CHAPTER I
The Return To Life

AS the train rounded the long curve, Ordway leaned from the window and saw spread before him the smiling battlefields that encircled Botetourt. From the shadow and sunlight of the distance a wind blew in his face, and he felt suddenly younger, fresher, as if the burden of the years had been lifted from him. The Botetourt to which he was returning was the place of his happiest memories; and closing his eyes to the landscape, he saw Lydia standing under the sparrows that flew out from the ivied walls of the old church. He met her pensive gaze; he watched her faint smile under the long black feather in her hat.

"His death was unexpected," said a strange voice in his ear, "but for the past five years I've seen that he was a failing man."

The next instant his thoughts had scattered like startled birds, and without turning his head, he sat straining his ears to follow the conversation that went on, above the roar of the train, in the seat behind him.

"Had a son, didn't he?" inquired the man who had not spoken. "What's become of him, I'd like to know? I mean the chap who went to smash somewhere in the North."

"Oh, he misappropriated trust funds and got found out and sent to prison. When he came out, he went West, I heard, and struck a gold mine, but, all the same, he left his wife and children for the old man to look after. Ever seen his wife? Well, she's a downright saint, if there ever lived one."

"And yet he went wrong, the more's the pity."

"It's a funny thing," commented the first speaker, who was evidently of a philosophic bent, "but I've often noticed that a good wife is apt to make a bad husband. It looks somehow as if male human nature, like the Irish members, is obliged to sit on the Opposition bench. The only example that ever counts with it, is an example that urges the other way."

"Well, what about this particular instance? I hope at least that she has come into the old man's money?"

"Nobody can tell, but it's generally believed that the two children will get the most of it. The son left a boy and a girl when he went to prison, you know."

"Ah, that's rather a pity, isn't it?"

"Well, I can't say—they've got good blood as well as bad, when it comes to that. My daughter went to school with the girl, and she was said to be, by long odds, the most popular member of her class. She graduated last spring, and people tell me that she has turned out to be the handsomest young woman in Botetourt."

"Like the mother?"

"No, dark and tall, with those snapping blue eyes of her grandmother's——"

So Alice was no longer the little girl in short white skirts, outstanding like a ballet dancer's! There was a pang for him in the thought, and he tried in vain to accustom himself to the knowledge that she would meet him to-night as a woman, not as a child. He remembered the morning when she had run out, as he passed up the staircase, to beg him to come in to listen to her music lesson; and with the sound of the stumbling scales in his ears, he felt again that terrible throbbing of his pulses and the dull weight of anguish which had escaped at last in an outburst of bitterness.

With a jolting motion the train drew up into the little station, and following the crowd that pressed through the door of the car, he emerged presently into the noisy throng of Negro drivers gathered before the rusty vehicles which were waiting beside the narrow pavement. Pushing aside the gaily decorated whips which encircled him at his approach, he turned, after a moment's hesitation, into one of the heavily shaded streets, which seemed to his awakened memory to have remained unaltered since the afternoon upon which he had left the town almost twenty years ago. The same red and gold maples stirred gently above his head; the same silent, green-shuttered houses were withdrawn behind glossy clusters of microphylla rose-creepers. Even the same shafts of sunshine slanted across the roughly paved streets, which were strewn thickly with yellowed leaves. It was to Ordway as if a pleasant dream had descended upon the place, and had kept unchanged the particular golden stillness of that autumn afternoon when he had last seen it. All at once he realised that what Tappahannock needed was not progress, but age; and he saw for the first time that the mellowed charm of Botetourt was relieved against the splendour of an historic background. Not the distinction of the present, but the enchantment of the past, produced this quality of atmosphere into which the thought of Tappahannock entered like a vulgar discord. The dead, not the living, had built these walls, had paved these streets, had loved and fought and starved beneath these maples; and it was the memory of such solemn things that steeped the little town in its softening haze of sentiment. A thrill of pleasure, more intense than any he had known for months, shot through his heart, and the next instant he acknowledged with a sensation of shame that he was returning, not only to his people, but to his class. Was this all that experience, that humiliation, could do for one—that he should still find satisfaction in the refinements of habit, in the mere external pleasantness of life? As he passed the old church he saw that the sparrows still fluttered in and out of the ivy, which was full of twittering cries like a gigantic bird's nest, and he had suddenly a ghostly feeling as if he were a moving shadow under shadowy trees and unreal shafts of sunlight. A moment later he almost held his breath lest the dark old church and the dreamy little town should vanish before his eyes and leave him alone in the outer space of shadows.

Coming presently under a row of poplars to the street in which stood his father's house—a square red brick building with white Doric columns to the portico—he saw with a shock of surprise that the funeral carriages were standing in a solemn train for many blocks. Until that moment it had not occurred to him that he might come in time to look on the dead face of the man who had not forgiven him while he was alive; and at first he shivered and shrank back as if hesitating to enter the door that had been so lately closed against him. An old Negro driver, who sat on the curbing, wiping the broad black band on his battered silk hat with a red bandanna handkerchief, turned to speak to him with mingled sympathy and curiosity.

"Ef'n you don' hurry up, you'll miss de bes' er hit, marster," he remarked. "Dey's been gwine on a pow'ful long time, but I'se been a-lisenin' wid all my years en I ain' hyearn nairy a sh'ut come thoo' de do'. Lawd! Lawd! dey ain' mo'n like I mo'n, caze w'en dey buried my Salviny I set up sech a sh'uttin' dat I bu'st two er my spar ribs clean ter pieces."

Still muttering to himself he fell to polishing his old top hat more vigorously, while Ordway quickened his steps with an effort, and entering the gate, ascended the brick walk to the white steps of the portico. A wide black streamer hung from the bell handle, so pushing open the door, which gave noiselessly before him, he entered softly into the heavy perfume of flowers. From the room on his right, which he remembered dimly as the formal drawing-room in the days of his earliest childhood, he heard a low voice speaking as if in prayer; and looking across the threshold, he saw a group of black robed persons kneeling in the faint light which fell through the chinks in the green shutters. The intense odour of lilies awoke in him a sharp anguish, which had no association in his thoughts with his father's death, and which he could not explain until the incidents of his mother's funeral crowded, one by one, into his memory. The scent of lilies was the scent of death in his nostrils, and he saw again the cool, high-ceiled room in the midst of which her coffin had stood, and through the open windows the wide green fields in which spring was just putting forth. That was nearly thirty years ago, yet the emotion he felt at this instant was less for his father who had died yesterday than for his mother whom he had lost while he was still a child.

At his entrance no one had observed him, and while the low prayer went on, he stood with bowed head searching among the veiled figures about the coffin for the figure of his wife. Was that Lydia, he wondered, kneeling there in her mourning garments with her brow hidden in her clasped hands? And as he looked at her it seemed to him that she had never lifted the black veil which she had lowered over her face at their last parting. Though he was outwardly now among his own people, though the physical distance which divided him from his wife and children was barely a dozen steps, the loneliness which oppressed him was like the loneliness of the prison; and he understood that his real home was not here, but in Tappahannock—that his true kinship was with the labourers whose lives he had shared and whose bitter poverty he had lessened. In the presence of death he was conscious of the space, the luxury, the costly funeral wreaths that surrounded him; and these external refinements of living produced in him a sensation of shyness, as if he had no longer a rightful place in the class in which he had been born. Against his will he grew ashamed of his coarse clothes and his roughened hands; and with this burning sense of humiliation a wave of homesickness for Tappahannock swept over him—for the dusty little town, with its hot, close smells and for the blue tent of sky which was visible from his ivied window at Cedar Hill. Then he remembered, with a pang, that even from Tappahannock he had been cast out. For the second time since his release from prison, he felt cowed and beaten, like an animal that is driven to bay. The dead man in his coffin was more closely woven into his surroundings than was the living son who had returned to his inheritance.

As the grave faces looked back at him at the end of the prayer, he realised that they belonged to branches, near or distant, of the Ordway connections. With the first glimpse of his figure in the doorway there came no movement of recognition; then he observed a slight start of surprise—or was it dismay? He knew that Lydia had seen him at last, though he did not look at her. It appeared to him suddenly that his return was an insult to her as well as to the dead man who lay there, helpless yet majestic, in the centre of the room. Flight seemed to him at the instant the only amendment in his power, and he had made an impulsive start back from the threshold, when the strained hush was broken by a word that left him trembling and white as from a blow.

"Father!" cried a voice, in the first uncontrollable joy of recognition; and with an impetuous rush through the crowd that surrounded her, Alice threw herself into his arms.

A mist swam before his eyes and he lost the encircling faces in a blur of tears; but as she clung to his breast and he held her close, he was conscious of a fierce joy that throbbed, like a physical pain, in his throat. The word which she had uttered had brought his soul up from the abyss as surely as if it were lifted by the hands of angels; and with each sobbing breath of happiness she drew, he felt that her nature was knit more firmly into his. The repulse he had received the moment before was forgotten, and while he held her drawn apart in the doorway, the silence of Lydia, and even the reproach of the dead man, had ceased to affect him. In that breathless, hysterical rush to his embrace Alice saved him to-day as Emily's outstretched hand had saved him three years before.

"They did not tell me! Oh, why, did they not tell me?" cried the girl, lifting her head from his breast, and the funeral hush that shrouded the room could not keep back the ecstasy in her voice. Even when after the first awkward instant the others gathered around him, nervous, effusive, friendly, Alice still clung to his hands, kissing first one and then the other and then both together, with the exquisite joyous abandonment of a child.

Lydia had kissed him, weeping softly under her long black veil, and hiding her pale, lovely face the moment afterwards in her clasped hands. Dick, his son, had touched his cheek with his fresh young mouth; Richard Ordway, his father's brother, had shaken him by the hand; and the others, one and all, kinsmen and kinswomen, had given him their embarrassed, yet kindly, welcome. But it was on Alice that his eyes rested, while he felt his whole being impelled toward her in a recovered rapture that was almost one of worship. In her dark beauty, with her splendid hair, her blue, flashing Ordway eyes, and her lips which were too red and too full for perfection, she appeared to him the one vital thing among the mourning figures in this house of death. Her delight still ran in little tremors through her limbs, and when a moment later, she slipped her hand through his arm, and followed Lydia and Richard Ordway down the steps, and into one of the waiting carriages, he felt that her bosom quivered with the emotion which the solemn presence of his father had forced back from her lips.

CHAPTER II
His Own Place

SOME hours later when he sat alone in his room, he told himself that he could never forget the drive home from the cemetery in the closed carriage. Lydia had raised her veil slightly, as if in a desire for air, and as she sat with her head resting against the lowered blind, he could trace the delicate, pale lines of her mouth and chin, and a single wisp of her ash blond hair which lay heavily upon her forehead. Not once had she spoken, not once had she met his eyes of her own accord, and he had discovered that she leaned almost desperately upon the iron presence of Richard Ordway. Had his sin, indeed, crushed her until she had not power to lift her head? he asked passionately, with a sharper remorse than he had ever felt.

"I am glad that you were able to come in time," Richard Ordway remarked in his cold, even voice; and after this the rattle of the wheels on the cobblestones in the street was the only sound which broke the death-like stillness in which they sat. No, he could never forget it, nor could he forget the bewildering effect of the sunshine when they opened the carriage door. Beside the curbing a few idle Negroes were left of the crowd that had gathered to watch the coffin borne through the gate, and the pavement was thick with dust, as if many hurrying feet had tramped by since the funeral had passed. As they entered the house the scent of lilies struck him afresh with all the agony of its associations. The shutters were still closed, the chairs were still arranged in their solemn circle, the streamer of crape, hurriedly untied from the bell handle, still lay where it had been thrown on the library table; and as he crossed the threshold, he trod upon some fading lilies which had fallen, unnoticed, from a funeral wreath. Then, in the dining-room, Richard Ordway poured out a glass of whiskey, and in the very instant when he was about to raise it to his lips, he put it hurriedly down and pushed the decanter aside with an embarrassed and furtive movement.

"Do you feel the need of a cup of coffee, Daniel?" he asked in a pleasant, conciliatory tone, "or will you have only a glass of seltzer?"

"I am not thirsty, thank you," Daniel responded shortly, and the next moment he asked Alice to show him the room in which he would stay.

With laughing eagerness she led him up the great staircase to the chamber in which he had slept as a boy.

"It's just next to Dick's," she said, "and mother's and mine are directly across the hall. At first we thought of putting you in the red guest-room, but that's only for visitors, so we knew you would be sure to like this better.""Yes, I'll like this better," he responded, and then as she would have moved away, he caught her, with a gesture of anguish, back to his arms.

"You remember me, Alice, my child? you have not forgotten me?"

She laughed merrily, biting her full red lips the moment afterward to check the sound.

"Why, how funny of you! I was quite a big girl—don't you remember?—when you went away. It was so dull afterwards that I cried for days, and that was why I was so overjoyed when mamma told me you would come back. It was never dull when you lived at home with us, because you would always take me to the park or the circus whenever I grew tired of dolls. Nobody did that after you went away and I used to cry and kick sometimes thinking that they would tell you and bring you back."

"And you remembered me chiefly because of the park and the circus?" he asked, smiling for joy, as he kissed her hand which lay on his sleeve.

