

Taking his head in her arms, she pressed it to her bosom and cried softly for a minute. "It's all my fault—everything is my fault, but I can't help it. I'm made that way." Then pushing him from her suddenly, she sprang to her feet and began walking up and down in her restless excited manner.

"Let me get you a glass of wine, Alice," he said, "you are trembling all over."

She shook her head. "It isn't that—it isn't that. It's the awful—awful money. If it wasn't for the money I could go on. Oh, I wish I'd never spent a single dollar! I wish I'd always gone in rags!"

Again he forced her back into her chair and again, after a minute of quiet, she rose to her feet and broke into hysterical sobs.

"All that I have is yours, Alice, you know that," he said in the effort to soothe her, "and, besides, your own property is hardly less than two hundred thousand."

"But Uncle Richard won't give it to me," she returned angrily. "I wrote and begged him on my knees and he still refused to let me have a penny more than my regular income. It's all tied up, he says, in investments, and that until I am twenty-one it must remain in his hands."

With a frantic movement, she reached for her muff, and drew from it a handful of crumpled papers, which she held out to him. "Geoffrey found these to-night and they brought on the quarrel," she said. "Yesterday he gave me this bracelet and he seems to think I could live on it for a month!" She stretched out her arm, as she spoke, and showed him a glittering circle of diamonds immediately below the blue finger marks. "There's a sable coat still that he doesn't know a thing of," she finished with a moan.

Bending under the lamp, he glanced hurriedly over the papers she had given him, and then rose to his feet still holding them in his hand.

"These alone come to twenty thousand dollars, Alice," he said with a gentle sternness.

"And there are others, too," she cried, making no effort to control her convulsive sobs. "There are others which I didn't dare even to let him see."

For a moment he let her weep without seeking to arrest her tears.

"Are you sure this will be a lesson to you?" he asked at last. "Will you be careful—very careful from this time?"

"Oh, I'll never spend a penny again. I'll stay in Botetourt forever," she promised desperately, eager to retrieve the immediate instant by the pledge of a more or less uncertain future.

"Then we must help you," he said. "Among us all—Uncle Richard, your mother and I—it will surely be possible."

Pacified at once by his assurance, she sat down again and dried her eyes in her muff.

"It seems a thousand years since I went away," she observed, glancing about her for the first time. "Nothing is changed and yet everything appears to be different."

"And are you different also?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm older and I've seen a great deal more," she responded, with a laugh which came almost as a shock to him after her recent tears, "but I still want to go everywhere and have everything just as I used to."

"But I thought you were determined to stay in Botetourt for the future?" he suggested.

"Well, so I am, I suppose," she returned dismally, "there's nothing else for me to do, is there?"

"Nothing that I see."

"Then I may as well make up my mind to be miserable forever. It's so frightfully gloomy in this old house, isn't it? How is mamma?"

"She's just as you left her, neither very well nor very sick."

"So it's exactly what it always was, I suppose, and will drive me to distraction in a few weeks. Is Dick away?"

"He's at college, and he's doing finely."

"Of course he is—that's why he's such a bore."

"Let Dick alone, Alice, and tell me about yourself. So you went to Europe immediately after I saw you in Washington?"

"Two days later. I was dreadfully seasick, and Geoffrey was as disagreeable as he could be, and made all kinds of horrid jokes about me."

"You went straight to Paris, didn't you?"

"As soon as we landed, but Geoffrey made me come away in three weeks because he said I spent so much money." Her face clouded again at the recollection of her embarrassments. "Oh, we had awful scenes, but I hadn't even a wedding dress, you know, and French dressmakers are so frightfully expensive. One of them charged me five thousand dollars for a gown—but he told me that it was really cheap, because he'd sold one to another American the day before for twelve thousand. I don't know who her husband is," she added wistfully, "but I wish I were married to him."

The wildness of her extravagance depressed him even more than her excessive despair had done; and he wondered if the vagueness of her ideas of wealth was due to the utter lack in her of the imagination which foresees results? She had lived since her girlhood in a quiet Virginia town, her surroundings had been comparatively simple, and she had never been thrown, until her marriage, amid the corrupting influences of great wealth, yet, in spite of these things, she had squandered a fortune as carelessly as a child might have strewed pebbles upon the beach. Her regret at last had come not through realisation of her fault, but in the face of the immediate punishment which threatened her.

"So he got you out of Paris? Well, I'm glad of that," he remarked.

"He was perfectly brutal about it, I wish you could have heard him. Then we went down into Italy and did nothing for months but look at old pictures—at least I did, he wouldn't come—and float around in a gondola until I almost died from the monotony. It was only after I found a lace shop, where they had the most beautiful things, that he would take me away, and then he insisted upon going to some little place up in the Alps because he said he didn't suppose I could possibly pack the mountains into my trunks. Oh, those dreadful mountains! They were so glaring I could never go out of doors until the afternoon, and Geoffrey would go off climbing or shooting and leave me alone in a horrid little hotel where there was nobody but a one-eyed German army officer, and a woman missionary who was bracing herself for South Africa. She wore a knitted jersey all day and a collar which looked as if it would cut her head off if she ever forgot herself and bent her neck." Her laughter, the delicious, irresponsible laughter of a child, rippled out: "She asked me one day if our blacks wore draperies? The ones in South Africa didn't, and it made it very embarrassing sometimes, she said, to missionary to them. Oh, you can't imagine what I suffered from her, and Geoffrey was so horrid about it, and insisted that she was just the sort of companion that I needed. So one day when he happened to be in the writing-room where she was, I locked the door on the outside and threw the key down into the gorge. There wasn't any locksmith nearer than twenty miles, and when they sent for him he was away. Oh, it was simply too funny for words! Geoffrey on the inside was trying to break the heavy lock and the proprietor on the outside was protesting that he mustn't, and all the time we could hear the missionary begging everybody please to be patient. She said if it were required of her she was quite prepared to stay locked up all night, but Geoffrey wasn't, so he swung himself down by the branches of a tree which grew near the window."

All her old fascination had come back to her with her change of mood, and he forgot to listen to her words while he watched the merriment sparkle in her deep blue eyes. It was a part of his destiny that he should submit to her spell, as, he supposed, even Geoffrey submitted at times.

He was about to make some vague comment upon her story, when her face changed abruptly into an affected gravity, and turning his head, he saw that Lydia had come noiselessly into the room, and was advancing to meet her daughter with outstretched arms.

"Why, Alice, my child, what a beautiful surprise! When did you come?"

As Alice started forward to her embrace, Ordway noticed that there was an almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles of her body.

"Only a few minutes ago," she replied, with the characteristic disregard of time which seemed, in some way, to belong to her inability to consider figures, "and, oh, I am so glad to be back! You are just as lovely as ever."

"Well, you are lovelier," said Lydia, kissing her, and adding a moment afterward, as the result of her quick, woman's glance, "what a charming gown!"

Alice shrugged her shoulders, with a foreign gesture which she had picked up. "Oh, you must see some of my others," she replied, "I wish that my trunks would come, but I forgot they were all sent to the other house, and I haven't even a nightgown. Will you lend me a nightgown, mamma? I have some of the loveliest you ever saw which were embroidered for me by the nuns in a French convent."

"So, you'll spend the night?" said Lydia, "I'm so glad, dear, and I'll go up and see if your bed has sheets on it."

"Oh, it's not only for the night," returned Alice, defiantly, "I've come back for good. I've left Geoffrey, haven't I, papa?"

"I hope so, darling," answered Ordway, coming for the first time over to where they stood.

"Left Geoffrey?" repeated Lydia. "Do you mean you've separated?"

"I mean I'm never going back again—that I detest him—that I'd rather die—that I'll kill myself before I'll do it."

Lydia received her violence with the usual resigned sweetness that she presented to an impending crisis.

"But, my dear, my dear, a divorce is a horrible thing!" she wailed.

"Well, it isn't half so horrible as Geoffrey," retorted Alice.

Ordway, who had turned away again as Lydia spoke, came forward at the girl's angry words, and caught the hand that she had stretched out as if to push her mother from her.

"Let's be humbly grateful that we've got her back," he said, smiling, "while we prepare her bed."

CHAPTER IV
The Power of the Blood

WHEN he came out into the hall the next morning, Lydia met him, in her dressing-gown, on her way from Alice's room.

"How is she?" he asked eagerly. "Did she sleep?"

"No, she was very restless, so I stayed with her. She went home a quarter of an hour ago."

"Went home? Do you mean she's gone back to that brute?"

A servant's step sounded upon the staircase, and with her unfailing instinct for propriety, she drew back into his room and lowered her voice.

"She said that she was too uncomfortable without her clothes and her maid, but I think she had definitely made up her mind to return to him."

"But when did she change? You heard her say last night that she would rather kill herself."

"Oh, you know Alice," she responded a little wearily; and for the first time it occurred to him that the exact knowledge of Alice might belong, after all, not to himself, but to her.

"You think, then," he asked, "that she meant none of her violent protestations of last night?"

"I am sure that she meant them while she uttered them—not a minute afterward. She can't help being dramatic any more than she can help being beautiful."

"Are you positive that you said nothing to bring about her decision? Did you influence her in any way?"

"I did nothing more than tell her that she must make her choice once for all—that she must either go back to Geoffrey Heath and keep up some kind of appearances, or publicly separate herself from him. I let her see quite plainly that a state of continual quarrels was impossible and indecent."

Her point of view was so entirely sensible that he found himself hopelessly overpowered by its unassailable logic.

"So she has decided to stick to him for better or for worse, then?"

"For the present at all events. She realised fully, I think, how much she would be obliged to sacrifice by returning home?"

"Sacrifice? Good God, what?" he demanded.

"Oh, well, you see, Geoffrey lives in a fashion that is rather grand for Botetourt. He travels a great deal, and he makes her gorgeous presents when he is in a good humour. She seemed to feel that if we could only settle these bills for her, she would be able to bring about a satisfactory adjustment. I was surprised to find how quietly she took it all this morning. She had forgotten entirely, I believe, the scene she made downstairs last night."

