THE BUILDERS

CHAPTER I
Caroline

THE train was late that day, and when the old leather mail pouch was brought in, dripping wet, by Jonas, the negro driver, Mrs. Meade put down the muffler she was knitting, and received it reluctantly.

"At least there aren't any bills at this time of the month," she observed, with the manner of one who has been designed by Providence to repel disaster.

While she unbuckled the clammy straps, her full, round face, which was still fresh and pretty in spite of her seventy years, shone like an auspicious moon in the dusky glow of the fire. Since wood was scarce, and this particular strip of southside Virginia grew poorer with each year's harvest, the only fire at The Cedars was the one in "the chamber," as Mrs. Meade's bedroom was called. It was a big, shabby room, combining, as successfully as its owner, an aspect of gaiety with a conspicuous absence of comforts. There were no curtains at the windows, and the rugs, made from threadbare carpets, had faded to indeterminate patterns; but the cracked mahogany belonged to a good period, and if the colours had worn dim, they were harmonious and restful. The house, though scarred, still held to its high standards. The spirit of the place was the spirit of generous poverty, of cheerful fortitude.

The three girls on the hearthrug, knitting busily for the War Relief Association, were so much alike in colouring, shape, and feature, that it was difficult at a casual glance to distinguish Maud, who was almost, if not quite, a beauty, from Margaret and Diana, who were merely pretty and intelligent. They were all natural, kind-hearted girls, who had been trained from infancy to make the best of things and to laugh when they were hurt. From the days when they had played with ears of corn instead of dolls, they had acquired ingenuity and philosophy. For Mrs. Meade, who derived her scant income from a plantation cultivated "on shares" by negro tenants, had brought up her girls to take life gaily, and to rely on their own resourcefulness rather than on fortuitous events.

"Here is a nice fat letter for Caroline, and it looks as if it weren't an advertisement." With one plump hand she held out the letter, while she handed the dripping mail bag to Jonas. "Bring some wood for the fire, Jonas, and be sure to shut the door after you."

"Dar ain' no mo' wood, ole Miss."

For an instant Mrs. Meade stopped to think. "Well, the garden fence is falling down by the smoke-house. Split up some of the rails. Here is your letter, Caroline."

A woman's figure, outlined against the rocking branches of an old cedar beyond the window, turned slowly toward the group on the hearthrug. In Caroline's movements, while she lingered there for a moment, there was something gallant and free and spirited, which was a part of the world outside and the swaying boughs. Though she was older than the three girls by the fire, she was young with an illusive and indestructible grace of the soul. At thirty-two, in spite of the stern sweetness about her thin red lips, and the defiant courage which flashed now and then from the shadowy pallor of her face, one felt that the flame and ardour of her glance flowed not from inward peace, but from an unconquerable and adventurous spirit. Against the grey rain her face seemed the face of some swiftly changing idea, so expressive of an intangible beauty was the delicate curve of the cheek and the broad, clear forehead beneath the dark hair, which grew low in a "widow's peak" above the arched eyebrows and the vivid blue of the eyes. If there was austerity in the lines of her mouth, her eyes showed gaiety, humour, and tenderness. Long ago, before the wreck of her happiness, her father, who had a taste for the striking in comparisons, had said that Caroline's eyes were like bluebirds flying.

The letter could wait. She was not interested in letters now, rarely as they came to her. It was, she knew, only the call to a patient, and after nearly eight years of nursing, she had learned that nothing varied the monotonous personalities of patients. They were all alike, united in their dreadful pathos by the condition of illness—and as a mere matter of excitement there was little to choose between diphtheria and pneumonia. Yet if it were a call, of course she would go, and her brief vacation would be over. Turning away from the firelight, she deferred as long as possible the descent from her thoughts to the inevitable bondage of the actuality.

Beyond the window, veiled in rain, she could see the pale quivering leaves of the aspens on the lawn, and the bend in the cedar avenue, which led to the big white gate and the private road that ran through the farm until it joined the turnpike at the crossroads. Ever since she was born, it seemed to her, for almost thirty-two years, she had watched like this for something that might come up that long empty road. Even in the years that she had spent away, she had felt that her soul waited there, tense and expectant, overlooking the bend in the avenue and the white gate, and then the road over which "the something different," if it came at all, must come at last to The Cedars. Nothing, not change, not work, not travel, could detach the invisible tendrils of her life from the eager, brooding spirit of the girl who had once watched there at the window. She had been watching—watching—she remembered, when the letter that broke her heart had come in the old mail pouch, up the road beyond, and through the gate, and on into the shadows and stillness of the avenue. That was how the blow had come to her, without warning, while she waited full of hope and expectancy and the ardent sweetness of dreams.

"My poor child, your heart is broken!" her mother had cried through her tears, and the girl, with the letter still in her hands, had faced her defiantly.

"Yes, but my head and my hands are whole," she had replied with a laugh.

Then, while the ruins of her happiness lay at her feet, she began rebuilding her house of life with her head and her hands. She would accept failure on its own terms, completely, exultantly, and by the very audacity of her acceptance, she would change defeat into victory. She would make something out of nothing; she would wring peace, not from joy, but from the heart of an incredible cruelty; she would build with courage, not with gladness, but she would build her house toward the stars.

"There must be something one can live on besides love," she thought, "or half the world would go famished."

"Come and read your letter, Caroline," called Maud, as she reached the end of a row. "There isn't anything for the rest of us."

"I am so afraid it is a call, dear," said Mrs. Meade; and then, as Caroline left the window and passed into the firelight, the old lady found herself thinking a little vaguely, "Poor child, the hard work is beginning to show in her face—but she has never been the same since that unfortunate experience. I sometimes wonder why a just Providence lets such things happen." Aloud she added, while her beaming face clouded slightly, "I hope and pray that it isn't anything catching."

As Caroline bent over the letter, the three younger girls put down their knitting and drew closer, while their charming faces, brown, flushed, and sparkling, appeared to catch and hold the glow of the flames. They were so unlike Caroline, that she might have been mistaken, by a stranger, for a woman of a different race. While she bent there in the firelight, her slender figure, in its cambric blouse and skirt of faded blue serge, flowed in a single lovely curve from her drooping dark head to her narrow feet in their worn russet shoes.

"It is from an old friend of yours, mother," she said presently, "Mrs. Colfax."

"Lucy Colfax! Why, what on earth is she writing to you about? I hope there isn't anything wrong with her."

"Read it aloud, Caroline," said Diana. "Mother, this fire will go out before Jonas can fix it."

"He has to split the wood, dear. Look out on the back porch and see if you can find some chips. They'll be nice and dry." Mrs. Meade spoke with authority, for beneath her cheerful smile there was the heart of a fighter, and like all good fighters, she fought best when she was driven against the wall. "Now, Caroline, I am listening."

"She wants me to take a case. It sounds queer, but I'll read you what she says. 'Dear Caroline'—she calls me 'Caroline.'"

"That's natural, dear. We were like sisters, and perhaps she took a fancy to you the time she met you in Richmond. It would be just like her to want to do something for you." The sprightly old lady, who was constitutionally incapable of seeing any prospect in subdued colours, was already weaving a brilliant tapestry of Caroline's future.

"'Dear Caroline:

"'My cousin, Angelica Blackburn, has asked me to recommend a trained nurse for her little girl, who is delicate, and I am wondering if you would care to take the case. She particularly wishes a self-reliant and capable person, and Doctor Boland tells me you have inherited your mother's sweet and unselfish nature (I don't see how he knows. Everybody is unselfish in a sick-room. One has to be.)'"

"Well, I'm sure you have a lovely nature," replied Mrs. Meade tenderly. "I was telling the girls only yesterday that you never seemed to think of yourself a minute." In her own mind she added, "Any other girl would have been embittered by that unfortunate experience" (the phrase covered Caroline's blighted romance) "and it shows how much character she has that she was able to go on just as if nothing had happened. I sometimes think a sense of humour does as much for you as religion."

"'I remember my poor father used to say,'" Caroline read on smoothly, "'that in hard dollars and cents Carrie Warwick's disposition was worth a fortune.'"

"That's very sweet of Lucy," murmured Mrs. Meade deprecatingly.

"'As you are the daughter of my old friend, I feel I ought not to let you take the case without giving you all the particulars. I don't know whether or not you ever heard of David Blackburn—but your mother will remember his wife, for she was a Fitzhugh, the daughter of Champ Fitzhugh, who married Bessie Ludwell.'"

"Of course I remember Bessie. She was my bosom friend at Miss Braxton's school in Petersburg."

"Let me go on, mother darling. If you interrupt me so often I'll never get to the interesting part."

"Very well, go on, my dear, but it does seem just like Providence. When the flour gave out in the barrel last night, I knew something would happen." For Mrs. Meade had begun life with the shining certainty that "something wonderful" would happen to her in the future, and since she was now old and the miracle had never occurred, she had transferred her hopes to her children. Her optimism was so elastic that it stretched over a generation without breaking.

"'Mrs. Blackburn—Angelica Fitzhugh, she was—though her name is really Anna Jeannette, and they called her Angelica as a child because she looked so like an angel—well, Mrs. Blackburn is the cousin I spoke of, whose little girl is so delicate.' She is all tangled up, isn't she, mother?"

"Lucy always wrote like that," said Mrs. Meade. "As a girl she was a scatterbrain."

"'I do not know exactly what is wrong with the child,'" Caroline resumed patiently, "'but as long as you may go into the family, I think I ought to tell you that I have heard it whispered that her father injured her in a fit of temper when she was small.'"

"How horrible!" exclaimed Diana. "Caroline, you couldn't go there!"

"'She has never been able to play with other children, and Doctor Boland thinks she has some serious trouble of the spine. I should not call her a disagreeable child, or hard to manage, just delicate and rather whining—at least she is whenever I see her, which is not often. Her mother is one of the loveliest creatures on earth, and I can imagine no greater privilege than living in the house with her. She is far from strong, but she seems never to think of her health, and all her time is devoted to doing good. Doctor Boland was telling me yesterday that he had positively forbidden her undertaking any more charitable work. He says her nerves are sensitive, and that if she does not stop and rest she will break down sooner or later. I cannot help feeling—though of course I did not say this to him—that her unhappy marriage is the cause of her ill health and her nervousness. She was married very young, and they were so desperately poor that it was a choice between marriage and school teaching. I cannot blame anybody for not wanting to teach school, especially if they have as poor a head for arithmetic as I have, but if I had been Angelica, I should have taught until the day of my death before I should have married David Blackburn. If she had not been so young it would be hard to find an excuse for her. Of course he has an immense fortune, and he comes of a good old family in southside Virginia—your mother will remember his father—but when you have said that, you have said all there is to his credit. The family became so poor after the war that the boy had to go to work while he was scarcely more than a child, and I believe the only education he has ever had was the little his mother taught him, and what he managed to pick up at night after the day's work was over. In spite of his birth he has had neither the training nor the advantages of a gentleman, and nothing proves this so conclusively as the fact that, though he was brought up a Democrat, he voted the Republican ticket at the last two Presidential elections. There is something black in a man, my dear old father used to say, who goes over to the negroes—— '"

"Of course Lucy belongs to the old school," said Mrs. Meade. "She talks just as her father used to—but I cannot see any harm in a man's voting as he thinks right."

"'I am telling you all this, my dear Caroline, in order that you may know exactly what the position is. The salary will be good, just what you make in other cases, and I am sure that Angelica will be kindness itself to you. As for David Blackburn, I scarcely think he will annoy you. He treats his wife abominably, I hear, but you can keep out of his way, and it is not likely that he will be openly rude to you when you meet. The papers just now are full of him because, after going over to the Republicans, he does not seem satisfied with their ways.

"'Give my fondest love to your mother, and tell her how thankful I am that she and I are not obliged to live through a second war. One is enough for any woman, and I know she will agree with me—especially if she could read some of the letters my daughter writes from France. I feel every hour I live how thankful we ought to be to a kind Providence for giving us a President who has kept us out of this war. Robert says if there were not any other reason to vote for Mr. Wilson, that would be enough—and with Mr. Hughes in the White House who knows but we should be in the midst of it all very soon. David Blackburn is making fiery speeches about the duty of America's going in, but some men can never have enough of a fight, and I am sure the President knows what is best for us, and will do what he thinks is right.

"'Be sure to telegraph me if you can come, and I will meet your train in Angelica's car.

"'Your affectionate friend,

LUCY COLFAX.

"'I forgot to tell you that Doctor Boland says I am prejudiced against David Blackburn, but I do not think I am. I tell only what I hear, for the stories are all over Richmond.'"

As Caroline finished the letter she raised her head with a laugh.

"It sounds like a good place, and as for Bluebeard—well, he can't kill me. I don't happen to be his wife."

Her figure, with its look of relaxed energy, of delicate yet inflexible strength, straightened swiftly, while her humorous smile played like an edge of light over her features. The old lady, watching her closely, remembered the way Caroline's dead father had laughed in his youth. "She is as like him as a girl could be," she thought, with her eyes on her daughter's wide white brow, which had always seemed to her a shade too strong and thoughtful for a woman. Only the softly curving line of hair and the large radiant eyes kept the forehead from being almost masculine. "She might be as pretty as Maud if only she had more colour and her brow and chin were as soft as her eyes. Her mouth isn't full and red like Maud's, and her nose isn't nearly so straight, but the girls' father used to say that the best nose after all is a nose that nobody remembers." Smiling vaguely at the recollection, Mrs. Meade readjusted her mental processes with an effort, and took up her work. "I hope Lucy is prejudiced against him," she observed brightly. "You know her father was once Governor of Virginia, and she can't stand anybody who doesn't support the Democratic Party."

"But she says he treats his wife abominably, and that it's all over Richmond!" exclaimed Maud indignantly.

Before this challenge Mrs. Meade quailed. "If she is prejudiced about one thing, she may be about others," she protested helplessly.

"Well, he can't hurt me," remarked Caroline with firmness. "People can't hurt you unless you let them." Nothing, she felt, in an uncertain world was more certain than this—no man could ever hurt her again. She knew life now; she had acquired experience; she had learned philosophy; and no man, not even Bluebeard himself, could ever hurt her again.

"There was something about him in the paper this morning," said Margaret, the serious and silent one of the family. "I didn't read it, but I am sure that I saw his name in the headlines. It was about an independent movement in politics."

"Well, I'm not afraid of independent movements," rejoined Caroline gaily, "and I'm not like Mrs. Colfax—for I don't care what he does to the Democratic Party."

"I hate to have you go there, my dear," Mrs. Meade's voice shook a little, "but, of course, you must do what you think right." She remembered the empty flour barrel, and the falling fence rails, and the habit of a merciful Providence that invariably came to her aid at the eleventh hour. Perhaps, after all, there was a design working through it, she reflected, as she recovered her sprightliness, and Providence had arranged the case to meet her necessities. "It seems disagreeable, but one never knows," she added aloud.

"It isn't the first time I've had a disagreeable case, mother. One can't nurse seven years and see only the pleasant side of people and things."

"Yes, I know, my child, I know. You have had so much experience." She felt quite helpless before the fact of her daughter's experience. "Only if he really does ill treat his wife, and you have to see it——"

"If I see it, perhaps I can stop it. I suppose even Bluebeard might have been stopped if anybody had gone about it with spirit. It won't be my first sudden conversion." Her eyes were still laughing, but her mouth was stern, and between the arched black eyebrows three resolute little lines had appeared. Before her "unfortunate experience," Mrs. Meade thought sadly, there had been no grimness in Caroline's humour.

"You have a wonderful way of bringing out the good in people, Caroline. Your Uncle Clarence was telling me last Sunday that he believed you could get the best out of anybody."

"Then granting that Bluebeard has a best, I'd better begin to dig for it as soon as I get there."

"I am glad you can take it like that. If you weren't so capable, so resourceful, I'd never be easy about you a minute, but you are too intelligent to let yourself get into difficulties that you can't find a way out of." The old lady brightened as quickly as she had saddened. After all, if Caroline had been merely an ordinary girl she could never have turned to nursing so soon after the wreck of her happiness. "If a man had broken my heart when I was a girl, I believe I should have died of it," she told herself. "Certainly, I should never have been able to hold up my head and go on laughing like that. I suppose it was pride that kept her up, but it is queer the way that pride affects people so differently. Now a generation ago pride would not have made a girl laugh and take up work. It would have killed her." And there flashed through her thoughts, with the sanguine irrelevance of her habit of mind, "What I have never understood is how any man could go off with a little yellow-haired simpleton like that after knowing Caroline. Yet, I suppose, as Clarence said, if she hadn't been a simpleton, it would have been that much worse."

"Well, I'm going," said Caroline so briskly that her mother and sisters looked at her in surprise. "Jonas will have to saddle Billy and take the telegram to the station, and then you can stop knitting and help me finish those caps. This is my war and I'm going to fight it through to the end."

She went out with the telegram, and a little later when she came back and turned again to the window, Mrs. Meade saw that her eyes were shining. After all, it looked sometimes as if Caroline really liked a battle. Always when things went wrong or appeared disastrous, this shining light came to her eyes.

Outside an eddying wind was driving the rain in gusts up the avenue, and the old cedar dashed its boughs, with a brushing sound, against the blurred window panes. As Caroline stood there she remembered that her father had loved the cedar, and there drifted into her thoughts the words he had spoken to her shortly before his death. "I haven't much to leave you, daughter, but I leave you one good thing—courage. Never forget that it isn't the victory that matters, it is the fight."

She heard Mrs. Meade telling Jonas, who was starting to the station, that he must haul a load of wood from Pine Hill when the rain was over, and while she listened, it seemed to her that she had never really known her mother until this instant—that she had never understood her simple greatness. "She has fought every minute," she thought, "she has had a hard life, and yet no one would know it. It has not kept her from being sweet and gay and interested in every one else. Even now in that calico dress, with an apron on, she looks as if she were brimming with happiness." Out of the wreck of life, out of poverty and sacrifice and drudgery, she realized that her mother had stood for something fine and clear and permanent—for an ideal order. She had never muddled things under the surface; she had kept in touch with realities; she had looked always through the changing tissue of experience to the solid structure of life. Like the old house she had held through all vicissitudes to her high standards.

Then her thoughts left her mother, and she faced the unknown future with the defiant courage she had won from disillusionment. "If we were not so poor I'd go to France," she reflected, "but how could they possibly do without the hundred dollars a month I can earn?" No, whatever happened she must stick to her task, and her task was keeping the roof from falling in over her mother and the girls. After a month's rest at The Cedars, she would start again on the round of uninspiring patients and tedious monotony. The place Mrs. Colfax offered her seemed to her uninteresting and even sordid, and yet she knew that nothing better awaited her. She hated darkness and mystery, and the house into which she was going appeared to her to be both dark and mysterious. She was sure of her own strength; she had tested her courage and her endurance, and she was not afraid; yet for some vague and inexplicable reason she shrank from the position she had accepted. Mrs. Colfax's picture of the situation she thought tinged with melodrama, and her honest and lucid intelligence despised the melodramatic. They might all have been on the stage—the good wife, the brutal husband, and the delicate child; they seemed to her as unrelated to actual life as the sombre ghost that stalked through Hamlet.

"Angelica! It is a lovely name," she mused, seizing upon the one charming thing in Mrs. Colfax's description, "I wonder what she is like?" Fair, graceful, suffering, she saw this unknown woman against the background of the unhappy home, in an atmosphere of mystery and darkness. "She must be weak," she thought. "If she were not weak, she would not let him hurt her." And she longed to pour some of her own strength of will, her own independence and determination and philosophy, into the imaginary figure of Mrs. Blackburn. "It may be that I can help her. If I can only help her a little, it will all be worth while."

She tried presently to think of other things—of the caps she must finish, of the uniforms she had intended to make during her vacation, of the piece of white lawn she must cut up into kerchiefs, of the mending she would ask the girls to do for her before they went to bed. There was so much to occupy her time and her thoughts in the one evening that was left to her—yet, do what she would—look where she pleased—the sweet veiled image of Mrs. Blackburn floated to her through the twilight, up the long, dim road and round the bend in the avenue—as if this stranger with the lovely name were the "something different" she had waited for in the past. By a miracle of imagination she had transferred this single character into actual experience. The sense of mystery was still there, but the unreality had vanished. It was incredible the way a woman whose face she had never seen had entered into her life. "Why, she is more real than anything," she thought in surprise. "She is more real even than the war."

For the war had not touched her. She stood secure, enclosed, protected from disaster, in her little green corner of southside Virginia. Her personal life had not been overpowered and submerged in the current of impersonal forces. The age of small things still surrounded her—but the quiver and vibration of great movements, of a world in dissolution, the subdued, insistent undercurrent of new spiritual energies in action—these were reaching her, with the ebb and flow of psychological processes, as they were reaching the Virginia in which she lived.

The world was changing—changing—while she went toward it.

CHAPTER II
The Time

AT midnight, when she was alone in her room, Caroline's mind passed from an intense personal realization of the Blackburns to a broader conception of the time in which she was living—the time which this generation had helped to create, and which, like some monster of the imagination, was now devouring its happiness. She thought of her father—a man of intellectual abilities who had spent his life out of touch with his environment, in an uncongenial employment. Young as she was when he died, she had been for years the solitary confidant of his mind, for he also, like these strangers into whose lives she was about to enter, had been the victim of the illimitable and inscrutable forces which shape the thought of an age. He had been different from his generation, and because he had been different, it had destroyed him. Yet his single idea had outlived the multitudinous actions and reactions that surrounded him. He saw not to-day, but to-morrow; and though he was of another mettle from this Blackburn of whom she had been reading, he appeared now in her fancy to take a place beside him in the vivid life of the age.

The lamp was smoking, and after lowering the wick, she sat gazing into the darkness beyond the loosened shutters, which rattled when the wind shook them.

It was in the early autumn of nineteen hundred and sixteen, the moment in history when America, hesitating on the verge of war, discovered that it was no longer an Anglo-Saxon nation; that, in spite of its language and literature, its shell of customs and traditions, a new race had been created out of a complicated mass of diverse interacting sympathies, prejudices, attractions, and repulsions. Confronted now with problems demanding a definite expression of the national will, it became evident that the pioneer stock had undergone profound modifications, and that from a mingling of many strains had been born an emphatic American spirit, with aspirations essentially different from those of the races from which its lifeblood was drawn. In the arrogant vigour of youth this spirit resented any disposition on the part of its kindred to dictate or even influence its policy or its purpose.