"Oh, I never forget anything, you know. Mamma even says that about me. I remember my first nurse and the baker's boy with red cheeks who used to bring me pink cakes when I was three years old. No, I never forget—I never forget," she repeated with vehemence.

Animation had kindled her features into a beauty of colour which made her eyes bluer and brighter and softened the too intense contrast of her full, red lips.

"All these years I've hoped that you would come back and that things would change," she said impulsively, her words tripping rapidly over one another. "Everything is so dreadfully grave and solemn here. Grandfather hated noise so that he would hardly let me laugh if he was in the house. Then mamma's health is wrecked, and she lies always on the sofa, and never goes out except for a drive sometimes when it is fair."

"Mamma's health is wrecked?" he repeated inquiringly, as she paused.

"Oh, that's what everybody says about her—her health is wrecked. And Uncle Richard is hardly any better, for he has a wife whose health is wrecked also. And Dick—he isn't sick, but he might as well be, he is so dull and plodding and over nice——"

"And you Alice?"

"I? Oh, I'm not dull, but I'm unhappy—awfully—you'll find that out. I like fun and pretty clothes and new people and strange places. I want to marry and have a home of my own and a lot of rings like mamma's, and a carriage with two men on the box, and to go to Europe to buy things whenever I please. That's the way Molly Burridge does and she was only two classes ahead of me. How rough your hands are, papa, and what a funny kind of shirt you have on. Do people dress like that where you came from? Well, I don't like it, so you'll have to change."

She had gone out at last, forgetting to walk properly in her mourning garments, tripping into a run on the threshold, and then checking herself with a prim, mocking look over her shoulder. Not until the door had closed with a slam behind her black skirt, did Ordway's gaze turn from following her and fix itself on the long mirror between the windows, in which he could see, as Alice had seen the moment before, his roughened hands, his carelessly trimmed hair and his common clothes. He was dressed as the labourers dressed on Sundays in Tappahannock; though, he remembered now, that in that crude little town he had been conspicuous for the neatness, almost the jauntiness, of his attire. As he laid out presently on the bed his few poor belongings, he told himself, with determination, that for Alice's sake even this must be changed. He was no longer of the class of Baxter, of Banks, of Mrs. Twine. All that was over, and he must return now into the world in which his wife and his children had kept a place. To do Alice honour—at least not to do her further shame—would become from this day, he realised, the controlling motive of his life. Then, as he looked down at the coarse, unshapely garments upon the delicate counterpane, he knew that Daniel Smith and Daniel Ordway were now parted forever.

He was still holding one of the rough blue shirts in his hand, when a servant entered to inquire if there was anything that he might need. The man, a bright young mulatto, was not one of the old family slaves; and while he waited, alert and intelligent, upon the threshold, Ordway was seized by a nervous feeling that he was regarded with curiosity and suspicion by the black rolling eyes.

"Where is uncle Boaz? He used to wait upon me," he asked.

"He's daid, suh. He drapped down daid right on de do' step."

"And Aunt Mirandy?"

"She's daid, too, en' I'se her chile."

"Oh, you are, are you?" said Ordway, and he had again the sensation that he was watched through inquisitive eyes. "That is all now," he added presently, "you may go," and it was with a long breath of relief that he saw the door close after the figure of Aunt Mirandy's son.

When a little later he dressed himself and went out into the hall, he found, to his annoyance, that he walked with a cautious and timid step like that of a labourer who has stumbled by accident into surroundings of luxury. As he descended the wide curving staircase, with his hand on the mahogany balustrade, the sound of his footsteps seemed to reverberate disagreeably through the awful funereal silence in which he moved. If he could only hear Alice's laugh, Dick's whistle, or even the garrulous flow of the Negro voices that he had listened to in his childhood. With a pang he recalled that Uncle Boaz was dead, and his heart swelled as he remembered how often he had passed up and down this same staircase on the old servant's shoulder. At that age he had felt no awe of the shining emptiness and the oppressive silence. Then he had believed himself to be master of all at which he looked; now he was conscious of that complete detachment from his surroundings which produces almost a sense of the actual separation of soul and body.

Reaching the hall below, he found that some hurried attempt had been made to banish or to conceal the remaining signs of the funeral. The doors and windows were open, the shreds of crape had disappeared from the carpet, and the fading lilies had been swept out upon the graveled walk in the yard. Upon entering the library, which invited him by its rows of calf-bound books, he discovered that Richard Ordway was patiently awaiting him in the large red leather chair which had once been the favourite seat of his father.

"Before I go home, I think it better to have a little talk with you, Daniel," began the old man, as he motioned to a sofa on the opposite side of the Turkish rug before the open grate. "It has been a peculiar satisfaction to me to feel that I was able to bring you back in time for the service."

"I came," replied Daniel slowly, "as soon as I received your telegram." He hesitated an instant and then went on in the same quiet tone in which the other had spoken, "Do you think, though, that he would have wished me to come at all?"

After folding the newspaper which he had held in his hand, Richard laid it, with a courteous gesture upon the table beside him. As he sat there with his long limbs outstretched and relaxed, and his handsome, severe profile resting against the leather back of his chair, the younger man was impressed, as if for the first time, by the curious mixture of strength and refinement in his features. He was not only a cleverer man than his brother had been, he was gentler, smoother, more distinguished on every side. In spite of his reserve, it was evident that he had wished to be kind—that he wished it still; yet this kindness was so removed from the ordinary impulse of humanity that it appeared to his nephew to be in a way as detached and impersonal as an abstract virtue. The very lines of his face were drawn with the precision, the finality, of a geometrical figure. To imagine that they could melt into tenderness was as impossible as to conceive of their finally crumbling into dust.

"He would have wished it—he did wish it," he said, after a minute. "I talked with him only a few hours before his death, and he told me then that it was necessary to send for you—that he felt that he had neglected his duty in not bringing you home immediately after your release. He saw at last that it would have been far better to have acted as I strongly advised at the time."

"It was his desire, then, that I should return?" asked Daniel, while a stinging moisture rose to his eyes at the thought that he had not looked once upon the face of the dead man. "I wish I had known."

A slight surprise showed in the other's gesture of response, and he glanced hastily away as he might have done had he chanced to surprise his nephew while he was still without his boots or his shirt.

"I think he realised before he died that the individual has no right to place his personal pride above the family tie," he resumed quietly, ignoring the indecency of emotion as he would have ignored, probably, the unclothed body. "I had said much the same thing to him eight years ago, when I told him that he would realise before his death that he was not morally free to act as he had done with regard to you. As a matter of fact," he observed in his trained, legal voice, "the family is, after all, the social unit, and each member is as closely related as the eye to the ear or the right arm to the left. It is illogical to speak of denying one's flesh and blood, for it can't be done."

So this was why they had received him. He turned his head away, and his gaze rested upon the boughs of the great golden poplar beyond the window.

"It is understood, then," he asked "that I am to come back—back to this house to live?"

When he had finished, but not until then, Richard Ordway looked at him again with his dry, conventional kindness. "If you are free," he began, altering the word immediately lest it should suggest painful associations to his companion's mind, "I mean if you have no other binding engagements, no decided plans for the future."

"No, I have made no other plans. I was working as a bookkeeper in a tobacco warehouse in Tappahannock."

"As a bookkeeper?" repeated Richard, as he glanced down inquiringly at the other's hands.

"Oh, I worked sometimes out of doors, but the position I held was that of confidential clerk."

The old man nodded amiably, accepting the explanation with a readiness for which the other was not prepared. "I was about to offer you some legal work in my office," he remarked. "Dry and musty stuff, I fear it is, but it's better—isn't it?—for a man to have some kind of occupation——"

Though the words were uttered pleasantly enough, it seemed to the younger man that the concluding and significant phrase was left unspoken. "Some kind of occupation to keep you out of temptation" was what Richard had meant to say—what he had withheld, from consideration, if not from humanity. While the horror of the whole situation closed over Daniel like a mental darkness, he remembered the sensitive shrinking of Lydia on the drive home, the prying, inquisitive eyes of the mulatto servant, the furtive withdrawal of the whiskey by the man who sat opposite to him. With all its attending humiliation and despair, there rushed upon him the knowledge that by the people of his own household he was regarded still as a creature to be restrained and protected at every instant. Though outwardly they had received him, instinctively they had repulsed him. The thing which stood between them and himself was neither of their making nor of his. It belonged to their very nature and was woven in with their inner fibre. It was a creation, not of the individual, but of the race, and the law by which it existed was rooted deep in the racial structure. Tradition, inheritance, instinct—these were the barriers through which he had broken and which had closed like the impenetrable sea-gates behind him. Though he were to live on day by day as a saint among them, they could never forget: though he were to shed his heart's blood for them, they would never believe. To convince them of his sincerity was more hopeless, he understood, than to reanimate their affection. In their very forgiveness they had not ceased to condemn him, and in the shelter which they offered him there would be always a hidden restraint. With the thought it seemed to him that he was stifling in the closeness of the atmosphere, that he must break away again, that he must find air and freedom, though it cost him all else besides. The possibility of his own weakness seemed created in him by their acceptance of it; and he felt suddenly a terror lest the knowledge of their suspicion should drive him to justify it by his future in Botetourt.

"Yes, it is better for me to work," he said aloud. "I hope that I shall be able to make myself of some small use in your office."

"There's no doubt of that, I'm sure," responded Richard, in his friendliest tone.

"It is taken for granted, then, that I shall live on here with my wife and children?"

"We have decided that it is best. But as for your wife, you must remember that she is very much of an invalid. Do not forget that she has had a sad—a most tragic life."

"I promise you that I shall not forget it—make your mind easy."

After this it seemed to Daniel that there was nothing further to be said; but before rising from his chair, the old man sat for a moment with his thin lips tightly folded and a troubled frown ruffling his forehead. In the dim twilight the profile outlined against the leather chair appeared to have been ground rather than roughly hewn out of granite.

"About the disposition of the estate, there were some changes made shortly before your father's death," remarked Richard presently. "In the will itself you were not mentioned; a provision was made for your wife and the bulk of the property left to your two children. But in a codicil, which was added the day before your father died, he directed that you should be given a life interest in the house as well as in investments to the amount of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This is to be paid you in the form of a quarterly allowance, which will yield you a personal income of about six thousand a year."

"I understand," replied the younger man, without emotion, almost without surprise. At the moment he was wondering by what name his father had alluded to him in his will. Had he spoken of him as "my son," or merely as "Daniel Ordway"?

"That is all, I think," remarked the other, with a movement which expressed, in spite of him, a sensation of relief. With a smile which appeared to be little more than a muscular contraction of his mouth, he held out his hand and stood for a moment, vainly searching for a phrase or a word that would fit the delicate requirements of the occasion.

"Well, I shall never cease to be thankful that you were with us at the cemetery," he said at last in a tone which was a patent admission that he had failed. Then, with a kindly inclination of his head, he released the hand he held and passed at his rapid, yet dignified step out of the house.

CHAPTER III
The Outward Pattern

THE front door had hardly closed when a breath of freshness blew into the library with the entrance of Alice, and a moment afterwards the butler rolled back the mahogany doors of the dining-room and they saw the lighted candles and the chrysanthemums upon the dinner table.

"We hardly ever dress," said Alice, slipping her hand through his arm, "I wish we did."

"Well, if you'll only pardon these clothes to-night I'll promise to call on the tailor before breakfast," he returned, smiling, conscious that he watched in anxiety lest the look of delight in his presence should vanish from her face.

"Oh, it doesn't matter now, because we're in the deepest grief—aren't we?—and mamma isn't coming down. She wants to see you, by the way, just for a minute when you go upstairs. It is to be just for a minute, I was to be very particular about that, as she is broken down. I wonder why they have put so many covers. There is nobody but you and Dick. I asked Uncle Richard, but he said that he wouldn't stay. It's just as well he didn't—he's so dreadfully dull, isn't he, papa?"

"All I wish is that I were dull in Uncle Richard's way," remarked Dick, with his boyish air of superiority, "I'd be the greatest lawyer in the state then, when my turn came."

"And you'd be even more tiresome than you are now," retorted the girl with a flash of irritation which brought out three fine, nervous wrinkles on her delicate forehead.

"Well, I shouldn't have your temper anyway," commented Dick imperturbably, as he ate his soup. "Do you remember, papa, how Alice used to bite and scratch as a baby? She'd like to behave exactly that way now if she weren't so tall."

"Oh, I know Alice better than you do," said Ordway, in a voice which he tried to make cheerful. The girl sat on his right, and while she choked back her anger, he reached out and catching her hand, held it against his cheek. "We stand together, Alice and I," he said softly—"Alice and I."

As he repeated the words a wave of joy rose in his heart, submerging the disappointment, the bitterness, the hard despair, of the last few hours. Here also, as well as in Tappahannock, he found awaiting him his appointed task.

Dick laughed pleasantly, preserving always the unshakable self-possession which reminded his father of Richard Ordway. He was a good boy, Daniel knew, upright, honest, manly, all the things which his grandfather and his great-grandfather had been before him.

"Then you'll have to stand with Geoffrey Heath," he said jestingly, "and, by Jove, I don't think I'd care for his company."