This was his old Alice, he reflected in baffled silence, and apparently he would never attain to the critical judgment of her. Well, in any case, he was able to do justice to Lydia's admirable detachment.

"I suppose I may have a talk with Heath anyway?" he said at last.

"She particularly begs you not to, and I feel strongly that she is right."

"Does she expect me to sit quietly by and see it go on forever? Why, there were bruises on her arm that he had made with his fingers."

Lydia paled as she always did when one of the brutal facts of life was thrust on her notice.

"Oh, she doesn't think that will happen again. It appears that she had lost her temper and tried her best to infuriate him. He is still very much in love with her at times, and she hopes that by a little diplomacy she may be able to arrange matters between them."

"Diplomacy with that insufferable cad! Pshaw!"

Lydia sighed, not in exasperation, but with the martyr's forbearance.

"It is really a crisis in Alice's life," she said, "and we must treat it with seriousness."

"I was never more serious in my life. I'm melancholy. I'm abject."

"Last night she told me that Geoffrey threatened to go West and get a divorce, and this frightened her."

"But I thought it was the very thing she wanted," he urged in bewilderment. "Hadn't she left him last night for good and all?"

"She might leave him, but she could not give up his money. It is impossible, I suppose, for you to realise her complete dependence upon wealth—the absurdity of her ideas about the value of money. Why, her income of five thousand which Uncle Richard allows her would not last her a month."

"I realised a little of this when I glanced over those bills she gave me."

"Of course we shall pay those ourselves, but what is twenty thousand dollars to her, when Geoffrey seems to have paid out a hundred thousand already. He began, I can see, by being very generous, but she confessed to me this morning that other bills were still to come in which she would not dare to let him see. I told her that she must try to meet these out of her income, and that we would reduce our living expenses as much as possible in order to pay those she gave you."

"I shall ask Uncle Richard to advance this out of my personal property," he said.

"But he will not do it. You know how scrupulous he is about all such matters, and he told me the other day that your father's will had clearly stated that the money was not to be touched unless he should deem it for your interest to turn it over to you."

Her command of the business situation amazed him, until he remembered her long conversations with Richard Ordway, whose interests were confined within strictly professional limits. His fatal mistake in the past, he saw now, was that he had approached her, not as a fellow mortal, but as a divinity; for the farther he receded from the attitude of worship, the more was he able to appreciate the quality of her practical virtues. In spite of her poetic exterior, it was in the rosy glow of romance that she showed now as barest of attractions. The bottle of cough syrup on his bureau still testified to her ability to sympathise in all cases where the imagination was not required to lend its healing insight.

"But surely it is to my interest to save Alice," he said after a pause.

"I think he will feel that it must be done by the family, by us all," she answered, "he has always had so keen a sense of honour in little things."

An hour later, when he broached the subject to Richard in his office, he found that Lydia was right, as usual, in her prediction; and with a flash of ironic humour, he pictured her as enthroned above his destiny, like a fourth fate who spun the unyielding thread of common sense.

"Of course the debt must be paid if it is a condition of Alice's reconciliation with her husband," said the old man, "but I shall certainly not sacrifice your securities in order to do it. Such an act would be directly against the terms of your father's will."

There was no further concession to be had from him, so Daniel turned to his work, half in disappointment, half in admiration of his uncle's loyalty to the written word.

When he went home to luncheon Lydia told him that she had seen Alice, who had appeared seriously disturbed, though she had shown her, with evident enjoyment, a number of exquisite Paris gowns. "She had a sable coat, also, in her closet, which could not have cost less, I should have supposed, than forty thousand dollars—the kind of coat that a Russian Grand Duchess might have worn—but when I spoke of it, she grew very much depressed and changed the subject. Did you talk to Uncle Richard? And was I right?"

"You're always right," he admitted despondently, "but do you think, then, that I'd better not see Alice to-day?"

"Perhaps it would be wiser to wait until to-morrow. Geoffrey is in a very difficult humour, she says, more brutally indifferent to her than he has been since her marriage."

"Isn't that all the more reason she ought to have her family about her?"

"She says not. It's easier to deal with him, she feels, alone—and any way Uncle Richard will call there this afternoon."

"Oh, Uncle Richard!" he groaned, as he went out.

In the evening there was no news beyond a reassuring visit from Richard Ordway, who stopped by, for ten minutes, on his way from an interview with Geoffrey Heath. "To tell the truth I found him less obstinate than I had expected," he said, "and there's no doubt, I fear, that he has some show of justice upon his side. He has agreed now to make Alice a very liberal allowance from the first of April, provided she will promise to make no more bills, and to live until then within her own income. He told me that he was obliged to retrench for the next six months in order to meet his obligations without touching his investments. It seems that he had bought very largely on margin, and the shrinkages in stocks has forced him to pay out a great deal of money recently."

"I knew you would manage it, Uncle, I relied on you absolutely," said Lydia, sweetly.

"I did only my duty, my child," he responded, as he held out his hand.

The one good result of the anxiety of the last twenty-four hours—the fact that it had brought Lydia and himself into a kind of human connection—had departed, Daniel observed, when he sat down to dinner, separated from her by six yellow candle shades and a bowl of gorgeous chrysanthemums. After a casual comment upon the soup, and the pleasant reminder that Dick would be home for Thanksgiving, the old uncomfortable silence fell between them. She had just remarked that the roast was a little overdone, and he had agreed with her from sheer politeness, when a sharp ring at the bell sent the old Negro butler hurrying out into the hall. An instant later there was a sound of rapid footsteps, and Alice, wearing a long coat, which slipped from her bare shoulders as she entered, came rapidly forward and threw herself into Ordway's arms, with an uncontrollable burst of tears.

"My child, my child, what is it?" he questioned, while Lydia, rising from the table with a disturbed face, but an unruffled manner, remarked to the butler that he need not serve the dessert.

"Come into the library, Alice, it is quieter there," she said, putting her arm about her daughter, with an authoritative pressure.

"O, papa, I will never see him again! You must tell him that. I shall never see him again," she cried, regardless alike of Lydia's entreaties and the restraining presence of the butler. "Go to him to-night and tell him that I will never—never go back."

"I'll tell him, Alice, and I'll do it with a great deal of pleasure," he answered soothingly, as he led her into the library and closed the door.

"But you must go at once. I want him to know it at once."

"I'll go this very hour—I'll go this very minute, if you honestly mean it."

"Would it not be better to wait until to-morrow, Alice?" suggested Lydia. "Then you will have time to quiet down and to see things rationally."

"I don't want to quiet down," sobbed Alice, angrily, "I want him to know now—this very instant—that he has gone too far—that I will not stand it. He told me a minute ago—the beast!—that he'd like to see the man who would be fool enough to keep me—that if I went he'd find a handsomer woman within a week!"

"Well, I'll see him, darling," said Ordway. "Sit here with your mother, and have a good cry and talk things over."

As he spoke he opened the door and went out into the hall, where he got into his overcoat.

"Remember last night and don't say too much, Daniel," urged Lydia in a warning whisper, coming after him, "she is quite hysterical now and does not realise what she is saying."

"Oh, I'll remember," he returned, and a minute later, he closed the front door behind him.

On his way to the Heath house in Henry Street, he planned dispassionately his part in the coming interview, and he resolved that he would state Alice's position with as little show of feeling as it was possible for him to express. He would tell Heath candidly that, with his consent, Alice should never return to him, but he would say this in a perfectly quiet and inoffensive manner. If there was to be a scene, he concluded calmly, it should be made entirely by Geoffrey. Then, as he went on, he said to himself, that he had grown tired and old, and that he lacked now the decision which should carry one triumphantly over a step like this. Even his anger against Alice's husband had given way to a dragging weariness, which seemed to hold him back as he ascended the brown-stone steps and laid his hand on the door bell. When the door was opened, and he followed the servant through the long hall, ornamented by marble statues, to the smoking-room at the end, he was conscious again of that sense of utter incapacity which had been bred in him by his life in Botetourt.

Geoffrey, after a full dinner, was lounging, with a cigar and a decanter of brandy, over a wood fire, and as his visitor entered he rose from his chair with a lazy shake of his whole person.

"I don't believe I've ever met you before, Mr. Ordway," he remarked, as he held out his hand, "though I've known you by sight for several years. Won't you sit down?" With a single gesture he motioned to a chair and indicated the cigars and the brandy on a little table at his right hand.

At his first glance Ordway had observed that he had been in a rage or drinking heavily—probably both; and he was seized by a sudden terror at the thought that Alice had been so lately at the mercy of this large red and black male animal. Yet, in spite of the disgust with which the man inspired him, he was forced to admit that as far as a mere physical specimen went, he had rarely seen his equal. His body was superbly built, and but for his sullen and brutal expression, his face would have been remarkable for its masculine beauty.

"No, I won't sit down, thank you," replied Ordway, after a short pause. "What I have to say can be said better standing, I think."

"Then fire away!" returned Geoffrey, with a coarse laugh. "It's about Alice, I suppose, and it's most likely some darn rot she's sent you with."

"It's probably less rot than you imagine. I have taken it upon myself to forbid her returning to you. Your treatment of her has made it impossible that she should remain in your house."

"Well, I've treated her a damned sight better than she deserved," rejoined Geoffrey, scowling, while his face, inflamed by the brandy he had drunk, burned to a dull red; "it isn't her fault, I can tell you, that she hasn't put me into the poorhouse in six months."

"I admit that she has been very extravagant, and so does she."

"Extravagant? So that is what you call it, is it? Well, she spent more in three weeks in Paris than my father did in his whole lifetime. I paid out a hundred thousand for her, and even then I could hardly get her away. But I won't pay the bills any longer, I've told her that. They may go into court about it and get their money however they can."

"In the future there will be no question of that."