For two years Europe had been at war. The outbreak of the struggle had come as a distant thunderbolt to a nation unaccustomed to threatening armies, and ignorant of the triumphant menace of military ideals; and stunned by a calamity which it had believed impossible, America had been inclined at first to condemn indiscriminately those who had permitted the disaster for apparently insignificant causes. There was sympathy with Belgium because it had been destroyed; with France because it had been invaded; and with England because it had worked sincerely in the interests of peace; but as early as the autumn of nineteen hundred and sixteen this sympathy was little more than uncrystallized sentiment. To the people the problem was irrelevant and disguised in words. For a century they had been taught that their geographical isolation was indestructible, and that European history concerned them only after it had been successfully transmuted into literature. The effect of these political illusions had been accentuated by the immediate demands upon the thoughts and energies of the nation, by the adventure of conquering a rich and undeveloped continent, and by the gradual adjustment of complex institutions to a rapidly expanding social and economic life. Secure in its remoteness, the country had grown careless in its diplomacy. Commerce was felt to be vital, but foreign relations were cheerfully left to the President, with the assumption that he was acting under the special guidance of Providence, on those memorable occasions when he acted at all. With the sinking of the Lusitania, the spirit of the country had flamed into a passionate demand for redress or war. Then the indignation had been gradually allayed by diplomatic phrases and bewildering technicalities; and the masses of the people, busy with an extravagant war prosperity, resigned international matters into the hands of the Government, while, with an uneasy conscience but genuine American optimism, they continued actively to hope for the best.

To an aËrial philosopher the Government of the hour might have appeared a composite image of the time—sentimental, evasive of realities, idealistic in speech, and materialistic in purpose and action. Dominated by a single strong intellect, it was composed mainly of men who were without knowledge of world questions or experience in world affairs. At the moment war was gathering, yet the demand for preparation was either ignored or ridiculed as hysteria.

As the national elections approached both parties avoided the direct issue, and sought by compromise and concession to secure the support of the non-American groups. While the country waited for leadership, the leaders hesitated in the midst of conflicting currents of public sentiment, and endeavoured to win popularity through an irresolute policy of opportunism. To Virginians, who thought politically in terms of a party, the great question was resolved into a personal problem. Where the President led they would follow.

From the beginning there had been many Americans who looked beneath the shifting surface of events, and beheld in this war a challenge to the principles which are the foundation-stones of Western civilization. They realized that this was a war not of men, not of materials, but of ideals—of ideals which are deeper than nationality since they are the common heritage of the human race. They saw that the ideals assailed were the basis of American institutions, and that if they should be overthrown the American Republic could not endure. As in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the problems of European civilization were fought out in the forests of America, so to-day, they felt, the future of America would be decided on the battlefields of Europe. The cause was the cause of humanity, therefore it was America's war.

And now as the elections drew nearer, these clearer thinkers stood apart and watched the grotesque political spectacle, with its unctuous promises of "peace and prosperity," in the midst of world tragedy. Though the struggle would be close, it was already evident that the sentiment of the country was drifting, not so much toward the policies of the administration, as away from the invectives of the opposite party. Since neither party stood for principle, nor had the courage to declare fearlessly for the maintenance of American rights, there was a measure of comfort in the reflection that, though the purposes of the Government were not wholly approved, they were at least partly known.

By the early autumn the campaign had passed through a fog of generalization and settled into a sham battle of personal and sectional issues, while in Europe the skies grew darker, and the events of the coming year gathered like vultures before the approaching storm.

And always, while America waited and watched, the forces that mould the destinies of men and of nations, were moving, profound, obscure, and impenetrable, beneath the surface of life.

Caroline's lamp flickered and went out, while her thoughts rushed back to the shelter of the house. The room was in darkness, but beyond the shutters, where the wind swept in gusts, the clouds had scattered, and a few stars were shining.

CHAPTER III
Briarlay

IN the train Caroline sat straight and still, with her eyes on the landscape, which unrolled out of the golden web of the distance. Now and then, when her gaze shifted, she could see the pale oval of her face glimmering unsteadily in the window-pane, like a light that is going out slowly. Even in the glass, where her eyes were mere pools of darkness, her mouth looked sad and stern, as if it had closed over some tragic and for ever unutterable secret. It was only when one saw her eyes—those eyes which under the arch of her brows and hair made one think of bluebirds flying—it was only when their colour and radiance lighted her features, that her face melted to tenderness.

While she sat there she thought of a hundred things, yet never once did she think of herself or her own interests as the centre around which her imagination revolved. If life had repressed and denied her, it had trained her mental processes into lucid and orderly habits. Unlike most women, she had learned to think impersonally, and to think in relations. Her spirit might beat its wings against the bars of the cage, but she knew that it would never again rise, with a dart of ecstasy, to test its freedom and its flight in the sky. She had had her day of joy. It was short, and it had left only sadness, yet because she had once had it, even for so brief a time, she might be disillusioned, but she could not feel wholly defrauded. Through that dead emotion she had reached, for an instant, the heart of life; she had throbbed with its rapture; she had felt, known, and suffered. And in confronting the illusions of life, she had found the realities. Because she had learned that thought, not emotion, is the only permanent basis of happiness, she had been able to found her house on a rock. It was worth a good deal of pain to discover that neither desire nor disappointment is among the eternal verities of experience.

To-day, as on many other days since she had passed through her training in the hospital, she was leaving home, after a vacation in which she had thought of herself scarcely a minute, for the kind of service in which she would not have time to think of herself at all. Work had been the solution of her problem, the immediate restorative; and she knew that it had helped her through the anguish, and—worse than anguish—through the bleakness of her tragedy, as nothing else could have done. "I will not sit down and think of myself," she had said over and over in those first bitter days, and in the years since then, while she was passionately rebuilding her universe, she had kept true to her resolve. She had been active always; she had never brooded among the romantic ruins of the past. If her inner life had grown indifferent, cold, and a little hard, her external sympathies had remained warm, clear, and glowing. The comfort she had denied herself, she had given abundantly to others; the strength she had not wasted in brooding, she had spent freely in a passion of service and pity. In her face there was the beauty and sweetness of a fervent, though disciplined, spirit.

"I am so sorry to leave them," she thought, with her eyes on the amber, crimson, and purple of the forest. "Mother is no longer young. She needs all the help I can give her, and the girls have so few pleasures. I wish there was something more I could do for them. I would work my fingers to the bone to give them a little happiness." And there floated before her, against the background of the forest, a still yet swiftly fleeting vision, of the fire-lit room, with the girls gathered, knitting, on the hearthrug, and her mother turning to look at her with the good and gentle expression that shone always in her face. Beyond the window the rain fell; the cedar brushed its boughs against the panes with a sound like that of ghostly fingers; on the roof above she heard the measured dropping of acorns. In the flickering light the old mahogany gleamed with a bronze and gold lustre, and the high white bed, under its fringed Marseilles coverlet, stood, like an embodiment of peace and sleep, in the corner. "It looks so happy, so sheltered," she thought, "and yet—" she was going to add, "and yet unhappiness came up the road, from a great distance, and found me there——" but she shattered the vague idea before it formed in her mind.

At the station Mrs. Colfax was waiting, and though Caroline had seen her only once, ten years ago, she recognized her by a bird-like, pecking manner she had never forgotten. As the ruin of a famous beauty the old lady was not without historic distinction. Though she was now shrunken and withered, and strung with quaint gold chains, which rattled with echoes of an earlier period, she still retained the gracious social art of the "sixties." Her eyes, hollowed under thin grey eyebrows, were black and piercing, and her small aristocratic features looked mashed, as if life had dealt them too hard a blow.

"My dear child, I should have known you anywhere, so, you see, I haven't yet lost my memory. It was years ago that I met you, wasn't it?"

A man in livery—she discovered afterwards that he was the Blackburn's footman—took her bag, and Caroline helped Mrs. Colfax out of the station and into the big limousine at the door. "It was so good of you to meet me," she said, for it was all she could think of, and to the last she had been haunted by the fear that Mr. Blackburn might decide to come for her.

"Good of me? Why, I wanted to come." As she watched Caroline's face, the old lady was thinking shrewdly, "She isn't so pretty as she used to be. I doubt if many men would think twice about her—but she has a lovely expression. I never saw a more spiritual face."

Once safely started she rambled on while the car shot into Franklin Street, and ran straight ahead in the direction of Monument Avenue.

"I always meant to meet you, and just as soon as your telegram came, I 'phoned Angelica about the car. She wanted to come down herself, but the doctor makes her lie down two hours every afternoon. Do you see that new office building at the corner? Your mother and I went to school on that spot before we boarded at Miss Braxton's in Petersburg. At that time this part of Franklin Street was very fashionable, but everything has moved west, and everybody who can afford it is building in the country. It isn't like your mother's day at all. New people have taken possession of the town, and anybody who has money can get into society now. We are coming to Monument Avenue. All the houses are brand new, but it is nothing to the country outside. The Blackburns' place just off the River Road is the finest house anywhere about Richmond, they tell me. He built it the year before his marriage, and I remember an artist, who came down to lecture before the Woman's Club, saying to me that Briarlay was like its owner—everything big in it was good and everything little in it was bad. I don't know much about such things, but he poked fun at the fireplaces—said they were Gothic or Italian—I can't remember which—and that the house, of course, is Colonial."

A fit of coughing stopped her, and while she dived into her black silk bag for a handkerchief, Caroline asked curiously, "Has Mr. Blackburn so much money?"

"Oh, yes, I suppose he is the richest man we have here. He owns the large steel works down by the river, and he discovered some new cheap process, they say, which brought him a fortune. I remember hearing this, but I haven't much of a head for such matters. Just now he is having a good deal of trouble with his men, and I'm sure it serves him right for deserting the ways of his father, and going over to the Republicans. Charles takes up for him because David has always stood by him in business, but of course out of respect for father's memory he couldn't openly sympathize with his disloyalty."

"Does anybody follow him, or is he all alone?" inquired Caroline, less from active interest in the question than from the desire to keep the old lady animated.

"You'll have to ask Charles, and he will be delighted to answer. In this new-fangled idea about breaking the solid South—did you ever hear such stuff and nonsense?—I believe he has had a very bad influence over a number of young men. Then, of late, he has been talking extravagantly about its being our duty to go into this war—as if we had any business mixing ourselves up in other people's quarrels—and that appeals to a lot of fire-eaters and fight-lovers. Of course, a man as rich as David Blackburn will always have a trail of sycophants and addlepates at his heels. What I say is that if Providence had intended us to be in this war, we shouldn't have been given a President wise and strong enough to keep us out of it. If Mr. Wilson is elected for a second term—and my brother Charles says there isn't a doubt of it—it will be because the country feels that he has kept us out of war. There was a long editorial in the paper this morning warning us that, if Mr. Hughes is elected, we shall be fighting Germany within two months. Then think of all the destruction and the dreadful high taxes that would follow——"

"But I thought there was a great deal of war spirit here? At home we work all the time for the Allies."

"Oh, there is, there is. Angelica is president or chairman of two or three societies for helping the wounded, and they even made me head of something—I never can remember the name of it—but it has to do with Belgian orphans. Everybody wants to help, but that is different from going into the actual fighting, you know, and people are very much divided. A few, like David Blackburn, wanted us to declare war the day after the Lusitania was destroyed, but most of us feel—especially the wiser heads—that the President knows more about it than any one else——"

"I suppose he does," admitted Caroline, and she added while she looked at the appointments of the car, "What a beautiful car!"

She sighed gently, for she was thinking of the rotting fence rails and the leaking roof at The Cedars. How far she could make a few thousand dollars go in repairing the house and the out-buildings! If only the leaks could be mended, and the roof reshingled over the wings! If only they could hire a younger man to help poor old Jones, who was growing decrepit!

"This car is Angelica's," said the old lady, "and everything she has is wonderful. As soon as she was married she began to re-decorate Briarlay from garret to cellar. When David first made his money, he went about buying everything he laid eyes on, and she gave whole wagon-loads of furniture to her relatives. There are people who insist that Angelica overdoes things in her way as much as her husband does in his—both were poor when they grew up—but I maintain that her taste is perfect—simply perfect. It is all very well for my daughter Lucy, who has studied interior decoration in New York, to turn up her nose at walls hung with silk in a country house, but to my mind that pink silk in Angelica's parlours is the most beautiful thing she could have, and I reckon I've as good a right to my ideas as Lucy has to hers. After all, as I tell her, it is only a question of taste."

It was a mild, bright afternoon in October, and as the car turned into the River Road, the country spread softly, in undulations of green, gold, and bronze, to the deep blue edge of the horizon. The valley lay in shadow, while above it shreds of violet mist drifted slowly against the golden ball of the sun. Near at hand the trees were touched with flame, but, as they went on, the brilliant leaves melted gradually into the multi-coloured blend of the distance.

"Mrs. Blackburn must be so beautiful," said Caroline presently. As she approached Briarlay—the house of darkness and mystery that she had seen in her imagination—she felt that the appeal of this unknown woman deepened in vividness and pathos, that it rushed to meet her and enveloped her with the intensity and sweetness of a perfume. It was as if the name Angelica were not a sound, but a thing composed of colour and fragrance—sky-blue like a cloud and as sweet-scented as lilies.

"She was the most beautiful girl who ever came out in Richmond," replied Mrs. Colfax. "The family was so poor that her mother couldn't do anything for her—she didn't even have a coming-out party—but with a girl like that nothing matters. David Blackburn saw her at some reception, and lost his head completely. I won't say his heart because I've never believed that he had one. Of course he was far and away the best chance she was ever likely to have down here, for it wasn't as if they could have sent her to the White Sulphur. They couldn't afford anything, and they were even educating Angelica to be a teacher. What she would have done if David Blackburn hadn't come along when he did, I cannot imagine—though, as I wrote you, I'd have taught school to my dying day before I'd have married him."

"But didn't she care anything for him?" asked Caroline, for it was incredible to her that such a woman should have sold herself.

Mrs. Colfax sniffed at her smelling-salts. "Of course I haven't the right to an opinion," she rejoined, after a pause, "but as I always reply to Charles when he tells me I am talking too much, 'Well, I can't help having eyes.' I remember as well as if it were yesterday the way Angelica looked when she told me of her engagement. 'I have decided to marry David Blackburn, Cousin Lucy,' she said, and then she added, just as if the words were wrung out of her, 'I loathe the thought of teaching!' It doesn't sound a bit like Angelica, but those were her very words. And now, my dear, tell me something about your mother. Does she still keep up her wonderful spirits?"

After this she asked so many questions that Caroline was still answering them when the car turned out of the road and sped up a long, narrow lane, which was thickly carpeted with amber leaves. At the end of the lane, the vista broadened into an ample sweep of lawn surrounding a red brick house with white columns and low wings half hidden in Virginia creeper. It was a beautiful house—so beautiful that Caroline held her breath in surprise. Under the October sky, in the midst of clustering elms, which shed a rain of small bronze leaves down on the bright grass and the dark evergreens, the house appeared to capture and imprison the mellow light of the sunset. It was so still, except for a curving flight of swallows over the roof, and the elm leaves, which fell slowly and steadily in the soft air, that the gleaming windows, the red walls, and the white columns, borrowed, for a moment, the visionary aspect of a place seen in a dream.

"There is a formal garden at the back, full of box-borders and cypresses—only they are really red cedars," said Mrs. Colfax. "From the terrace there is a good view of the river, and lower down Angelica has made an old-fashioned garden, with grass walks and rose arbours and mixed flower beds. I never saw such Canterbury bells as she had last summer."

As they entered the circular drive, a touring car passed them slowly on the way out, and a man leaned forward and bowed to Mrs. Colfax. From her casual glance Caroline received an impression of a strong, sunburned face, with heavy brows and dark hair going a little grey on the temples.

"What searching eyes that man has," she observed carelessly, and added immediately, "You know him?"

"Why, that was David Blackburn. I forgot you had never seen him."

"He isn't at all what I expected him to be." While Caroline spoke she felt an inexplicable sense of disappointment. She scarcely knew what she had expected; yet she realized that he was different from some vague image she had had in her mind.

"His face looked so set I'm afraid he has been quarrelling with Angelica," said the old lady. "Poor child, I feel so distressed."

They had reached the house, and as they were about to alight, the door opened, and a girl in a riding habit, with two Airedale terriers at her heels, strolled out on the porch. At sight of Mrs. Colfax, she came quickly forward, and held out her hand. She had a splendid figure, which the riding habit showed to advantage, and though her face was plain, her expression was pleasant and attractive. Without the harsh collar and the severe arrangement of her hair, which was braided and tied up with a black ribbon, Caroline imagined that she might be handsome.

Mrs. Colfax greeted her as "Miss Blackburn" and explained immediately that she lived at Briarlay with her brother. "She is a great lover of dogs," added the old lady, "and it is a pity that Angelica doesn't like to have them about."

"Oh, they don't mind, they're such jolly beggars," replied the girl in a cheerful, slangy manner, "and besides they get all they want of me. I'm so sorry you didn't come in time for tea. Now I'm just starting for a ride with Alan."

While she was speaking a man on horseback turned from the lane into the drive, and Caroline saw her face change and brighten until it became almost pretty. "There he is now!" she exclaimed, and then she called out impulsively, "Oh, Alan, I've waited for ever!"

He shouted back some words in a gay voice, but Caroline did not catch them, and before he dismounted, Mrs. Colfax led her through the open door into the hall.

"That's Alan Wythe," said the old lady in a whisper, and she resumed a moment later when they stood within the pink silk walls of Angelica's drawing-room, "Mary has been engaged to him for a year, and I never in my life saw a girl so much in love. I suppose it's natural enough—he's charming—but in my day young ladies were more reserved. And now we'll go straight upstairs to Angelica. She is sure to be lying down at this hour."

As they passed through the wide hall, and up the beautiful Colonial staircase, Caroline felt that the luxury of the place bewildered her. Though the house, except in size, was not unlike country homes she had seen in southside Virginia, there was nothing in her memory, unless she summoned back stray recollections of photographs in Sunday newspapers, that could compare with the decoration of the drawing-room. "It is beautiful, but there is too much of it," she thought, for her eyes, accustomed to bare surfaces and the formal purity of Sheraton and Chippendale, were beginning to discriminate.

"I want you to notice everything when you have time," said Mrs. Colfax. "I tell Angelica that it is a liberal education just to come inside of this house."

"It would take weeks to see it," responded Caroline; and then, as she moved toward a long mirror in the hall upstairs, it seemed to her that her reflection, in her severe blue serge suit, with the little round blue hat Diana had trimmed, looked as grotesquely out of place as if she had been one of the slender Sheraton chairs at The Cedars. "If I appear a lady I suppose it is as much as I can hope for," she thought, "and besides nobody will notice me."

The humour leaped to her eyes, while Mrs. Colfax, watching her with a side-long glance, reflected that Carrie Warwick's daughter had distinction. Her grace was not merely the grace of a slender body with flowing lines; it was the grace of word, of glance, of smile, of gesture, that indefinable and intangible quality which is shed by a lovely soul as fragrance is shed by a flower. "Even if she lives to be as old as I am, she will still keep her poise and her charm of appearance," thought the old lady, "she will never lose it because it isn't a matter of feature—it isn't dependent on outward beauty. Years ago she was prettier than she is to-day, but she wasn't nearly so distinguished." Aloud she said presently, "Your hair grows in such a nice line on your forehead, my dear, just like your mother's. I remember we always made her brush hers straight back as you do, so she could show her 'widow's peak' in the centre. But yours is much darker, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is almost black. Mother's was the loveliest shade of chestnut. I have a lock of it in an old breast-pin."

A door at the end of the hall opened, and a thin woman, in rusty black alpaca, came to meet them.

"That's the housekeeper—Matty Timberlake, the very salt of the earth," whispered Mrs. Colfax. "She is Angelica's cousin."

When the housekeeper reached them, she stooped and kissed Mrs. Colfax before she spoke to Caroline. She was a long, narrow, neuralgic woman, with near-sighted eyes, thin grey hair which hung in wisps on her forehead, and a look which seemed to complain always that she was poor and dependent and nobody noticed her.

"Angelica is lying down," she said, "but she would like to speak to Miss Meade before I take her to her room."

Caroline's heart gave a bound. "At last I shall see her," she thought, while she followed Mrs. Timberlake down the hall and across the threshold of Angelica's room. The influence that she had felt first in the twilight at The Cedars and again in the drive out from Richmond, welcomed her like a caress.

Her first impression was one of blue and ivory and gold. There was a bed, painted in garlands, with a scalloped canopy of blue silk; and Caroline, who was accustomed to mahogany testers or the little iron beds in the hospital, was conscious of a thrill of delight as she looked at it. Then her eyes fell on the white bear-skin rug before the fire, and from the rug they passed to the couch on which Mrs. Blackburn was lying. The woman and the room harmonized so perfectly that one might almost have mistaken Angelica for a piece of hand-painted furniture. At first she appeared all blue silk and pale gold hair and small delicate features. Then she sat up and held out her hand, and Caroline saw that she looked not only human, but really tired and frail. There were faint shadows under her eyes, which were like grey velvet, and her hair, parted softly in golden wings over her forehead, showed several barely perceptible creases between her eyebrows. She was so thin that the bones of her face and neck were visible beneath the exquisite texture of her flesh, yet the modelling was as perfect as if her head and shoulders had been chiselled in marble.

"You are Caroline Meade," she said sweetly. "I am so glad you have come."

"I am glad, too. I wanted to come." The vibrant voice, full of warmth and sympathy, trembled with pleasure. For once the reality was fairer than the dream; the woman before her was lovelier than the veiled figure of Caroline's imagination. It was one of those unforgettable moments when the mind pauses, with a sensation of delight and expectancy, on the edge of a new emotion, of an undiscovered country. This was not only something beautiful and rare; it was different from anything that had ever happened to her before; it was a part of the romantic mystery that surrounded the unknown. And it wasn't only that Mrs. Blackburn was so lovely! More than her beauty, the sweetness of her look, the appeal of her delicacy, of her feminine weakness, went straight to the heart. It was as if her nature reached out, with clinging tendrils, seeking support. She was like a fragile white flower that could not live without warmth and sunshine.