"Geoffrey Heath?" repeated Ordway inquiringly, with his eyes on his daughter, who sat silent and angry, biting her lower lip. Her mouth, which he had soon discovered to be her least perfect feature, was at the same time her most expressive one. At her slightest change of mood, he watched it tremble into a smile or a frown, and from a distance it was plainly the first thing one noticed about her face. Now, as she sat there, with her eyes on her plate, her vivid lips showed like a splash of carmine in the lustreless pallor of her skin.

"Oh, he's one of Alice's chums," returned Dick with his merciless youthful sneer, "she has a pretty lot of them, too, though he is by long odds the worst."

"Well, he's rich enough anyway," protested Alice defiantly, "he keeps beautiful horses and sends me boxes of candy, and I don't care a bit for the rest."

"Who is he, by the way?" asked Daniel. "There was a family of Heaths who lived near us in the country when I was a boy. Is he one of these?"

"He's the son of old Rupert Heath, who made a million out of some panic in stocks. Uncle Richard says the father was all right, but he's tried his best to break up Alice's craze about Geoffrey. But let her once get her nose to the wind and nobody can do anything with her."

"Well, I can, can't I, darling?" asked Ordway, smiling in spite of a jealous pang. The appeal of the girl to him was like the appeal of the finer part of his own nature. Her temptations he recognised as the old familiar temptations of his youth, and the kinship between them seemed at the moment something deeper and more enduring than the tie of blood. Yet the thought that she was his daughter awoke in him a gratitude that was almost as acute as pain. The emptiness of his life was filled suddenly to over-flowing, and he felt again that he had found here as he had found at Tappahannock both his mission and his reward.

When dinner was over he left the boy and girl in the library and went slowly, and with a nervous hesitation, upstairs to the room in which Lydia was lying on her couch, with a flower-decked tray upon the little inlaid table beside her. As he entered the room something in the luxurious atmosphere—in the amber satin curtains, the white bearskin rugs, the shining mirrors between the windows—recalled the early years of his marriage, and as he remembered them, he realised for the first time the immensity of the change which divided his present existence from his past. The time had been when he could not separate his inner life from his surroundings, and with the thought he saw in his memory the bare cleanliness of the blue guest-room at Cedar Hill—with its simple white bed, its rag carpet, its faded sampler worked in blue worsteds. That place had become as a sanctuary to him now, for it was there that he had known his most perfect peace, his completest reconciliation with God.

As he entered the room Lydia raised herself slightly upon her elbow, and without turning her head, nervously pushed back a white silk shawl which she had thrown over her knees. A lamp with an amber shade cast its light on her averted profile, and he noticed that its perfect outline, its serene loveliness, was untouched by suffering. Already he had discovered those almost imperceptible furrows between Alice's eyebrows, but when Lydia looked up at him at last, he saw that her beautiful forehead, under its parting of ash blond hair, was as smooth as a child's. Was it merely the Madonna-like arrangement of her hair, after all, he wondered, not without bitterness, that had bestowed upon her that appealing expression of injured innocence?

"You wished to speak to me, Alice said," he began with an awkward gesture, acutely conscious, as he stood there, of the amber light in the room, of the shining waves of her hair, of the delicate perfume which floated from the gold-topped boxes upon her dressing-table. An oval mirror above the mantel gave back to him the reflection of his own roughly clad figure, and the violent contrast between himself and his surroundings stung him into a sense of humiliation that was like a physical smart.

"I thought it better to speak to you—Uncle Richard and Dick advised me to——" she broke off in a gentle confusion, lifting her lovely, pensive eyes for the first time to his face.

"Of course it is better, Lydia," he answered gravely. "You must let me know what you wish—you must tell me quite frankly just what you would rather that I should do——"

The look of gratitude in her face gave him a sudden inexplicable pang.

"I am hardly more than an invalid," she said in a voice that had grown firm and sweet, "Uncle Richard will tell you——"

Her reliance upon Richard Ordway aroused in him a passion of resentment, and for an instant the primitive man in him battled hotly against the renunciation his lips had made.

"I know, I understand," he said hurriedly at last. "I appreciate it all and I shall do whatever is in my power to make it easier for you." As he looked at her bowed head a wave of remorse rose in his breast and swept down, one by one, the impulses of anger, of pride, of self-righteousness. "O my dear, my dear, don't you think I know what I have done to you?" he asked, and going a step toward her, he fell on his knees beside the couch and kissed passionately the hand that lay in her lap. "Don't you think I know that I have ruined your life?"

For a moment her eyes dwelt thoughtfully upon his, and she let her hand lie still beneath his remorseful kisses, until her withdrawal of it had lost any appearance of haste or of discourtesy.

"Then you will not object to my living on in this way? You will not seek to change anything? You will——" She hesitated and broke off, not impulsively, but with the same clear, sweet voice in which she had put her question.

Lifting his head, he looked up at her from his knees, and the dumb loneliness in his eyes caused her at last to drop her own to the rug upon which he knelt.

"If you will only let me care for you—serve you—work for you," he implored brokenly. "If you will only let me make up, however poorly, something of what you have suffered."

A vague discomfort, produced in her by the intensity of his gaze, moved her to draw slightly away from him, while she turned restlessly on her pillows. At the first shade of perplexity, of annoyance, that showed in her face, he felt, with a terrible power of intuition, that she was seeking in vain to estimate each of his heartbroken words at its full value—to read calmly by the light of experience the passion for atonement to which his lips had tried hopelessly to give expression. The wall of personality rose like a visible object between them. He might beat against it in desperation until his strength was gone, yet he knew that it would remain forever impenetrable, and through its thickness there would pass only the loud, unmeaning sound of each other's voice.

"Have you lost all love for me, Lydia?" he asked. "Have you even forgotten that I am the father of your children?"

As soon as his words were uttered, he stumbled to his feet, horrified by the effect upon her. A change that was like a spasm of physical nausea had shaken her limbs, and he felt rather than saw that she had shrunk from him, convulsed and quivering, until she was crushed powerless against the back of the sofa on which she lay. Her whole attitude, he realised, was the result, not of a moral judgment, but of a purely physical antipathy. Her horror of him had become instinctive, and she was no more responsible for its existence than a child is responsible for the dread aroused in it by the goblins of nursery rhymes. His life as a convict had not only unclassed him in her eyes, it had put him entirely outside and below the ordinary relations of human beings. To his wife he must remain forever an object of pity, perhaps, but of intense loathing and fear also.

The wave of remorse turned to bitterness on his lips, and all the tenderer emotions he had felt when he knelt by her side—the self-reproach, the spiritual yearning, the passion for goodness, all these were extinguished in the sense of desolation which swept over him.

"Don't be afraid," he said coldly, "I shall not touch you."

"It was nothing—a moment's pain," she answered, in a wistful, apologetic voice.

She was playing nervously with the fringe of the silk shawl, and he stood for a minute in silence while he watched her long, slender fingers twine themselves in and out of the tasseled ends. Then turning aside she pushed away the coffee service on the little table as if its fragrance annoyed her.

"Is it in your way? Do you wish it removed?" he inquired, and when she had nodded in reply, he lifted the tray and carried it in the direction of the door. "Don't be afraid. It is all right," he repeated as he went out.

Back in his own room again, he asked himself desperately if this existence could be possible? Would it not be better for him to lose himself a second time—to throw in his lot with a lower class, since his own had rejected him? Flinging himself on the floor beside the window, he pressed his forehead against the white painted wood as if the outward violence could deaden the throbbing agony he felt within. Again he smelt the delicate, yet intense perfume of Lydia's chamber; again he saw her shrinking from him until she lay crushed and white against the back of the sofa; again he watched her features contract with the instinctive repulsion she could not control. The pitiful deprecating gesture with which she had murmured: "It is nothing—a moment's pain," was seared forever like the mark from a burning iron into his memory.

"No, no—it cannot be—it is impossible," he said suddenly aloud. And though he had not the strength to frame the rest of his thought into words, he knew that the impossible thing he meant was this life, this torture, this slow martyrdom day by day without hope and without end except in death. After all there was a way of escape, so why should it be closed to him? What were these people to him beside those others whom he might yet serve—the miserable, the poor, the afflicted who would take from him the gifts which his own had rejected? What duty remained? What obligation? What responsibility? Step by step he retraced the nineteen years of his marriage, and he understood for the first time, that Lydia had given him on her wedding day nothing of herself beyond the gentle, apologetic gesture which had followed that evening her involuntary repulsion. From the beginning to the end she had presided always above, not shared in his destiny. She had wanted what he could give, but not himself, and when he could give nothing more she had shown that she wanted him no longer. While he knelt there, still pressing his forehead against the window sill, the image of her part in his life rose out of the darkness of his mind, which opened and closed over it, and he saw her fixed, shining and immovable, to receive his offerings, like some heathen deity above the sacrificial altar.

The next instant the image faded and was replaced by Emily as she had looked at him on that last evening with her soft, comforting gaze. The weakness of self pity came over him, and he asked himself in the coward's luxury of hopeless questioning, what Emily would have done had she stood to him in Lydia's place? He saw her parting from him with her bright courage at the prison doors; he saw her meeting him with her smile of welcome and of forgiveness when he came out. As once before he had risen to the vision of service, so now in the agony of his humiliation he was blessed at last with the understanding of love.

For many minutes he knelt there motionless by the open window, beyond which he could see the dimly lighted town on which a few drops of rain had begun to fall. The faint perfume of lilies came up to him from the walk below, where the broken sprays swept from the house were fading under the slow, soft rain. With the fragrance the image of Emily dissolved as in a mist to reappear the minute afterwards in a more torturing and human shape. He saw her now with her bright dark hair blown into little curls on her temples, with her radiant brown eyes that penetrated him with their soft, yet animated glance. The vigorous grace of her figure, as he had seen it outlined in her scant blue cotton gown against the background of cedars, remained motionless in his thoughts, bathed in a clear golden light that tormented his senses.

Rising from his knees with an effort, he struck a match and raised the green shade from the lamp on the table. Then while the little blue flame flickered out in his hand, he felt that he was seized by a frantic, an irresistible impulse of flight. Gathering his clothes from the bed in the darkness, he pushed them hurriedly back into the bag he had emptied, and with a last glance at the room which had become unendurable to him, opened the door and went with a rapid step down the great staircase and into the hall below. The direction of his journey, as well as the purpose of it, was obscure in his mind. Yesterday he had told himself that he could not remain in Tappahannock, and to-day he knew that it was impossible for him to live on in his father's house. To pass the hall door meant release—escape to him; beyond that there lay only the distance and the unknown.

The lights burned dimly on the staircase, and when he reached the bottom he could see on the carpet the thin reddish stream which issued from the closed door of the library. As he was about to pass by, a short sob fell on his ear, arresting him as authoritatively as if it had been the sound of his own name. While he stood there listening the sobs ceased and then broke out more loudly, now violent, now smothered, now followed by quick, furious steps across the floor within. Alice was shut in the room alone and suffering! With the realisation the bag fell from his hand, and turning the knob softly, he opened the door and paused for an instant upon the threshold.

At the noise of the opening door the girl made a single step forward, and as she raised her hands to conceal her distorted features, her handkerchief, torn into shreds, fell to the carpet at her feet. Around her the room showed other signs of an outbreak of anger—the chairs were pushed hurriedly out of place, the books from the centre table were lying with opened backs on the floor, and a vase of dahlias lay overturned and scattered upon the mantel.

"I don't care—I don't care," she repeated, convulsively. "Why do they always interfere with me? What right has Dick or Uncle Richard to say whom I shall see or whom I shall not? I hate them all. Mamma is always against me—so is Uncle Richard—so is everybody. They side with Dick—always—always."

A single wave of her dark hair had fallen low on her forehead, and this, with the violent colour of her mouth, gave her a look that was almost barbaric. The splendid possibilities in her beauty caused him, in the midst of his pity, a sensation of dread.

"Alice," he said softly, almost in a whisper, and closing the door after him, he came to the middle of the room and stood near her, though still without touching her quivering body.

"They side with Dick always," she repeated furiously, "and you will side with him, too—you will side with him, too!"

For a long pause he looked at her in silence, waiting until the convulsive tremors of her limbs should cease.

"I shall never side against my daughter," he said very slowly. "Alice, my child, my darling, are you not really mine?"

A last quivering sob shook through her and she grew suddenly still. "They will tell you things about me and you will believe them," she answered sternly.

"Against you, Alice? Against you?"

"You will blame me as they do."

"I love you," he returned, almost as sternly as she had spoken.

An emotional change, so swift that it startled him, broke in her look, and he saw the bright red of her mouth tremble and open like a flower in her glowing face. At the sight a sharp joy took possession of him—a joy that he could measure only by the depth of the agony out of which he had come. Without moving from his place, he stretched out his arms and stood waiting.

"Alice, I love you," he said.

Then his arms closed over her, for with the straight flight of a bird she had flown to his breast.

CHAPTER IV
The Letter and the Spirit

AWAKING before dawn, he realised with his first conscious thought that his life had been irrevocably settled while he slept. His place was here; he could not break away from it without leaving a ragged edge; and while he had believed himself to be deciding his future actions, that greater Destiny, of which his will was only a part, had arranged them for him during the dim pause of the night. He could feel still on his arm, as if it had persisted there through his sleep, the firm, almost viselike pressure of Alice's hands, and his whole sensitive nature thrilled in response to this mute appeal to his fatherhood. Yes, his purpose, his mission, and his happiness were here in his father's house.