"You think so, do you? Now I'll bet you whatever you please that she's back here in this house again before the week is up. She knows on which side her bread is buttered, and she won't stay in that dull old place, not for all you're worth."

"She shall never return to you with my consent."

"Did she wait for that to marry me?" demanded Geoffrey, laughing uproariously at his wit, "though I can tell you now, that it makes precious little difference to me whether she comes or stays."

"She shall never do it," said Ordway, losing his temper. Then as he uttered the words, he remembered Lydia's warning and added more quietly, "she shall never do it if I can help it."

"It makes precious little difference to me," repeated Geoffrey, "but she'll be a blamed fool if she doesn't, and for all her foolishness, she isn't so big a fool as you think her."

"She has been wrong in her extravagance, as I said before, but she is very young, and her childishness is no excuse for your brutality."

Rage, or the brandy, or both together, flamed up hotly in Geoffrey's face.

"I'd like to know what right you have to talk about brutality?" he sneered.

"I've the right of any man to keep another from ill-treating his daughter."

"Well, you're a nice one with your history to put on these highfaluting, righteous airs, aren't you?"

For an instant the unutterable disgust in Ordway's mind was like physical nausea. What use was it, after all, to bandy speeches, he questioned, with a mere drunken animal? His revulsion of feeling had moved him to take a step toward the door, when the sound of the words Geoffrey uttered caused him to stop abruptly and stand listening.

"Much good you'll do her when she hears about that woman you've been keeping down at Tappahannock. As if I didn't know that you'd been running back there again after that Brooke girl——"

The words were choked back in his throat, for before they had passed his lips Ordway had swung quickly round and struck him full in the mouth.

With the blow it seemed to Daniel that all the violence in his nature was loosened. A sensation that was like the joy of health, of youth, of manhood, rushed through his veins, and in the single exalted instant when he looked down on Geoffrey's prostrate figure, he felt himself to be not only triumphant, but immortal. All that his years of self-sacrifice had not done for him was accomplished by that explosive rush of energy through his arm.

There was blood on his hand and as he glanced down, he saw that Geoffrey, with a bleeding mouth, was struggling, dazed and half drunk, to his feet. Ordway looked at him and laughed—the laugh of the boastful and victorious brute. Then turning quickly, he took up his hat and went out of the house and down into the street.

The physical exhilaration produced by the muscular effort was still tingling through his body, and while it lasted he felt younger, stronger, and possessed of a courage that was almost sublime. When he reached home and entered the library where Lydia and Alice were sitting together, there was a boyish lightness and confidence in his step.

"Oh, papa!" cried Alice, standing up, "tell me about it. What did he do?"

Ordway laughed again, the same laugh with which he had looked down on Geoffrey lying half stunned at his feet.

"I didn't wait to see," he answered, "but I rather think he got up off the floor."

"You mean you knocked him down?" asked Lydia, in an astonishment that left her breathless.

"I cut his mouth, I'm sure," he replied, wiping his hand from which the blood ran, "and I hope I knocked out one or two of his teeth."

Then the exhilaration faded as quickly as it had come, for as Lydia looked up at him, while he stood there wiping the blood from his bruised knuckles, he saw, for the first time since his return to Botetourt, that there was admiration in her eyes. So it was the brute, after all, and not the spirit that had triumphed over her.

CHAPTER V
The House of Dreams

From that night there was a new element in Lydia's relation to him, an increased consideration, almost a deference, as if, for the first time, he had shown himself capable of commanding her respect. This change, which would have pleased him, doubtless, twenty years before, had only the effect now of adding to his depression, for he saw in it a tribute from his wife not to his higher, but to his lower nature. All his patient ideals, all his daily self-sacrifice, had not touched her as had that one instant's violence; and it occurred to him, with a growing recognition of the hopeless inconsistency of life, that if he had treated her with less delicacy, less generosity, if he had walked roughshod over her feminine scruples, instead of yielding to them, she might have entertained for him by this time quite a wholesome wifely regard. Then the mere possibility disgusted him, and he saw that to have compromised with her upon any lower plane would have been always morally repugnant to him. After all, the dominion of the brute was not what he was seeking.

On the morning after his scene with Geoffrey, Alice came to him and begged for the minutest particulars of the quarrel. She wanted to know how it had begun? If Geoffrey had been really horrible? And if he had noticed the new bronze dragon she had bought for the hall? Upon his replying that he had not, she seemed disappointed, he thought, for a minute.

"It's very fine," she said, "I bought it from what's-his-name, that famous man in Paris? If I ever have money enough I shall get the match to it, so there'll be the pair of them." Then seeing his look of astonishment, she hastened to correct the impression she had made. "Of course, I mean that I'd like to have done it, if I had been going to live there."

"It would take more than a bronze dragon, or a pair of them, to make that house a home, dear," was his only comment.

"But it's very handsome," she remarked after a moment, "everything in it is so much more costly than the things here." He made no rejoinder, and she added with vehemence, "but of course, I wouldn't go back, not even if it were a palace!"

Then a charming merriment seized her, and she clung to him and kissed him and called him a dozen silly pet names. "No, she won't ever, ever play in that horrid old house again," she sang gaily between her kisses.

For several days these exuberant spirits lasted, and then he prepared himself to meet the inevitable reaction. Her looks drooped, she lost her colour and grew obviously bored, and in the end she complained openly that there was nothing for her to do in the house, and that she couldn't go out of doors because she hadn't the proper clothes. To his reminder that it was she herself who had prevented his sending for her trunks, she replied that there was plenty of time, and that "besides nobody could pack them unless she was there to overlook it."

"If anybody is obliged to go back there, for heaven's sake, let me be the one," he urged desperately at last.

"To knock out more of poor Geoffrey's teeth? Oh, you naughty, naughty, papa!"—she cried, lifting a reproving finger. The next instant her laughter bubbled out at the delightful picture of "papa in the midst of her Paris gowns. I'd be so afraid you'd roll up Geoffrey in my precious laces," she protested, half seriously.

For a week nothing more was said on the subject, and then she remarked irritably that her room was cold and she hadn't her quilted silk dressing-gown. When he asked her to ride with him, she declared that her old habit was too tight for her and her new one was at the other house. When he suggested driving instead, she replied that she hadn't her fur coat and she would certainly freeze without it. At last one bright, cold day, when he came up to luncheon, Lydia told him, with her strange calmness, that Alice had gone back to her husband.

"I knew it would come in time," she said, and he bowed again before her unerring prescience.

"Do you mean to tell me that she's willing to put up with Heath for the sake of a little extra luxury?" he demanded.

"Oh, that's a part of it. She likes the newness of the house and the air of costliness about it, but most of all, she feels that she could never settle down to our monotonous way of living. Geoffrey promised her to take her to Europe again in the summer and I think she began to grow restless when it appeared that she might have to give it up."

"But one of us could have taken her to Europe, if that's all she wanted. You could have gone with her."

"Not in Alice's way, we could never have afforded it. She told me this when I offered to go with her if she would definitely separate from Geoffrey."

"Then you didn't want her to go back? You didn't encourage it?"

"I encouraged her to behave with decency—and this isn't decent."

"No, I admit that. It decidedly is not."

"Yet we have no assurance that she won't fly in upon us at dinner to-night, with all the servants about," she reflected mournfully.

His awful levity broke out as it always did whenever she invoked the sanctity of convention.

"In that case hadn't we better serve ourselves until she has made up her mind?" he inquired.

But the submission of the martyr is proof even against caustic wit, and she looked at him, after a minute, with a smile of infinite patience.

"For myself I can bear anything," she answered, "but I feel that for her it is shocking to make things so public."

It was shocking. In spite of his flippancy he felt the vulgarity of it as acutely as she felt it; and he was conscious of something closely akin to relief, when Richard Ordway dropped in after dinner to tell them that Alice and Geoffrey had come to a complete reconciliation.

"But will it last?" Lydia questioned, in an uneasy voice.

"We'll hope so at all events," replied the old man, "they appeared certainly to be very friendly when I came away. Whatever happens it is surely to Alice's interest that she should be kept out of a public scandal."

They were still discussing the matter, after Richard had gone, when the girl herself ran in, bringing Geoffrey, and fairly brilliant with life and spirits.

"We've decided to forget everything disagreeable," she said, "we're going to begin over again and be nice and jolly, and if I don't spend too much money, we are going to Egypt in April."

"If you're happy, then I'm satisfied," returned Ordway, and he held out his hand to Geoffrey by way of apology.

To do the young man justice, he appeared to cherish no resentment for the blow, though he still bore a scar on his upper lip. He looked heavy and handsome, and rather amiable in a dull way, and the one discovery Daniel made about him was that he entertained a profound admiration for Richard Ordway. Still, when everybody in Botetourt shared his sentiment, this was hardly deserving of notice.

As the weeks went on it looked as if peace were really restored, and even Lydia's face lost its anxious foreboding, when she gazed on the assembled family at Thanksgiving. Dick had grown into a quiet, distinguished looking young fellow, more than ever like his Uncle Richard, and it was touching to watch his devotion to his delicate mother. At least Lydia possessed one enduring consolation in life, Ordway reflected, with a rush of gratitude.

In the afternoon Alice drove with him out into the country, along the pale brown November roads, and he felt, while he sat beside her, with her hand clasped tightly in his under the fur robe, that she was again the daughter of his dreams, who had flown to his arms in the terrible day of his homecoming. She was in one of her rare moods of seriousness, and when she lifted her eyes to his, it seemed to him that they held a new softness, a deeper blueness. Something in her face brought back to him the memory of Emily as she had looked down at him when he knelt before her; and again he was aware of some subtle link which bound together in his thoughts the two women whom he loved.

"There's something I've wanted to tell you, papa, first of all," said Alice, pressing his hand, "I want you to know it before anybody else because you've always loved me and stood by me from the beginning. Now shut your eyes while I tell you, and hold fast to my hand. O papa, there's to be really and truly a baby in the spring, and even if it's a boy—I hope it will be a girl—you'll promise to love it and be good to it, won't you?"