"The other nurse leaves in the morning," Mrs. Blackburn was saying in her gentle voice, which carried the merest note of complaint, as if she cherished at heart some secret yet ineradicable grievance against destiny, "So you have come at the right moment to save me from anxiety. I am worried about Letty. You can understand that she is never out of my thoughts."

"Yes, I can understand, and I hope she will like me."

"She will love you from the first minute, for she is really an affectionate child, if one knows how to take her. Oh, Miss Meade, you have taken a load off my shoulders! You look so kind and so competent, and I feel that I can rely on you. I am not strong, you know, and the doctor won't let me be much with Letty. He says the anxiety is too wearing, though, if I had my way, I should never think of myself."

"But you must," said Caroline quietly. She felt that the child's illness and the terrible cause of it were wrecking Mrs. Blackburn's health as well as her happiness.

"Of course, I must try to take care of myself because in the end it will be so much better for Letty." As she answered, Angelica slipped her feet into a pair of embroidered blue silk mules, and rising slowly from her lace pillows, stood up on the white rug in front of the fire. Though she was not tall, her extraordinary slenderness gave her the effect of height and the enchanting lines of one of Botticelli's Graces. "With you in the house I feel that everything will be easier," she added, after a minute in which she gazed down at the new nurse with a thoughtful, appraising look.

"It will be as easy as I can make it. I will do everything that I can." The words were not spoken lightly, for the opportunity of service had brought a glow to Caroline's heart, and she felt that her reply was more than a promise to do her best—that it was a vow of dedication from which only the future could release her. She had given her pledge of loyalty, and Mrs. Blackburn had accepted it. From this instant the bond between them assumed the nature and the obligation of a covenant.

A smile quivered and died on Angelica's lips, while the pathos in her expression drew the other to her as if there were a visible wound to be healed. "You will be a blessing. I can tell that when I look at you," she murmured; and her speech sounded almost empty after the overflowing sympathy of the silence. To Caroline it was a relief when the housekeeper called to her from the doorway, and then led her upstairs to a bedroom in the third storey.

It was a delightful room overlooking the circular drive, and for a minute they stood gazing down on the lawn and the evergreens.

"Everything is so lovely!" exclaimed Caroline presently. One could rest here, she thought, even with hard work and the constant strain, which she foresaw, on her sympathies.

"Yes, it is pretty," answered the housekeeper. Already Mrs. Timberlake had proved that, though she might be the salt of the earth, she was a taciturn and depressing companion—a stranded wreck left over from too voluble a generation of women.

"And I never saw any one lovelier than Mrs. Blackburn," said Caroline, "she looks like an angel."

"Well, I reckon there is mighty little you can say against Angelica's looks unless your taste runs to a trifle more flesh," responded Mrs. Timberlake drily.

"She ought to be happy," pursued Caroline, with a feeling that was almost one of resentment. "Anyone as beautiful as that ought to be happy."

Mrs. Timberlake turned slowly toward her, and Caroline was aware of a spasmodic stiffening of her figure, as if she were nerving herself for an outburst. When the explosion came, however, it was in the nature of an anti-climax.

"I expect you are going to be very useful to her," she said; and in answer to a hurried summons at the door, she made one of her nervous gestures, and went out into the hall.

"It would be perfect," thought Caroline, "if I didn't have to meet Mr. Blackburn"; and she concluded, with a flash of her mother's unquenchable optimism, "Well, perhaps I shan't see him to-night!"

The sun had set, and almost imperceptibly the afterglow had dissolved into the twilight. Outside, the lawn and the evergreens were in shadow; but from the house a misty circle of light fell on the drive, and on a narrow strip of turf, from which each separate blade of grass emerged with exaggerated distinctness as if it were illuminated. Within this circle, with its mysterious penumbra, human life also seemed exaggerated by the luminous haze which divided it from the partial shadow of the evening. The house stood enclosed in light as in a garden; and beyond it, where the obscurity began, there was the space and silence of the universe. While she stood there, she felt, with a certainty more profound than a mere mental conviction, that this lighted house contained, for her, all the joy and tragedy of human experience; that her life would be interwoven with these other lives as closely as branches of trees in a forest. The appeal of Mrs. Blackburn had stirred her heart and intensified her perceptions. From the bleakness of the last seven years, she had awakened with revived emotions.

"It is just my fancy," she thought, "but I feel as if something wonderful had really happened—as if life were beginning all over again to-night."

The words were still in her mind, when a child's laugh rang out from a window below, and the figure of a man passed from the outlying obscurity across the illuminated grass. Though he moved so hurriedly out of the light, she caught the suggestion of a smile; and she had a singular feeling that he was the same man, and yet not the same man, that she had seen in the motor.

"I do hope I shan't have to meet him to-night," she repeated at the very instant that a knock fell on her door, and an old coloured woman came in to bring a message from Mrs. Blackburn.

She was a benevolent looking, aristocratic negress, with a fine, glossy skin as brown as a chestnut, and traces of Indian blood in her high cheekbones. A white handkerchief was bound over her head like a turban, and her black bombazine dress hung in full, stately folds from her narrow waist line. For a minute, before delivering her message, she peered gravely at Caroline by the dim light of the window.

"Ain't you Miss Carrie Warwick's chile, honey? You ax 'er ef'n she's done forgot de Fitzhugh chillun's mammy? I riz all er de Fitzhugh chillun."

"Then you must be Mammy Riah? Mother used to tell me about you when I was a little girl. You told stories just like Bible ones."

"Dat's me, honey, en I sutney is glad ter see you. De chillun dey wuz al'ays pesterin' me 'bout dose Bible stories jes' exactly de way Letty wuz doin' dis ve'y mawnin'."

"Tell me something about the little girl. Is she really ill?" asked Caroline; and it occurred to her, as she put the question, that it was strange nobody had mentioned the child's malady. Here again the darkness and mystery of the house she had imagined—that house which was so unlike Briarlay—reacted on her mind.

The old negress chuckled softly. "Naw'm, she ain' sick, dat's jes' some er Miss Angy's foolishness. Dar ain' nuttin' in de worl' de matter wid Letty 'cep'n de way dey's brung 'er up. You cyarn' raise a colt ez ef'n hit wuz a rabbit, en dar ain' no use'n tryin'." Then she remembered her message. "Miss Angy sez she sutney would be erbleeged ter you ef'n you 'ould come erlong down ter dinner wid de res' un um. Miss Molly Waver's done 'phone she cyarn' come, en dar ain' nobody else in de house ez kin set in her place."

For an instant Caroline hesitated. "If I go down, I'll have to meet Mr. Blackburn," she said under her breath.

A gleam of humour shot into the old woman's eyes.

"Marse David! Go 'way f'om yer, chile, whut you skeered er Marse David fur?" she rejoined. "He ain' gwine ter hu't you."

CHAPTER IV
Angelica

AT a quarter of eight o'clock, when Caroline was waiting to be called, Mrs. Timberlake came in to ask if she might fasten her dress.

"Oh, you're all hooked and ready," she remarked. "I suppose nurses learn to be punctual."

"They have to be, so much depends on it."

"Well, you look sweet. I've brought you a red rose from the table. It will lighten up that black dress a little."

"I don't often go to dinner parties," said Caroline while she pinned on the rose. "Will there be many people?" There was no shyness in her voice or manner; and it seemed to Mrs. Timberlake that the black gown, with its straight, slim skirt, which had not quite gone out of fashion, made her appear taller and more dignified. Her hair, brushed smoothly back from her forehead, gave to her clear profile the look of some delicate etching. There was a faint flush in her cheeks, and her eyes were richer and bluer than they had looked in the afternoon. She was a woman, not a girl, and her charm was the charm not of ignorance, but of intelligence, wisdom, and energy.

"Only twelve," answered the housekeeper, "sometimes we have as many as twenty." There was an expression of pain in her eyes, due to chronic neuralgia, and while she spoke she pressed her fingers to her temples.

"Is Mr. Wythe coming?" asked Caroline.

"He always comes. It is so hard to find unattached men that the same ones get invited over and over. Then there are Mr. and Mrs. Chalmers. They are from New York and the dinner is given to them—and the Ashburtons and Robert Colfax and his wife—who was Daisy Carter—she is very good looking but a little flighty—and Mr. Peyton, old Mrs. Colfax's brother."

"I know—'Brother Charles'—but who are the Ashburtons?"

"Colonel Ashburton is very amusing. He is on Mr. Blackburn's side in politics, and they are great friends. His wife is dull, but she means well, and she is useful on committees because she is a good worker and never knows when she is put upon. Well, it's time for you to go down, I reckon. I just ran up from the pantry to see if I could help you."

A minute later, when Caroline left her room, Mary Blackburn joined her, and the two went downstairs together. Mary was wearing a lovely gown of amber silk, and she looked so handsome that Caroline scarcely recognized her. Her black hair, piled on the crown of her head, gave her, in spite of her modern dash and frankness, a striking resemblance to one of the old portraits at The Cedars. She was in high spirits, for the ride with Alan had left her glowing with happiness.

"We'd better hustle. They are waiting for us," she said. "I was late getting in, so I tossed on the first dress I could find."

Then she ran downstairs, and Caroline, following her more slowly, found herself presently shaking hands with the dreaded David Blackburn. He was so quiet and unassuming that only when he had taken her hand and had asked her a few conventional questions about her trip, did she realize that she was actually speaking to him. In evening clothes, surrounded by the pink silk walls of Angelica's drawing-room, his face looked firmer and harder than it had appeared in the motor; but even in this extravagant setting, he impressed her as more carefully dressed and groomed than the average Virginian of her acquaintance. She saw now that he was younger than she had at first thought; he couldn't, she surmised, be much over forty. There were deep lines in his forehead; his features had settled into the granite-like immobility that is acquired only through grim and resolute struggle; and his dark, carefully brushed hair showed a silvery gloss on the temples—yet these things, she realized, were the marks of battles, not of years. What struck her most was the quickness with which the touch of arrogance in his expression melted before the engaging frankness of his smile.

"I'm glad you've come. I hope you will get on with Letty," he said; and then, as he turned away, the vision of Angelica, in white chiffon and pearls, floated toward her from a group by the fireplace.

"Colonel Ashburton is an old friend of your mother's, Miss Meade. He took her to her first cotillion, and he is eager to meet her daughter." There followed swift introductions to the Ashburtons, the Chalmers, and the Colfaxes; and not until Caroline was going into the dining-room on the arm of Mrs. Colfax's "Brother Charles," was she able to distinguish between the stranger from New York, who looked lean and wiry and strenuous, and the white-haired old gentleman who had taken her mother to the cotillion. She was not confused; and yet her one vivid impression was of Angelica, with her pale Madonna head, her soft grey eyes under thick lashes, and her lovely figure in draperies of chiffon that flowed and rippled about her.

Though the house was an inappropriate setting for David Blackburn, it was, for all its newness and ornate accessories, the perfect frame for his wife's beauty. She reminded Caroline of the allegorical figure of Spring in one of the tapestries on the dining-room walls—only she was so much softer, so much more ethereal, as if the floral image had come to life and been endowed with a soul. It was the rare quality of Mrs. Blackburn's beauty that in looking at her one thought first of her spirit—of the sweetness and goodness which informed and animated her features. The appeal she made was the appeal of an innocent and beautiful creature who is unhappy. Against the background of an unfortunate marriage, she moved with the resigned and exalted step of a Christian martyr.

Sitting silently between the flippant "Brother Charles" and the imposing Colonel Ashburton, who was still talking of her mother, Caroline tried to follow the conversation while she studied the faces and the dresses of the women. Mrs. Chalmers, who was large and handsome in a superb gown of green velvet, appeared heavy and indifferent, and Mrs. Ashburton, an over-earnest middle-aged woman, with a classic profile and a look of impersonal yet hungry philanthropy, was so detached that she seemed, when she spoke, to be addressing an invisible audience. In spite of her regular features and her flawless complexion, she was as devoid of charm as an organized charity. On her right sat Allan Wythe, a clean-cut, good-looking chap, with romantic eyes and the air of a sportsman. Though Caroline had heard that he wrote plays, she thought that he needed only a gun and a dog to complete his appearance. "He is the only good-looking man here," she concluded. "Some people might think Mr. Blackburn good-looking, but I suppose I know too much about him." And she remembered that her father had said a man's character always showed in his mouth.

Next to Alan there was Mrs. Robert Colfax—a beautiful Spanish-looking creature, straight as a young poplar, and as full of silvery lights and shadows. She had no sooner sat down than she began to ask Angelica, with an agreeable though flighty animation, if she had seen somebody since he had come back from his wedding trip? For the next quarter of an hour they kept up an excited interchange of gossip, while Mr. Chalmers listened with polite attention, and Caroline tried in vain to discover who the unknown person was, and why his wedding trip should interest anybody so profoundly.

"Well, I never thought he'd get another wife after his last misadventure," rippled Mrs. Colfax, "but they tell me he had only to wink an eyelash. I declare I don't know a more discouraging spectacle than the men that some women will marry."

At the other end of the table, Mrs. Blackburn was talking in a low voice to Mr. Chalmers, and the broken clauses of her conversation were punctuated by the laughter of the irrepressible Daisy, who was never silent. Though Angelica was not brilliant, though she never said anything clever enough for one to remember, she had what her friends called "a sweet way of talking," and a flattering habit, when she was with a man, of ending every sentence with a question. "I'm sure I don't see how we are to keep out of this war, do you, Mr. Chalmers?" or "I think the simplest way to raise money would be by some tableaux, don't you, Colonel Ashburton?"; and still a little later there floated to Caroline, "I tell Mary she rides too much. Don't you think it is a pity for a woman to spend half her life in the saddle? Of course if she hasn't anything else to do—but in this age, don't you feel, there are so many opportunities of service?"

"Oh, when it comes to that," protested Mrs. Colfax, in the tone of airy banter she affected, "There are many more of us trying to serve than there are opportunities of service. I was telling mother only the other day that I couldn't see a single war charity because the vice-presidents are so thick."

A lull fell on the table, and for the first time Caroline heard Blackburn's voice. Mrs. Chalmers was asking him about the house, and he was responding with a smile that made his face almost young and sanguine. His mouth, when he was not on guard, was sensitive and even emotional, and his eyes lost the sharpness that cut through whatever they looked at.

"Why, yes, I built it before my marriage," he was saying. "Dodson drew the plans. You know Dodson?"

Mrs. Chalmers nodded. "He has done some good things in New York. And this lovely furniture," she was plainly working hard to draw him out. "Where did you find it?"

He met the question lightly. "Oh, I had a lot of stuff here that Angelica got rid of."

From the other end of the table Mrs. Blackburn's voice floated plaintively, "There isn't a piece of it left," she said. "It made the house look exactly like an Italian hotel."

The remark struck Caroline as so unfortunate that she turned, with a start of surprise, to glance at her hostess. Could it be that Mrs. Blackburn was without tact? Could it be that she did not realize the awkwardness of her interruption? Yet a single glance at Angelica was sufficient to answer these questions. A woman who looked like that couldn't be lacking in social instinct. It must have been a casual slip, nothing more. She was probably tired—hadn't old Mrs. Colfax said that she was delicate?—and she did not perceive the effect of her words. Glancing again in Blackburn's direction, Caroline saw that his features had hardened, and that the hand on the tablecloth was breaking a piece of bread into crumbs.

The change in his manner was so sudden that Caroline understood, even before she saw the twitching of his eyebrows, and the gesture of irritation with which he pushed the bread crumbs away, that, in spite of his reserve and his coldness, he was a bundle of over-sensitive nerves. "He was behaving really well," she thought. "It is a pity that she irritated him." Though she disliked Blackburn, she was just enough to admit that he had started well with Mrs. Chalmers. Of course, no one expected him to appear brilliant in society. A man who had had no education except the little his mother had taught him, and who had devoted his life to making a fortune, was almost as much debarred from social success as a woman who knew only trained nursing. Yet, in spite of these defects, she realized that he appeared to advantage at his own table. There was something about him—some latent suggestion of force—which distinguished him from every other man in the room. He looked—she couldn't quite define the difference—as if he could do things. The recollection of his stand in politics came to her while she watched him, and turning to Mr. Peyton, who was a trifle more human than Colonel Ashburton, she asked:

"What is this new movement Mr. Blackburn is so much interested in? I've seen a great deal about it in the papers."

There was a bluff, kind way about Charles Peyton, and she liked the natural heartiness of the laugh with which he answered. "You've seen a great deal more than you've read, young lady, I'll warrant. No, it isn't exactly a new movement, because somebody in the North got ahead of him—you may always count on a Yankee butting in just before you—but he is organizing the independent voters in Virginia, if that's what you mean. At least he thinks he is, though even way down here I've a suspicion that those Yankees have been meddling. Between you and me, Miss Meade, it is all humbug—pure humbug. Haven't we got one party already, and doesn't that one have a hard enough time looking after the negroes? Why do we want to go and start up trouble just after we've got things all nicely settled? Why does David want to stir up a hornet's nest among the negroes, I'd like to know?"

On the other side of Caroline, Colonel Ashburton became suddenly audible. "Ask that Rip Van Winkle, Miss Meade, if he was asleep while we made a new constitution and eliminated the vote of the negroes? You can't argue with these stand-patters, you know, because they never read the signs of the times."

"Well, there isn't a better way of proving it's all humbug than by asking two questions," declared the jovial Charles—a plethoric, unwieldy old man, with a bald head, and a figure that was continually brimming over his waistcoat. "What I want to know, Billy Ashburton, is just this—wasn't your father as good a man as you are, and wasn't the Democratic Party good enough for your father? I put the same to you, Miss Meade, wasn't the Democratic Party good enough for your father?"

"Ah, you're driven to your last trench," observed the Colonel, with genial irony, while Caroline replied slowly: "Yes, it was good enough for father, but I remember he used to be very fond of quoting some lines from Pope about 'principles changing with the times.' I suppose the questions are different from what they were in his day."

"I'd like to see any questions the Democrats aren't able to handle," persisted Charles. "They always have handled them to my satisfaction, and I reckon they always will, in spite of Blackburn and Ashburton."

"I wish Blackburn could talk to you, Miss Meade," said Colonel Ashburton. "He doesn't care much for personalities. He has less small talk than any man I know, but he speaks well if you get him started on ideas. By-the-way, he is the man who won me over. I used to be as strongly prejudiced against any fresh departure in Virginia politics as our friend Charles there, but Blackburn got hold of me, and convinced me, as he has convinced a great many others, against my will. He proved to me that the old forms are worn out—that they can't do the work any longer. You see, Blackburn is an idealist. He sees straight through the sham to the truth quicker than any man I've ever known——"

"An idealist!" exclaimed Caroline, and mentally she added, "Is it possible for a man to have two characters? To have a public character that gives the lie to his private one?"

"Yes, I think you might call him that, though, like you, I rather shy at the word. But it fits Blackburn, somehow, for he is literally on fire with ideas. I always say that he ought to have lived in the glorious days when the Republic was founded. He belongs to the pure breed of American."

"But I understood from the papers that it was just the other way—that he was—that he was——"

"I know, my child, I know." He smiled indulgently, for she looked very charming with the flush in her cheeks, and after thirty years of happy companionship with an impeccable character, he preferred at dinner a little amiable weakness in a woman. "You have seen in the papers that he is a traitor to the faith of his fathers. You have even heard this asserted by the logical Charles on your right."

She lifted her eyes, and to his disappointment he discovered that earnestness, not embarrassment, had brought the colour to her cheeks. "But I thought that this new movement was directed at the Democratic Party—that it was attempting to undo all that had been accomplished in the last fifty years. It seems the wrong way, but of course there must be a right way toward better things."

For a minute he looked at her in silence; then he said again gently, "I wish Blackburn could talk to you." Since she had come by her ideas honestly, not merely borrowed them from Charles Colfax, it seemed only chivalrous to treat them with the consideration he accorded always to the fair and the frail.

She shook her head. The last thing she wanted was to have Mr. Blackburn talk to her. "I thought all old-fashioned Virginians opposed this movement," she added after a pause. "Not that I am very old-fashioned. You remember my father, and so you will know that his daughter is not afraid of opinions."

"Yes, I remember him, and I understand that his child could not be afraid either of opinions or armies."

She smiled up at him, and he saw that her eyes, which had been a little sad, were charged with light. While he watched her he wondered if her quietness were merely a professional habit of reserve which she wore like a uniform. Was the warmth and fervour which he read now in her face a glimpse of the soul which life had hidden beneath the dignity of her manner?

"But Blackburn isn't an agitator," he resumed after a moment. "He has got hold of the right idea—the new application of eternal principles. If we could send him to Washington he would do good work."

"To Washington?" She looked at him inquiringly. "You mean to the Senate? Not in the place of Colonel Acton?"

"Ah, that touches you! You wouldn't like to see the 'Odysseus of Democracy' dispossessed?"

Laughter sparkled in her eyes, and he realized that she was more girlish than he had thought her a minute ago. After all, she had humour, and it was a favourite saying of his that ideas without humour were as bad as bread without yeast.

"Only for another Ajax," she retorted merrily. "I prefer the strong to the wise. But does Mr. Blackburn want the senatorship?"

"Perhaps not, but he might be made to take it. There is a rising tide in Virginia."

"Is it strong enough to overturn the old prejudices?"

"Not yet—not yet, but it is strengthening every hour." His tone had lost its gallantry and grown serious. "The war in Europe has taught us a lesson. We aren't satisfied any longer, the best thought isn't satisfied, with the old clutter and muddle of ideas and sentiments. We begin to see that what we need in politics is not commemorative gestures, but constructive patriotism."

As he finished, Caroline became aware again that Blackburn was speaking, and that for the first time Mrs. Chalmers looked animated and interested.

"Why, that has occurred to me," he was saying with an earnestness that swept away his reserve. "But, you see, it is impossible to do anything in the South with the Republican Party. The memories are too black. We must think in new terms."

"And you believe that the South is ready for another party? Has the hour struck?"