At breakfast he found a white rosebud on his plate, and as he took it up, Alice rushed in from the garden and threw herself into his arms.

"I thought you were never, never coming down!" she exclaimed, choking with laughter, and utterly forgetful of the shadow of death which still lay over the house. "At first I was afraid you might have gone away in the night—just as you went that awful day eight years ago. Then I peeped out and saw your boots, so I went back to bed again and fell asleep. Oh, I'm so glad you've come! Why did you stay away such an age? Now, at last, I'll have somebody to take my side against mamma and Dick and Uncle Richard——"

"But why against them, Alice? Surely they love you just as I do?"

Biting her lips sharply, she bent her heavy brows in a stern and frowning expression. "Oh, they're horrid," she said angrily, "they want me to live just as mamma does—shut up all day in a hot room on a hateful sofa. She reads novels all the time, and I despise books. I want to go away and see things and to have plenty of clothes and all the fun I choose. They let Dick do just as he pleases because he's a boy, but they try to make me dull and stupid and foolish all because I'm a girl. I won't have it like that and it makes them angry——"

"Oh, well, we'll have fun together, you and I," returned Ordway, with a sinking heart, "but you must wait a bit till I catch up with you. Don't be in a precious hurry, if you please."

"Shall we have a good time, then? Shall we?" she persisted, delighted, kissing him with her warm mouth until he was dazzled by her beauty, her fascination, her ardent vitality. "And you will do just what I wish, won't you?" she whispered in his ear as she hung on his shoulder, "you will be good and kind always? and you will make them leave me alone about Geoffrey Heath?"

"About Geoffrey Heath?" he repeated, and grew suddenly serious.

"Oh, he's rich and he's fun, too," she responded irritably. "He has asked me to ride one of his horses—the most beautiful chestnut mare in the world—but mamma scolds me about it because she says he's not nice and that he did something once years ago about cards. As if I cared about cards!"

By the fear that had gripped him he could judge the strength of her hold on his heart. "Alice, be careful—promise me to be careful!" he entreated.

At his words he felt her arms relax from their embrace, and she seemed instantly to turn to marble upon his breast. "Oh, you're just like the others now. I knew you would be!" she exclaimed, as she drew away from him.

Before the coldness of her withdrawal he felt that his will went out of him; and in one despairing flight of imagination he saw what the loss of her affection would mean now in his life. An emotion which he knew to be weakness pervaded not only his heart, but his soul and his senses and the remotest fibre of his physical being. "Whatever comes I shall always stand by you, Alice," he said.

Though she appeared to be mollified by his subjection, the thin almost imperceptible furrows caused by the moment's anger, were still visible between her eyebrows. There was a certain fascination, he found, in watching these marks of age or of experience come and go on her fresh, childlike forehead, with its lustrous pallor, from which her splendid dark hair rolled back, touched with light, like a moonlit cloud. It was a singular characteristic of her beauty that its appeal was rather to the imagination than to the eye, and the moments, perhaps, when she dazzled least were those in which she conquered most through her enigmatical charm.

"You will buy some clothes, first of all, will you not?" she said, when, having finished his breakfast, he rose from the table and went out into the hall.

He met her eyes laughing, filled with happiness at the playful authority she assumed, and yet fearful still lest some incautious word of his should bring out those fine nervous wrinkles upon her forehead.

"Give me a week and I'll promise you a fashion plate," he responded gaily, kissing his hand to her as he went down the steps, and, under the trailing rose creepers at the gate, out into the street.

Rain had fallen in the night, and the ground was covered with shining puddles beneath which a few autumn leaves showed drenched and beaten. From the golden and red maples above a damp odour was wafted down into his face by the October wind, which now rose and now died away with a gentle sound. In the pale sunshine, which had not yet drained the moisture from the bricks, a wonderful freshness seemed to emanate from the sky and the earth and the white-pillared houses.

As he approached the corner, he heard his name called in a clear emphatic voice from the opposite sidewalk, and turning his head, he saw hastening toward him, a little elderly lady in a black silk gown trimmed heavily with bugles. As she neared him, followed by a young Negro maid bearing a market basket filled with vegetables, he recognised her as an intimate friend of his mother's, whom he had known familiarly in his childhood as "Aunt Lucy." It seemed so long now since his mother's death that he was attacked by a ghostly sensation, as if he were dreaming over his past life, while he stood face to face with the old lady's small soldierly figure and listened to the crisp, emphatic tones in which she welcomed him back to Botetourt. He remembered his frequent visits to her solemn old house, which she kept so dark that he had always stumbled over the two embroidered ottomans on the parlour hearth. He recalled the smell of spices which had hung about her storeroom, and the raspberry preserves which she had never failed to give him out of a blue china jar.

"Why, my dear, blessed child, it's such a pleasure to have you back!" she exclaimed now with an effusion which he felt to be the outward veil of some hidden embarrassment. "You must come sometimes and let me talk to you about your mother. I knew your mother so well—I was one of her bridesmaids."

Seizing his arm in her little firm, clawlike hands, she assured him with animation of her delight at his return, alluding in a shaking voice to his mother, and urging him to come to sit with her whenever he could stand the gloom of her empty house.

"And you will give me raspberry preserves out of the blue china jar?" he asked, laughing, "and let me feed crackers to the green parrot?"

"What a boy! What a boy!" she returned. "You remember everything. The parrot is dead—my poor Polly!—but there is a second."

Her effusiveness, her volubility, which seemed to him to be the result of concealed embarrassment, produced in him presently a feeling of distrust, almost of resentment, and he remembered the next instant that, in his childhood, she had been looked upon as a creature of uncontrolled charitable impulses. Upon the occasion of his last meeting with her was she not hastening upon some ministering errand to the city gaol? At the casual recollection an unreasoning bitterness awoke in his mind; her reiterated raptures fell with a strange effect of irritation upon his ears; and he knew now that he could never bring himself to enter her house again, that he could never accept her preserved raspberries out of the blue china jar. Her reception of him, he saw, was but a part of the general reception of Botetourt. Like her the town would be voluble, unnatural, overdone in its kindness, hiding within itself a furtive constraint as if it addressed its speeches to the sensitive sufferer from some incurable malady. The very tenderness, the exaggerated sympathy in its manner would hardly have been different, he understood, if he had been recently discharged as harmless, yet half-distraught, from an asylum for the insane.

As the days went on this idea, instead of dissolving, became unalterably lodged in his brain. Gradually he retreated further and further into himself, until the spiritual isolation in which he lived appeared to him more and more like the isolation of the prison. His figure had become a familiar one in the streets of Botetourt, yet he lived bodily among the people without entering into their lives or sharing in any degree the emotions that moved their hearts. Only in periods of sorrow did he go willingly into the houses of those of his own class, though he had found a way from the beginning to reach the poor, the distressed, or the physically afflicted. His tall, slightly stooping figure, in its loose black clothes, his dark head, with the thick locks of iron gray hair upon the temples, his sparkling blue eyes, his bright, almost boyish smile, and the peculiar, unforgettable charm of his presence—these were the things which those in sickness or poverty began to recognise and to look for. In his own home he lived, except for the fitful tenderness of Alice, as much apart as he felt himself to be in the little town. They were considerate of him, but their consideration, he knew, contained an ineradicable suspicion, and in the house as outside, he was surrounded by the watchful regard that is given to the infirm or the mentally diseased. He read this in Lydia's gently averted eyes; he felt it in Richard Ordway's constrained manner; he detected it even in the silent haste with which the servants fulfilled his slightest wish.

His work in his uncle's office, he had soon found to be of the most mechanical character, a mere pretext to give him daily employment, and he told himself, in a moment of bitterness that it was convincing proof of the opinion which the older man must hold of his honesty or of his mental capacity. It became presently little more than a hopeless round to him—this morning walk through the sunny streets, past the ivied walls of the old church, to the clean, varnish scented office, where he sat, until the luncheon hour, under the hard, though not unkind, eyes of the man who reminded him at every instant of his dead father. And the bitterest part of it, after all, was that the closer he came to the character of Richard Ordway, the profounder grew his respect for his uncle's unwavering professional honour. The old man would have starved, he knew, rather than have held back a penny that was not legally his own or have owed a debt that he felt had begun to weigh, however lightly, upon his conscience. Yet this lawyer of scrupulous rectitude was the husband, his nephew suspected, of a neglected, a wretchedly unhappy wife—a small, nervous creature, whom he had married, shortly after the death of his first wife, some twenty years ago. The secret of this unhappiness Daniel had discovered almost by intuition on the day of his father's funeral, when he had looked up suddenly in the cemetery to find his uncle's wife regarding him with a pair of wonderful, pathetic eyes, which seemed to gaze at him sadly out of a blue mist. So full of sympathy and understanding was her look that the memory of it had returned to him more than a year later, and had caused him to stop at her gate one November afternoon as he was returning from his office work. After an instant's pause, and an uncertain glance at the big brick house with its clean white columns, he ascended the steps and rang the bell for the first time since his boyhood.

The house was one of the most charming in Botetourt, but as he followed the servant down the hall to the library, it seemed to him that all these high, imposing walls, with their fine white woodwork, enclosed but so much empty space to fill with loneliness. His uncle had no children, and the sad, fair-haired little wife appeared to be always alone and always suffering.

She was seated now in a low rocking-chair beside the window, and as she turned her head at his entrance, he could see, through the lace curtains, a few pale November leaves, which fluttered down from an elm tree beside the porch. When she looked at him he noticed that her eyes were large and beautiful and of a changeable misty colour which appeared now gray, now violet.

"It is so good of you, Daniel," she said, in a soft, grateful voice, removing her work-basket from the chair at her side so that he might come within the reach of her short-sighted gaze.

"I've wanted to come ever since I saw you for the first time after my return," he answered cheerfully. "It is strange, isn't it?—that I hardly remember you when I lived here. You were always ill, were you not?"

"Yes, ill almost always," she replied, smiling as she met his glance. "When you were married I remember I couldn't go to the wedding because I had been in bed for three months. But that's all over now," she added, fearing to produce in him a momentary depression. "I am well again, you see, so the past doesn't matter."

"The past doesn't matter," he repeated in a low voice, struck by the words as if they held more than their surface meaning for his ears.

She nodded gravely. "How can it matter if one is really happy at last."

"And you are happy at last?"

As he watched her it seemed to him that a pale flame burned in her face, tinging its sallow wanness with a golden light. "I am at peace and is that not happiness?" she asked.

"But you were sad once—that day in the cemetery? I felt it."

"That was while I was still struggling," she answered, "and it always hurts one to struggle. I wanted happiness—I kept on wanting it even after I ceased to believe in its existence. I fought very hard—oh, desperately hard—but now I have learned that the only way to get anything is to give it up. Happiness is like everything else, it is only when one gives it back to God that one really possesses it."

He had never seen a face in which the soul spoke so clearly, and her look rather than her words came to him like the touch of divine healing.

"When I saw you standing beside your father's grave, I knew that you were just where I had been for so many years—that you were still telling your self that things were too hard, that they were unendurable. I had been through it all, you see, so I understood."

"But how could you know the bitterness, the shame of feeling that it was all the result of my own mistake—of my own sin."

Taking his hand in hers, she sat for a moment in silence with her ecstatic gaze fixed on his face. "I know that in spite of your sin you are better than they are," she said at last, "because your sin was on the outside—a thing to be sloughed off and left far behind, while their self-righteousness is of their very souls——"

"Oh, hush, hush," he interrupted sternly, "they have forgiven me for what I did, that is enough."

"Sixteen years ago," she returned, dropping her voice, "my husband forgave me in the same way, and he has never forgotten it."

At his start of surprise, he felt that she clung the more closely to the hand she held. "Oh, it wasn't so big a thing," she went on, "I had been married to him for five years, and I was very unhappy when I met someone who seemed to understand and to love me. For a time I was almost insane with the wonder and delight of it—I might have gone away with him—with the other—in my first rapture, had not Richard found it all out two days before. He behaved very generously—he forgave me. I should have been happier," she added a little wistfully, "if he had not."

As she broke off trembling, he lifted her hand to his lips, kissing it with tenderness, almost with passion. "Then that was the beginning of your unhappiness—of your long illness!" he exclaimed.

She nodded smiling, while a tear ran slowly down her flushed cheek. "He forgave me sixteen years ago and he has never allowed me to forget it one hour—hardly a minute since."

"Then you understand how bitter—how intolerable it is!" he returned in an outbreak of anger.

"I thought I knew," she replied more firmly than he had ever heard her speak, "but I learned afterwards that it was a mistake. I see now that they are kind—that they are good in their way, and I love them for it. It isn't our way, I know, but the essence of charity, after all, is to learn to appreciate goodness in all its expressions, no matter how different they may be from our own. Even Richard is kind—he means everything for the best, and it is only his nature that is straightened—that is narrow—not his will. I felt bitterly once, but not now because I am so happy at last."

Beyond the pale outline of her head, he saw the elm leaves drifting slowly down, and beyond them the low roofs and the dim church spires of the quiet town. Was it possible that even here he might find peace in the heart of the storm?