"Love your child? Alice, my darling!" he cried, and his voice broke.

She raised her hand to his cheek with a little caressing gesture, which had always been characteristic of her, and as he opened his eyes upon her, her beauty shone, he thought, with a light that blinded him.

"I hope it will be a little girl with blue eyes and fair hair like mamma's," she resumed softly. "It will be better than playing with dolls, won't it? I always loved dolls, you know. Do you remember the big wax doll you gave me when I was six years old, and how her voice got out of order and she used to crow instead of talking? Well, I kept her for years and years, and even after I was a big girl, and wore long dresses, and did up my hair, I used to take her out sometimes and put on her clothes. Only I was ashamed of it and used to lock the door so no one could see me. But this little girl will be real, you know, and that's ever so much more fun, isn't it? And you shall help teach her to walk, and to ride when she's big enough; and I'll dress her in the loveliest dresses, with French embroidered ruffles, and a little blue bonnet with bunches of feathers, like one in Paris. Only she can't wear that until she's five years old, can she?"

"And now you will have something to think of, Alice, you will be bored no longer?"

"I shall enjoy buying the little things so much, but it's too soon yet to plan about them. Papa, do you think Geoffrey will fuss about money when he hears this?"

"I hope not, dear, but you must be careful. The baby won't need to be extravagant, just at first."

"But she must have pretty clothes, of course, papa. It wouldn't be kind to the little thing to make her look ugly, would it?"

"Are simple things always ugly?"

"Oh, but they cost just as much if they're fine—and I had beautiful clothes when I came. Mamma has told me about them."

She ran on breathlessly, radiant with the promise of motherhood, dwelling in fancy upon the small blond ideal her imagination had conjured into life.

It was dark when they returned to town, and when Daniel entered his door, after leaving Alice in Henry Street, he found that the lamps were already lit in the library. As he passed up the staircase, he glanced into the room, and saw that Lydia and Dick were sitting together before the fire, the boy resting his head on her knees, while her fragile hand played caressingly with his hair. They did not look up at his footsteps, and his heart was so warm with happiness that even the picture of mother and son in the firelit room appeared dim beside it.

When he opened his door he found a bright fire in his grate, and throwing off his coat, he sat down in an easy chair with his eyes on the glowing coals. The beneficent vision that he had brought home with him was reflected now in the red heart of the fire, and while he gazed on it, he told himself that the years of his loneliness, and his inner impoverishment, were ended forever. The path of age showed to him no longer as hard and destitute, but as a peaceful road along which he might travel hopefully with young feet to keep him company. With a longing, which no excess of the imagination could exhaust, he saw Alice's child as she had seen it in her maternal rapture—as something immortally young and fair and innocent. He thought of the moment so long ago, when they had first placed Alice in his arms, and it seemed to him that this unborn child was only a renewal of the one he had held that day—that he would reach out his arms to it with that same half human, half mystic passion. Even to-day he could almost feel the soft pressure of her little body, and he hardly knew whether it was the body of Alice or of her child. Then suddenly it seemed to him that the reality faded from his consciousness and the dream began, for while he sat there he heard the patter of the little feet across his floor, and felt the little hands creep softly over his lips and brow. Oh, the little hands that would bring healing and love in their touch!

And he understood as he looked forward now into the dreaded future, that the age to which he was travelling was only an immortal youth.

CHAPTER VI
The Ultimate Choice

ON Christmas Eve a heavy snowstorm set in, and as there was but little work in the office that day, he took a long walk into the country before going home to luncheon. By the time he came back to town the ground was already covered with snow, which was blown by a high wind into deep drifts against the houses. Through the thick, whirling flakes the poplars stood out like white ghosts of trees, each branch outlined in a delicate tracery, and where the skeletons of last spring's flowers still clung to the boughs, the tiny cups were crowned with clusters of frozen blossoms.

As he passed Richard's house, the sight of his aunt's fair head at the window arrested his steps, and going inside, he found her filling yarn stockings for twenty poor children, to whose homes she went every Christmas Eve. The toys and the bright tarleton bags of candy scattered about the room gave it an air that was almost festive; and for a few minutes he stayed with her, watching the glow of pleasure in her small, pale face, while he helped stuff the toes of the yarn stockings with oranges and nuts. As he stood there, surrounded by the little gifts, he felt, for the first time since his childhood, the full significance of Christmas—of its cheer, its mirth and its solemnity.

"I am to have a tree at twelve o'clock to-morrow. Will you come?" she asked wistfully, and he promised, with a smile, before he left her and went out again into the storm.

In the street a crowd of boys were snowballing one another, and as he passed a ball struck him, knocking his hat into a drift. Turning in pretended fury, he plunged into the thick of the battle, and when he retreated some minutes afterward, he was powdered from head to foot with dry, feathery flakes. When he reached home, he discovered, with dismay, that he left patches of white on the carpet from the door to the upper landing. After he had entered his room he shook the snow from his clothes, and then looking at his watch, saw to his surprise, that luncheon must have been over for at least an hour. In a little while, he told himself, he would go downstairs and demand something to eat from the old butler; but the hearth was so bright and warm that after sinking into his accustomed chair, he found that it was almost impossible to make the effort to go out. In a moment a delicious drowsiness crept over him, and he fell presently asleep, while the cigar he had lighted burned slowly out in his hand.

The sound of the opening and closing door brought him suddenly awake with a throb of pain. The gray light from the windows, beyond which the snow fell heavily, was obscured by the figure of Lydia, who seemed to spring upon him out of some dim mist of sleep. At first he saw only her pale face and white outstretched hands; then as she came rapidly forward and dropped on her knees in the firelight, he saw that her face was convulsed with weeping and her eyes red and swollen. For the first time in his life, it occurred to him with a curious quickness of perception, he looked upon the naked soul of the woman, with her last rag of conventionality stripped from her. In the shock of the surprise, he half rose to his feet, and then sank back helplessly, putting out his hand as if he would push her away from him.

"Lydia," he said, "don't keep me waiting. Tell me at once."

She tried to speak, and he heard her voice strangle like a live thing in her throat.

"Is Alice dead?" he asked quietly, "or is Dick?"

At this she appeared to regain control of herself and he watched the mask of her impenetrable reserve close over her features. "It is not that—nobody is dead—it is worse," she answered in a subdued and lifeless voice.

"Worse?" The word stunned him, and he stared at her blankly, like a person whose mind has suddenly given way.

"Alice is in my room," she went on, when he had paused, "I left her with Uncle Richard while I came here to look for you. We did not hear you come in. I thought you were still out."

Her manner, even more than her words, impressed him only as an evasion of the thing in her mind, and seizing her hands almost roughly, he drew her forward until he could look closely into her face.

"For God's sake—speak!" he commanded.

But with his grasp all animation appeared to go out of her, and she fell across his knees in an immovable weight, while her eyes still gazed up at him.

"If you can't tell me I must go to Uncle Richard," he added.

As he attempted to rise she put out her hands to restrain him, and in the midst of his suspense, he was amazed at the strength there was in a creature so slight and fragile.

"Uncle Richard has just come to tell us," she said in a whisper. "A lawyer—a detective—somebody. I can't remember who it is—has come down from New York to see Geoffrey about a check signed in his name, which was returned to the bank there. At the first glance it was seen to be—to be not in his writing. When it was sent to him, after the bank had declined to honour it, he declared it to be a forgery and sent it back to them at once. It is now in their hands——"

"To whom was it drawn?" he asked so quietly that his voice sounded in his own ears like the voice of a stranger.

"To Damon & Hanska, furriers in Fifth Avenue, and it was sent in payment for a sable coat which Alice had bought. They had already begun a suit, it seems, to recover the money."

As she finished he rose slowly to his feet, and stood staring at the snow which fell heavily beyond the window. The twisted bough of a poplar tree just outside was rocking back and forth with a creaking noise, and presently, as his ears grew accustomed to the silence in the room, he heard the loud monotonous ticking of the clock on the mantel, which seemed to grow more distinct with each minute that the hands travelled. Lydia had slipped from his grasp as he rose, and lay now with her face buried in the cushions of the chair. It was a terrible thing for Lydia, he thought suddenly, as he looked down on her.

"And Geoffrey Heath?" he asked, repeating the question in a raised voice when she did not answer.

"Oh, what can we expect of him? What can we expect?" she demanded, with a shudder. "Alice is sure that he hates her, that he would seize any excuse to divorce her, to outrage her publicly. He will do nothing—nothing—nothing," she said, rising to her feet, "he has returned the check to the bank, and denied openly all knowledge of it. After some violent words with Alice in the lawyer's presence, he declared to them both that he did not care in the least what steps were taken—that he had washed his hands of her and of the whole affair. She is half insane with terror of a prosecution, and can hardly speak coherently. Oh, I wonder why one ever has children?" she exclaimed in anguish.

With her last words it seemed to him that the barrier which had separated him from Lydia had crumbled suddenly to ruins between them. The space which love could not bridge was spanned by pity; and crossing to where she stood, he put his arms about her, while she bowed her head on his breast and wept.

"Poor girl! poor girl!" he said softly, and then putting her from him, he went out of the room and closed the door gently upon her grief.

From across the hall the sound of smothered sobs came to him, and entering Lydia's room, he saw Alice clinging hysterically to Richard's arm. As she looked round at his footsteps, her face showed so old and haggard between the splendid masses of her hair, that he could hardly believe for a minute that this half distraught creature was really his daughter. For an instant he was held dumb by the horror of it; then the silence was broken by the cry with which Alice threw herself into his arms. Once before she had rushed to his breast with the same word on her lips, he remembered.

"O papa, you will help me! You must help me!" she cried. "Oh, make them tell you all so that you may help me!"

"They have told me—your mother has told me, Alice," he answered, seeking in vain to release himself from the frantic grasp of her arms.

"Then you will make Geoffrey understand," she returned, almost angrily. "You will make Geoffrey understand that it was not my fault—that I couldn't help it."