"Can't you hear it?" He looked up as he spoke. "The war abroad has liberated us from the old sectional bondage. It has brought the world nearer, and the time is ripe for the national spirit. The demand now is for men. We need men who will construct ideas, not copy them. We need men strong enough to break up the solid South and the solid North, and pour them together into the common life of the nation. We want a patriotism that will overflow party lines, and put the good of the country before the good of a section. The old phrases, the old gestures, are childish to-day because we have outgrown them——" He stopped abruptly, his face so enkindled that Caroline would not have known it, and an instant later the voice of Mrs. Blackburn was heard saying sweetly but firmly, "David, I am afraid that Mrs. Chalmers is not used to your melodramatic way of talking."

In the hush that followed it seemed as if a harsh light had fallen over Blackburn's features. A moment before Caroline had seen him inspired and exalted by feeling—the vehicle of the ideas that possessed him—and now, in the sharp flash of Angelica's irony, he appeared insincere and theatrical—the claptrap politician in motley.

"It is a pity she spoke just when she did," thought Caroline, "but I suppose she sees through him so clearly that she can't help herself. She doesn't want him to mislead the rest of us."

Blackburn's guard was up again, and though he made no reply, his brow paled slowly and his hand—the nervous, restless hand of the emotional type—played with the bread crumbs.

"Yes, it is a pity," repeated Caroline to herself. "It makes things very uncomfortable." It was evident to her that Mrs. Blackburn watched her husband every instant—that she was waiting all the time to rectify his mistakes, to put him in the right again. Then, swiftly as an arrow, there flashed through Caroline's mind, "Only poor, lovely creature, she achieves exactly the opposite result. She is so nervous she can't see that she puts him always in the wrong. She makes matters worse instead of better every time."

From this moment the dinner dragged on heavily to its awkward end. Blackburn had withdrawn into his shell; Mrs. Chalmers looked depressed and bored; while the giddy voice of Mrs. Colfax sounded as empty as the twitter of a sparrow. It was as if a blight had fallen over them, and in this blight Angelica made charming, futile attempts to keep up the conversation. She had tried so hard, her eyes, very gentle and pensive, seemed to say, and all her efforts were wasted.

Suddenly, in the dull silence, Mrs. Colfax began asking, in her flightiest manner, about Angelica's family. For at least five minutes she had vacillated in her own mind between the weather and Roane Fitzhugh, who, for obvious reasons, was not a promising topic; and now at last, since the weather was too perfect for comment, she recklessly decided to introduce the unsavoury Roane.

"We haven't seen your brother recently, Angelica. What do you hear from him?"

For an instant Mrs. Blackburn's eyes rested with mute reproach on her husband. Then she said clearly and slowly, "He has been away all summer, but we hope he is coming next week. David," she added suddenly in a louder tone, "I was just telling Daisy how glad we are that Roane is going to spend the autumn at Briarlay."

It was at that instant, just as Mrs. Blackburn, smiling amiably on her husband, was about to rise from the table, that the astounding, the incredible thing happened, for Blackburn looked up quickly, and replied in a harsh, emphatic manner, "He is not coming to Briarlay. You know that we cannot have him here."

Then before a word was uttered, before Mrs. Colfax had time to twitter cheerfully above the awkwardness, Mrs. Blackburn rose from her chair, and the women trailed slowly after her out of the dining-room. As Caroline went, she felt that her heart was bursting with sympathy for Angelica and indignation against her husband. "How in the world shall I ever speak to him after this?" she thought. "How shall I ever stay under the same roof with him?" And glancing pityingly to where Mrs. Blackburn's flower-like head drooped against the rosy shade of a lamp, she realized that Angelica never looked so lovely as she did when she was hurt.

CHAPTER V
The First Night

WHEN the last guest had gone, Caroline went upstairs to her room, and sitting down before the little ivory and gold desk, began a letter to her mother. For years, ever since her first night in the hospital, she had poured out her heart after the day's work and the day's self-control and restraint were over. It was a relief to be free sometimes, to break through the discipline of her profession, to live and love for oneself, not for others.

The house was very still—only from the darkness outside, where the wind had risen, a few yellow leaves fluttered in through the window.

I am here, at last, dearest mother, and I have been longing to tell you about it. First of all, I had a good trip, my train was exactly on time, and Mrs. Colfax met me in the most beautiful car I ever saw, and brought me out to Briarlay. She was very nice and kind, but she looks ever so much older than you do, and I cannot help feeling that, in spite of the loss of so many children and father's dreadful disappointments, your life has been happier than hers. As I get older, and see more of the world—and heaven knows I have seen anything but the best of it these last seven or eight years—I understand better and better that happiness is something you have to find deep down in yourself, not in other people or outside things. It shines through sometimes just as yours does and lights up the world around and the dark places, but it never, never comes from them—of this I am very sure.

I wish I could describe this house to you, but I cannot—I simply cannot, the words will not come to me. It is big and beautiful, but I think it is too full of wonderful things—there are rooms that make me feel as if I were in a museum because of the tapestries and crowded rugs and French furniture. I like English mahogany so much better, but that may be just because I am used to it. I suppose it is natural that Mrs. Blackburn should prefer surroundings that are opulent and florid, since they make her look like a lovely flower in a greenhouse. She is even more beautiful than I thought she would be, and she does not seem the least bit snobbish or spoiled or arrogant. I have always said, you remember, that nursing has taught me not to rely on mere impressions whether they are first or last ones—but I have never in my life met any one who attracted me so strongly in the beginning. It is years since I have felt my sympathy so completely drawn out by a stranger. I feel that I would do anything in the world that I could for her; and though I cannot write frankly about what I have observed here, I believe that she needs help and understanding as much as any one I ever saw. The situation seems worse even than we were led to expect. Of course I have seen only the surface so far, but my heart has been wrung for her ever since I have been in the house, and this evening there was a very painful scene at the dinner table. I shall not write any more about it, though I imagine it will be spread all over Richmond by young Mrs. Colfax.

About Mr. Blackburn I have not quite made up my mind. I do not doubt that everything Mrs. Colfax wrote us is true, and I know if I stay on here that I shall make no attempt to conceal from him how much I dislike him. That will be no secret. I simply could not pretend even to him that I was not heart and soul on the side of his wife. It is so perfectly dreadful when one has to take sides with a husband or wife, isn't it? When I think how wonderful a marriage like yours and father's can be, it makes me feel sorry and ashamed for human nature as I see it here. But you cannot become a nurse and keep many illusions about love. The thing that remains after years of such work is no illusion at all—but the clear knowledge of the reality. A nurse sees the best and the worst of humanity—and the very best of it is the love that some people keep to the end.

As for this marriage, there is not a person in Richmond, nor a servant in the house, who does not know that it is an unhappy one. Mrs. Blackburn cannot be at fault—one has only to look at her to realize that she is too gentle and sweet to hurt any one—and yet I discovered to-night that she does not know how to treat him, that she says the wrong thing so often without meaning to, and that unconsciously she irritates him whenever she speaks. It is impossible to blame her, for she must have suffered a great many things that no one knows of, and I suppose her nerves are not always under control. But nothing could be more unfortunate than her manner to him at times.

Strange to say (I do not understand why) some people appear to admire him tremendously. I went down to dinner to-night because one of the guests did not come, and Colonel Ashburton—he said he used to know you—talked in the most extravagant fashion about Mr. Blackburn's abilities. The air here is heavy with politics because of the elections, and I tried to listen as closely as I could. I thought how intensely interested father would have been in the discussion. As far as I can understand Mr. Blackburn's way of thinking is not unlike father's, and but for his behaviour to his wife, this would give me a sympathetic feeling for him. I forgot to tell you that he looked very well to-night—not in the least rough or common. His face is not ugly, only he wears his hair brushed straight back, and this makes his features look sterner than they really are. His eyes are the keenest I ever saw—grey, I think, and yet, funny as it sounds, there are times when they are almost pathetic—and his smile is very nice and reminds me in a way of father's. This may have been why I thought of father all the time I was at dinner—this and the political talk which went on as long as we were at the table.

Well, I started to tell you about the elections, and I know you are thinking I shall never go on. It seems that Mr. Blackburn intends to vote for Hughes—though I heard him tell Mr. Chalmers that if he lived in the North he should probably vote with the Democrats. Voting for a man, he feels, is not nearly so important as voting against a section—at least this is what I gathered. There was a great deal said about the war, but nobody, except Mrs. Colfax's brother Charles, who does not count, seemed to think there was the faintest chance of our being in it. Mr. Chalmers told me afterwards that if Wilson should be re-elected, it would be mainly because of the slogan "he kept us out of war." As far as I could discover Mr. Chalmers stands firmly by the President, but I heard Mr. Blackburn tell Colonel Ashburton that what he hoped for now was conduct so flagrant, on Germany's part, that the public conscience would demand a more vigorous policy. By the way, Mr. Chalmers said that the feeling was so strong in New York that he expected the State to go to the Republicans because there was a general impression that to vote with them meant to vote for war. Of course, he added, this was mere German propaganda—but that was only another way of saying he did not agree with it. Opinions change every hour, and just as soon as a new one begins to be popular, people forget all that they believed just as ardently a few weeks before. Don't you remember how complacent we were about our splendid isolation and our pluperfect pacifism and our being "too proud to fight" such a very short while ago? Well, nobody remembers now the way we crowed over Europe and patted one another on the back, and congratulated ourselves because we could stand aside and wait until history showed who was right. That is over and gone now, and "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier" has joined the dust of all the other rag-time. If the slow coach of history ever does come up with us, it may find us in the thick of the fight after all, and not waiting by the roadside. Mr. Chalmers believes that if the President is re-elected, and can get the country behind him, the Government will declare that a state of war exists—but Mr. Blackburn, on the other hand, is convinced that both Wilson and Hughes are pledged to fulfil their promises of "peace and prosperity." He insists that there was more war spirit over the whole country the week after the Lusitania was sunk, than there has ever been since, and that we were as ready to fight then as we shall be after the elections. It is like being in the midst of electric currents to sit still and listen to these men argue. Can you imagine anything more unlike father's day when all Virginians, except those whom nobody knew, thought exactly alike? Now, though the vote is solid still, and the great majority accepts the policies of the Democrats as uncritically as it accepts Scripture, opinions about secondary issues vary as much as they do anywhere else. There are some who regard the President as greater than George Washington—and others who say that the moment is great, not the man. Mr. Colfax believes that he is a generation ahead of his country, and Colonel Ashburton believes just as strongly that he is a generation behind it—that it is a case where a wave of destiny is sweeping a man on to greatness. I suppose here again we shall have to wait until history shows who is right.

I have not seen the little girl yet—her name is Letty. They have to be careful not to excite her in the evening, and the other nurse is still with her.

Now I must go to bed.

Your devoted child,
CAROLINE.

She had finished her letter and glanced at her watch on the bureau—it was one o'clock—when a cry or moan reached her from the darkness and silence of the house, and a few minutes afterwards there came the sound of running footsteps on the stairs, and a hasty knock fell on her door.

"Miss Meade, will you please come as quickly as you can?"

Opening the door, she met the frightened face of a maid.

"What has happened? Is Mrs. Blackburn ill?"

"I don't know. She hasn't undressed and she is too ill to speak. I left her on the couch, and ran upstairs to call you."

They were already in the hall, and while they hurried to the staircase, Caroline asked a few questions in a whisper.

"Is there any medicine that she is accustomed to take?"

"I give her ammonia sometimes, but to-night it didn't do any good."

"Does she faint often?"

"I'm not sure. She has these attacks, but only after—after——"

The woman paused in confusion, and before she could recover herself, Caroline had opened the door and walked swiftly to the prostrate figure, in white chiffon, on the couch in front of the fire. Bending over she felt Angelica's pulse and lowered her head, with its loosened amber hair, on the pillows.

"Your pulse is good. Do you feel better now?" she asked tenderly, for, in spite of the quiet competence of her professional attitude, her heart was aching with pity.

"I was sure I could count on your sympathy." As she answered, Mrs. Blackburn stretched out her hands until they rested on Caroline's arm. "Has Mary gone out of the room?"

"Your maid? Yes, she has just gone. What can I do for you?"

Even in the midst of the emotional crisis, Angelica's manner had not lost a trace of its charming self-possession, its rather colourless sweetness. Her grey eyes, drenched in tears which left no redness on the firm white lids, were as devoid of passion as the eyes of a child.

"I cannot tell you—I cannot tell any one," she said after a moment, not in answer to the other's question, but with a plaintive murmur. Then she began to cry very gently, while she clung to Caroline with her lovely hands which were as soft and fragrant as flowers.

"I think I know without your telling me," responded Caroline soothingly. "Let me help you." All her years of nursing had not enabled her to watch suffering, especially the suffering of helpless things, without a pang of longing to comfort. She was on her knees now by the couch, her smooth dark head bending over Angelica's disarranged fair one, her grave, compassionate face gazing down on the other's delicate features, which were softened, not disfigured, by tears.

"The worst is about Roane—my brother," began Angelica slowly. "He came here to-night, but they—" she lingered over the word, "sent him away before I could talk to him. He is downstairs now on the terrace because he is not allowed to come into the house—my brother. I must get this cheque to him, but I do not like to ask one of the servants——"

"You wish me to take it to him?" Caroline released herself from the clinging hands, and rose quickly to her feet. Here at last was a definite call to action.

"Oh, Miss Meade, if you would!" Already Angelica's eyes were dry.

"I will go at once. Is the cheque written?"

"I carried it down with me, but I could not get a chance to give it to Roane. Poor boy," she added in a low rather than a soft tone, "Poor boy, after all, he is more sinned against than sinning!"

Drawing the cheque from under the lace pillows, she gave it into Caroline's hand with a gesture of relief. "Go through the dining-room to the terrace, and you will find him outside by the windows. Tell him that I will see him as soon as I can, and ask him please not to trouble me again."

She had rung for her maid while she was speaking, and when the woman appeared, she rose and waited, with a yawn, for her dress to be unfastened. Then suddenly, as if she had forgotten something, she gave Caroline a smile full of beauty and pathos. "Thank you a thousand tunes, dear Miss Meade," she exclaimed gratefully.

It was dark downstairs, except for a nebulous glow from the hall above and a thin reddish line that ran beneath the closed door of the library. Not until she reached the dining-room did Caroline dare turn on the electric light, and as soon as she did so, the terrace and the garden appeared by contrast to be plunged in blackness. When she opened one of the long French windows, and stepped out on the brick terrace, her eyes became gradually accustomed to the starlight, and she discerned presently the shrouded outlines of the juniper trees and a marble fountain which emerged like a ghost from the quivering spray of water. As she went quickly down the steps to the lower terrace, she felt as much alone in her surroundings as if the house and Mrs. Blackburn had receded into a dream. Overhead there was the silvery glitter of stars, and before her she divined the simplicity and peace of an autumn garden, where the wind scattered the faint scent of flowers that were already beginning to drop and decay.

When she approached the fountain, the figure of a man detached itself from the vague shape of an evergreen, and came toward her.

"Well, I've waited awhile, haven't I?" he began airily, and the next instant exclaimed with scarcely a change of tone, "Who are you? Did Anna Jeannette send you?"

"I am Letty's new nurse—Miss Meade."

"What! A spirit yet a woman too!" His voice was full of charm.

"Mrs. Blackburn sent me with this." As she held out the cheque, he took it with a gesture that was almost hungry. "She asked me to say that she would see you very soon, and to beg you not to trouble her again."

"Does she imagine that I do it for pleasure!" He placed the cheque in his pocket book. "She cannot suppose that I came here to-night for the sake of a row."

Though he was unusually tall, he carried his height with the ease of an invincible dignity and self-possession; and she had already discerned that his sister's pathos had no part in the tempestuous ardour and gaiety of his nature.

"She didn't tell me," answered Caroline coldly. "There is nothing else, is there?" Her features were like marble beneath the silken dusk of her hair which was faintly outlined against the cloudier darkness.

"There is a great deal—since you ask me."

"Nothing, I mean, that I may say to your sister?"

"You may say to her that I thank her for her message—and her messenger."

He was about to add something more, when Caroline turned away from him and moved, without haste, as if she were unaware that he followed her, up the shallow steps of the terrace. When she reached the window, she passed swiftly, like a dissolving shadow, from the darkness into the light of the room. Nothing had been said that she found herself able to resent, and yet, in some indefinable way, Roane's manner had offended her. "For a trained nurse you are entirely too particular," she said to herself, smiling, as she put out the light and went through the wide doorway into the hall. "You have still a good deal of haughtiness to overcome, Miss Meade, if you expect every man to treat you as if you wore side curls and a crinoline."

The hall, when she entered it, was very dim, but as she approached the door of the library, it opened, and Blackburn stood waiting for her on the threshold. Behind him the room was illuminated, and she saw the rich sheen of leather bindings and the glow of firelight on the old Persian rug by the hearth.

"You have been out, Miss Meade?"

"Yes, I have been out." As she threw back her head, the light was full on her face while his was in shadow.

"Do you need anything?"

"Nothing, thank you."

For an instant their eyes met, and in that single glance, charged with an implacable accusation, she made Angelica's cause her own. Grave, remote, dispassionate, her condemnation was as impersonal as a judgment of the invisible Powers.

"That is all, then, good-night," he said.

"Good-night."

While he watched her, she turned as disdainfully as she had turned from Roane, and ascended the stairs.

CHAPTER VI
Letty

IN the breakfast room next morning, Caroline found the little girl in charge of Miss Miller, the nurse who was leaving that day. Letty was a fragile, undeveloped child of seven years, with the dark hair and eyes of her father, and the old, rather elfish look of children who have been ill from the cradle. Her soft, fine hair hung straight to her shoulders, and framed her serious little face, which was charming in spite of its unhealthy pallor. Caroline had questioned Miss Miller about the child's malady, and she had been reassured by the other nurse's optimistic view of the case.

"We think she may outgrow the trouble, that's why we are so careful about all the rules she lives by. The doctor watches her closely, and she isn't a difficult child to manage. If you once gain her confidence you can do anything with her, but first of all you must make her believe in you."

"Was she always so delicate?"

"I believe she was born this way. She is stunted physically, though she is so precocious mentally. She talks exactly like an old person sometimes. The things she says would make you laugh if it wasn't so pathetic to know that a child thinks them."

Yes, it was pathetic, Caroline felt, while she watched Letty cross the room to her father, who was standing before one of the French windows. As she lifted her face gravely, Blackburn bent over and kissed her.

"I'm taking a new kind of medicine, father."

He smiled down on her. "Then perhaps you will eat a new kind of breakfast."

"And I've got a new nurse," added Letty before she turned away and came over to Caroline. "I'm so glad you wear a uniform," she said in her composed manner. "I think uniforms are much nicer than dresses like Aunt Matty's."

Mrs. Timberlake looked up from the coffee urn with a smile that was like a facial contortion. "Anything might be better than my dresses, Letty."

"But you ought to get something pretty," said the child quickly, for her thoughts came in flashes. "If you wore a uniform you might look happy, too. Are all nurses happy, Miss Miller?"

"We try to be, dear," answered Miss Miller, a stout, placid person, while she settled the little girl in her chair. "It makes things so much easier."

Blackburn, who had been looking out on the terrace and the formal garden, turned and bowed stiffly as he came to the table. It was evident that he was not in a talkative mood, and as Caroline returned his greeting with the briefest acknowledgment, she congratulated herself that she did not have to make conversation for him. Mary had not come in from her ride, and since Mrs. Timberlake used language only under the direct pressure of necessity, the sound of Letty's unembarrassed childish treble rippled placidly over the constrained silence of her elders.

"Can you see the garden?" asked the child presently. "I don't mean the box garden, I mean the real garden where the flowers are?"

Caroline was helping herself to oatmeal, and raising her eyes from the dish, she glanced through the window which gave on the brick terrace. Beyond the marble fountain and a dark cluster of junipers there was an arch of box, which framed the lower garden and a narrow view of the river.

"That's where my garden is, down there," Letty was saying. "I made it all by myself—didn't I, Miss Miller?—and my verbenas did better than mother's last summer. Would you like to have a garden, father?" she inquired suddenly, turning to Blackburn, who was looking over the morning paper while he waited for his coffee. "It wouldn't be a bit more trouble for me to take care of two than one. I'll make yours just like mine if you want me to."

Blackburn put down his paper. "Well, I believe I should like one," he replied gravely, "if you are sure you have time for it. But aren't there a great many more important things you ought to do?"

"Oh, it doesn't take so much time," returned the child eagerly, "I work all I can, but the doctor won't let me do much. I'll make yours close to mine, so there won't be far to go with the water. I have to carry it in a very little watering-pot because they won't let me lift a big one."

A smile quivered for an instant on her father's lips, and Caroline saw his face change and soften as it had done the evening before. It was queer, she thought, that he should have such a sensitive mouth. She had imagined that a man of that character would have coarse lips and a brutal expression.

"Now, it's odd, but I've always had a fancy for a garden of that sort," he responded, "if you think you can manage two of them without over-taxing yourself. I don't want to put you to additional trouble, you know. After all, that's just what I hire Peter for, isn't it?"

While the child was assuring him that Peter had neither the time nor the talent for miniature gardening, Miss Miller remarked pleasantly, as if she were visited by a brilliant idea, "You ought to make one for your mother also, Letty."

"Oh, mother doesn't want one," returned the child: "The big ones are hers, aren't they, father?" Then, as Blackburn had unfolded his paper again, she added to Caroline, with one of the mature utterances Miss Miller had called pathetic, "When you have big things you don't care for little things, do you?"

As they were finishing breakfast, Mary Blackburn dashed in from the terrace, with the Airedale terriers at her heels.

"I was afraid you'd have gone before I got back, David," she said, tossing her riding-crop and gloves on a chair, and coming over to the table. "Patrick, put the dogs out, and tell Peter to give them their breakfast." Then turning back to her brother, she resumed carelessly, "That man stopped me again—that foreman you discharged from the works."

Blackburn's brow darkened. "Ridley? I told him not to come on the place. Is he hanging about?"

"I met him in the lane. He asked me to bring a message to you. It seems he wants awfully to be reinstated. He is out of work; and he doesn't want to go North for a job."

"It's a pity he didn't think of that sooner. He has made more trouble in the plant than any ten men I've ever had. It isn't his fault that there's not a strike on now."

"I know," said Mary, "but I couldn't refuse to hear him. There's Alan now," she added. "Ask him about it."

She looked up, her face flushing with pride and happiness, as Alan Wythe opened the window. There was something free and noble in her candour. All the little coquetries and vanities of women appeared to shrivel in the white blaze of her sincerity.