"It is only since I have given my happiness back to God that it is really mine," she said, and it seemed to him again that her soul gathered brightness and shone in her face.

CHAPTER V
The Will of Alice

WHEN he reached home the servant who helped him out of his overcoat, informed him at the same time that his uncle awaited him in the library. With the news a strange chill came over him as if he had left something warm and bright in the November sunset outside. For an instant it seemed to him that he must turn back—that he could not go forward. Then with a gesture of assent, he crossed the hall and entered the library, where he found Lydia and the children as well as Richard Ordway.

The lamps were unlit, and the mellow light of the sunset fell through the interlacing half-bared boughs of the golden poplar beyond the window. This light, so rich, so vivid, steeped the old mahogany furniture and the faded family portraits in a glow which seemed to Daniel to release, for the first time, some latent romantic spirit that had dwelt in the room. In the midst of this glamor of historic atmosphere, the four figures, gathered so closely together against the clear space of the window, with its network of poplar leaves beyond the panes, borrowed for the moment a strange effectiveness of pose, a singular intensity of outline. Not only the figures, but the very objects by which they were surrounded appeared to vibrate in response to a tragic impulse.

Richard Ordway was standing upon the hearthrug, his fine head and profile limned sharply against the pale brown wall at his side. His right hand was on Lydia's shoulder, who sat motionless, as if she had fallen there, with her gentle, flower-like head lying upon the arm of her son. Before them, as before her judges, Alice was drawn to her full height, her girlish body held tense and quivering, her splendid hair loosened about her forehead, her trembling mouth making a violent contrast to the intense pallor of her face.

Right or wrong Ordway saw only that she was standing alone, and as he crossed the threshold, he turned toward her and held out his hand.

"Alice," he said softly, as if the others were not present. Without raising her eyes, she shrank from him in the direction of Richard Ordway, as if shielding herself behind the iron fortitude of the man whom she so bitterly disliked.

"Alice has been out driving alone with Geoffrey Heath all the afternoon," said Lydia in her clear, calm voice. "We had forbidden it, but she says that you knew of it and did not object to her going."

With the knowledge of the lie, Ordway grew red with humiliation, while his gaze remained fastened on the figure in the carpet at Alice's feet. He could not look at her, for he felt that her shame was scorching him like a hot wind. To look at her at the moment meant to convict her, and this his heart told him he could never do. He was conscious of the loud ticking of the clock, of the regular tapping of Richard's fingers upon the marble mantel-piece, of the fading light on the poplar leaves beyond the window, and presently of the rapid roll of a carriage that went by in the street. Each of these sounds produced in him a curious irritation like a physical smart, and he felt again something of the dumb resentment with which he had entered his wife's dressing-room on the morning of his arrest. Then a smothered sob reached his ear, and Alice began to tremble from head to foot at his side. Lifting his eyes at last, he made a step forward and drew her into his arms.

"Was it so very wrong? I am sorry," he said to Lydia over the bowed head of their child. Until the words were uttered, and he felt Alice's tense body relax in his arms, he had not realised that in taking sides with her, he was not only making himself responsible for her fault, he was, in truth, actually sharing in the lie that she had spoken. The choice was an unconscious one, yet he knew even in the ensuing moment of his clearer judgment that it had been inevitable—that from the first instant, when he had paused speechless upon the threshold, there had been open to him no other course.

"I am sorry if it was wrong," he repeated, turning his glance now upon Richard Ordway.

"Do you know anything of Geoffrey Heath? Have you heard him spoken of by decent people since you have been in Botetourt?" asked the old man sternly.

"I have heard little of him," answered Daniel, "and that little was far from good. We are sorry, Alice, are we not? It must not happen again if we can help it."

"It has happened before," said Lydia, lifting her head from Dick's arm, where it had lain. "It was then that I forbade her to see him alone."

"I did not know," responded Daniel, "but she will do as you wish hereafter. Will you not, Alice?"

"How does it concern them? What have they to do with me?" demanded Alice, turning in his arms to face her mother with a defiant and angry look, "they have never cared for me—they have always preferred Dick—always, even when I was a little child."

He saw Lydia grow white and hide her drooping face again on Dick's shoulder. "You are unjust to your mother, Alice," he said gravely, "she has loved you always, and I have loved you."

"Oh, you are different—I would die for you!" she exclaimed passionately, as she wept on his breast.

While he stood there holding her in his arms, it seemed to him that he could feel like an electric current the wave of feeling which had swept Alice and himself together. The inheritance which was his had descended to her also with its keen joys and its sharp anguish. Even the road which he had travelled so lately in weariness was the one upon which her brave young feet were now set. Not his alone, but his child's also, was this mixture of strength and weakness, of gaiety and sadness, of bitterness and compassion.

"If you will leave me alone with her, I think I can make her understand what you wish," he said, lifting his eyes from the dark head on his breast to Lydia, who had risen and was standing before him with her pensive, inquiring gaze fixed on his face. "She is like me," he added abruptly, "in so many ways."

"Yes, she is like you, I have always thought so," returned Lydia, quietly.

"And for that reason, perhaps, you have never quite understood her," he responded.

She bowed her head as if too polite or too indifferent to dissent from his words; and then slipping her hand through Richard Ordway's arm, she stood waiting patiently while the old man delivered his last bit of remonstrance.

"Try to curb her impulses, Daniel, or you will regret it."

He went out, still holding Lydia's hand, and a moment afterwards, when Daniel looked up at the sound of the hall door closing quickly, he saw that Dick also had vanished, and that he was alone in the library with Alice, who still sobbed on his breast.

A few moments before it had seemed to him that he needed only to be alone with her to make all perfectly clear between them. But when the others had passed out, and the door had closed at last on the empty silence in which they stood, he found that the words which he had meant to utter had vanished hopelessly from his mind. He had said to Lydia that Alice was like himself, but there had never been an hour in his life when his hatred of a lie had not been as intense, as uncompromising, as it was to-day. And this lie which she had spoken appeared to divide them now like a drawn sword.

"Alice," he said, breaking with an effort through the embarrassment which had held him speechless, "will you give me your word of honour that you will never tell me a falsehood again?"

She stirred slightly in his arms, and he felt her body grow soft and yielding. "I didn't to you," she answered, "oh, I wouldn't to you."

"Not to the others then. Will you promise?"

Her warm young arm tightened about his neck. "I didn't mean to—I didn't mean to," she protested between her sobs, "but they forced me to do it. It was more than half their fault—they are so—so hateful! I tried to think of something else, but there was nothing to say, and I knew you would stand by me——"

"You have almost broken my heart," he answered, "for you have lied, Alice, you have lied."

She lifted her head and the next instant he felt her mouth on his cheek, "I wish I were dead! I have hurt you and I wish I were dead!" she cried.

"It is not hurting me that I mind—you may do that and welcome. It is hurting yourself, my child, my Alice," he answered; and pressing her upturned face back on his arm, he bent over her in an ecstasy of emotion, calling her his daughter, his darling, the one joy of his life. The iron in his nature had melted beneath her warm touch, and he felt again the thrill, half agony, half rapture, with which he had received her into his arms on the day of her birth. That day was nearer to him now than was the minute in which he stood, and he could trace still the soft, babyish curves in the face which nestled so penitently on his arm. His very fear for her moved him into a deeper tenderness, and the appeal she made to him now was one with the appeal of her infancy, for its power lay in her weakness, not in her strength.

"Be truthful with me, Alice," he said, "and remember that nothing can separate me from you."

An hour later when he parted from her and went upstairs, he heard Lydia's voice calling to him through her half open door, and turning obediently, he entered her bedroom for the first time since the night of his return. Now as then the luxury, the softness, of his wife's surroundings produced in him a curious depression, an enervation of body; and he stood for an instant vainly striving to close his nostrils against the delicious perfume which floated from her lace-trimmed dressing-table.

Lydia, still in her light mourning gown, was standing, when he entered, before a little marquetry desk in one corner, her eyes on an open letter which she appeared to have left partially unread.

"I wanted to tell you, Daniel," she began at once, approaching the point with a directness which left him no time to wonder as to the purpose of her summons, "that Alice's intimacy with Geoffrey Heath has already been commented upon in Botetourt. Cousin Paulina has actually written to me for an explanation."

"Cousin Paulina?" he repeated vaguely, and remembered immediately that the lady in question was his wife's one rich relation—an elderly female who was greatly respected for her fortune, which she spent entirely in gratifying her personal passion for trinkets. "Oh, yes," he added flippantly, "the old lady who used to look like a heathen idol got up for the sacrifice."

He felt that his levity was out of place, yet he went on rashly because he knew that he was doomed forever to appear at a disadvantage in Lydia's presence. She would never believe in him—his best motives would wear always to her the covering of hypocrisy; and the very hopelessness of ever convincing her goaded him at times into the reckless folly of despair.

"She writes me that people are talking of it," she resumed, sweetly, as if his untimely mirth had returned still-born into the vacancy from which it emerged.

"Who is this Geoffrey Heath you speak of so incessantly?" he demanded. "There was a Heath, I remember, who had a place near us in the country, and kept a barroom or a butcher's shop or something in town."

"That was the father," replied Lydia, with a shudder which deepened the slightly scornful curve of her lip. "He was a respectable old man, I believe, and made his fortune quite honestly, however it was. It was only after his son began to grow up that he became socially ambitious——"

"And is that all you have against him?"

"Oh, there's nothing against the old man—nothing at least except the glaring bad taste he showed in that monstrous house he built in Henry Street. He's dead now, you know."

"Then the son has all the money and the house, too, hasn't he?"

"All he hasn't wasted, yes."

As she spoke she subsided into a chair, with a graceful, eddying motion of her black chiffon draperies, and continued the conversation with an expression of smiling weariness. All her attitudes were effective, and he was struck, while he stood, embarrassed and awkward, before her, by the plaintive grace that she introduced into her smallest gesture. Though he was aware that he saw her now too clearly for passion, the appeal of her delicate fairness went suddenly to his head.

"Then there's not much to be said for the chap, I suppose?" he asked abruptly, fearing the prolonged strain of the silence.

"Very little for him, but a good deal about him, according to Cousin Paulina. It seems that three years ago he was sent away from the University for something disgraceful—cheating at cards, I believe; and since then he has been conspicuous chiefly because of his low associations. How Alice met him, I could never understand—I can't understand now."

"And do you think she cares for him—that she even imagines that she does?" he demanded, while his terror rose in his throat and choked back his words.

"She will not confess it—how could she?" replied Lydia wearily, "I believe it is only wildness, recklessness, lack of discipline that prompts her. Yet he is good-looking—in a vulgar way," she added in disgust, "and Alice has always seemed to like vulgar things."

Her eyes rested on him, not directly, but as if they merely included him in their general pensive survey of the world; yet he read the accusation in her gentle avoidance of his gaze as plainly as she had uttered in it her clear, flute-like tones.

"It is very important," she went on, "that she should be curbed in her impulses, in her extravagance. Already her bills are larger than mine and yet she is never satisfied with the amount of her allowance. We can do nothing with her, Uncle Richard and I, but she seems to yield, in a measure, to your influence, and we thought—we hoped——"

"I will—I will," he answered. "I will give my life to help her if need be. But Lydia," he broke out more earnestly, "you must stand by and aid me for her sake, for the sake of our child, we must work together——"

Half rising in her chair, she looked at him fixedly a moment, while he saw her pupils dilate almost as if she were in physical fear.

"But what can I do? I have done all I could," she protested, with an injured look. By this look, without so much as a gesture, she put the space of the whole room between them. The corners of her mouth quivered and drooped, and he watched the pathos creep back into her light blue eyes. "I have given up my whole life to the children since—since——"

She broke off in a frightened whisper, but the unfinished sentence was more expressive than a volley of reproaches would have been. There was something in her thoughts too horrible to put into words, and this something of which she could not bring herself to speak, would have had no place in her existence except for him. He felt cowed suddenly, as if he had been physically beaten and thrust aside.

"You have been very brave—I know—I appreciate it all," he said, and while he spoke he drew away from her until he stood with his back against one of the amber satin curtains. Instinctively he put out his hand for support, and as it closed over the heavy draperies, he felt that the hard silken texture made his flesh creep. The physical sensation, brief as it was, recalled in some strange way the effect upon him of Lydia's smooth and shining surface when he had knelt before her on the night of his homecoming. Yet it was with difficulty even now that he could free himself from the conviction that her emotional apathy was but one aspect of innocence. Would he admit to-day that what he had once worshipped as purity of soul was but the frost of an unnatural coldness of nature? All at once, as he looked at her, he found himself reminded by her calm forehead, her classic features, of the sculptured front of a marble tomb which he had seen in some foreign gallery. Was there death, after all, not life hidden for him in her plaintive beauty? The next instant, as he watched her, he told himself that such questions belonged to the evil promptings of his own nature.

"I realise all that you have been, all that you have suffered," he said at last, aware that his words sounded hysterical in the icy constraint which surrounded them.

When his speech was out, his embarrassment became so great that he found himself presently measuring the distance which divided him from the closed door. With a last effort of will, he went toward her and stretched out his hand in a gesture that was almost one of entreaty.

"Lydia," he asked, "is it too painful for you to have me here? Would it be any better for you if I went away?"