Richard Ordway turned from the window, through which he had been looking, and taking her fingers, which were closed in a vice-like pressure about Daniel's arm, pried them forcibly apart.

"Look at me, Alice," he said sternly, "and answer the question that I asked you. What did you say to Geoffrey when he spoke to you in the lawyer's presence? Did you deny, then, that you had signed the check? Don't struggle so, I must hear what you told them."

But she only writhed in his hold, straining her arms and her neck in the direction of Daniel.

"He was very cruel," she replied at last, "they were both very cruel. I don't know what I said, I was so frightened. Geoffrey hurt me terribly—he hurt me terribly," she whimpered like a child, and as she turned toward Daniel, he saw her bloodless gum, from which her lower lip had quivered and dropped.

"I must know what you told them, Alice," repeated the old man in an unmoved tone. "I can do nothing to help you, if you will not speak the truth." Even when her body struggled in his grasp, no muscle altered in the stern face he bent above her.

"Let me go," she pleaded passionately, "I want to go to papa! I want papa!"

At her cry Daniel made a single step forward, and then fell back because the situation seemed at the moment in the command of Richard. Again he felt the curious respect, the confidence, with which his uncle inspired him in critical moments.

"I shall let you go when you have told me the truth," said Richard calmly.

She grew instantly quiet, and for a minute she appeared to hang a dead weight on his arm. Then her voice came with the whimpering, childlike sound.

"I told them that I had never touched it—that I had asked papa for the money, and he had given it to me," she said.

"I thought so," returned Richard grimly, and he released his hold so quickly that she fell in a limp heap at his feet.

"I wanted it from her own lips, though Mr. Cummins had already told me," he added, as he looked at his nephew.

For a moment Daniel stood there in silence, with his eyes on the gold-topped bottles on Lydia's dressing table. He had heard Alice's fall, but he did not stoop to lift her; he had heard Richard's words, but he did not reply to them. In one instant a violent revulsion—a furious anger against Alice swept over him, and the next he felt suddenly, as in his dream, the little hands pass over his brow and lips.

"She is right about it, Uncle Richard," he said, "I gave her the check."

At the words Richard turned quickly away, but with a shriek of joy, Alice raised herself to her knees, and looked up with shining eyes.

"I told you papa would know! I told you papa would help me!" she cried triumphantly to the old man.

Without looking at her, Richard turned his glance again to his nephew's face, and something that was almost a tremor seemed to pass through his voice.

"Daniel," he asked, "what is the use?"

"She has told you the truth," repeated Daniel steadily, "I gave her the check."

"You are ready to swear to this?"

"If it is necessary, I am."

Alice had dragged herself slowly forward, still on her knees, but as she came nearer him, Daniel retreated instinctively step by step until he had put the table between them.

"It is better for me to go away, I suppose, at once?" he inquired of Richard.

The gesture with which Richard responded was almost impatient. "If you are determined—it will be necessary for a time at least," he replied. "There's no doubt, I hope, that the case will be hushed up, but already there has been something of a scandal. I have made good the loss to the bank, but Geoffrey has been very difficult to bring to reason. He wanted a divorce and he wanted revenge in a vulgar way upon Alice."

"But she is safe now?" asked Daniel, and the coldness in his tone came as a surprise to him when he spoke.

"Yes, she is safe," returned Richard, "and you, also, I trust. There is little danger, I think, under the circumstances, of a prosecution. If at any time," he added, with a shaking voice, "before your return you should wish the control of your property, I will turn it over to you at once."

"Thank you," said Daniel quietly, and then with an embarrassed movement, he held out his hand. "I shall go, I think, on the four o'clock train," he continued, "is that what you would advise?"

"It is better, I feel, to go immediately. I have an appointment with the lawyer for the bank at a quarter of five." He put out his hand again for his nephew's. "Daniel, you are a good man," he added, as he turned away.

Not until a moment later, when he was in the hall, did Ordway remember that he had left Alice crouched on the floor, and coming back he lifted her into his arms. "It is all right, Alice, don't cry," he said, as he kissed her. Then turning from her, with a strange dullness of sensation, he crossed the hall and entered his room, where he found Lydia still lying with her face hidden in the cushions of the chair.

At his step she looked up and put out her hand, with an imploring gesture.

"Daniel!" she called softly, "Daniel!"

Before replying to her he went to his bureau and hurriedly packed some clothes into a bag. Then, with the satchel still in his hand, he came over and stopped beside her.

"I can't wait to explain, Lydia; Uncle Richard will tell you," he said.

"You are going away? Do you mean you are going away?" she questioned.

"To-morrow you will understand," he answered, "that it is better so."

For a moment uncertainty clouded her face; then she raised herself and leaned toward him.

"But Alice? Does Alice go with you?" she asked.

"No, Alice is safe. Go to her."

"You will come back again? It is not forever?"

He shook his head smiling. "Perhaps," he answered.

She still gazed steadily up at him, and he saw presently a look come into her face like the look with which she had heard of the blow he had struck Geoffrey Heath.

"Daniel, you are a brave man," she said, and sobbed as she kissed him.

Following him to the threshold, she listened, with her face pressed against the lintel, while she heard him go down the staircase and close the front door softly behind him.

CHAPTER VII
Flight

NOT until the train had started and the conductor had asked for his ticket, did Ordway realize that he was on his way to Tappahannock. At the discovery he was conscious of no surprise—scarcely of any interest—it seemed to matter to him so little in which direction he went. A curious numbness of sensation had paralysed both his memory and his perceptions, and he hardly knew whether he was glad or sorry, warm or cold. In the same way he wondered why he felt no regret at leaving Botetourt forever—no clinging tenderness for his home, for Lydia, for Alice. If his children had been strangers to him he could not have thought of his parting from them with a greater absence of feeling. Was it possible at last that he was to be delivered from the emotional intensity, the power of vicarious suffering, which had made him one of the world's failures? He recalled indifferently Alice's convulsed features, and the pathetic quiver of her lip, which had drooped like a child's that is hurt. These things left him utterly unmoved when he remembered them, and he even found himself asking the next instant, with a vague curiosity, if the bald-headed man in the seat in front of him was going home to spend Christmas with his daughter? "But what has this bald-headed man to do with Alice or with me?" he demanded in perplexity, "and why is it that I can think of him now with the same interest with which I think of my own child? I am going away forever and I shall never see them again," he continued, with emphasis, as if to convince himself of some fact which he had but half understood. "Yes, I shall never see them again, and Alice will be quite happy without me, and Alice's child will grow up probably without hearing my name. Yet I did it for Alice. No, I did not do it for Alice, or for Alice's child," he corrected quickly, with a piercing flash of insight. "It was for something larger, stronger—something as inevitable as the law. I could not help it, it was for myself," he added, after a minute. And it seemed to him that with this inward revelation the outer covering of things was stripped suddenly from before his eyes. As beneath his sacrifice he recognised the inexorable law, so beneath Alice's beauty he beheld the skeleton which her radiant flesh clothed with life, and beneath Lydia's mask of conventionality her little naked soul, too delicate and shivering to stand alone. It was as if all pretence, all deceit, all illusions, had shrivelled now in the hard dry, atmosphere through which he looked. "Yes, I am indifferent to them all and to everything," he concluded; "Lydia, and Dick and even Alice are no closer to me than is the bald-headed man on the front seat. Nobody is closer to another when it comes to that, for each one of us is alone in an illimitable space."

The swinging lights of the train were reflected in the falling snow outside, like orbed blue flames against a curtain of white. Through the crack under the window a little cold draught entered, blowing the cinders from the sill into his face. It was the common day coach of a local train, and the passengers were, for the most part, young men or young women clerks, who were hastening back to their country homes for Christmas. Once when they reached a station several girls got off, with their arms filled with packages, and pushed their way through the heavy drifts to a sleigh waiting under the dim oil lamp outside. For a minute he followed them idly in his imagination, seeing the merry party ploughing over the old country roads to the warm farm house, where a bright log fire and a Christmas tree were prepared for them. The window panes were frosted over now, and when the train started on its slow journey he could see only the orbed blue flames dancing in the night against the whirling snowflakes.

It was nine o'clock when they pulled into Tappahannock and when he came out upon the platform he found that the storm had ceased, though the ground lay white and hard beneath the scattered street lamps. Straight ahead of him, as he walked up the long hill from the station, he heard the ring of other footsteps on the frozen snow. The lights were still burning in the little shops, and through the uncurtained windows he could see the variegated display of Christmas decorations. Here and there a woman, with her head wrapped in a shawl, was peering eagerly at a collection of toys or a wreath of evergreens, but, for the rest, the shops appeared singularly empty even for so late an hour on Christmas Eve. In the absorption of his thoughts, he scarcely noticed this, and he was conscious of no particular surprise when, as he reached the familiar warehouse, he saw Baxter's enormous figure loom darkly under the flickering light above the sidewalk. Behind him the vacant building yawned like a sepulchral cavern, the dim archway hung with a glistening fringe of icicles.

"Is that you, Baxter?" he asked, and stretched out his hand with a mechanical movement.

"Why, bless my soul, Smith!" exclaimed Baxter, "who'd ever have believed it!"

"I've just got off the train," returned Ordway, feeling vaguely that some explanation of his presence was needed, "and I'm trying to find a place where I can keep warm until I take the one for the West at midnight. It didn't occur to me that you would be in your office. I was going to Mrs. Buzzy's."

"You'd better come along with me, for I don't believe you'll find a living soul at Mag Buzzy's—not even a kid," replied Baxter, "her husband is one of Jasper Trend's overseers, you know, and they're most likely down at the cotton mills."

"At the cotton mills? Why, what's the matter there?"

"You haven't heard then? I thought it was in all the papers. There's been a big strike on for a week—Jasper lowered wages the first of the month—and every operative has turned out and demanded more pay and shorter hours. The old man's hoppin', of course, and the funny part is, Smith, that he lays every bit of the trouble at your door. He says that you started it all by raisin' the ideas of the operatives."