"So you've been held up by Ridley," remarked Blackburn, as the young man seated himself between Mary and Mrs. Timberlake. "Did he tell you just what political capital he expects to make out of my discharging him? It isn't the first time he has tried blackmail."

Alan was replying to Mrs. Timberlake's question about his coffee—she never remembered, Caroline discovered later, just how much sugar one liked—and there was a pause before he turned to Blackburn and answered: "I haven't a doubt that he means to make trouble sooner or later—he has some pull, hasn't he?—but at the moment he is more interested in getting his job back. He talked a lot about his family—tried to make Mary ask you to take him on again——"

Blackburn laughed, not unpleasantly, but with a curious bluntness and finality, as if he were closing a door on some mental passage. "Well, you may tell him," he rejoined, "that I wouldn't take him back if all the women in creation asked me."

Alan received this with his usual ease and flippancy. "The fellow appears to have got the wrong impression. He told me that Mrs. Blackburn was taking an interest in his case, and had promised to speak to you."

"He told you that?" said Blackburn, and stopped abruptly.

For a minute Alan looked almost disconcerted. In his riding clothes he was handsomer and more sportsmanlike than he had been the evening before, and Caroline told herself that she could understand why Mary Blackburn had fallen so deeply in love with him. What she couldn't understand—what puzzled her every instant—was the obvious fact that Alan had fallen quite as deeply in love with Mary. Of course the girl was fine and sensible and high-spirited—any one could see that—but she appeared just the opposite of everything that Alan would have sought in a woman. She was neither pretty nor feminine; and Alan's type was the one of all others to which the pretty and feminine would make its appeal. "He must love her for her soul," thought Caroline. "He must see how splendid she is at heart, and this has won him."

In a few minutes Blackburn left the table, while Letty caught Caroline's hand and drew her through the window out on the terrace. The landscape, beyond the three gardens, was golden with October sunlight, and over the box maze and the variegated mist of late blooming flowers, they could see the river and the wooded slopes that folded softly into the sparkling edge of the horizon. It was one of those autumn days when the only movement of the world seems to be the slow fall of the leaves, and the quivering of gauzy-winged insects above the flower-beds. Perfect as the weather was, there was a touch of melancholy in its brightness that made Caroline homesick for The Cedars. "It is hard to be where nobody cares for you," she thought. "Where nothing you feel or think matters to anybody." Then her stronger nature reasserted itself, and she brushed the light cloud away. "After all, life is mine as much as theirs. The battle is mine, and I will fight it. It is just as important that I should be a good nurse as it is that Mrs. Blackburn should be beautiful and charming and live in a house that is like fairyland."

Letty called to her, and running down the brick steps from the terrace, the two began a gentle game of hide-and-seek in the garden. The delighted laughter of the child rang out presently from the rose-arbours and the winding paths; and while Caroline passed in and out of the junipers and the young yew-trees, she forgot the loneliness she had felt on the terrace. "I'll not worry about it any more," she thought, pursuing Letty beyond the marble fountain, where a laughing Cupid shot a broken arrow toward the sun. "Mother used to say that all the worry in the world would never keep a weasel out of the hen-house." Then, as she twisted and doubled about a tall cluster of junipers, she ran directly across the shadow of Blackburn.

As her feet came to a halt the smile died on her lips, and the reserve she had worn since she reached Briarlay fell like a veil over her gaiety. While she put up her hand to straighten her cap, all the dislike she felt for him showed in her look. Only the light in her eyes, and the blown strands of hair under her cap, belied her dignity and her silence.

"Miss Meade, I wanted to tell you that the doctor will come about noon. I have asked him to give you directions."

"Very well." Against the dark junipers, in her white uniform, she looked like a statue except for her parted lips and accusing eyes.

"Letty seems bright to-day, but you must not let her tire herself."

"I am very careful. We play as gently as possible."

"Will you take her to town? I'll send the car back for you."

For an instant she hesitated. "Mrs. Blackburn has not told me what she wishes."

He nodded. "Letty uses my car in the afternoon. It will be here at three o'clock."

In the sunlight, with his hat off, he looked tanned and ruddy, and she saw that there was the power in his face which belongs to expression—to thought and purpose—rather than to feature. His dark hair, combed straight back from his forehead, made his head appear distinctive and massive, like the relief of a warrior on some ancient coin, and his eyes, beneath slightly beetling brows, were the colour of the sea in a storm. Though his height was not over six feet, he seemed to her, while he stood there beside the marble fountain, the largest and strongest man she had ever seen. "I know he isn't big, and yet he appears so," she thought: "I suppose it is because he is so muscular." And immediately she added to herself, "I can understand everything about him except his mouth—but his mouth doesn't belong in his face. It is the mouth of a poet. I wonder he doesn't wear a moustache just to hide the way it changes."

"I shall be ready at three o'clock," she said. "Mrs. Colfax asked me to bring Letty to play with her children."

"She will enjoy that," he answered, "if they are not rough." Then, as he moved away, he observed indifferently, "It is wonderful weather."

As he went back to the house Letty clung to him, and lifting her in his arms, he carried her to the terrace and round the corner where the car waited. For the time at least the play was spoiled, and Caroline, still wearing her professional manner, stood watching for Letty to come back to her. "I could never like him if I saw him every day for years," she was thinking, when one of the French windows of the dining-room opened, and Mary Blackburn came down the steps into the garden.

"I am so glad to find you alone," she said frankly, "I want to speak to you—and your white dress looks so nice against those evergreens."

"It's a pity I have to change it then, but I am going to take Letty to town after luncheon. The doctor wants her to be with other children."

"I know. She is an odd little thing, isn't she? I sometimes think that she is older and wiser than any one in the house." Her tone changed abruptly. "I want to explain to you about last night, Miss Meade. David seemed so dreadfully rude, didn't he?"

Caroline gazed back at her in silence while a flush stained her cheeks. After all, what could she answer? She couldn't and wouldn't deny that Mr. Blackburn had been inexcusably rude to his wife at his own table.

"It is so hard to explain when one doesn't know everything," pursued Mary, with her unfaltering candour. "If you had ever seen Roane Fitzhugh, you would understand better than I can make you that David is right. It is quite impossible to have Roane in the house. He drinks, and when he was here last summer, he was hardly ever sober. He was rude to everyone. He insulted me."

"So that was why——" began Caroline impulsively, and checked herself.

"Yes, that was why. David told him that he must never come back again."

"And Mrs. Blackburn did not understand."

Mary did not reply, and glancing at her after a moment, Caroline saw that she was gazing thoughtfully at a red and gold leaf, which turned slowly in the air as it detached itself from the stem of a maple.

"If you want to get the best view of the river you ought to go down to the end of the lower garden," she said carelessly before she went back into the house.

In the afternoon, when Caroline took Letty to Mrs. Colfax's, a flickering light was shed on the cause of Mary's reticence.

"Oh, Miss Meade, wasn't it perfectly awful last evening?" began the young woman as soon as the children were safely out of hearing in the yard. "I feel so sorry for Angelica!"

Even in a Southern woman her impulsiveness appeared excessive, and when Caroline came to know her better, she discovered that Daisy Colfax was usually described by her friends as "kind-hearted, but painfully indiscreet."

"It was my first dinner party at Briarlay. As far as I know they may all end that way," responded Caroline lightly.

"Of course I know that you feel you oughtn't to talk," replied Mrs. Colfax persuasively, "but you needn't be afraid of saying just what you think to me. I know that I have the reputation of letting out everything that comes into my mind—and I do love to gossip—but I shouldn't dream of repeating anything that is told me in confidence." Her wonderful dusky eyes, as vague and innocent as a child's, swept Caroline's face before they wandered, with their look of indirection and uncertainty, to her mother-in-law, who was knitting by the window. Before her marriage Daisy had been the acknowledged beauty of three seasons, and now, the mother of two children and as lovely as ever, she managed to reconcile successfully a talent for housekeeping with a taste for diversion. She was never still except when she listened to gossip, and before Caroline had been six weeks in Richmond, she had learned that the name of Mrs. Robert Colfax would head the list of every dance, ball, and charity of the winter.

"If you ask me what I think," observed the old lady tartly, with a watchful eye on the children, who were playing ring-around-the-rosy in the yard. "It is that David Blackburn ought to have been spanked and put to bed."

"Well, of course, Angelica had been teasing him about his political views," returned her daughter-in-law. "You know how she hates it all, but she didn't mean actually to irritate him—merely to keep him from appearing so badly. It is as plain as the nose on your face that she doesn't know how to manage him."

They were sitting in the library, and every now and then the younger woman would take up the receiver of the telephone, and have a giddy little chat about the marketing or a motor trip she was planning. "But all I've got to say," she added, turning from one of these breathless colloquies, "is that if you have to manage a man, you'd better try to get rid of him."

"Well, I'd like to see anybody but a bear-tamer manage David Blackburn," retorted the old lady. "With Angelica's sensitive nature she ought never to have married a man who has to be tamed. She never dares take her eyes off him, poor thing, for fear he'll make some sort of break."

"I wonder," began Caroline, and hesitated an instant. "I wonder if it wouldn't be better just to let him make his breaks and not notice them? Of course, I know how trying it must be for her—she is so lovely and gentle that it wrings your heart to see him rude to her—but it makes every little thing appear big when you call everybody's attention to it. I don't know much about dinner parties," she concluded with a desire to be perfectly fair even to a man she despised, "but I couldn't see that he was doing anything wrong last night. He was getting on very well with Mrs. Chalmers, who was interested in politics——" She broke off and asked abruptly, "Is Mrs. Blackburn's brother really so dreadful?"

"I've often wondered," said the younger Mrs. Colfax, "if Roane Fitzhugh is as bad as people say he is?"

"Well, he has always been very polite to me," commented the old lady. "Though Brother Charles says that you cannot judge a man's morals by his manners. Was Alan Wythe there last night?"

"Yes, I sat by him," answered Daisy. "I wish that old uncle of his in Chicago would let him marry Mary."

This innocent remark aroused Caroline's scorn. "To think of a man's having to ask his uncle whom he shall marry!" she exclaimed indignantly.

"You wouldn't say that, my dear," replied old Mrs. Colfax, "if you knew Alan. He is a charming fellow, but the sort of talented ne'er-do-well who can do anything but make a living. He has an uncle in Chicago who is said to be worth millions—one of the richest men, I've heard, in the West—but he will probably leave his fortune to charity. As it is he doles out a pittance to Alan—not nearly enough for him to marry on."

"Isn't it strange," said Caroline, "that the nice people never seem to have enough money and the disagreeable ones seem to have a great deal too much? But I despise a man," she added sweepingly, "who hasn't enough spirit to go out into the world and fight."

The old lady's needles clicked sharply as she returned to her work. "I've always said that if the good Lord would look after my money troubles, I could take care of the others. Now, if Angelica's people had not been so poor she would have been spared this dreadful marriage. As it is, I am sure, the poor thing makes the best of it—I don't want you to think that I am saying a word against Angelica—but when a woman runs about after so many outside interests, it is pretty sure to mean that she is unhappy at home."

"It's a pity," said the younger woman musingly, "that so many of her interests seem to cross David's business. Look at this Ridley matter, for instance—of course everyone says that Angelica is trying to make up for her husband's injustice by supporting the family until the man gets back to work. It's perfectly splendid of her, I know. There isn't a living soul who admires Angelica more than I do, but with all the needy families in town, it does seem that she might just as well have selected some other to look after."

The old lady, having dropped some stitches, went industriously to work to pick them up. "For all we know," she observed piously, "it may be God's way of punishing David."

CHAPTER VII
Caroline Makes Discoveries

AT four o'clock Daisy Colfax rushed off to a committee meeting at Briarlay ("something very important, though I can't remember just which one it is"), and an hour later Caroline followed her in Blackburn's car, with Letty lying fast asleep in her arms.

"I am going to do all I can to make it easier for Mrs. Blackburn," she thought. "I don't care how rude he is to me if he will only spare her. I am stronger than she is, and I can bear it better." Already it seemed to her that this beautiful unhappy woman filled a place in her life, that she would be willing to make any sacrifice, to suffer any humiliation, if she could only help her.

Suddenly Letty stirred and put up a thin little hand. "I like you, Miss Meade," she said drowsily. "I like you because you are pretty and you laugh. Mammy says mother never laughs, that she only smiles. Why is that?"

"I suppose she doesn't think things funny, darling."

"When father laughs out loud she tells him to stop. She says it hurts her."

"Well, she isn't strong, you know. She is easily hurt."

"I am not strong either, but I like to laugh," said the child in her quaint manner. "Mammy says there isn't anybody's laugh so pretty as yours. It sounds like music."

"Then I must laugh a great deal for you, Letty, and the more we laugh together the happier we'll be, shan't we?"

As the car turned into the lane, where the sunlight fell in splinters over the yellow leaves, a man in working clothes appeared suddenly from under the trees. For an instant he seemed on the point of stopping them; then lowering the hand he had raised, he bowed hurriedly, and passed on at a brisk walk toward the road.

"His name is Ridley, I know him," said Letty. "Mother took me with her one day when she went to see his children. He has six children, and one is a baby. They let me hold it, but I like a doll better because dolls don't wriggle." Then, as the motor raced up the drive and stopped in front of the porch, she sat up and threw off the fur robe. "There are going to be cream puffs for tea, and mammy said I might have one. Do you think mother will mind if I go into the drawing-room? She is having a meeting."

"I don't know, dear. Is it a very important meeting?"

"It must be," replied Letty, "or mother wouldn't have it. Everything she has is important." As the door opened, she inquired of the servant, "Moses, do you think this is a very important meeting?"

Moses, a young light-coloured negro, answered solemnly, "Hit looks dat ar way ter me, Miss Letty, caze Patrick's jes' done fotched up de las' plate uv puffs. Dose puffs wuz gwine jes' as fast ez you kin count de las' time I tuck a look at um, en de ladies dey wuz all a-settin' roun' in va' yous attitudes en eatin' um up like dey tasted moughty good."

"Then I'm going in," said the child promptly. "You come with me, Miss Meade. Mother won't mind half so much if you are with me." And grasping Caroline's hand she led the way to the drawing-room. "I hope they have left one," she whispered anxiously, "but meetings always seem to make people so hungry."

In the back drawing-room, where empty cups and plates were scattered about on little tables, Angelica was sitting in a pink and gold chair that vaguely resembled a throne. She wore a street gown of blue velvet, and beneath a little hat of dark fur, her hair folded softly on her temples. At the first glance Caroline could see that she was tired and nervous, and her pensive eyes seemed to plead with the gaily chattering women about her. "Of course, if you really think it will help the cause," she was saying deprecatingly; then as Letty entered, she broke off and held out her arms. "Did you have a good time, darling?"

The child went slowly forward, shaking hands politely with the guests while her steady gaze, so like her father's, sought the tea table. "May I have a puff and a tart too, mother?" she asked as she curtseyed to Mrs. Ashburton.

"No, only one, dear, but you may choose."

"Then I'll choose a puff because it is bigger." She was a good child, and when the tart was forbidden her, she turned her back on the plate with a determined gesture. "I saw the man, mother—the one with the baby. He was in the lane."

"I know, dear. He came to ask your father to take him back in the works. Perhaps if you were to go into the library and ask him very gently, he would do it. It is the case I was telling you about, a most distressing one," explained Angelica to Mrs. Ashburton. "Of course David must have reason on his side or he wouldn't take the stand that he does. I suppose the man does drink and stir up trouble, but we women have to think of so much besides mere justice. We have to keep close to the human part that men are so apt to overlook." There was a writing tablet on her knee, and while she spoke, she leaned earnestly forward, and made a few straggling notes with a yellow pencil which was blunt at the point. Even her efficiency—and as a chairman she was almost as efficient as Mrs. Ashburton—was clothed in sweetness. As she sat there, holding the blunt pencil in her delicate, blue-veined hand, she appeared to be bracing herself, with a tremendous effort of will, for some inexorable demand of duty. The tired droop of her figure, the shadow under her eyes, the pathetic little lines that quivered about her mouth—these things, as well as the story of her loveless marriage, awakened Caroline's pity. "She bears it so beautifully," she thought, with a rush of generous emotion. "I have never seen any one so brave and noble. I believe she never thinks of herself for a minute."

"I always feel," observed Mrs. Ashburton, in her logical way which was trying at times, "that a man ought to be allowed to attend to his own business."

A pretty woman, with a sandwich in her hand, turned from the tea table and remarked lightly, "Heaven knows it is the last privilege of which I wish to deprive him!" Her name was Mallow, and she was a new-comer of uncertain origin, who had recently built a huge house, after the Italian style, on the Three Chopt Road. She was very rich, very smart, very dashing, and though her ancestry was dubious, both her house and her hospitality were authentic. Alan had once said of her that she kept her figure by climbing over every charity in town; but Alan's wit was notoriously malicious.

"In a case like this, don't you think, dear Mrs. Ashburton, that a woman owes a duty to humanity?" asked Angelica, who liked to talk in general terms of the particular instance. "Miss Meade, I am sure, will agree with me. It is so important to look after the children."

"But there are so many children one might look after," replied Caroline gravely; then feeling that she had not responded generously to Angelica's appeal, she added, "I think it is splendid of you, perfectly splendid to feel the way that you do."

"That is so sweet of you," murmured Angelica gratefully, while Mrs. Aylett, a lovely woman, with a face like a magnolia flower and a typically Southern voice, said gently, "I, for one, have always found Angelica's unselfishness an inspiration. With her delicate health, it is simply marvellous the amount of good she is able to do. I can never understand how she manages to think of so many things at the same moment." She also held a pencil in her gloved hand, and wrote earnestly, in illegible figures, on the back of a torn envelope.

"Of course, we feel that!" exclaimed the other six or eight women in an admiring chorus. "That is why we are begging her to be in these tableaux."

It was a high-minded, unselfish group, except for Mrs. Mallow, who was hungry, and Daisy Colfax, who displayed now and then an inclination to giddiness. Not until Caroline had been a few minutes in the room did she discover that the committee had assembled to arrange an entertainment for the benefit of the Red Cross. Though Mrs. Blackburn was zealous as an organizer, she confined her activities entirely to charitable associations and disapproved passionately of women who "interfered" as she expressed it "with public matters." She was disposed by nature to vague views and long perspectives, and instinctively preferred, except when she was correcting an injustice of her husband's, to right the wrongs in foreign countries.

"Don't you think she would make an adorable Peace?" asked Mrs. Aylett of Caroline.

"I really haven't time for it," said Angelica gravely, "but as you say, Milly dear, the cause is everything, and then David always likes me to take part in public affairs."

A look of understanding rippled like a beam of light over the faces of the women, and Caroline realized without being told that Mrs. Blackburn was overtaxing her strength in deference to her husband's wishes. "I suppose like most persons who haven't always had things he is mad about society."

"I've eaten it all up, mother," said Letty in a wistful voice. "It tasted very good."

"Did it, darling? Well, now I want you to go and ask your father about poor Ridley and his little children. You must ask him very sweetly, and perhaps he won't refuse. You would like to do that, wouldn't you?"

"May I take Miss Meade with me?"

"Yes, she may go with you. There, now, run away, dear. Mother is so busy helping the soldiers she hasn't time to talk to you."

"Why are you always so busy, mother?"

"She is so busy because she is doing good every minute of her life," said Mrs. Aylett. "You have an angel for a mother, Letty."

The child turned to her with sudden interest. "Is father an angel too?" she inquired.

A little laugh, strangled abruptly in a cough, broke from Daisy Colfax, while Mrs. Mallow hastily swallowed a cake before she buried her flushed face in her handkerchief. Only Mrs. Aylett, without losing her composure, remarked admiringly, "That's a pretty dress you have on, Letty."

"Now run away, dear," urged Angelica in a pleading tone, and the child, who had been stroking her mother's velvet sleeve, moved obediently to the door before she looked back and asked, "Aren't you coming too, Miss Meade?"

"Yes, I'm coming too," answered Caroline, and while she spoke she felt that she had never before needed so thoroughly the discipline of the hospital. As she put her arm about Letty's shoulders, and crossed the hall to Blackburn's library, she hoped passionately that he would not be in the room. Then Letty called out "father!" in a clear treble, and almost immediately the door opened, and Blackburn stood on the threshold.

"Do you want to come in?" he asked. "I've got a stack of work ahead, but there is always time for a talk with you."

He turned back into the room, holding Letty by the hand, and as Caroline followed silently, she noticed that he seemed abstracted and worried, and that his face, when he glanced round at her, looked white and tired. The red-brown flush of the morning had faded, and he appeared much older.

"Won't you sit down," he asked, and then he threw himself into a chair, and added cheerfully, "What is it, daughter? Have you a secret to tell me?"

Against the rich brown of the walls his head stood out, clear and fine, and something in its poise, and in the backward sweep of his hair, gave Caroline an impression of strength and swiftness as of a runner who is straining toward an inaccessible goal. For the first time since she had come to Briarlay he seemed natural and at ease in his surroundings—in the midst of the old books, the old furniture, the old speckled engravings—and she understood suddenly why Colonel Ashburton had called him an idealist. With the hardness gone from his eyes and the restraint from his thin-lipped, nervous mouth, he looked, as the Colonel had said of him, "on fire with ideas." He had evidently been at work, and the fervour of his mood was still visible in his face.

"Father, won't you please give Ridley his work again?" said the child. "I don't want his little children to be hungry." As she stood there at his knee, with her hands on his sleeve and her eyes lifted to his, she was so much like him in every feature that Caroline found herself vaguely wondering where the mother's part in her began. There was nothing of Angelica's softness in that intense little face, with its look of premature knowledge.

Bending over he lifted her to his knee, and asked patiently, "If I tell you why I can't take him back, Letty, will you try to understand?"

She nodded gravely. "I don't want the baby to be hungry."

For a moment he gazed over her head through the long windows that opened on the terrace. The sun was just going down, and beyond the cluster of junipers the sky was turning slowly to orange.

"Miss Meade," he said abruptly, looking for the first time in Caroline's face, "would you respect a man who did a thing he believed to be unjust because someone he loved had asked him to?"

For an instant the swiftness of the question—the very frankness and simplicity of it—took Caroline's breath away. She was sitting straight and still in a big leather chair, and she seemed to his eyes a different creature from the woman he had watched in the garden that morning. Her hair was smooth now under her severe little hat, her face was composed and stern, and for the moment her look of radiant energy was veiled by the quiet capability of her professional manner.