As he moved toward her she bent over with a nervous, mechanical movement to arrange her train, and before replying to his question, she laid each separate fold in place. "Why, by no means," she answered, looking up with her conventional smile. "It would only mean—wouldn't it?—that people would begin to wonder all over again?"

CHAPTER VI
The Iron Bars

AS the days went on it seemed to him that his nature, repressed in so many other directions, was concentrated at last in a single channel of feeling. The one outlet was his passion for Alice, and nothing that concerned her was too remote or too trivial to engross him—her clothes, her friendships, the particular chocolate creams for which she had once expressed a preference. To fill her life with amusements that would withdraw her erring impulses from Geoffrey Heath became for a time his absorbing purpose.

At first he told himself in a kind of rapture that success was apparent in his earliest and slightest efforts. For weeks Alice appeared to find interest and animation in his presence. She flattered, scolded, caressed and tyrannised, but with each day, each hour, she grew nearer his heart and became more firmly interwoven into his life.

Then suddenly a change came over her, and one day when she had been kissing him with "butterfly kisses" on his forehead, he felt her suddenly grow restless and draw back impatiently as if seeking a fresh diversion. A bored look had come into her eyes and he saw the three little wrinkles gather between her eyebrows.

"Alice," he said, alarmed by the swift alteration, "are you tired of the house? Shall we ride together?"

She shook her head, half pettishly, half playfully, "I can't—I've an engagement," she responded.

"An engagement?" he repeated inquiringly. "Why, I thought we were always to ride when it was fair."

"I promised one of the girls to go to tea with her," she repeated, after a minute. "It isn't a real tea, but she wanted to talk to me, so I said I would go."

"Well, I'm glad you did—don't give up the girls," he answered, relieved at once by the explanation.

In the evening when she returned, shortly after dark, "one of the girls" as she called laughingly from the library, had come home for the night with her. Ordway heard them chatting gayly together, but, when he went in for a moment before going upstairs to dress, they lapsed immediately into an embarrassed silence. Alice's visitor was a pretty, gray-eyed, flaxen-haired young woman named Jenny Lane, who smiled in a frightened way and answered "Yes—no," when he spoke to her, as if she offered him the choice of his favourite monosyllable from her lips. Clearly the subject which animated them was one in which, even as Alice's father, he could have no share.

For weeks after this it seemed to him that a silence fell gradually between them—that silence of the heart which is so much more oppressive than the mere outward silence of the lips. It was not, he told himself again and again, that there had come a perceptible change in her manner. She still met him at breakfast with her flower and her caress, still flung herself into his arms at unexpected moments, still coaxed and upbraided in her passionate, childish voice. Nevertheless, the difference was there, and he recognised it with a pang even while he demanded of himself in what breathless suspension of feeling it could consist? Her caresses were as frequent, but the fervour, the responsiveness, had gone out of them; and he was brought at last face to face with the knowledge that her first vivid delight in him had departed forever. The thing which absorbed her now was a thing in which he had no share, no recognition; and true to her temperament, her whole impulsive being had directed itself into this new channel. "She is young and it is only natural that she should wish to have her school friends about her," he thought with a smile.

In the beginning it had been an easy matter to efface his personality and stand out of the way of Alice's life, but as the weeks drew on into months and the months into a year, he found that he had been left aside not only by his daughter, but by the rest of the household as well. In his home he felt himself to exist presently in an ignored, yet obvious way like a familiar piece of household furniture, which is neither commented upon nor wilfully overlooked. It would have occasioned, he supposed, some vague exclamations of surprise had he failed to appear in his proper place at the breakfast table, but as long as his accustomed seat was occupied all further use for his existence seemed at an end. He was not necessary, he was not even enjoyed, but he was tolerated.

Before this passive indifference, which was worse to him than direct hostility, he found that his sympathies, his impulses, and even his personality, were invaded by an apathy that paralysed the very sources of his will. He beheld himself as the cause of the gloom, the suspicion, the sadness, that surrounded him, and as the cause, too, of Alice's wildness and of the pathetic loneliness in which Lydia lived. But for him, he told himself, there would have been no shadow upon the household; and his wife's pensive smile was like a knife in his heart whenever he looked up from his place at the table and met it unawares. At Tappahannock he had sometimes believed that his past was a skeleton which he had left behind; here he had grown, as the years went by, to think of it as a coffin which had shut over him and from which there was no escape. And with the realisation of this, a blighting remorse, a painful humbleness awoke in his soul, and was revealed outwardly in his face, in his walk, in his embarrassed movements. As he passed up and down the staircase, he went softly lest the heavy sound of his footsteps should become an annoyance to Lydia's sensitive ears. His manner lost its boyish freedom and grew awkward and nervous, and when he gave an order to the servants it seemed to him that a dreadful timidity sounded in his voice. He began to grow old suddenly in a year, before middle age had as yet had time to soften the way.

Looking in the glass one morning, when he had been less than three years in Botetourt, he discovered that the dark locks upon his forehead had turned almost white, and that his shoulders were losing gradually their youthful erectness of carriage. And it seemed to him that the courage with which he might have once broken away and begun anew had departed from him in this new and paralysing humility, which was like the humility of a helpless and burdensome old age.

After a day of peculiar loneliness, he was returning from Richard's office on this same afternoon, when a voice called to him from beneath the fringed linen cover of a little phaeton which had driven up to the crossing. Turning in surprise he found Aunt Lucy holding the reins over a fat pony, while she sat very erect, with her trim, soldierly figure emerging from a mountain of brown-paper parcels.

"This is the very chance I've been looking for, Daniel Ordway!" she exclaimed, in her emphatic voice. "Do you know, sir, that you have not entered my house once in the last three years?"

"Yes," he replied, "I know—but the fact is that I have hardly been anywhere since I came back."

"And why is that?" she demanded sharply.

He shook his head, "I don't know. Perhaps you can tell me."

"Yes, I can tell you," she snapped back, with a rudeness which, in some singular way, seemed to him kinder than the studied politeness that he had met. "It's because, in spite of all you've gone through, you are still more than half a fool, Daniel Ordway."

"Oh, you're right, I dare say," he acknowledged bitterly.

With a frown, which struck him curiously as the wrong side of a smile, she nodded her head while she made room for him among the brown-paper parcels on the low linen covered seat of the phaeton. "Come in here, I want to talk to you," she said, "there's a little matter about which I should like your help."

"My help?" he repeated in astonishment, as a sensation of pleasure shot through his heart. It was so seldom that anybody asked his help in Botetourt. "Is the second green parrot dead, and do you want me to dig the grave?" he inquired, checking his unseemly derision as he met her warning glance.

"Polly is perfectly well," she returned, rapping him smartly upon the knee with her little tightly closed black fan which she carried as if it were a baton, "but I do not like Richard Ordway."

The suddenness of her announcement, following so inappropriately her comment upon the health of the green parrot, caused him to start from his seat in the amazement with which he faced her. Then he broke into an echo of his old boyish merriment. "You don't?" he retorted flippantly. "Well, Lydia does."

Her eyes blinked rapidly in the midst of her wrinkled little face, and bending over she flicked the back of the fat pony gently with the end of the whip. "Oh, I'm not sure I like Lydia," she responded, "though, of course, Lydia is a saint."

"Yes, Lydia is a saint," he affirmed.

"Well, I'm not talking about Lydia," she resumed presently, "though there's something I've always had a burning curiosity to find out." For an instant she held back, and then made her charge with a kind of desperate courage. "Is she really a saint?" she questioned, "or is it only the way that she wears her hair?"

Her question was so like the spoken sound of his own dreadful suspicion that it took away his breath completely, while he stared at her with a gasp that was evenly divided between a laugh and a groan.

"Oh, she's a saint, there's no doubt of that," he insisted loyally.

"Then I'll let her rest," she replied, "and I'm glad, heaven knows, to have my doubts at an end. But where do you imagine that I am taking you?"

"For a drive, I hope," he answered, smiling.

"It's not," she rejoined grimly, "it's for a visit."

"A visit?" he repeated, starting up with the impulse to jump over the moving wheel, "but I never visit."

She reached out her wiry little fingers, which clung like a bird's claw, and drew him by force back upon the seat.

"I am taking you to see Adam Crowley," she explained, "do you remember him?"

"Crowley?" he repeated the name as he searched his memory. "Why, yes, he was my father's clerk for forty years, wasn't he? I asked when I came home what had become of him. So he is still living?"

"He was paralysed in one arm some years ago, and it seems he has lost all his savings in some investment your father had advised him to make. Of course, there was no legal question of a debt to him, but until the day your father died he had always made ample provision for the old man's support. Crowley had always believed that the allowance would be continued—that there would be a mention made of him in the will."

"And there was none?"

"It was an oversight, Crowley is still convinced, for he says he had a distinct promise."

"Then surely my uncle will fulfil the trust? He is an honourable man."

She shook her head. "I don't know that he is so much 'honourable' as he is 'lawful.' The written obligation is the one which binds him like steel, but I don't think he cares whether a thing is right or wrong, just or unjust, as long as it is the law. The letter holds him, but I doubt if he has ever even felt the motion of the spirit. If he ever felt it," she concluded with grim humour, "he would probably try to drive it out with quinine."

"Are we going there now—to see Crowley, I mean?"

"If you don't mind. Of course there may be nothing that you can do—but I thought that you might, perhaps, speak to Richard about it."

He shook his head, "No, I can't speak to my uncle, though I think you are unjust to him," he answered, after a pause in which the full joy of her appeal had swept through his heart, "but I have an income of my own, you know, and out of this, I can help Crowley."

For an instant she did not reply, and he felt her thin, upright little figure grow rigid at his side. Then turning with a start, she laid her hand, in its black lace mitten, upon his knee.

"O my boy, you are your mother all over again!" she said.

After this they drove on in silence down one of the shaded streets, where rows of neat little houses, packed together like pasteboard boxes, were divided from the unpaved sidewalks by low whitewashed fences. At one of these doors the phaeton presently drew up, and dropping the reins on the pony's back, Aunt Lucy alighted with a bound between the wheels, and began with Ordway's help, to remove the paper parcels from the seat. When their arms were full, she pushed open the gate, and led him up the short walk to the door where an old man, wearing a knitted shawl, sat in an invalid's chair beyond the threshold. At the sound of their footsteps Crowley turned on them a cheerful wrinkled face which was brightened by a pair of twinkling black eyes that gave him an innocent and merry look.

"I knew you'd come around," he said, smiling with his toothless mouth like an amiable infant. "Matildy has been complaining that the coffee gave out at breakfast, but I said 'twas only a sign that you were coming. Everything bad is the sign of something good, that's what I say."

"I've brought something better than coffee to-day, Adam," replied Aunt Lucy, seating herself upon the doorstep. "This is Daniel Ordway—do you remember him?"

The old man bent forward, without moving his withered hand, which lay outstretched on the cushioned arm of the chair, and it seemed to Ordway that the smiling black eyes pierced to his heart. "Oh, I remember him, I remember him," said Crowley, "poor boy—poor boy."

"He's come back now," rejoined Aunt Lucy, raising her voice, "and he has come to see you."

"He's like his mother," remarked Crowley, almost in a whisper, "and I'm glad of that, though his father was a good man. But there are some good people who do more harm than bad ones," he added, "and I always knew that old Daniel Ordway would ruin his son." A chuckle broke from him, "but your mother: I can see her now running out bareheaded in the snow to scold me for not having on my overcoat. She was always seeing with other people's eyes, bless her, and feeling with other people's bodies."

Dropping upon the doorstep, Ordway replaced the knitted shawl which had slipped from the old man's shoulder. "I wonder how it is that you keep so happy in spite of everything?" he said.

"Happy?" repeated Crowley with a laugh. "Well, I don't know, but I am not complaining. I've seen men who hadn't an ache in their bodies, who were worse off than I am to-day. I tell you it isn't the thing that comes to you, but the way you look at it that counts, and because you've got a paralysed arm is no reason that you should have a paralysed heart as well. I've had a powerful lot of suffering, but I've had a powerful lot of happiness, too, and the suffering somehow, doesn't seem to come inside of me to stay as the happiness does. You see, I'm a great believer in the Lord, sir," he added simply, "and what I can't understand, I don't bother about, but just take on trust." All the cheerful wrinkles of his face shone peacefully as he talked. "It's true there've been times when things have gone so hard I've felt that I'd just let go and drop down to the bottom, but the wonderful part is that when you get to the bottom there's still something down below you. It's when you fall lowest that you feel most the Lord holding you up. It may be that there ain't any bottom after all but I know if there is one the Lord is surely waiting down there to catch you when you let go. He ain't only there, I reckon, but He's in all the particular hard places on earth much oftener than He's up in His heaven. He knows the poorhouse, you may be sure, and He'll be there to receive me and tell me it ain't so bad as it looks. I don't want to get there, but if I do it will come a bit easier to think that the Lord has been there before me——"

The look in his smiling, toothless face brought to Ordway, as he watched him, the memory of the epileptic little preacher who had preached in the prison chapel. Here, also, was that untranslatable rapture of the mystic, which cannot be put into words though it passes silently in its terrible joy from the heart of the speaker to the other heart that is waiting. Again he felt his whole being dissolve in the emotion which had overflowed his eyes that Sunday when he was a prisoner. He remembered the ecstasy with which he had said to himself on that day: "I have found the key!" and he knew now that this ecstasy was akin to the light that had shone for him while he sat on the stage of the town hall in Tappahannock. A chance word from the lips of a doting old man, who saw the doors of the poorhouse swing open to receive him, had restored to Ordway, with a miraculous clearness, the vision that he had lost; and he felt suddenly that the hope with which he had come out of the prison had never really suffered disappointment or failure.