"But it's a pretty serious business for them, Baxter. How are they going to live through this weather?"

"They ain't livin', they're starvin', though I believe the union is comin' to their help sooner or later. But what's that in such a blood-curdlin' spell as this?"

A sudden noise, like that of a great shout, rising and falling in the bitter air, came to them from below the slope of the hill, and catching Ordway's arm, Baxter drew him closer under the street lamp.

"They're hootin' at the guards Trend has put around the mills," he said, while his words floated like vapour out of his mouth into the cold, "he's got policemen stalkin' up an' down before his house, too."

"You mean he actually fears violence?"

"Oh, well, when trouble is once started, you know, it is apt to go at a gallop. A policeman got his skull knocked in yesterday, and one of the strikers had his leg broken this afternoon. Somebody has been stonin' Jasper's windows in the back, but they can't tell whether it's a striker or a scamp of a boy. The truth is, Smith," he added, "that Jasper ought to have sold the mills when he had an offer of a hundred thousand six months ago. But he wouldn't do it because he said he made more than the interest on that five times over. I reckon he's sorry enough now he didn't catch at it."

For a moment Ordway looked in silence under the hanging icicles into the cavernous mouth of the warehouse, while he listened to the smothered sounds, like the angry growls of a great beast, which came toward them from the foot of the hill.

Into the confusion of his thoughts there broke suddenly the meaning of Richard Ordway's parting words.

"Baxter," he said quietly, "I'll give Jasper Trend a hundred thousand dollars for his mills to-night."

Baxter let go the lamp post against which he was leaning, and fell back a step, rubbing his stiffened hands on his big shaggy overcoat.

"You, Smith? Why, what in thunder do you want with 'em? It's my belief that they will be afire before midnight. Do you hear that noise? Well, there ain't men enough in Tappahannock to put those mills out when they are once caught."

Ordway turned his face from the warehouse to his companion, and it seemed to Baxter that his eyes shone like blue lights out of the darkness.

"But they won't burn after they're mine, Baxter," he answered. "I'll buy the mills and I'll settle this strike before I leave Tappahannock at midnight."

"You mean you'll go away even after you've bought 'em?"

"I mean I've got to go—to go always from place to place—but I'll leave you here in my stead." He laughed shortly, but there was no merriment in the sound. "I'll run the mills on the cooperative plan, Baxter, and I'll leave you in charge of them—you and Banks." Then he caught Baxter's arm with both hands, and turned his body forcibly in the direction of the church at the top of the hill. "While we are talking those people down there are freezing," he said.

"An' so am I, if you don't mind my mentionin' it," observed Baxter meekly.

"Then let's go to Trend's. There's not a minute to lose, if we are to save the mills. Are you coming, Baxter?"

"Oh, I'm comin'," replied Baxter, waddling in his shaggy coat like a great black bear, "but I'd like to git up my wind first," he added, puffing clouds of steam as he ascended the hill.

"There's no time for that," returned Ordway, sharply, as he dragged him along.

When they reached Jasper Trend's gate, a policeman, who strolled, beating his hands together, on the board walk, came up and stopped them as they were about to enter. Then recognising Baxter, he apologised and moved on. A moment later the sound of their footsteps on the porch brought the head of Banks to the crack of the door.

"Who are you? and what is your business?" he demanded.

"Banks!" said Ordway in a whisper, and at his voice the bar, which Banks had slipped from the door, fell with a loud crash from his hands.

"Good Lord, it's really you, Smith!" he cried in a delirium of joy.

"Harry, be careful or you'll wake the baby," called a voice softly from the top of the staircase.

"Darn the baby!" growled Banks, lowering his tone obediently. "The next thing she'll be asking me to put out the mills because the light wakes the baby. When did you come, Smith? And what on God's earth are you doing here?"

"I came to stop the strike," responded Ordway, smiling. "I've brought an offer to Mr. Trend, I must speak to him at once."

"He's in the dining-room, but if you've come from the strikers it's no use. His back's up."

"Well, it ain't from the strikers," interrupted Baxter, pushing his way in the direction of the dining-room. "It's from a chap we won't name, but he wants to buy the mills, not to settle the strike with Jasper."

"Then he's a darn fool," remarked Jasper Trend from the threshold, "for if I don't get the ringleaders arrested befo' mornin' thar won't be a brick left standin' in the buildings."

"The chap I mean ain't worryin' about that," said Baxter, "provided you'll sign the agreement in the next ten minutes. He's ready to give you a hundred thousand for the mills, strikers an' all."

"Sign the agreement? I ain't got any agreement," protested Jasper, suspecting a trap, "and how do I know that the strike ain't over befo' you're making the offer?"

"Well, if you'll just step over to the window, and stick your head out, you won't have much uncertainty about that, I reckon," returned Baxter.

Crossing to the window, Ordway threw it open, waiting with his hand on the sash, while the threatening shouts from below the hill floated into the room.

"Papa, the baby can't sleep for the noise those men make down at the mills," called a peremptory voice from the landing above.

"I told you so!" groaned Banks, closing the window.

"I ain't got any agreement," repeated Jasper, in helpless irritation, as he sank back into his chair.

"Oh, I reckon Smith can draw up one for you as well as a lawyer," said Baxter, while Ordway, sitting down at a little fancy desk of Milly's in one corner, wrote out the agreement of sale on a sheet of scented note paper.

When he held the pen out to Jasper, the old man looked up at him with blinking eyes. "Is it to hold good if the damned thing burns befo' mornin'?" he asked.

"If it burns before morning—yes."

With a sigh of relief Jasper wrote his name. "How do I know if I'm to get the money?" he inquired the next instant, moved by a new suspicion.

"I shall telegraph instructions to a lawyer in Botetourt," replied Ordway, as he handed the pen to Baxter, "and you will receive an answer by twelve o'clock to-morrow. I want your signature, also, Banks," he continued, turning to the young man. "I've made two copies, you see, one of which I shall leave with Baxter."

"Then you're going away?" inquired Banks, gloomily.

Ordway nodded. "I am leaving on the midnight train," he answered.

"So you're going West?"

"Yes, I'm going West, and I've barely time to settle things at the mills before I start. God bless you, Banks. Good-bye."

Without waiting for Baxter, who was struggling into his overcoat in the hall, he broke away from the detaining hold of Banks, and opening the door, ran down the frozen walk, and out into the street, where the policeman called a "Merry Christmas!" to him as he hurried by.

When he gained the top of the hill, and descended rapidly toward the broad level beyond, where the brick buildings of the cotton mills stood in the centre of a waste of snow, the shouts grew louder and more frequent, and the black mass on the frozen ground divided itself presently into individual atoms. A few bonfires had started on the outskirts of the crowd, and by their fitful light, which fell in jagged, reddish shadows on the snow, he could see the hard faces of the men, the sharpened ones of the women, and the pinched ones of little children, all sallow from close work in unhealthy atmospheres and wan from lack of nourishing and wholesome food. As he approached one of these fires, made from a burning barrel, a young woman, with a thin, blue face, and a baby wrapped in a ragged shawl on her breast, turned and spat fiercely in his direction. "This ain't no place for swells!" she screamed, and began laughing shrilly in a half-crazed voice.

In the excitement no one noticed her, and her demented shrieks followed him while he made his way cautiously along the outskirts of the strikers, until he came to the main building, before which a few men with muskets had cleared a hollow space. They looked cowed and sullen, he saw, for their sympathies were evidently with the operatives, and he realised that the first organised attack would force them from their dangerous position.

Approaching one of the guards, whom he remembered, Ordway touched him upon the arm and asked to be permitted to mount to the topmost step. "I have a message to deliver to the men," he said.

The guard looked up with a start of fear, and then, recognising him, exclaimed in a hoarse whisper, "My God, boys, it's 'Ten Commandment Smith' or it's his ghost!"

"Let me get through to the steps," said Ordway, "I must speak to them."

"Well, you may speak all you want to, but I doubt if they'd listen to an angel from heaven if he were to talk to them about Jasper Trend. They are preparing a rush on the doors now, and when they make it they'll go through."

Passing him in silence, Ordway mounted the steps, and stood with his back against the doors of the main building, in which, when he had last entered it, the great looms had been at work. Before him the dark mass heaved back and forth, and farther away, amid the bonfires in the waste of frozen snow, he could hear the shrill, mocking laughter of the half-crazed woman.

"We won't hear any talk," cried a spokesman in the front ranks of the crowd. "It's too late to haggle now. We'll have nothin' from Jasper Trend unless he gives us what we ask."

"And if he says he'll give it who will believe him?" jeered a woman, farther back, holding a crying child above her head. "He killed the father and he's starvin' the children."

"No—no, we'll have no damned words. We'll burn out the scabs!" shouted a man, lifting a torch he had just lit at a bonfire. As the torch rose in a splendid blaze, it lighted up the front of the building, and cast a yellow flame upon Ordway's face.

"I have nothing to do with Jasper Trend!" he called out, straightening himself to his full height. "He has no part in the mills from to-night! I have bought them from him!"

With the light on his face, he stood there an instant before them, while the shouts changed in the first shock of recognition from anger to surprise. The minute afterward the crowd was rocked by a single gigantic emotion, and it hurled itself forward, bearing down the guards in its efforts to reach the steps. As it swayed back and forth its individual members—men, women and children—appeared to float like straws on some cosmic undercurrent of feeling.

"From to-night the mills belong to me!" he cried in a voice which rang over the frozen ground to where the insane woman was laughing beside a bonfire. "Your grievances after to-night are not against Jasper Trend, but against me. You shall have fair pay, fair hours and clean rooms, I promise you——"

He went on still, but his words were drowned in the oncoming rush of the crowd, which rolled forward like great waters, surrounding him, overwhelming him, sweeping him off his feet, and bearing him out again upon its bosom. The cries so lately growls of anger had changed suddenly, and above all the din and rush he heard rising always the name which he had made honoured and beloved in Tappahannock. It was the one great moment of his life, he knew, when on the tremendous swell of feeling, he was borne like a straw up the hillside and back into the main street of Tappahannock.