"I suppose not," she answered fearlessly, "if one is quite sure that the thing is unjust."

"In this case I haven't a doubt. The man is a firebrand in the works. He drinks, and breeds lawlessness. There are men in jail now who would be at work but for him, and they also have families. If I take him back there are people who would say I do it for a political reason."

"Does that matter? It seems to me nothing matters except to be right."

He smiled, and she wondered how she could have thought that he looked older. "Yes, if I am right, nothing else matters, and I know that I am right." Then looking down at Letty, he said more slowly, "My child, I know another family of little children without a father. Wouldn't you just as soon go to see these children?"

"Is there a baby? A very small baby?"

"Yes, there is a baby. I am sending the elder children to school, and one of the girls is old enough to learn stenography. The father was a good man and a faithful worker. When he died he asked me to look after his family."

"Then why doesn't Mrs. Blackburn know about them?" slipped from Caroline's lips. "Why hasn't any one told her?"

The next instant she regretted the question, but before she could speak again Blackburn answered quietly, "She is not strong, and already she has more on her than she should have undertaken."

"Her sympathy is so wonderful!" Almost in spite of her will, against her instinct for reticence where she distrusted, against the severe code of her professional training, she began by taking Mrs. Blackburn's side in the household.

"Yes, she is wonderful." His tone was conventional, yet if he had adored his wife he could scarcely have said more to a stranger.

There was a knock at the door, and Mammy Riah inquired querulously through the crack, "Whar you, Letty? Ain't you comin' ter git yo' supper?"

"I'm here, I'm coming," responded Letty. As she slid hurriedly from her father's knees, she paused long enough to whisper in his ear, "Father, what shall I tell mother when she asks me?"

"Tell her, Letty, that I cannot do it because it would not be fair."

"Because it would not be fair," repeated the child obediently as she reached for Caroline's hand. "Miss Meade is going to have supper with me, father. We are going to play that it is a party and let all the dolls come, and she will have bread and milk just as I do."

"Will she?" said Blackburn, with a smile. "Then I'd think she'd be hungry before bed-time."

Though he spoke pleasantly, Caroline was aware that his thoughts had wandered from them, and that he was as indifferent to her presence as he was to the faint lemon-coloured light streaming in at the window. It occurred to her suddenly that he had never really looked at her, and that if they were to meet by accident in the road he would not recognize her. She had never seen any one with so impersonal a manner—so encased and armoured in reserve—and she began to wonder what he was like under that impenetrable surface? "I should like to hear him speak," she thought, "to know what he thinks and feels about the things he cares for—about politics and public questions." He stood up as she rose, and for a minute before Letty drew her from the room, he smiled down on the child. "If I were Miss Meade, I'd demand more than bread and milk at your party, Letty." Then he turned away, and sat down again at his writing table.

An hour or two later, when Letty's supper was over, Angelica came in to say good-night before she went out to dinner. She was wearing an evening wrap of turquoise velvet and ermine, and a band of diamonds encircled the golden wings on her temples. Her eyes shone like stars, and there was a misty brightness in her face that made her loveliness almost unearthly. The fatigue of the afternoon had vanished, and she looked as young and fresh as a girl.

"I hope you are comfortable, Miss Meade," she said, with the manner of considerate gentleness which had won Caroline from the first. "I told Fanny to move you into the little room next to Letty's."

"Yes, I am quite comfortable. I like to sleep where she can call me."

The child was undressing, and as her mother bent over her, she put up her bare little arms to embrace her. "You smell so sweet, mother, just like lilacs."

"Do I, darling? There, don't hug me so tight or you'll rumple my hair. Did you ask your father about Ridley?"

"He won't do it. He says he won't do it because it wouldn't be fair." As Letty repeated the message she looked questioningly into Mrs. Blackburn's face. "Why wouldn't it be fair, mother?"

"He will have to tell you, dear, I can't." Drawing back from the child's arms, she arranged the ermine collar over her shoulders. "We must do all we can to help them, Letty. Now, kiss me very gently, and try to sleep well."

She went out, leaving a faint delicious trail of lilacs in the air, and while Caroline watched Mammy Riah slip the night-gown over Letty's shoulders, her thoughts followed Angelica down the circular drive, through the lane, and on the road to the city. She was fascinated, yet there was something deeper and finer than fascination in the emotion Mrs. Blackburn awakened. There was tenderness in it and there was romance; but most of all there was sympathy. In Caroline's narrow and colourless life, so rich in character, so barren of incident, this sympathy was unfolding like some rare and exquisite blossom.

"Did you ever see any one in your life look so lovely?" she asked enthusiastically of Mammy Riah.

The old woman was braiding Letty's hair into a tight little plait, which she rolled over at the end and tied up with a blue ribbon. "I wan' bawn yestiddy, en I reckon I'se done seen er hull pa'cel un um," she replied. "Miss Angy's de patte'n uv whut 'er ma wuz befo' 'er. Dar ain' never been a Fitzhugh yit dat wan't ez purty ez a pictur w'en dey wuz young, en Miss Angy she is jes' like all de res' un um. But she ain' been riz right, dat's de gospel trufe, en I reckon ole Miss knows hit now way up yonder in de Kingdom Come. Dey hed a w'ite nuss to nuss 'er de same ez dey's got for Letty heah, en dar ain' never been a w'ite nuss yit ez could raise a chile right, nairy a one un um."

"But I thought you nursed all the Fitzhughs? Why did they have a white nurse for Mrs. Blackburn?"

"Dy wuz projeckin', honey, like dey is projeckin' now wid dis yer chile. Atter I done nuss five er dem chillun ole Miss begun ter git sort er flighty in her haid, en ter go plum 'stracted about sto' physick en real doctahs. Stop yo' foolishness dis minute, Letty. You git spang out er dat baid befo' I mek you, en say yo' pray'rs. Yas'm, hit's de gospel trufe, I'se tellin' you," she concluded as Letty jumped obediently out of bed and prepared to kneel down on the rug. "Ef'n dey hed lemme raise Miss Angy de fambly wouldn't hev run ter seed de way hit did atter old Marster died, en dar 'ouldn't be dese yer low-lifeted doin's now wid Marse David."

Later in the night, lying awake and restless in the little room next to Letty's, Caroline recalled the old woman's comment. Though she had passionately taken Angelica's side, it was impossible for her to deny that both Mrs. Timberlake and Mammy Riah appeared to lean sympathetically at least in the direction of Blackburn. There was nothing definite—nothing particularly suggestive even—to which she could point; yet, in spite of her prejudice, in spite of the sinister stories which circulated so freely in Richmond, she was obliged to admit that the two women who knew Angelica best—the dependent relative and the old negress—did not espouse her cause so ardently as did the adoring committee. "The things they say must be true. Such dreadful stories could never have gotten out unless something or somebody had started them. It is impossible to look in Mrs. Blackburn's face and not see that she is a lovely character, and that she is very unhappy." Then a reassuring thought occurred to her, for she remembered that her mother used to say that a negro mammy always took the side of the father in any discussion. "It must be the same thing here with Mrs. Timberlake and Mammy Riah. They are so close to Mrs. Blackburn that they can't see how lovely she is. It is like staying too long in the room with an exquisite perfume. One becomes at last not only indifferent, but insensible to its sweetness." Closing her eyes, she resolutely put the question away, while she lived over again, in all its varied excitement, her first day at Briarlay. The strangeness of her surroundings kept her awake, and it seemed to her, as she went over the last twenty-four hours, that she was years older than she had been when she left The Cedars. Simply meeting Mrs. Blackburn, she told herself again, was a glorious adventure; it was like seeing and speaking to one of the heroines in the dingy old volumes in her father's library. And the thought that she could really serve her, that she could understand and sympathize where Mrs. Timberlake and Mammy Riah failed, that she could, by her strength and devotion, lift a share of the burden from Angelica's shoulders—the thought of these things shed an illumination over the bare road of the future. She would do good, she resolved, and in doing good, she would find happiness. The clock struck eleven; she heard the sound of the returning motor; and then, with her mind filled with visions of usefulness, she dropped off to sleep.

It might have been a minute later, it might have been hours, when she was awakened by Letty's voice screaming in terror. Jumping out of bed, Caroline slipped into the wrapper of blue flannel Diana had made for her, and touching the electric button, flooded the nursery with light. Sitting very erect, with wide-open vacant eyes, and outstretched arms, Letty was uttering breathless, distracted shrieks. Her face was frozen into a mask, and the bones of her thin little body quivered through the cambric of her night-gown. As the shadows leaped out on the walls, which were covered with garlands of pink and blue flowers, she shuddered and crouched back under the blankets.

"I am here, Letty! I am here, darling!" cried Caroline, kneeling beside the bed, and at the same instant the door opened, and Mammy Riah, half dressed, and without wig or turban, came in muttering, "I'se coming, honey! I'se coming, my lamb!"

Without noticing them, the child cried out in a loud, clear voice, "Where is father? I want father to hold me! I want my father!" Then the terror swept over her again like some invisible enemy, and her cries became broken and inarticulate.

"Is she often like this?" asked Caroline of the old woman. "I can't hold her. I am afraid she will have a convulsion." With her arms about Letty, who moaned and shivered in her grasp, she added, "Letty, darling, shall I send for your mother?"

"Dar ain' but one thing dat'll quiet dis chile," said the old negress, "en dat is Marse David. I'se gwine atter Marse David."

She hobbled out in her lint slippers, while the girl held Letty closer, and murmured a hundred soothing words in her ear. "You may have father and mother too," she said, "you may have everyone, dear, if only you won't be frightened."

"I don't want everyone. I want father," cried the child, with a storm of sobs. "I want father because I am afraid. I want him to keep me from being afraid." Then, as the door opened, and Blackburn came into the room, she held out her arms, and said in a whisper, like the moan of a small hurt animal, "I thought you had gone away, father, and I was afraid of the dark."

Without speaking, Blackburn crossed the room, and dropping into a chair by the bed, laid his arm across the child's shoulders. At his touch her cries changed into shivering sobs which grew gradually fainter, and slipping back on the pillows, she looked with intent, searching eyes in his face. "You haven't gone away, father?"

"No, I haven't gone anywhere. You were dreaming."

Clasping his hand, she laid her cheek on it, and nestled under the cover. "I am afraid to go to sleep because I dream such ugly dreams."

"Dreams can't hurt you, Letty. No matter how ugly they are, they are only dreams."

His voice was low and firm, and at the first sound of it the pain and fear faded from Letty's face. "Were you asleep, father?"

"No, I was at work. I am writing a speech. It is twelve o'clock, but I had not gone to bed." He spoke quite reasonably as if she were a grown person, and Caroline asked herself if this explained his power over the child. There was no hint of stooping, no pretense of childish words or phrases. He looked very tired and deep lines showed in his face, but there was an inexhaustible patience in his manner. For the first time she thought of him as a man who carried a burden. His very shadow, which loomed large and black on the flowered wall paper, appeared, while she watched it, to bend beneath the pressure of an invisible weight.

"Has mother come in?" asked Letty in a still whisper.

"Yes, she has gone to bed. You must not wake your mother."

"I'll try not to," answered the child, and a minute afterwards she said with a yawn, "I feel sleepy now, father. I'd like to go to sleep, if you'll sit by me."

He laughed. "I'll sit by you, if you'll let Miss Meade and Mammy Riah go to bed."

As if his laugh had driven the last terror from her mind, Letty made a soft, breathless sound of astonishment. "Miss Meade has got on a wrapper," she said, "and her hair is plaited just like mine only there isn't any ribbon. Mammy Riah, do you think my hair would stay plaited like that if it wasn't tied?"

The old woman grunted. "Ef'n you don' shet yo' mouf, I'se gwine ter send Marse David straight down agin whar he b'longs."

"Well, I'll go to sleep," replied Letty, in her docile way; and a minute later, she fell asleep with her cheek on her father's hand.

For a quarter of an hour longer Blackburn sat there without stirring, while Caroline put out the high lights and turned on the shaded lamp by the bed. Then, releasing himself gently, he stood up and said in a whisper, "I think she is all right now." His back was to the lamp, and Caroline saw his face by the dim flicker of the waning fire.

"I shall stay with her," she responded in the same tone.

"It is not necessary. After an attack like this she sleeps all night from exhaustion. She seems fast asleep, but if you have trouble again send for me."

He moved softly to the door, and as Caroline looked after him, she found herself asking resentfully, "I wonder why Letty cried for her father?"

CHAPTER VIII
Blackburn

A week later, on an afternoon when the October sunshine sparkled like wine beneath a sky that was the colour of day-flowers, Caroline sat on the terrace waiting for Mrs. Blackburn to return from a rehearsal. In the morning Angelica had promised Letty a drive if she were good, and as soon as luncheon was over the child had put on a new hat and coat of blue velvet, and had come downstairs to listen for the sound of the motor. With a little white fur muff in her hands, she was now marching sedately round the fountain, while she counted her circuits aloud in a clear, monotonous voice. Under the velvet hat she was looking almost pretty, and as Caroline gazed at her she seemed to catch fleeting glimpses of Angelica in the serious little face. "I believe she is going to be really lovely when she grows up. It is a pity she hasn't her mother's colouring, but she gets more like her every day." Leaning over, she called in a low, admonishing tone, "Letty, don't go too near the fountain. You will get your coat splashed."

Obedient as she always was, Letty drew away from the water, and Caroline turned to pick up the knitting she had laid aside while she waited. Angelica had promised a dozen mufflers to the War Relief Association, and since it made her nervous to knit, she gracefully left the work for others to do. Now, while Caroline's needles clicked busily, and the ball of yarn unwound in her lap, her eyes wandered from the dying beauty of the garden to the wreaths of smoke that hung over the fringed edge of the river. On the opposite side, beyond the glittering band of the water, low grey-green hills melted like shadows into the violet haze of the distance. A roving fragrance of wood-smoke was in the air, and from the brown and russet sweep of the fields rose the chanting of innumerable insects. All the noise and movement of life seemed hushed and waiting while nature drifted slowly into the long sleep of winter. So vivid yet so evanescent was the light on the meadows that Caroline stopped her work, lest a stir or a sound might dissolve the perfect hour into darkness.

Growing suddenly tired of play, Letty came to Caroline's side and leaned on her shoulder. The child's hat had slipped back, and while she nestled there she sank gradually into the pensive drowsiness of the afternoon.

"Do you think she has forgotten to come for us?"

"No, dear, it is early yet. It can't be much after three o'clock."

Up through the golden-rod and life-everlasting, along the winding pathway across the fields, Alan and Mary were strolling slowly toward the lower garden. "They are so happy," mused Caroline. "I wonder if she is ever afraid that she may lose him? He doesn't look as if he could be constant."

Suddenly one of the nearest French windows opened, and the scent of cigar smoke floated out from the library. A moment later she heard the words, "Let's get a bit of air," and Blackburn, followed by two callers, came out on the terrace. While the three stood gazing across the garden to the river, she recognized one of the callers as Colonel Ashburton, but the other was a stranger—a tall, slender man, with crisp iron-grey hair and thin, austere features. Afterwards she learned that he was Joseph Sloane of New York, a man of wide political vision, and a recognized force in the industrial life of America. He had a high, dome-like forehead, which vaguely reminded Caroline of a tower, and a mouth so tightly locked that it looked as if nothing less rigid than a fact had ever escaped it. Yet his voice, when it came, was rich and beautifully modulated. "It is a good view," he remarked indifferently, and then looking at Blackburn, as if he were resuming a conversation that had been broken off, he said earnestly, "A few years ago I should have thought it a sheer impossibility, but I believe now that there is a chance of our winning."

"With the chance strengthening every hour," observed Colonel Ashburton, and as he turned his back to the view, his mild and innocent gaze fell on Caroline's figure. "It is good to see you, Miss Meade," he said gallantly, with a bow in which his blue eyes and silvery hair seemed to mingle. "I hope the sound of politics will not frighten you?"

Caroline looked up with a smile from her knitting. "Not at all. I was brought up in the midst of discussions. But are we in the way?"

The Colonel's gallantry was not without romantic flavour. "It is your Eden, and we are the intruders," he answered softly. It was a pity, thought Caroline, while she looked at him over Letty's head, that a velvet manner like that had almost vanished from the world. It went with plumes and lace ruffles and stainless swords.

"I am going to drive, father," called Letty, "if mother ever comes."

"That's good." Blackburn smiled as he responded, and then moving a step or two nearer the garden, drew several deep wicker chairs into the sunshine. For a few minutes after they had seated themselves, the men gazed in silence at the hazy hills on the horizon, and it seemed to Caroline that Blackburn was drawing strength and inspiration from the radiant, familiar scene.

"I have never wanted anything like this," he said at last, speaking very slowly, as if he weighed each separate word before it was uttered.

"Not for yourself, but for the country," replied the Colonel in his musical voice, which sounded always as if it were pitched to arouse sleeping enthusiasm. He had once been in Congress, and the habit of oratorical phrasing had never entirely left him. "Do you know, Blackburn, I sometimes think that you are one of the few statesmen we have left. The others are mixtures of so many ingredients—ambition, prejudice, fanaticism, self-interest—everything but the thought of the country, and the things for which the country should stand. It's the difference, I suppose, between a patriot and a politician."

"It is not that I am less selfish," Blackburn laughed with embarrassment as he answered, "but perhaps I have had a harder time than the others, and have learned something they haven't. I've seen how little material things or their acquisition matter in life. After all, the idea is the only thing that really counts—an idea big enough to lift a man out of his personal boundaries, big enough to absorb and possess him completely. A man's country may do this, but not a man's self, nor the mere business of living."

As he paused, though his head was turned in Caroline's direction, she had a queer impression that he was looking beyond her at some glowing vision that was imperceptible to the others. She knew that he was oblivious of her presence, and that, if he saw her at all, she was scarcely more to him than an image painted on air. The golden light of the afternoon enveloped his figure, yet she realized that the illumination in his face was not due to the shifting rays of the sun. She did not like him—the aversion she felt was too strong for her to judge him tolerantly—but she was obliged to admit that his straight, firm figure, with its look of arrested energy, of controlled power, made Colonel Ashburton and the stranger from the North appear almost commonplace. Even his rough brown clothes possessed a distinction apart from the cut of his tailor; and though it was impossible for her to define the quality which seemed to make him stand alone, to put him in a class by himself, she was beginning to discern that his gift of personality, of intellectual dominance, was a kind of undeveloped genius. "He ought to have been a writer or a statesman," she thought, while she looked at his roughened hair, which would never lie flat, at his smoky grey eyes, and his thin, almost colourless lips. It was a face that grew on her as she watched it, a face, she realized, that one must study to understand, not attempt to read by erring flashes of insight. She remembered that Colonel Ashburton had told her that Blackburn had no small talk, but that he spoke well if he were once started on a current of ideas. "It is true. He speaks just as if he had thought it all out years ago," she said to herself while she listened, "just as if every sentence, every word almost, was crystallized." She felt a mild curiosity about his political convictions—a desire to know what he really believed, and why his opinions had aroused the opposition of men like Charles Peyton and Robert Colfax.

"I used to believe, not long ago, that these things counted supremely," Blackburn said presently, with his eyes on the river—those intense grey eyes which seemed always searching for something. "I held as firmly as any man by the Gospel of Achievement—by the mad scramble to acquire things. I had never had them, and what a man hasn't had, he generally wants. Perhaps I travelled the historic road through materialism to idealism, the road America is following this very hour while we are talking. I am not saying that it isn't all for the best, you know. You may call me an optimist, I suppose, down beneath the eternal muddle of things; but I feel that the ambition to acquire is good only as a process, and not as a permanent condition or the ultimate end of life. I haven't a doubt that the frantic struggle in America to amass things, to make great fortunes, has led to discoveries of incalculable benefit to mankind, and has given a splendid impetus to the development of our country. We wanted things so passionately that we were obliged to create them in order to satisfy our desires. This spirit, this single phase of development, is still serving a purpose. We have watched it open the earth, build railroads, establish industries, cut highways over mountains, turn deserts into populous cities; and through these things lay the foundation of the finer and larger social order—the greater national life. We are fond of speaking of the men who have made this possible as money-grubbers or rank materialists. Some of them were, perhaps, but not the guiding spirits, the real builders. No man can do great constructive work who is not seeking to express an imperishable idea in material substance. No man can build for to-morrow who builds only with bricks and mortar."

He leaned forward to flick the ashes from his cigar, while the sunshine sprinkling through the junipers deepened the rapt and eager look in his face. "It all comes back to this—the whole problem of life," he pursued after a moment. "It all comes back to the builders. We are—with apologies for the platitude—a nation of idealists. It is our ability to believe in the incredible, to dream great dreams, not our practical efficiency, that has held our body politic together. Because we build in the sky, I believe we are building to last——"

"But our mistakes, our follies, our insanities——?" As Blackburn paused the voice of Colonel Ashburton fell like music on the stillness. "Even our fairest dreams—the dream of individual freedom—what has become of it? Show me the man who is free among us to-day?" With his bowed white head, his blanched aristocratic features, and his general air of having been crushed and sweetened by adversity, he reminded Caroline of one of the perpetual mourners, beside the weeping willow and the classic tomb, on the memorial brooch her great-grandmother used to wear.

"I believe you are wrong," replied Blackburn slowly, "for, in spite of the voice of the demagogue, America is a land of individual men, not of classes, and the whole theory of the American State rests upon the rights and obligations of the citizen. If the American Republic survives, it will be because it is founded upon the level of conscience—not upon the peaks of inspiration. We have no sovereign mind, no governing class, no body of men with artificial privileges and special obligations. Every American carries in his person the essential elements of the State, and is entrusted with its duties. To this extent at least, Colonel, your man is free."

"Free to sink, or to swim with the current?"

Blackburn smiled as he answered. "Well, I suppose your pessimism is natural. In Colonel Ashburton, Sloane, you behold a sorrowful survivor of the Age of Heroes. By Jove, there were giants in those days!" Then he grew serious again, and went on rapidly, with the earnest yet impersonal note in his voice: "Of course, we know that as long as a people is striving for its civil rights, for equality of right before the law, there is a definite objective goal. Now, in theory at least, these things have been attained, and we are confronted to-day with the more difficult task of adjusting the interests, without impairing the rights, of the individual man. The tangled skeins of social and economic justice must be unravelled before we can weave them into the fabric of life."