CHAPTER VII
The Vision and the Fact

AS he walked home along one of the side streets, shaded by an irregular row of flowering linden trees, it appeared to him that his life in Botetourt, so unendurable an hour before, had been rendered suddenly easy by a miracle, not in his surroundings, but in himself. His help had been asked, and in the act of giving there had flowed back into his heart the strength by which he might live his daily life. His unrest, his loneliness, his ineffectiveness, showed to him now as the result of some fatal weakness in his own nature—some failure in his personal attitude to the people among whom he lived.

Straight ahead of him a fine white dust drifted down from the blossoming lindens, lying like powder on the roughly paved street, where the wind blew it in soft swirls and eddies against the crumbling stone steps which led down from the straight doorways of the old-fashioned houses. The boughs overhead made a green arch through which the light fell, and it was under this thick tent of leaves, that, looking up presently, he saw Emily Brooke coming toward him. Not until she was so close to him that he could hear the rustle of her dress, did she lift her eyes from the pavement and meet his cry of welcome with a look of joyful surprise.

"Emily!" he cried, and at his voice, she stretched out her hand and stood smiling at him with the soft and animated gaze which, it seemed to him now, he had but dimly remembered. The thought of her had dwelt as a vision in his memory, yet he knew, as he looked into her face, that the ideal figure had lacked the charm, the radiance, the sparkling energy, of the living substance.

"So you came to Botetourt and did not send me word," he said.

"No, I did not send you word," she answered, "and now I am leaving within an hour."

"And you would have gone without seeing me?"

For an instant she hesitated, and he watched the joy in her face melt into a sorrowful tenderness. "I knew that you were well and I was satisfied. Would it have been kind to appear to you like an arisen ghost of Tappahannock?"

"The greatest kindness," he answered gravely, "that you—or anyone could do me."

She shook her head: "Kindness or not, I found that I could not do it."

"And you go in an hour?"

"My train leaves at seven o'clock. Is it nearly that?"

He drew out his watch, a mechanical action which relieved the emotional tension that stretched like a drawn cord between them. "It is not yet six. Will you walk a little way with me down this street? There is still time."

As she nodded silently, they turned and went back along the side street, under the irregular rows of lindens, in the direction from which he had come.

"One of the girls I used to teach sent for me when she was dying," she said presently, as if feeling the need of some explanation of her presence in Botetourt. "That was three days ago and the funeral was yesterday. It is a great loss to me, for I haven't so many friends that I can spare the few I love."

He made no answer to her remark, and in the silence that followed, he felt, with a strange ache at his heart, that the distance that separated them was greater than it had been when she was in Tappahannock and he in Botetourt. Then there had stretched only the luminous dream spaces between their souls; now they stood divided by miles and miles of an immovable reality. Was it possible that in making her a part of his intense inner life, he had lost, in a measure, his consciousness of her actual existence? Then while the vision still struggled blindly against the fact, she turned toward him with a smile which lifted her once more into the shining zone of spirits.

"If I can feel that you are happy, that you are at peace, I shall ask nothing more of God," she said.

"I am happy to-day," he answered, "but if you had come yesterday, I should have broken down in my weakness. Oh, I have been homesick for Tappahannock since I came away!"

"Yet Botetourt is far prettier to my eyes."

"To mine also—but it isn't beauty, it is usefulness that I need. For the last two years I have told myself night and day that I had no place and no purpose—that I was the stone that the builders rejected."

"And it is different now?"

"Different? Yes, I feel as if I had been shoved suddenly into a place where I fitted—as if I were meant, after all, to help hold things together. And the change came—how do you think?" he asked, smiling. "A man wanted money of me to keep him out of the poorhouse."

The old gaiety was in his voice, but as she looked at him a ray of faint sunshine fell on his face through a parting in the leaves overhead, and she saw for the first time how much older he had grown since that last evening in Tappahannock. The dark hair was all gray now, the lines of the nose were sharper, the cheek bones showed higher above the bluish hollows beneath. Yet the change which had so greatly aged him had deepened the peculiar sweetness in the curves of his mouth, and this sweetness, which was visible also in his rare smile, moved her heart to a tenderness which was but the keener agony of renouncement.

"I know how it is," she said slowly, "just as in Tappahannock you found your happiness in giving yourself to others, so you will find it here."

"If I can only be of use—perhaps."

"You can be—you will be. What you were with us you will be again."

"Yet it was different. There I had your help, hadn't I?"

"And you shall have it here," she responded, brightly, though he saw that her eyes were dim with tears.

"Will you make me a promise?" he asked, stopping suddenly before some discoloured stone steps "will you promise me that if ever you need a friend—a strong arm, a brain to think for you—you will send me word?"

She looked at him smiling, while her tears fell from her eyes. "I will make no promise that is not for your sake as well as for mine," she answered.

"But it is for my sake—it is for my happiness."

"Then I will promise," she rejoined gravely, "and I will keep it."

"I thank you," he responded, taking the hand that she held out.

At his words she had turned back, pausing a moment in her walk, as if she had caught from his voice or his look a sense of finality in their parting. "I have but a few minutes left," she said, "so I must walk rapidly back or I shall be late."

A sudden clatter of horses' hoofs on the cobblestones in the street caused them to start away from each other, and turning his head, Ordway saw Alice gallop furiously past him with Geoffrey Heath at her side.

"How beautiful!" exclaimed Emily beneath her breath, for Alice as she rode by had looked back for an instant, her glowing face framed in blown masses of hair.

"Yes, she is beautiful," he replied, and added after a moment as they walked on, "she is my daughter."

Her face brightened with pleasure. "Then you are happy—you must be happy," she said. "Why, she looked like Brunhilde."

For a moment he hesitated. "Yes," he answered at last, "she is very beautiful—and I am happy."

After this they did not speak again until they reached the iron gate before the house in which she was staying. On his side he was caught up into some ideal realm of feeling, in which he possessed her so utterly that the meeting could not bring her nearer to him nor the parting take her farther away. His longing, his unrest, and his failure, were a part of his earthly nature which he seemed to have left below him in that other life from which he had escaped. Without doubt he would descend to it again, as he had descended at moments back into the body of his sin; but in the immediate exaltation of his mood, his love had passed the bounds of personality and entered into a larger and freer world. When they parted, presently, after a casual good-bye, he could persuade himself, almost without effort, that she went on with him in the soft May twilight.

At his door he found Lydia just returning from a drive, and taking her wraps from her arm, he ascended the steps and entered the house at her side. She had changed her mourning dress for a gown of pale gray cloth, and he noticed at once that her beauty had lost in transparency and become more human.

"I thought you had gone riding with Alice," she said without looking at him, as she stooped to gather up the ends of a lace scarf which had slipped from her arm.

"No, I was not with her," he answered. "I wanted to go, but she would not let me."

"Are you sure, then, that she was not with Geoffrey Heath?"

"I am sure that she was with him, for they passed me not a half hour ago as I came up."

They had entered the library while he spoke, and crossing to the hearth, where a small fire burned, Lydia looked up at him with her anxious gaze. "I hoped at first that you would gain some influence over her," she said, in a distressed voice, "but it seems now that she is estranged even from you."

"Not estranged, but there is a difference and I am troubled by it. She is young, you see, and I am but a dull and sober companion for her."

She shook her head with the little hopeless gesture which was so characteristic of her. Only yesterday this absence of resolution, the discontented droop of her thin, red lips, had worked him into a feeling of irritation against her. But his vision of her to-day had passed through some softening lens; and he saw her shallowness, her vanity, her lack of passion, as spiritual infirmities which were not less to be pitied than an infirmity of the body.

"The end is not yet, though," he added cheerfully after a moment, "and she will come back to me in time when I am able really to help her."

"Meanwhile is she to be left utterly uncontrolled?"

"Not if we can do otherwise. Only we must go quietly and not frighten her too much."

Again she met his words with the resigned, hopeless movement of her pretty head in its pearl gray bonnet. "I have done all I can," she said, "and it has been worse than useless. Now you must try if your method is better than mine."

"I am trying," he answered smiling.

For an instant her gaze fluttered irresolutely over him, as if she were moved by a passing impulse to a deeper utterance. That this impulse concerned Alice he was vaguely aware, for when had his wife ever spoken to him upon a subject more directly personal? Apart from their children he knew there was no bond between them—no memories, no hopes, no ground even for the building of a common interest. Lydia adored her children, he still believed, but when there was nothing further to be said of Dick or of Alice, their conversation flagged upon the most trivial topics. Upon the few unfortunate occasions when he had attempted to surmount the barrier between them, she had appeared to dissolve, rather than to retreat, before his approach. Yet despite her soft, cloud-like exterior, he had discovered that the rigour of her repulsion had hardened to a vein of iron in her nature. What must her life be, he demanded in a sudden passion of pity, when the strongest emotion she had ever known was the aversion that she now felt to him? All the bitterness in his heart melted into compassion at the thought, and he resisted an impulse to take her into his arms and say: "I know, I understand, and I am sorry." Yet he was perfectly aware that if he were to do this, she would only shrink farther away from him, and look up at him with fear and mystification, as if she suspected him of some hidden meaning, of some strategic movement against her impregnable reserve. Her whole relation to him had narrowed into the single instinct of self-defence. If he came unconsciously a step nearer, if he accidentally touched her hand as he passed, he had grown to expect the flaring of her uncontrollable repugnance in the heightened red in her cheeks. "I know that I am repulsive to her, that when she looks at me she still sees the convict," he thought, "and yet the knowledge of this only adds to the pity and tenderness I feel."

Lydia had moved through the doorway, but turning back in the hall, she spoke with a return of confidence, as if the fact of the threshold, which she had put between them, had restored to her, in a measure, the advantage that she had lost.

"Then I shall leave Alice in your hands. I can do nothing more," she said.

"Give me time and I will do all that you cannot," he answered.

When she had gone upstairs, he crossed the hall to the closed door of the library, and stopped short on hearing Alice's voice break out into song. The girl was still in her riding habit, and the gay French air on her lips was in accord with the spirited gesture with which she turned to him as he appeared. Her beauty would have disarmed him even without the kiss with which she hastened to avert his reproach.

"Alice, can you kiss me when you know you have broken your promise?"

"I made no promise," she answered coldly, drawing away. "You told me not to go riding with Geoffrey, but it was you that said it, not I, and you said it only because mamma made you. Oh, I knew all the time that it was she!"

Her voice broke with anger and before he could restrain her, she ran from the room and up the staircase. An instant afterward he heard a door slam violently above his head. Was she really in love with Geoffrey Heath? he asked in alarm, or was the passion she had shown merely the outburst of an undisciplined child?

CHAPTER VIII
The Weakness In Strength

AT breakfast Alice did not appear, and when he went upstairs to her room, she returned an answer in a sullen voice through her closed door. All day his heart was oppressed by the thought of her, but to his surprise, when he came home to luncheon, she met him on the steps with a smiling face. It was evident to him at the first glance that she meant to ignore both the cause and the occasion of last evening's outburst; and he found himself yielding to her determination before he realised all that his evasion of the subject must imply. But while she hung upon his neck, with her cheek pressed to his, it was impossible that he should speak any word that would revive her anger against him. Anything was better than the violence with which she had parted from him the evening before. He could never forget his night of anguish, when he had strained his ears unceasingly for some stir in her room, hoping that a poignant realisation of his love for her would bring her sobbing and penitent to his door before dawn.

Now when he saw her again for the first time, she had apparently forgotten the parting which had so tortured his heart.

"You've been working too hard, papa, and you're tired," she remarked, rubbing the furrows between his eyebrows in a vain endeavour to smooth them out. "Are you obliged to go back to that hateful office this afternoon?"

"I've some work that will keep me there until dark, I fear," he replied. "It's a pity because I'd like a ride of all things."

"It is a pity, poor dear," protested Alice, but he noticed that there was no alteration in her sparkling gaiety. Was there, indeed, almost a hint of relief in her tone? and was this demonstrative embrace but a guarded confession of her gratitude for his absence? Something in her manner—a veiled excitement in her look, a subtle change in her voice—caused him to hold her to him in a keener tenderness. It was on his lips to beg for her confidence, to remind her of his sympathy in whatever she might feel or think—to assure her even of his tolerance of Geoffrey Heath. But in the instant when he was about to speak, a sudden recollection of the look with which she had turned from him last evening, checked the impulse before it had had time to pass into words. And so because of his terror of losing her, he let her go at last in silence from his arms.

His office work that afternoon was heavier than usual, for in the midst of his mechanical copying and filing, he was abstracted by the memory of that strange, unnatural vivacity in Alice's face. Then in the effort to banish the disturbing recollection, he recalled old Adam Crowley, wrapped in his knitted shawl, on the doorstep of his cottage. A check of Richard's contributing six hundred dollars toward the purchase of a new organ for the church he attended gave Daniel his first opportunity to mention the old man to his uncle.