An hour later, bruised, aching and half stunned, he entered the station and telegraphed twice to Richard Ordway before he went out upon the platform to take the train. He had left his instructions with Baxter, from whom he had just parted, and now, as he walked up and down in the icy darkness, broken by the shivering lights of the station, it seemed to him that he was like a man, who having been condemned to death, stands looking back a little wistfully at life from the edge of the grave. He had had his great moment, and ahead of him there was nothing.

A freight train passed with a grating noise, a station hand, holding a lantern ran hurriedly along the track, a whistle blew, and then again there was stillness. His eyes were wearily following the track, when he felt a touch on his arm, and turning quickly, saw Banks, in a fur-lined overcoat, looking up at him with an embarrassed air.

"Smith," he said, strangling a cough, "I've seen Baxter, and neither he nor I like your going West this way all by yourself and half sick. If you don't mind, I've arranged to take a little holiday and come along. To tell the truth, it's just exactly the chance I've been looking for. I haven't been away from Milly twenty-four hours since I married her, and a change does anybody good."

"No, you can't come, Banks, I don't want you. I'd rather be alone," replied Ordway, almost indignantly.

"But you ain't well," insisted Banks stubbornly. "We don't like the looks of you, Baxter and I."

"Well, you can't come, that's all," retorted Ordway, as the red eyes of the engine pierced the darkness. "There, go home, Banks," he added, as he held out his hand, "I'm much obliged to you. You're a first-rate chap. Good-bye."

"Then good-bye," returned Banks hastily turning away.

A minute afterward, as Ordway swung himself on the train, he heard the bells of a church, ringing cheerfully in the frosty air, and remembered, with a start, that it was Christmas morning.

CHAPTER VIII
The End Of The Road

IN the morning, after a short sleep on the hard plush seat, he awoke with a shooting pain in his head. When the drowsiness of exhaustion had overcome him, he remembered, he had been idly counting the dazzling electric lights of a town through which they were passing. By the time he had reached "twenty-one" he had dropped off into unconsciousness, though it seemed to him that a second self within him, wholly awake, had gone on through the night counting without pause, "twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five—" Still in his brain the numbers went on, and still the great globular lights flashed past his eyes.

Struggling awake in the gray dawn, he lay without changing his position, until the mist gave place slowly to the broad daylight. Then he found that they were approaching another town, which appeared from a distant view to resemble a single gigantic factory, composed chiefly of a wilderness of chimneys. When he looked at his watch, he saw that it was eight o'clock; and the conductor passing through the coach at the instant, informed the passengers generally that they must change cars for the West. The name of the town Ordway failed to catch, but it made so little difference to him that he followed the crowd mechanically, without inquiring where it would lead him. The pain in his head had extended now to his chest and shoulders, and presently it passed into his lower limbs, with a racking ache that seemed to take from him the control of his muscles. Yet all the while he felt a curious drowsiness, which did not in the least resemble sleep, creeping over him like the stealthy effect of some powerful drug. After he had breathed the fresh air outside, he felt it to be impossible that he should return to the overheated car, and pushing his way through the crowded station, where men were rushing to the luncheon counter in one corner, he started along a broad street, which looked as if it led to an open square at the top of a long incline. On either side there were rows of narrow tenements, occupied evidently by the operatives in the imposing factories he had observed from the train. Here and there a holly wreath suspended from a cheap lace curtain, reminded him again that it was Christmas morning, and by some eccentricity of memory, he recalled vividly a Christmas before his mother's death, when he had crept on his bare feet, in the dawn, to peep into the bulging stocking before her fireplace.

At the next corner a small eating house had hung out its list of Christmas dainties, and going inside he sat down at one of the small deserted tables and asked for a cup of coffee. When it was brought he swallowed it in the hope that it might drive away the heaviness in his head, but after a moment of relief the stupor attacked him again more oppressively than ever. He felt that even the growing agony in his forehead and shoulders could not keep him awake if he could only find a spot in which to lie down and rest.

After he came out into the street again he felt stronger and better, and it occurred to him that his headache was due probably to the fact that he had eaten nothing since breakfast the day before. He remembered now that he had missed his luncheon because of his long walk into the country, and the recollection of this trivial incident seemed to make plain all the subsequent events. Everything that had been so confused a moment ago stood out quite clearly now. His emotions, which had been benumbed when he left Botetourt, revived immediately in the awakening of his memory; and he was seized with a terrible longing to hold Alice in his arms and to say to her that he forgave her and loved her still. It seemed to him impossible that he should have come away after a single indifferent kiss, without glancing back—and her face rose before him, not convulsed and haggard as he had last seen it, but glowing and transfigured, with her sparkling blue eyes and her lips that were too red and too full for beauty. Then, even while he looked at her with love, the old numbness crept back, and his feeling for her died utterly away. "No, I have ceased to care," he thought indifferently. "It does not matter to me whether I see her again or not. I must eat and lie down, nothing else is of consequence."

He had reached the open space at the end of the long graded hill, and as he stopped to look about him he saw that a small hotel, frequented probably by travelling salesmen, stood directly across the square, which was now deep in snow. Following the pavement to the open door of the lobby, he went inside and asked for a room, after which he passed into the restaurant and drank a second cup of coffee. Then turning away from his untasted food, he went upstairs to the large, bare apartment, with a broken window pane, which they had assigned him, and throwing himself upon the unmade bed, fell heavily asleep.

When he awoke the pain was easier, and feeling oppressed by the chill vacancy of the room, he went downstairs and out into the open square. Though it was a dull gray afternoon, the square was filled with children, dragging bright new sleds over the snow. One of them, a little brown-haired girl, was trundling her Christmas doll and as she passed him, she turned and smiled into his face with a joyful look. Something in her smile was vaguely familiar to him, and he remembered, after a minute, that Emily had looked at him like that on the morning when he had met her for the first time riding her old white horse up the hill in Tappahannock. "Yes, it was that look that made me love her," he thought dispassionately, as if he were reviewing some dimly remembered event in a former life, "and it is because I loved her that I was able to do these things. If I had not loved her, I should not have saved Milly Trend, nor gone back to Botetourt, nor sacrificed myself for Alice. Yes, all these have come from that," he added, "and will go back, I suppose, to that in the end." The little girl ran by again, still trundling her doll, and again he saw Emily in her red cape on the old horse.

For several hours he sat there in the frozen square, hardly feeling the cold wind that blew over him. But when he rose presently to go into the hotel, he found that his limbs were stiff, and the burning pain had returned with violence to his head and chest. The snow in the square seemed to roll toward him as he walked, and it was with difficulty that he dragged himself step by step along the pavement to the entrance of the hotel. After he was in his room again he threw himself, still dressed, upon the bed, and fell back into the stupor out of which he had come.

When he opened his eyes after an hour, he was hardly sure, for the first few minutes, whether he was awake or asleep. The large, bare room in which he had lost consciousness had given place, when he awoke, to his prison cell. The hard daylight came to him through the grated windows, and from a nail in the wall he saw his gray prison coat, with the red bars, won for good behaviour, upon the sleeve. Then while he looked at it, the red bars changed quickly to the double stripes of a second term, and the double stripes became three, and the three became four, until it seemed to him that he was striped from head to foot so closely that he knew that he must have gone on serving term after term since the beginning of the world. "No, no, that is not mine. I am wearing the red bars!" he cried out, and came back to himself with a convulsive shudder.

As he looked about him the hallucination vanished, and he felt that he had come out of an eternity of unconsciousness into which he should presently sink back again. The day before appeared to belong to some other life that he had lived while he was still young, yet when he opened his eyes the same gray light filled the windows, the same draught blew through the broken pane, the same vague shadows crawled back and forth on the ceiling. The headache was gone now, but the room had grown very cold, and from time to time, when he coughed, long shivers ran through his limbs and his teeth chattered. He had thrown his overcoat across his chest as a coverlet, but the cold from which he suffered was an inward chill, which was scarcely increased by the wind that blew through the broken pane. There was no confusion in his mind now, but a wonderful lucidity, in which he saw clearly all that had happened to him last night in Tappahannock. "Yes, that was my good moment," he said "and after such a moment there is nothing, but death. If I can only die everything will be made entirely right and simple." As he uttered the words the weakness of self pity swept over him, and with a sudden sense of spiritual detachment, he was aware of a feeling of sympathy for that other "I," who seemed so closely related to him, and yet outside of himself. The real "I" was somewhere above amid the crawling shadows on the ceiling, but the other—the false one—lay on the bed under the overcoat; and he saw, when he looked down that, though he himself was young, the other "I" was old and haggard and unshaven. "So there are two of us, after all," he thought, "poor fellows, poor fellows."

But the minute afterward the perception of his dual nature faded as rapidly as the hallucination of his prison cell. In its place there appeared the little girl, who had passed him, trundling her Christmas doll, in the square below. "I have seen her before—she is vaguely familiar," he thought, troubled because he could not recall the resemblance. From this he passed to the memory of Alice when she was still a child, and she came back to him, fresh and vivid, as on the day when she had run out to beg him to come in to listen to her music. The broken scales ran in his head again, but there was no love in his heart.

His gaze dropped from the ceiling and turned toward the door, for in the midst of his visions, he had seen it open softly and Banks come into the room on tiptoe and stop at the foot of the bed, regarding him with his embarrassed and silly look "What in the devil, am I dreaming about Banks for?" he demanded aloud, with an impatient movement of his feet, as if he meant to kick the obtruding dream away from his bed.

At the kick the dream stopped rolling its prominent pale eyes and spoke. "I hope you ain't sick, Smith," it said, and with the first words he knew that it was Banks in the familiar flesh and not the disembodied spirit.

"No I'm not sick, but what are you doing here?" he asked.