"And for the next fifty years this is our business," said Sloane, speaking suddenly in the rich, strong voice which seemed to strike with unerring blows at the root of the question.

"Yes, this is our business for the next fifty years. I believe with you, Sloane, that this may be done. I believe that this work will be accomplished when, and only when, the citizen recognizes that he is the State, and is charged with the duties and the obligations of the State to his fellowmen. To reach this end we must overthrow class prejudice, and realize that justice to all alike is the cornerstone of democracy. We must put aside sectional feeling and create a national ideal by merging the State into the nation. We must learn to look beyond the material prosperity of America and discern her true destiny as the champion of the oppressed, the giver of light. It is for us to do this. After all, we are America, you and I and Ashburton and the man who works in my garden. When all is said, a nation is only an organized crowd, and can rise no higher, or sink no lower, than its source—the spirit of the men who compose it. As a man thinketh in his heart so his country will be."

For a moment there was silence, and then Sloane said sharply: "There is one thing that always puzzles me in you Southerners, and that is the apparent conflict between the way you think and the way you act, or to put it a trifle more accurately, between your political vision and your habit of voting. You see I am a practical man, an inveterate believer in the fact as the clinching argument in any question, and I confess that I have failed so far to reconcile your theory with your conduct. You are nationalists and idealists in theory, you Virginians, yet by your votes you maintain the solid South, as you call it, as if it were not a part of the American Republic. You cherish and support this heresy regardless of political issues, and often in defiance of your genuine convictions. I like you Virginians. Your history fascinates me like some brilliantly woven tapestry; but I can never understand how this people, whose heroic qualities helped to create the Union, can remain separated, at least in act, from American purposes and ideals. You give the lie to your great statesmen; you shatter their splendid dream for the sake of a paradox. Your one political party battens on the very life of the South—since you preserve its independence in spite of representatives whom you oppose, and, not infrequently, in spite even of principles that you reject. However broad may be our interpretation of recent events, as long as this heresy prevails, the people of the South cannot hope to recover their historic place in the councils of the nation. And this condition," he concluded abruptly, "retards the development of our future. A short while ago—so short a while, indeed, as the year 1896—the security of the nation was endangered by the obsession of a solid and unbreakable South. This danger passed yesterday, but who knows when it may come again?"

As he finished, Blackburn leaned eagerly forward as if he were bracing himself to meet an antagonist. To the man whose inner life is compacted of ideas, the mental surgery of the man of facts must always appear superficial—a mere trick of technique. A new light seemed to have fallen over him, and, through some penetrating sympathy, Caroline understood that he lived in a white blaze not of feeling, but of thought. It was a passion of the mind instead of the heart, and she wondered if he had ever loved Angelica as he loved this fugitive, impersonal image of service?

"I sometimes doubt," he said gravely, "if a man can ever understand a country unless he was born in it—unless its sun and dust have entered into his being."

"And yet we Southerners, even old-fashioned ones like myself, see these evils as clearly as you Northerners," interposed Colonel Ashburton while Blackburn hesitated. "The difference between us is simply that you discern the evils only, and we go deep enough to strike the root of the trouble. If you want really to understand us, Sloane, study the motive forces in English and American history, especially the overpowering influence of racial instinct, and the effect of an injustice on the mind of the Anglo-Saxon."

With the Colonel's voice the old sense of familiarity pervaded Caroline's memory like a perfume, and she seemed to be living again through one of her father's political discussions at The Cedars—only the carefully enunciated phrases of Sloane and Blackburn were more convincing than the ringing, colloquial tones of the country orators. As she listened she told herself that these men were modern and constructive while her father and his group of Confederate soldiers had been stationary and antiquated. They had stood like crumbling landmarks of history, while Blackburn and his associates were building the political structure of the future.

"Of course I admit," Sloane was saying frankly, "that mistakes were made in the confusion that followed the Civil War. Nobody regrets these things more than the intelligent men of the North; but all this is past; a new generation is springing up; and none of us desires now to put your house in order, or force any government upon you. The North is perfectly willing to keep its hands off your domestic affairs, and to leave the race problem to you, or to anybody else who possesses the ability to solve it. It seems to me, therefore, that the time has come to put these things behind us, and to recognize that we are, and have been, at least since 1865, a nation. There are serious problems before us to-day, and the successful solution of these demands unity of thought and purpose."

There was a slight ironic twist to his smile as he finished, and he sat perfectly still, with the burned-out cigar in his hand, watching Blackburn with a look that was at once sympathetic and merciless.

"Colonel Ashburton has pointed out the only way," rejoined Blackburn drily. "You must use the past as a commentary before you can hope clearly to interpret the present."

"That is exactly what I am trying to do." The irony had vanished, and a note of solemnity had passed into Sloane's voice. "I am honestly trying to understand the source of the trouble, to discover how it may be removed. I see in the solid South not a local question, but a great national danger. There is no sanctity in a political party; it is merely an instrument to accomplish the ends of government through the will of the people. I realize how men may follow one party or another under certain conditions; but no party can always be right, and I cannot understand how a people, jealous of its freedom, intensely patriotic in spirit, can remain through two generations in bondage to one political idea, whether that idea be right or wrong. This seems to me to be beyond mere politics, to rise to the dignity of a national problem. I feel that it requires the best thought of the country for its adjustment. It is because we need your help that I am speaking so frankly. If we go into this war—and there are times when it seems to me that it will be impossible for us to keep out of it—it must be a baptism of fire from which we should emerge clean, whole, and united."

"Ashburton is fond of telling me," said Blackburn slowly, "that I live too much in the next century, yet it does not seem to me unreasonable to believe that the chief end of civilization is the development of the citizen, and of a national life as deeply rooted in personal consciousness as the life of the family. The ideal citizen, after all, is merely a man in whom the patriotic nerve has become as sensitive as the property nerve—a man who brings his country in touch with his actual life, who places the public welfare above his private aims and ambitions. It is because I believe the Southern character is rich in the material for such development that I entered this fight two years ago. As you know I am not a Democrat. I have broken away from the party, and recently, I have voted the Republican ticket at Presidential elections——"

"This is why I am here to-day," continued Sloane. "I am here because we need your help, because we see an opportunity for you to aid in the great work ahead of us. With a nation the power to survive rests in the whole, not in the parts, and America will not become America until she has obliterated the sections."

Blackburn was gazing at the hills on the horizon, while there flickered and waned in his face a look that was almost prophetic.

"Well, of course I agree with you," he said in a voice which was so detached and contemplative that it seemed to flow from the autumnal stillness, "but before you can obliterate the sections, the North as well as the South must cease to be sectional—especially must the North, which has so long regarded its control of the Federal Government as a proprietary right, cease to exclude the South from participation in national affairs and movements. Before you can obliterate the sections, you must, above all, understand why the solidarity of the South exists as a political issue—you must probe beneath the tissue of facts to the very bone and fibre of history. Truth is sometimes an inconvenient thing, but experience has found nothing better to build on. First of all—for we must clear the ground—first of all, you must remember that we Virginians are Anglo-Saxons, and that we share the sporting spirit which is ready to fight for a principle, and to accept the result whether it wins or loses. When the war was over—to dig no deeper than the greatest fact in our past—when the war was over we Virginians, and the people of the South, submitted, like true sportsmen, to the logic of events. We had been beaten on the principle that we had no right to secede from the Union, and therefore were still a part of the Union. We accepted this principle, and were ready to resume our duties and discharge our obligations; but this was not to be permitted without the harsh provisions of the Reconstruction acts. Then followed what is perhaps the darkest period in American history, and one of the darkest periods in the history of the English-speaking race——"

"I admit all this," interrupted Sloane quickly, "and yet I cannot understand——"

"You must understand before we work together," replied Blackburn stubbornly. "I shall make you understand if it takes me all night and part of to-morrow. Politics, after all, is not merely a store of mechanical energy; even a politician is a man first and an automaton afterwards. You can't separate the way a man votes from the way he feels; and the way he feels has its source in the secret springs of his character, in the principles his parents revered, in the victories, the shames, the sufferings and the evasions of history. Until you realize that the South is human, you will never understand why it is solid. People are ruled not by intellect, but by feeling; and in a democracy mental expediency is no match for emotional necessity. Virginia proved this philosophical truth when she went into the war—when she was forced, through ties of blood and kinship, into defending the institution of slavery because it was strangely associated with the principle of self-government—and she proved it yet again when she began slowly to rebuild the shattered walls of her commonwealth."

For a moment he was silent, and Colonel Ashburton said softly with the manner of one who pours oil on troubled waters with an unsteady hand, "I remember those years more clearly than I remember last month or even yesterday."

His voice trailed into silence, and Blackburn went on rapidly, without noticing the interruption: "The conditions of the Reconstruction period were worse than war, and for those conditions you must remember that the South has always held the Republican Party responsible. Not content with the difficulties which would inevitably result from the liberation of an alien population among a people who had lost all in war, and were compelled to adjust themselves to new economic and social conditions, the Federal Government, under the influence of intemperate leaders, conferred upon the negroes full rights of citizenship, while it denied these rights to a large proportion of the white population—the former masters. State and local governments were under the control of the most ignorant classes, generally foreign adventurers who were exploiting the political power of the negroes. The South was overwhelmed with debts created for the private gain of these adventurers; the offices of local governments were filled either by alien white men or by negroes; and negro justices of the peace, negro legislators, and even negro members of Congress were elected. My own county was represented in the Legislature of Virginia by a negro who had formerly belonged to my father."

"All this sounds now like the ancient history of another continent," remarked Sloane with anxious haste, "Fifty years can change the purpose of a people or a party!"

"Often in the past," resumed Blackburn, "men who have taken part in revolutions or rebellions have lost their lives as the punishment of failure; but there are wrongs worse than death, and one of these is to subject a free and independent people to the rule of a servile race; to force women and children to seek protection from magistrates who had once been their slaves. The Republican Party was then in control, and its leaders resisted every effort of the South to re-establish the supremacy of the white race, and to reassert the principles of self-government. We had the Civil Rights Act, and the Federal Election Laws, with Federal supervisors of elections to prevent the white people from voting and to give the vote to the negroes. Even when thirty years had passed, and the South had gained control of its local governments, the Republicans attempted to pass an election law which would have perpetuated negro dominance. You have only to stop and think for a minute, and you will understand that conditions such as I have suggested are the source of that national menace you are trying now to remove."

"It is all true, but it is the truth of yesterday," rejoined Sloane eagerly. "If we have made mistakes in the past, we wish the more heartily to do right in the present. What can prove this more clearly than the fact that I am here to ask your help in organizing the independent vote in Virginia? There is a future for the man who can lead the new political forces."

The sun was dropping slowly in the direction of the wooded slopes on the opposite shore; the violet mist on the river had become suddenly luminous; and the long black shadows of the junipers were slanting over the grass walks in the garden. In the lower meadows the chanting rose so softly that it seemed rather a breath than a sound; and this breath, which was the faint quivering stir of October, stole at last into the amber light on the terrace.

"If I had not known this," answered Blackburn, and again there flickered into his face the look of prophecy and vision which seemed to place him in a separate world from Sloane and Colonel Ashburton, "I should have spoken less frankly. As you say the past is past, and we cannot solve future problems by brooding upon wrongs that are over. The suffrage is, after all, held in trust for the good of the present and the future; and for this reason, since Virginia limited her suffrage to a point that made the negro vote a negligible factor, I have felt that the solid South is, if possible, more harmful to the Southern people than it is to the nation. This political solidarity prevents constructive thought and retards development. It places the Southern States in the control of one political machine; and the aim of this machine must inevitably be self-perpetuation. Offices are bestowed on men who are willing to submit to these methods; and freedom of discussion is necessarily discouraged by the dominant party. In the end a governing class is created, and this class, like all political cliques, secures its privileges by raising small men to high public places, and thereby obstructs, if it does not entirely suppress, independent thought and action. I can imagine no more dangerous condition for any people under a republican form of government, and for this reason, I regard the liberation of the South from this political tyranny as the imperative duty of every loyal Southerner. As you know, I am an independent in politics, and if I have voted with the Republicans, it is only because I saw no other means of breaking the solidarity of the South. Yet—and I may as well be as frank at the end as I was at the beginning of our discussion, I doubt the ability of the Republican Party to win the support of the Southern people. The day will come, I believe, when another party will be organized, national in its origin and its purposes; and through this new party, which will absorb the best men from both the Republican and the Democratic organizations, I hope to see America welded into a nation. In the meantime, and only until this end is clearly in sight," he added earnestly, "I am ready to help you by any effort, by any personal sacrifice. I believe in America not with my mind only, but with my heart—and if the name America means anything, it must mean that we stand for the principle of self-government whatever may be the form. This principle is now in danger throughout the world, and just as a man must meet his responsibilities and discharge his obligations regardless of consequences, so a nation cannot shirk its duties in a time of international peril. We have now reached the cross-roads—we stand waiting where the upward and the downward paths come together. I am willing to cast aside all advantage, to take any step, to face misunderstanding and criticism, if I can only help my people to catch the broader vision of American opportunity and American destiny——"

The words were still in the air, when there was a gentle flutter of pink silk curtains, and Angelica came out, flushed and lovely, from a successful rehearsal. An afternoon paper was in her hand, and her eyes were bright and wistful, as if she were trying to understand how any one could have hurt her.

"Letty, dear, I am waiting!" she called; and then, as her gaze fell on Sloane, she went toward him with outstretched hand and a charming manner of welcome. "Oh, Mr. Sloane, how very nice to see you in Richmond!" The next instant she added seriously, "David, have you seen the paper? You can't imagine what dreadful things they are saying about you."

"Well, they can call him nothing worse than a traitor," retorted Colonel Ashburton lightly before Blackburn could answer. "Surely, the word traitor ought to have lost its harshness to Southern ears!"

"But Robert Colfax must have written it!" Though she was smiling it was not because the Colonel's rejoinder had seemed amusing to her. "I know I am interrupting," she said after a moment. "It will be so nice if you will dine with us, Mr. Sloane—only you must promise me not to encourage David's political ideas. I couldn't bear to be married to a politician."

As she stood there against a white column, she looked as faultless and as evanescent as the sunbeams, and for the first time Sloane's face lost its coldness and austerity.

"I think your husband could never be a politician," he answered gently, "though he may be a statesman."

CHAPTER IX
Angelica's Charity

AS the car turned into the lane it passed Alan and Mary, and Mrs. Blackburn ordered the chauffeur to stop while she leaned out of the window and waited, with her vague, shimmering look, for the lovers to approach. "I wanted to ask you, Mr. Wythe, about that article in the paper this morning," she began. "Do you think it will do David any real harm?"

Her voice was low and troubled, and she gazed into Alan's face with eyes that seemed to be pleading for mercy.

"Well, I hardly think it will help him if he wants an office," replied Alan, reddening under her gaze. "I suppose everything is fair in politics, but it does seem a little underhand of Colfax doesn't it? A man has a right to expect a certain amount of consideration from his friends."

For the first time since she had known him, Caroline felt that Alan's nimble wit was limping slightly. In place of his usual light-hearted manner, he appeared uncomfortable and embarrassed, and though his eyes never left Angelica's face, they rested there with a look which it was impossible to define. Admiration, surprise, pleasure, and a fleeting glimpse of something like dread or fear—all these things Caroline seemed to read in that enigmatical glance. Could it be that he was comparing Angelica with Mary, and that, for the moment at least, Mary's lack of feminine charm, was estranging him? He looked splendidly vigorous with the flush in his cheeks and a glow in his red-brown eyes—just the man, Caroline fancied, with whom any woman might fall in love.

"But don't you think," asked Angelica hesitatingly, as if she dared not trust so frail a thing as her own judgment, "that it may be a matter of principle with Robert? Of course I know that David feels that he is right, and there can't be a bit of truth in what people say about the way he runs his works, but, after all, isn't he really harming the South by trying to injure the Democratic Party? We all feel, of course, that it is so important not to do anything to discredit the Democrats, and with Robert I suppose there is a great deal of sentiment mixed with it all because his grandfather did so much for Virginia. Oh, if David could only find some other ambition—something that wouldn't make him appear disloyal and ungrateful! I can't tell you how it distresses me to see him estrange his best friends as he does. I can't feel in my heart that any political honour is worth it!"

There was a flute-like quality in her voice, which was singularly lacking in the deeper and richer tones of passion, like the imperfect chords of some thin, sweet music. Though Angelica had the pensive eyes and the drooping profile of an early Italian Madonna, her voice, in spite of its lightness and delicacy, was without softness. At first it had come as a surprise to Caroline, and even now, after three weeks at Briarlay, she was aware of a nervous expectancy whenever Mrs. Blackburn opened her lips—of a furtive hope that the hard, cold tones might melt in the heat of some ardent impulse.

"It isn't ambition with David," said Mary, speaking bluntly, and with an arrogant conviction. "He doesn't care a rap for any political honour, and he is doing this because he believes it to be his duty. His country is more to him, I think, than any living creature could be, even a friend."

"Well, as far as that goes, he has made more friends by his stand than he has lost," observed Alan, with unnatural diffidence. "I shouldn't let that worry me a minute, Mrs. Blackburn. David is a big man, and his influence grows every hour. The young blood is flowing toward him."

"Oh, but don't you see that this hurts me most of all?" responded Angelica. "I wouldn't for the world say this outside, but you are David's friend and almost one of the family, and I know you will understand me."

She lifted her eyes to his face—those large, shining eyes as soft as a dove's breast—and after a moment in which he gazed at her without speaking, Alan answered gently, "Yes, I understand you."

"It would grieve me if you didn't because I feel that I can trust you."

"Yes, you can trust me—absolutely." He looked at Mary as he spoke, and she smiled back at him with serene and joyous confidence.

"That is just what I tell Mary," resumed Angelica. "You are so trustworthy that it is a comfort to talk to you, and then we both feel, don't we, dear?" she inquired turning to the girl, "that your wonderful knowledge of human nature makes your judgment of such value."

Alan laughed, though his eyes sparkled with pleasure. "I don't know about that," he replied, "though my opinion, whatever it may be worth, is at your service."

"That is why I am speaking so frankly because I feel that you can help me. If you could only make David see his mistake—if you could only persuade him to give up this idea. It can't be right to overturn all the sacred things of the past—to discredit the principles we Virginians have believed in for fifty years. Surely you agree with me that it is a deplorable error of judgment?"

As she became more flattering and appealing, Alan recovered his gay insouciance. "If you want a candid answer, Mrs. Blackburn," he replied gallantly, "there isn't an ambition, much less a principle on earth, for which I would disagree with you."

Angelica smiled archly, and she was always at her loveliest when her face was illumined by the glow and colour of her smile. Was it possible, Caroline wondered while she watched her, that so simple a thing as the play of expression—as the parting of the lips, the raising of the eyebrows—could make a face look as if the light of heaven had fallen over it?

"If you get impertinent, I'll make Mary punish you!" exclaimed Angelica reproachfully; and a minute later the car passed on, while she playfully shook her finger from the window.

"How very handsome he is," said Caroline as she looked back in the lane. "I didn't know that a man could be so good-looking."

Angelica was settling herself comfortably under the robe. "Yes, he is quite unusual," she returned, and added after a pause, "If his uncle ever dies, and they say he is getting very feeble, Alan will inherit one of the largest fortunes in Chicago."

"I'm so glad. That's nice for Miss Blackburn."

"It's nice for Mary—yes." Her tone rather than her words, which were merely conventional, made Caroline glance at her quickly; but Angelica's features were like some faultless ivory mask. For the first time it struck the girl that even a beautiful face could appear vacant in repose.

"Where are we going now, mother?" asked Letty, who had been good and quiet during the long wait in the lane.

"To the Ridleys', dear. I've brought a basket." There was a moment's delay while she gave a few directions to the footman, and then, as Letty snuggled closely against Caroline's arm, the car went on rapidly toward the city.

The Ridleys lived in a small frame house in Pine Street; and when the car stopped before the door, where a number of freshly washed children were skipping rope on the pavement, Angelica alighted and held out her hand to Letty.

"Do you want to come in with me, Letty?"

"I'd rather watch these children skip, mother. Miss Meade, may I have a skipping-rope?"

Behind them the footman stood waiting with a covered basket, and for an instant, while Mrs. Blackburn looked down on it, a shadow of irritation rippled across her face. "Take that up to the second floor, John, and ask Mrs. Ridley if she got the yarn I sent for the socks?" Then, changing her mind as John disappeared into the narrow hall, from which a smell of cabbage floated, she added firmly, "We won't stay a minute, Letty, but you and Miss Meade must come up with me. I always feel," she explained to Caroline, "that it does the child good to visit the poor, and contrast her own lot with that of others. Young minds are so impressionable, and we never know when the turning-point comes in a life." Grasping Letty's hand she stepped over the skipping-rope, which the children had lowered in awe to the pavement.

"Letty has a cold. I'm afraid she oughtn't to go in," said Caroline hastily, while the child, rescued in the last extremity, threw a grateful glance at her.

"You really think so? Well, perhaps next time. Ah, there is Mr. Ridley now! We can speak to him without seeing his wife to-day." Instinctively, before she realized the significance of her action, she had drawn slightly aside.

A tall man, with a blotched, irascible face and a wad of tobacco in his mouth, lurched out on the porch, and stopped short at the sight of his visitors. He appeared surly and unattractive, and in her first revulsion, Caroline was conscious of a sudden sympathy with Blackburn's point of view. "He may be right, after all," she admitted to herself. "Kind as Mrs. Blackburn is, she evidently doesn't know much about people. I suppose I shouldn't have known anything either if I hadn't been through the hospital."

"I am glad to see you down, Mr. Ridley," said Angelica graciously. "I hope you are quite well again and that you have found the right kind of work."

"Yes, 'm, I'm well, all right, but there ain't much doing now except down at the works, and you know the way Mr. Blackburn treats me whenever I go down there." He was making an effort to be ingratiating, and while he talked his appearance seemed to change and grow less repelling. The surliness left his face, his figure straightened from the lurching walk, and he even looked a shade cleaner. "It is wonderful the power she has over people," reflected the girl. "I suppose it comes just from being so kind and lovely."