"I saw Crowley the other day," he began abruptly, "the man who was my father's clerk for forty years, and whose place," he added smiling, "I seem to have filled."

"Ah, indeed," remarked Richard quietly. "So he is still living?"

"His right arm has been paralysed, as you know, and he is very poor. All his savings were lost in some investments he made by my father's advice."

"So I have heard—it was most unfortunate."

"He had always been led to believe, I understand, that he would be provided for by my father's will."

Richard laid down his pen and leaned thoughtfully back in his chair. "He has told me so," he rejoined, "but we have only his word for it, as there was no memorandum concerning him among my brother's papers."

"But surely it was well known that father had given him a pension. Aunt Lucy was perfectly aware of it—they talked of it together."

"During his lifetime he did pay Crowley a small monthly allowance in consideration of his past services. But his will was an extremely careful document—his bequests are all made in a perfectly legal form."

"Was not this will made some years ago, however, before the old man became helpless and lost his money?"

Richard nodded: "I understood as much from Crowley when he came to me with his complaint. But, as I reminded him, it would have been a perfectly simple matter for Daniel to have made such a bequest in a codicil—as he did in your case," he concluded deliberately.

The younger man met his gaze without flinching. "The will, I believe, was written while I was in prison," he observed.

"Upon the day following your conviction. By a former will, which he then destroyed, he had bequeathed to you his entire estate. You understand, of course," he pursued, after a pause in which he had given his nephew full time to possess himself of the information, as well as of the multiplied suggestions that he had offered, "that the income you receive now comes from money that is legally your own. If it should ever appear advisable for me to do so, I am empowered to make over to you the sum of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in securities. The principal is left in my hands merely because it is to your interest that I should keep an eye on the investments."

"Yes, I understand, and I understand, too, that but for your insistence my father would probably have left me nothing."

"I felt very strongly that he had no right to disinherit you," returned Richard. "In my eyes he made a grave mistake in refusing to lend you support at your trial——"

"As you did, I acknowledge gratefully," interrupted Daniel, and wondered why the fact had aroused in him so little appreciation. As far as the observance of the conventional virtues were concerned, Richard Ordway, he supposed, was, and had been all his life, a good man, yet something in his austere excellence froze instantly all the gentler impulses in his nephew's heart. It was impossible after this to mention again the subject of Crowley, so going back to his work, he applied himself to his copying until Richard put down his papers and left the office. Then he locked his desk wearily and followed his uncle out into the street.

A soft May afternoon was just closing, and the street lamps glimmered, here and there, like white moths out of the mist which was fragrant with honeysuckle and roses. An old lamplighter, who was descending on his ladder from a tall lamppost at the corner, looked down at Ordway with a friendly and merry face.

"The days will soon be so long that you won't be needing us to light you home," he remarked, as he came down gingerly, his hands grasping the rungs of the ladder above his head. When he landed at Daniel's side he began to tell him in a pleasant, garrulous voice about his work, his rheumatism and the strange sights that he had seen in his rounds for so many years. "I've seen wonders in my day, you may believe it," he went on, chuckling, "I've seen babies in carriages that grew up to be brides in orange blossoms, and then went by me later as corpses in hearses. I've seen this town when it warn't mo'n a little middlin' village, and I've seen soldiers dyin' in blood in this very street." A train went by with a rush along the gleaming track that ran through the town. "An' I've known the time when a sight like that would have skeered folks to death," he added.

For a minute Ordway looked back, almost wistfully, after the flying train. Then with a friendly "good-bye!" he parted from the lamplighter and went on his way.

When he reached home he half expected to find Alice waiting for him in the twilight on the piazza, but, to his surprise, Lydia met him as he entered the hall and asked him, in a voice which sounded as if she were speaking in the presence of servants, to come with her into the library. There she closed the door upon him and inquired in a guarded tone:

"Has Alice been with you this afternoon? Have you seen or heard anything of her?"

"Not since luncheon. Why, I thought that she was at home with one of the girls."

"It seems she left the house immediately after you. She wore her dark blue travelling dress, and one of the servants saw her at the railway station at three o'clock."

For an instant the room swam before his eyes. "You believe, then, that she has gone off?" he asked in an unnatural voice, "that she has gone off with Geoffrey Heath?"

In the midst of his own hideous anguish he was impressed by the perfect decency of Lydia's grief—by the fact that she wore her anxiety as an added grace.

"I have telephoned for Uncle Richard," she said in a subdued tone, "and he has just sent me word that after making inquiries, he learned that Geoffrey Heath went to Washington on the afternoon train."

"And Alice is with him!"

"If she is not, where is she?" Her eyes filled with tears, and sinking into a chair she dropped her face in her clasped hands. "Oh, I wish Uncle Richard would come," she moaned through her fingers.

Again he felt a smothered resentment at this implicit reliance upon Richard Ordway. "We must make sure first that she is gone," he said, "and then it will be time enough to consider ways and means of bringing her back."

Turning abruptly away from her, he went out of the library and up the staircase to Alice's room, which was situated directly across the hall from his own. At the first glance it seemed to him that nothing was missing, but when he looked at her dressing-table in the alcove, he found that it had been stripped of her silver toilet articles, and that her little red leather bag, which he had filled with banknotes a few days ago, was not in the top drawer where she kept it. Something in the girl's chamber, so familiar, so redolent of associations with her bright presence, tore at his heart with a fresh sense of loss, like a gnawing pain that fastens into a new wound. On the bed he saw her pink flannel dressing-gown, with the embroidered collar which had so delighted her when she had bought it; on the floor at one side lay her pink quilted slippers, slightly soiled from use; and between the larger pillows was the delicate, lace-trimmed baby's pillow upon which she slept. The perfume of her youth, her freshness, was still in the room, as if she had gone from it for a little while through a still open door.

At a touch on his arm he looked round startled, to find one of the servants—the single remaining slave of the past generation—rocking her aged body as she stood at his side.

"She ain' gwine come back no mo'—Yes, Lawd, she ain' gwine come back no mo'. Whut's done hit's done en hit cyarn be undone agin."

"Why, Aunt Mehaley, what do you mean?" he demanded sternly, oppressed, in spite of himself by her wailing voice and her African superstition.

"I'se seen er tur'ble heap done in my day wid dese hyer eyes," resumed the old negress, "but I ain' never seen none un um undone agin atter deys wunst been done. You kin cut down er tree, but you cyarn' mek hit grow back togedder. You kin wring de neck er a rooster, but you cyarn' mek him crow. Yes, my Lawd, hit's easy to pull down, but hit's hard to riz up. I'se ole, Marster, en I'se mos' bline wid lookin', but I ain' never seen whut's done undone agin."

She tottered out, still wailing in her half-crazed voice, and hastily shutting the drawers of the dressing-table, he went downstairs again to where Lydia awaited him in the library.

"There's no doubt, I fear, that she's gone with Heath," he said, with a constraint into which he had schooled himself on the staircase. "As he appears to have stopped at Washington, I shall take the next train there, which leaves at nine-twenty-five. If they are married——"

He broke off, struck by the pallor that overspread her face.

"But they are married! They must be married!" she cried in terror.

For an instant he stared back at her white face in a horror as great as hers. Was it the first time in his life, he questioned afterwards, that he had been brought face to face with the hideous skeletons upon which living conventions assume a semblance of truth?

"I hope to heaven that he has not married her!" he exclaimed in a passion from which she shrank back trembling. "Good God! do you want me to haggle with a cad like that to make him marry my child?"

"And if he doesn't? what then?" moaned Lydia, in a voice that seemed to fade away while she spoke.

"If he doesn't I shall be almost tempted to bless his name. Haven't you proved to me that he is a cheat and a brute and a libertine, and yet you dare to tell me that I must force him to marry Alice. Oh, if he will only have the mercy to leave her free, I may still save her!" he said.

She looked at him with dilated eyes as if rooted in fear to the spot upon which she stood. "But the consequences," she urged weakly at last in a burst of tears.

"Oh, I'll take the consequences," he retorted harshly, as he went out.

An hour later, when he was settled in the rushing train, it seemed to him that he was able to find comfort in the words with which he had separated from his wife. Let Alice do what she would, there was always hope for her in the thought that he might help her to bear, even if he could not remove from her, the consequences of her actions. Could so great a force as his love for her fail to avert from her young head at least a portion of her inevitable disillusionment? The recollection of her beauty, of her generosity, and of the wreck of her womanhood almost before it had begun, not only added to his suffering, but seemed in some inexplicable way to increase his love. The affection he had always felt for her was strengthened now by that touch of pity which lends a deeper tenderness to all human relations.

Upon reaching Washington he found that a shower had come up, and the pavements were already wet when he left the station. He had brought no umbrella, but he hardly heeded this in the eagerness which drove him from street to street in his search for his child. After making vain inquiries at several of the larger hotels, he had begun to feel almost hopeless, when going into the newest and most fashionable of them all, he discovered that "Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Heath" had been assigned an apartment there an hour before. In answer to his question the clerk informed him that the lady had ordered her dinner served upstairs, leaving at the same time explicit instructions that she was "not at home" to anyone who should call. But in spite of this rebuff, he drew out his card, and sat down in a chair in the brilliantly lighted lobby. He had selected a seat near a radiator in the hope of drying his damp clothes, and presently a little cloud of steam rose from his shoulders and drifted out into the shining space. As he watched the gorgeous, over-dressed women who swept by him, he remembered as one remembers a distant dream, the years when his life had been spent among such crowds in just such a dazzling glare of electric light. It appeared false and artificial to him now, but in the meantime, he reflected, while he looked on, he had been in prison.

A voice at his elbow interrupted his thoughts, and turning in response to an invitation from a buttoned sleeve, he entered an elevator and was borne rapidly aloft among a tightly wedged group of women who were loudly bewailing their absence from the theatre. It was with difficulty that he released himself at the given signal from his escort, and stepped out upon the red velvet carpet which led to Alice's rooms. In response to a knock from the boy who had accompanied him, the door flew open with a jerk, and Alice appeared before him in a bewildering effect of lace and pink satin.

"O papa, papa, you naughty darling!" she exclaimed, and was in his arms before he had time to utter the reproach on his lips.

With her head on his breast, he was conscious at first only of an irresponsible joy, like the joy of the angels for whom evil no longer exists. To know that she was alive, that she was safe, that she was in his arms, seemed sufficient delight, not only unto the day, but unto his whole future as well. Then the thought of what it meant to find her thus in her lace and satin came over him, and drawing slightly away he looked for the first time into her face.

"Alice, what does it mean?" he asked, as he kissed her.

Pushing the loosened hair back from her forehead, she met his question with a protesting pout.

"It means that you're a wicked boy to run away from home like this and be all by yourself in a bad city," she responded with a playful shake of her finger. Then she caught his hand and drew him down on the sofa beside her in the midst of the filmy train of her tea-gown. "If you promise never to do it again, I shan't tell mamma on you," she added, with a burst of light-hearted merriment.

"Where were you married, Alice? and who did it?" he asked sternly.

At his tone a ripple of laughter broke from her lips, and reaching for her little red leather bag on the table, she opened it and tossed a folded paper upon his knees. "I didn't ask his name," she responded, "but you can find it all written on that, I suppose."

"And you cared nothing for me?—nothing for my anxiety, my distress?"

"I always meant to telegraph you, of course. Geoffrey has gone down now to do it."

"But were you obliged to leave home in this way? If you had told me you loved him, I should have understood—should have sympathised."

"Oh, but mamma wouldn't, and I had to run off. Of course, I wanted a big wedding like other girls, and a lot of bridesmaids and a long veil, but I knew you'd never consent to it, so I made up my mind just to slip away without saying a word. Geoffrey is so rich that I can make up afterwards for the things I missed when I was married. This is what he gave me to-day. Isn't it lovely?"

Baring her throat she showed him a pearl necklace hidden beneath her lace collar. "We're sailing day after to-morrow," she went on, delightedly, "and we shall go straight to Paris because I am dying to see the shops. I wouldn't run away with him until he promised to take me there."

There was no regret in her mind, no misgiving, no disquietude. The thought of his pain had not marred for an instant the pleasure of her imaginary shopping. "O papa, I am happy, so happy!" she sang aloud, springing suddenly to her full height and standing before him in her almost barbaric beauty—from the splendid hair falling upon her shoulders to the little feet that could not keep still for sheer joy of living. He saw her red mouth glow and tremble as she bent toward him. "To think that I'm really and truly out of Botetourt at last!" she cried.

"Then you've no need of me and I may as well go home?" he said a little wistfully as he rose.

At this she hung upon his neck for a minute with her first show of feeling. "I'd rather you wouldn't stay till Geoffrey comes back," she answered, abruptly releasing him, "because it would be a surprise to him and he's always so cross when he's surprised. He has a perfectly awful temper," she confided in a burst of frankness, "but I've learned exactly how to manage him, so it doesn't matter. Then he's so handsome, too. I shouldn't have looked at him twice if he hadn't been handsome. Now, go straight home and take good care of yourself and don't get fat and bald before I come back."

She kissed him several times, laughing in little gasps, while she held him close in her arms. Then putting him from her, she pushed him gently out into the hall. As the door closed on her figure, he felt that it shut upon all that was living or warm in his heart.