"Enjoying myself," replied Banks gloomily.

"Well, I wish you'd chosen to enjoy yourself somewhere else."

"I couldn't. If you don't mind I'd like to stuff the curtain into that window pane."

"Oh, I don't mind. When did you get here?"

"I came on the train with you."

"On the train with me? Where did you get on? I didn't see you."

"You didn't look," replied Banks, from the window, where he was stuffing the red velveteen curtain into the broken pane. "I was in the last seat in the rear coach."

"So you followed me," said Ordway indignantly. "I told you not to. Why did you do it?"

Banks came back and stood again at the foot of the bed, looking at him with his sincere and kindly smile.

"Well, the truth is, I wanted an outing," he answered, "it's a good baby as babies go, but I get dog-tired of playing nurse."

"You might have gone somewhere else. There are plenty of places."

"I couldn't think of 'em, and, besides, this seems a nice town. The're a spanking fine lot of factories. But I hope you ain't sick Smith? What are you doing in bed?"

"Oh, I've given up," replied Ordway gruffly. "Every man has a right to give up some time, hasn't he?"

"I don't know about every man," returned Banks, stolidly, "but you haven't, Smith."

"Well, I've done it anyway," retorted Ordway, and turned his face to the wall.

As he lay there with closed eyes, he had an obscure impression that Banks—Banks, the simple; Banks, the impossible—was in some way operating the forces of destiny. First he heard the bell ring, then the door open and close, and a little later, the bleak room was suffused with a warm rosy light in which the vague shadows melted into a shimmering background. The crackling of the fire annoyed him because it suggested the possibility of physical comfort, and he no longer wanted to be comfortable.

"Smith," said Banks, coming over to the bed and pulling off the overcoat, "I've got a good fire here and a chair. I wish you'd get up. Good Lord, your hands are as hot as a hornet's nest. When did you eat anything?"

"I had breakfast in Botetourt," replied Ordway, as he rose from the bed and came over to the chair Banks had prepared. "I can't remember when it was, but it must have been since the creation of the world, I suppose." The fire grew suddenly black before him, "I'd rather lie down," he added, "my head is splitting and I can't see."

"Oh, you'll see all right in a minute. Wait till I light this candle, so the electric light won't hurt your eyes. The boy's gone for a little supper, and as soon as you've swallowed a mouthful you'll begin to feel better."

"But I'm not hungry. I won't eat," returned Ordway, with an irritable feeling that Banks was looming into a responsibility. Anything that pulled one back to life was what he wanted to escape, and even the affection of Banks might prove, he thought, tenaciously clinging. One resolution he had made in the beginning—he would not take up his life again for the sake of Banks.

"Yes, you must, Smith," remonstrated the other, with an angelic patience which gave him, if possible, a more foolish aspect. "It's after six o'clock and you haven't had a bite since yesterday at eight. That's why your head's so light and you're in a raging fever."

"It isn't that, Banks, it's because I've got to die," he answered. "If they don't hush things up with money, I may have to go back to prison." As he said the words he saw again the prison coat, with the double stripes of a second term, as in the instant of his hallucination.

"I know," said Banks, softly, as he bent over to poke the fire. "There was a line or two about it in a New York paper. But they'll hush it up, and besides they said it was just suspicion."

"You knew all the time and yet you wanted me to go back to Tappahannock?"

"Oh, they don't read the papers much there, except the Tappahannock Herald, and it won't get into that. It was just a silly little slip anyway, and not two dozen people will be likely to know what it meant."

"And you, Banks? What do you think?" he asked with a mild curiosity.

Banks shook his head. "Why, what's the use in your asking?" he replied. "Of course, I know that you didn't do it, and if you had done it, it would have been just because the other man ought to have written his name and wouldn't," he concluded, unblushingly.

For a moment Ordway looked at him in silence. "You're a good chap, Banks," he said at last in a dull voice. Again he felt, with an awakened irritation, that the absurd Banks was pulling him back to life. Was it impossible, after all, that a man should give up, as long as there remained a soul alive who believed in him? It wasn't only the love of women, then, that renewed courage. He had loved both Emily and Alice, and yet they were of less importance in his life at this hour than was Banks, whom he had merely endured. Yet he had thought the love of Emily a great thing and that of Banks a small one.

His gaze went back to the flames, and he did not remove it when a knock came at the door, and supper was brought in and placed on a little table before the fire.

"I ordered a bowl of soup for you, Smith," said Banks, crumbling the bread into it as he spoke, as if he were preparing a meal for a baby, "and a good stout piece of beefsteak for myself. Now drink this whiskey, won't you."

"I'm not hungry," returned Ordway, pushing the glass away, after it had touched his lips. "I won't eat."

Banks placed the bowl of soup on the fender, and then sat down with his eyes fastened on the tray. "I haven't had a bite myself since breakfast," he remarked, "and I'm pretty faintish, but I tell you, Smith, if it's the last word I speak, that I won't put my knife into that beefsteak until you've eaten your soup—no, not if I die right here of starvation."

"Well, I'm sorry you're such a fool, for I've no intention of eating it. I left you my whiskey, you can take that."

"I shouldn't dare to on an empty stomach. I get drunk too quick."

For a few minutes he sat in silence regarding the supper with a hungry look; then selecting a thin slice of bread, he stuck it on the end of a fork, and kneeling upon the hearthrug, held it out to the glowing coals. As it turned gradually to a delicious crisp brown, the appetising smell of it floated to Ordway's nostrils.

"I always had a particular taste for toast," remarked Banks as he buttered the slice and laid it on a hot plate on the fender. When he took up a second one, Ordway watched him with an attention of which he was almost unconscious, and he did not remove his gaze from the fire, until the last slice, brown and freshly buttered, was laid carefully upon the others. As he finished Banks threw down his fork, and rising to his feet, looked wistfully at the beefsteak, keeping hot before the cheerful flames.

"It's kind of rare, just as I like it," he observed, "thick and juicy, with little brown streaks from the broiler, and a few mushrooms scattered gracefully on top. Tappahannock is a mighty poor place for a steak," he concluded resignedly, "it ain't often I have a chance at one, but I thought to-night being Christmas——"

"Then, for God's sake, eat it!" thundered Ordway, while he made a dash for his soup.

But an hour after he had taken it, his fever rose so high that Banks helped him into bed and rushed out in alarm for the doctor.

CHAPTER IX
The Light Beyond

OUT of the obscurity of the next few weeks, he brought, with the memory of Banks hovering about his bed, the vague impression of a woman's step across his floor and a woman's touch on his brow and hands. When he returned to consciousness the woman's step and touch had vanished, but Banks was still nursing him with his infinite patience and his silly, good-humoured smile. The rest was a dream, he said to himself, resignedly, as he turned his face to the wall and slept.

On a mild January morning, when he came downstairs for the first time, and went with Banks out into the open square in front of the hotel, he put almost timidly the question which had been throbbing in his brain for weeks.

"Was there anybody else with me, Banks? I thought—I dreamed—I couldn't get rid of it——"

"Who else could there have been?" asked Banks, and he stared straight before him, at the slender spire of the big, gray church in the next block. So the mystery would remain unsolved, Ordway understood, and he would go back to life cherishing either a divine memory or a phantasy of delirium.

After a little while Banks went off to the chemists' with a prescription, and Ordway sat alone on a bench in the warm sunshine, which was rapidly melting the snow. It was Sunday morning, and presently the congregation streamed slowly past him on its way to the big gray church just beyond. A bright blue sky was overhead, the sound of bells was in the air, and under the melting snow he saw that the grass was still fresh and green. As he sat there in the wonderful Sabbath stillness, he felt, with a new sense of security, of reconciliation, that his life had again been taken out of his hands and adjusted without his knowledge. This time it had been Banks—Banks, the impossible—who had swayed his destiny, and lacking all other attributes, Banks had accomplished it through the simple power of the human touch. In the hour of his need it had been neither religion nor philosophy, but the outstretched hand, that had helped. Then his vision broadened and he saw that though the body of love is one, the members of it are infinite; and it was made plain to him at last, that the love of Emily, the love of Alice, and the love of Banks, were but different revelations of the same immortality. He had gone down into the deep places, and out of them he had brought this light, this message. As the people streamed past him to the big gray church, he felt that if they would only stop and listen, he could tell them in the open, not in walls, of the thing that they were seeking. Yet the time had not come, though in the hope of it he could sit there patiently under the blue sky, with the snow melting over the grass at his feet.

At the end of an hour Banks returned, and stood over him with affectionate anxiety. "In a few days you'll be well enough to travel, Smith, and I'll take you back with me to Tappahannock."

Ordway glanced up, smiling, and Banks saw in his face, so thin that the flesh seemed almost transparent, the rapt and luminous look with which he had stood over his Bible in the green field or in the little grove of pines.

"You will go back to Tappahannock and Baxter will take you in until you grow strong and well, and then you can start your schools, or your library, and look after the mills instead of letting Baxter do it."

"Yes," said Ordway, "yes," but he had hardly heard Banks's words, for his gaze was on the blue sky, against which the spire of the church rose like a pointing finger. His face shone as if from an inward flame, and this flame, burning clearly in his blue eyes, transfigured his look. Ah, Smith was always a dreamer, thought Banks, with the uncomprehending simplicity of a child.

But Ordway was looking beyond Banks, beyond the church spire, beyond the blue sky. He saw himself, not as Banks pictured him, living quietly in Tappahannock, but still struggling, still fighting, still falling to rise and go on again. His message was not for Tappahannock alone, but for all places where there were men and women working and suffering and going into prison and coming out. He heard his voice speaking to them in the square of this town; then in many squares and in many towns——

"Come," said Banks softly, "the wind is changing. It is time to go in."

With an effort Ordway withdrew his gaze from the church spire. Then leaning upon Banks's arm, he slowly crossed the square to the door of the hotel. But before going inside, he turned and stood for a moment looking back at the grass which showed fresh and green under the melting snow.