"You mustn't give up hope," Mrs. Blackburn replied encouragingly. "We never know at what moment some good thing may turn up. It is a pity there isn't more work of the kind in Richmond."

"Well, you see, ma'am, Mr. Blackburn has cornered the whole lot. That's the way capital treats labour whenever it gets the chance." His face assumed an argumentative expression. "To be sure, Mr. Blackburn didn't start so very high himself, but that don't seem to make any difference, and the minute a man gets to the top, he tries to stop everybody else that's below him. If he hadn't had the luck to discover that cheap new way to make steel, I reckon he wouldn't be very far over my head to-day. It was all accident, that's what I tell the men down at the works, and luck ain't nothing but accident when you come to look at it."

Mrs. Blackburn frowned slightly. It was plain that she did not care to diminish the space between Blackburn and his workmen, and Ridley's contemptuous tone was not entirely to her liking. She wanted to stoop, not to stand on a level with the objects of her charity.

"The war abroad has opened so many opportunities," she observed, amiably but vaguely.

"It's shut down a sight more than it's opened," rejoined Ridley, who possessed the advantage of knowing something of what he was talking about. "All the works except the steel and munition plants are laying off men every hour. It's easy enough on men like Mr. Blackburn, but it's hard on us poor ones, and it don't make it any easier to be sending all of this good stuff out of the country. Let the folks in Europe look after themselves, that's what I say. There are hungry mouths enough right here in this country without raising the price of everything we eat by shipping the crops over the water. I tell you I'll vote for any man, I don't care what he calls himself, who will introduce a bill to stop sending our provisions to the folks over yonder who are fighting when they ought to be working——."

"But surely we must do our best to help the starving women and children of Europe. It wouldn't be human, it wouldn't be Christian——" Angelica paused and threw an appealing glance in the direction of Caroline, who shook her head scornfully and looked away to the children on the pavement. Why did she stoop to argue with the man? Couldn't she see that he was merely the cheapest sort of malcontent?

"The first thing you know we'll be dragged into this here war ourselves," pursued Ridley, rolling the wad of tobacco in his mouth, "and it's the men like Mr. Blackburn that will be doing it. There's a lot of fellows down at the works that talk just as he does, but that's because they think they know which side their bread is buttered on! Some of 'em will tell you the boss is the best friend they have on earth; but they are talking through their hats when they say so. As for me, I reckon I've got my wits about me, and as long as I have they ain't going to make me vote for nobody except the man who puts the full dinner pail before any darn squabble over the water. I ain't got anything against you, ma'am, but Mr. Blackburn ain't treated me white, and if my turn ever comes, I'm going to get even with him as sure as my name is James Ridley."

"I think we'd better go," said Caroline sternly. She had suspected from the first that Ridley had been drinking, and his rambling abuse was beginning to make her angry. It seemed not only foolish, but wicked to make a martyr of such a man.

"Yes, we must go," assented Mrs. Blackburn uneasily. "I won't see Mrs. Ridley to-day," she added. "Tell her to let me know when she has finished the socks, and I will send for them. I am giving her some knitting to do for the War Relief."

"All right, she may do what she pleases as long as she's paid for it," rejoined Ridley with a grin. "I ain't interfering."

Then, as the procession moved to the car, with the footman and the empty basket making a dignified rear-guard, he added apologetically, "I hope you won't bear me a grudge for my plain speaking, ma'am?"

"Oh, no, for I am sure you are honest," replied Mrs. Blackburn, with the manner of affable royalty.

At last, to Caroline's inexpressible relief, they drove away amid the eager stares of the children that crowded the long straight street. "I always wonder how they manage to bring up such large families," remarked Angelica as she gazed with distant benignity out of the window. "Oh, I quite forgot. I must speak to Mrs. Macy about some pillow cases. John, we will stop at Mrs. Macy's in the next block."

In a dark back room just beyond the next corner, they found an elderly woman hemstitching yards of fine thread cambric ruffling. As they entered, she pinned the narrow strip of lawn over her knee, and looked up without rising. She had a square, stolid face, which had settled into the heavy placidity that comes to those who expect nothing. Her thin white hair was parted and brushed back from her sunken temples, and her eyes, between chronically reddened lids, gazed at her visitors with a look of passive endurance. "My hip is bad to-day," she explained. "I hope you won't mind my not getting up." She spoke in a flat, colourless voice, as if she had passed beyond the sphere of life in which either surprises or disappointments are possible. Suffering had moulded her thought into the plastic impersonal substance of philosophy.

"Oh, don't think of moving, Mrs. Macy," returned Angelica kindly. "I stopped by to bring you the lace edging you needed, and to ask if you have finished any of the little pillow slips? Now, that your son is able to get back to work, you ought to have plenty of spare time for hemstitching."

"Yes, there's plenty of time," replied Mrs. Macy, without animation, "but it's slow work, and hard on weak eyes, even with spectacles. You like it done so fine that I have to take twice the trouble with the stitches, and I was just thinking of asking you if you couldn't pay me twenty cents instead of fifteen a yard? It's hard to make out now, with every mouthful you eat getting dearer all the time, and though Tom is a good son, he's got a large family to look after, and his eldest girl has been ailing of late, and had to have the doctor before she could keep on at school."

A queer look had crept into Angelica's face—the prudent and guarded expression of a financier who suspects that he is about to be over-matched, that, if he is not cautious, something will be got from him for nothing. For the instant her features lost their softness, and became sharp and almost ugly, while there flashed through Caroline's mind the amazing thought, "I believe she is stingy! Yet how could she be when she spends such a fortune on clothes?" Then the cautious look passed as swiftly as it had come, and Mrs. Blackburn stooped over the rocking-chair, and gathered the roll of thread cambric into her gloved hands. "I can have it done anywhere for fifteen cents a yard," she said slowly.

"Well, I know, ma'am, that used to be the price, but they tell me this sort of work is going up like everything else. When you think I used to pay eight and ten cents a pound for middling, and yesterday they asked me twenty-six cents at the store. Flour is getting so high we can barely afford it, and even corn meal gets dearer every day. If the war in Europe goes on, they say there won't be enough food left in America to keep us alive. It ain't that I'm complaining, Mrs. Blackburn, I know it's a hard world on us poor folks, and I ain't saying that anybody's to blame for it, but it did cross my mind, while I was thinking over these things a minute ago, that you might see your way to pay me a little more for the hemstitching."

While she talked she went on patiently turning the hem with her blunted thumb, and as she finished, she raised her head for the first time and gazed stoically, not into Angelica's face, but at a twisted ailantus tree which grew by the board fence of the backyard.'

"I am glad you look at things so sensibly, Mrs. Macy," observed Angelica cheerfully. She had dropped the ruffling to the floor, and as she straightened herself, she recovered her poise and amiability. "One hears so many complaints now among working people, and at a time like this, when the country is approaching a crisis, it is so important"—this was a favourite phrase with her, and she accented it firmly—"it is so important that all classes should stand together and work for the common good. I am sure I try to do my bit. There is scarcely an hour when I am not trying to help, but I do feel that the well-to-do classes should not be expected to make all the sacrifices. The working people must do their part, and with the suffering in Europe, and the great need of money for charities, it doesn't seem quite fair, does it, for you to ask more than you've been getting? It isn't as if fifteen cents a yard wasn't a good price. I can easily get it done elsewhere for that, but I thought you really needed the work."

"I do," said Mrs. Macy, with a kind of dry terror. "It's all I've got to live on."

"Then I'm sure you ought to be thankful to get it and not complain because it isn't exactly what you would like. All of us, Mrs. Macy, have to put up with things that we wish were different. If you would only stop to think of the suffering in Belgium, you would feel grateful instead of dissatisfied with your lot. Why, I can't sleep at night because my mind is so full of the misery in the world."

"I reckon you're right," Mrs. Macy replied humbly, and she appeared completely convinced by the argument. "It's awful enough the wretchedness over there, and Tom and I have tried to help the little we could. We can't give much, but he has left off his pipe for a month in order to send what he spent in tobacco, and I've managed to do some knitting the last thing at night and the first in the morning. I couldn't stint on food because there wasn't any to spare, so I said to myself, 'Well, I reckon there's one thing you can give and that's sleep.' So Mrs. Miller, she lets me have the yarn, and I manage to go to bed an hour later and get up an hour sooner. When you've got to my age, the thing you can spare best is sleep."

"You're right, and I'm glad you take that rational view." Mrs. Blackburn's manner was kind and considerate. "Every gift is better that includes sacrifice, don't you feel? Tell your son that I think it is fine his giving up tobacco. He has his old place at the works, hasn't he?"

"I wrote straight to Mr. Blackburn, ma'am, and he made the foreman hold it for him. Heaven only knows how we'd have managed but for your husband. He ain't the sort that talks unless he is on the platform, but I don't believe he ever forgets to be just when the chance comes to him. There are some folks that call him a hard man, but Tom says it ain't hardness, but justice, and I reckon Tom knows. Tom says the boss hasn't any use for idlers and drunkards, but he's fair enough to the ones who stand by him and do their work—and all the stuff they are putting in the papers about trouble down at the works ain't anything on earth but a political game."

"Well, we must go," said Mrs. Blackburn, who had been growing visibly restless. On her way to the door she paused for an instant and asked, "Your son is something of a politician himself, isn't he, Mrs. Macy?"

"Yes, 'm, Tom has a good deal to do with the Federation of Labour, and in that way he comes more or less into politics. He has a lot of good hard sense if I do say it, and I reckon there ain't anybody that stands better with the workers than he does."

"Of course he is a Democrat?"

"Well, he always used to be, ma'am, but of late I've noticed that he seems to be thinking the way Mr. Blackburn does. It wouldn't surprise me if he voted with him when the time came, and the way Tom votes," she added proudly, "a good many others will vote, too. He says just as Mr. Blackburn does that the new times take new leaders—that's one of Tom's sayings—and that both the Democratic and Republican Parties ain't big enough for these days. Tom says they are both hitched tight, like two mules, to the past."

By this time Angelica had reached the door, and as she passed out, with Letty's hand in hers, she glanced back and remarked, "I should think the working people would be grateful to any party that keeps them out of the war."

Mrs. Macy looked up from her needle. "Well, war is bad," she observed shortly, "but I've lived through one, and I ain't saying that I haven't seen things that are worse."

The air was fresh and bracing after the close room, and a little later, as they turned into Franklin Street, Angelica leaned out of the window as if she were drinking deep draughts of sunlight.

"The poor are so unintelligent," she observed when she had drawn in her head again. "They seem never able to think with any connection. The war has been going on for a long time now, and yet they haven't learned that it is any concern of theirs."

Letty had begun coughing, and Caroline drew her closer while she asked anxiously, "Do you think it is wise to take a child into close houses?"

"Well, I meant to stay only a moment, but I thought Mrs. Macy would never stop talking. Do you feel badly, darling? Come closer to mother."

"Oh, no, I'm well," answered the child. "It is just my throat that tickles." Then her tone changed, and as they stopped at the corner of the park, she cried out with pleasure, "Isn't that Uncle Roane over there? Uncle Roane, do you see us?"

A handsome, rather dissipated looking young man, with a mop of curly light hair and insolent blue eyes, glanced round at the call, and came quickly to the car, which waited under the elms by the sidewalk. The street was gay with flying motors, and long bars of sunshine slanted across the grass of the park, where groups of negro nurses gossiped drowsily beside empty perambulators.

"Why, Anna Jeannette!" exclaimed the young man, with genial mockery. "This is a pleasure which I thought your worthy Bluebeard had forbidden me!"

"Get in, and I'll take you for a little drive. This is Miss Meade. You met her that night at Briarlay."

"The angel in the house! I remember." He smiled boldly into Caroline's face. "Well, Letty, I'd like to trade my luck for yours. Look at your poor uncle, and tell me honestly if I am not the one who needs to be nursed. Lend her to me?"

"I can't lend you Miss Meade, Uncle Roane," replied the child seriously, "because she plays with me; but if you really need somebody, I reckon I can let you have Mammy Riah for a little while."

Roane laughed while he bent over and pinched Letty's cheek. That he had a bad reputation, Caroline was aware, and though she was obliged to admit that he looked as if he deserved it, she could not deny that he possessed the peculiar charm which one of the old novels at The Cedars described as "the most dangerous attribute of a rake." "I could never like him, yet I can understand how some women might fall in love with him," she thought.

"No, I decline, with thanks, your generous offer," Roane was saying. "If I cannot be nursed by an angel, I will not be nursed by a witch."

Beneath his insolent, admiring gaze a lovely colour flooded Caroline's cheeks. In the daylight his manner seemed to her more offensive than ever, and her impulsive recognition of his charm was followed by an instantaneous recoil.

"I don't like witches," said Letty. "Do you think Miss Meade is an angel, Uncle Roane?"

"From first impressions," retorted Roane flippantly, "I should say that she might be."

As Caroline turned away indignantly, Angelica leaned over and gently patted her hand. "You mustn't mind him, my dear, that's just Roane's way," she explained.

"But I do mind," replied Caroline, with spirit. "I think he is very impertinent."

"Think anything you please, only think of me," rejoined Roane, with a gallant air.

"You bad boy!" protested Angelica. "Can't you see that Miss Meade is provoked with you?"

"No woman, Anna Jeannette, is provoked by a sincere and humble admiration. Are you ignorant of the feminine heart?"

"If you won't behave yourself, Roane, you must get out of the car. And for heaven's sake, stop calling me by that name!"

"My dear sister, I thought it was yours."

"It is not the one I'm known by." She was clearly annoyed. "By the way, have you got your costume for the tableaux? You were so outrageous at Mrs. Miller's the other night that if they could find anybody else, I believe that they would refuse to let you take part. Why are you so dreadful, Roane?"

"They require me, not my virtue, sister. Go over the list of young men in your set, and tell me if there is another Saint George of England among them?"

His air of mocking pride was so comic that a smile curved Caroline's lips, while Angelica commented seriously, "Well, you aren't nearly so good-looking as you used to be, and if you go on drinking much longer, you will be a perfect fright."

"How she blights my honourable ambition!" exclaimed Roane to Caroline. "Even the cherished career of a tableau favourite is forbidden me."

"Mother is going to be Peace," said Letty, with her stately manner of making conversation, "and she will look just like an angel. Her dress has come all the way from New York, Uncle Roane, and they sent a wreath of leaves to go on her head. If I don't get sick, Miss Meade is going to take me to see her Friday night."

"Well, if I am brother to Peace, Letty, I must be good. Miss Meade, how do you like Richmond?"

"I love it," answered Caroline, relieved by his abrupt change of tone. "The people are so nice. There is Mrs. Colfax now. Isn't she beautiful?"

They were running into Monument Avenue, and Daisy Colfax had just waved to them from a passing car.

"Yes, I proposed to her twice," replied Roane, gazing after Daisy's rose-coloured veil which streamed gaily behind her. "But she could not see her way, unfortunately, to accept me. I am not sure, between you and me, that she didn't go farther and fare worse with old Robert. I might have broken her heart, but I should never have bored her. Speaking of Robert, Anna Jeannette, was he really the author of that slashing editorial in the Free-Press?"

"Everybody thinks he wrote it, but it doesn't sound a bit like him. Wasn't it dreadful, Roane?"

"Oh, well, nothing is fair in politics, but the plum," he returned. "By the way, is it true about Blackburn's vaulting ambition, or is it just newspaper stuff?"

"Of course I know nothing positively, Roane, for David never talks to me about his affairs; but he seems to get more and more distracted about politics every day that he lives. I shouldn't like to have it repeated, yet I can't help the feeling that there is a great deal of truth in what the article says about his disloyalty to the South."

"Well, I shouldn't lose any sleep over that if I were you. No man ever took a step forward on this earth that he didn't move away from something that the rest of the world thought he ought to have stood by. There isn't much love lost between your husband and me, but it isn't a political difference that divides us. He has the bad taste not to admire my character."

"I know you never feel seriously about these things," said Angelica sadly, "but I always remember how ardently dear father loved the Democratic Party. He used to say that he could forgive a thief sooner than a traitor."

"Great Scott! What is there left to be a traitor to?" demanded Roane, disrespectfully. "A political machine that grinds out jobs isn't a particularly patriotic institution. I am not taking sides with Blackburn, my dear sister, only I'd be darned before I'd have acted the part of your precious Colfax. It may be good politics, but it's pretty bad sport, I should think. It isn't playing the game."

"I suppose Robert feels that things are really going too far," observed Angelica feebly, for her arguments always moved in a circle. "He believes so strongly, you know, in the necessity of keeping the South solid. Of course he may not really have attacked David," she added quickly. "There are other editors."

"I am sure there is not one bit of truth in that article," said Caroline suddenly, and her voice trembled with resentment. "I know Mr. Blackburn doesn't oppress his men because we've just been talking with the mother of a man who works in his plant. As for the rest, I was listening to him this afternoon, and I believe he is right." Her eyes were glowing as she finished, and her elusive beauty—the beauty of spirit, not of flesh—gave her features the rare and noble grace of a marble Diana. Her earnestness had suddenly lifted her above them. Though she was only a dark, slender woman, with a gallant heart, she seemed to Roane as remote and royal as a goddess. He liked the waving line of hair on her clear forehead, where the light gathered in a benediction; he liked her firm red lips, with their ever-changing play of expression, and he liked above all the lovely lines of her figure, which was at once so strong and so light, so feminine and so spirited. It was the beauty of character, he told himself, and, by Jove, in a woman, he liked character!

"Well, he has a splendid champion, lucky dog!" he exclaimed, with his eyes on her face.

For an instant Caroline wavered as Angelica's gaze, full of pained surprise, turned toward her; then gathering her courage, she raised her lashes and met Roane's admiring stare with a candid and resolute look.

"No, it is not that," she said, "but I can't bear to see people unjust to any one."

"You are right," ejaculated Roane impulsively, and he added beneath his breath, "By George, I hope you'll stand up for me like that when I am knocked."

CHAPTER X
Other Discoveries

IN the morning Letty awoke with a sore throat, and before night she had developed a cold which spent itself in paroxysms of coughing. "Oh, Miss Meade, make me well before Friday," she begged, as Caroline undressed her. "Isn't Friday almost here now?"

"In three days, dear. You must hurry and get over this cold."

"Do you think I am going to be well, Mammy?" They were in the nursery at Letty's bedtime, and Mammy Riah was heating a cup of camphorated oil over the fire.

"You jes' wait twel I git dish yer' red flan'l on yo' chist, en hit's gwinter breck up yo' cough toreckly," replied Mammy Riah reassuringly. "I'se done soused hit right good in dis hot ile."

"I'll do anything you want. I'll swallow it right down if it will make me well."

"Dar ain't nuttin dat'll breck up a cole quick'n hot ile," said the old woman, "lessen hit's a hot w'iskey toddy."

"Well, you can't give her that," interposed Caroline quickly, "if she isn't better in the morning I'm going to send for Doctor Boland. I've done everything I could think of. Now, jump into bed Letty, dear, and let me cover you up warm before I open the window. I am going to sleep on the couch in the corner."

"Hit pears to me like you en Marse David is done gone clean 'stracted 'bout fresh a'r," grumbled Mammy Riah, as she drew a strip of red flannel out of the oil. "Dar ain' nuttin in de worl' de matter wid dis chile but all dis night a'r you's done been lettin' in on 'er w'ile she wuz sleepin'. Huh! I knows jes ez much about night a'r ez enny er yo' reel doctahs, en I ain' got er bit er use fur hit, I ain't. Hit's a woner to me you all ain' done kilt 'er betweenst you, you and Marse David en Miss Angy, 'en yo' reel doctah. Ef'n you ax me, I 'ud let down all dem winders, en stuff up de chinks wid rags twel Letty was peart enuff ter be outer dat baid."

The danger in night air had been a source of contention ever since the first frost of the season, and though science had at last carried its point, Caroline felt that the victory had cost her both the respect and the affection of the old negress.

"I ain' never riz noner my chillun on night a'r," she muttered rebelliously, while she brought the soaked flannel over to Letty's bed.

"I hope it will cure me," said the child eagerly, and she added after a moment in which Mammy Riah zealously applied the oil and covered her with blankets, "Do you think I'd better have all the night air shut out as she says, Miss Meade?"

"No, darling," answered Caroline firmly. "Fresh air will cure you quicker than anything else."

But, in spite of the camphorated oil and the wide-open windows, Letty was much worse in the morning. Her face was flushed with fever, and she refused her breakfast, when Mammy Riah brought it, because as she said, "everything hurt her." Even her passionate interest in the tableaux had evaporated, and she lay, inert and speechless, in her little bed, while her eyes followed Caroline wistfully about the room.

"I telephoned for Doctor Boland the first thing," said Caroline to the old woman, "and now I am going to speak to Mrs. Blackburn. Will you sit with Letty while I run down for a cup of coffee?"

"Ef'n I wuz you, I wouldn't wake Miss Angy," replied the negress. "Hit'll mek 'er sick jes ez sho' ez you live. You'd better run along down en speak ter Marse David."

"I'll tell him at breakfast, but oughtn't Letty's mother to know how anxious I am?"

"She's gwine ter know soon enuff," responded Mammy Riah, "but dey don' low none un us ter rouse 'er twell she's hed 'er sleep out. Miss Angy is one er dem nervous sort, en she gits 'stracted moughty easy."

In the dining-room, which was flooded with sunshine, Caroline found the housekeeper and Blackburn, who had apparently finished his breakfast, and was glancing over a newspaper. There was a pile of half-opened letters by his plate, and his face wore the look of animation which she associated with either politics or business.

"I couldn't leave Letty until Mammy Riah came," she explained in an apologetic tone. "Her cold is so much worse that I've telephoned for the doctor."

At this Blackburn folded the paper and pushed back his chair. "How long has she had it?" he inquired anxiously. "I thought she wasn't well yesterday." There was the tender, protecting sound in his voice that always came with the mention of Letty.

"She hasn't been herself for several days, but this morning she seems suddenly worse. I am afraid it may be pneumonia."

"Have you said anything to Angelica?" asked Mrs. Timberlake, and her tone struck Caroline as strained and non-committal.

"Mammy Riah wouldn't let me wake her. I am going to her room as soon as her bell rings."

"Well, she's awake. I've just sent up her breakfast." The housekeeper spoke briskly. "She has to be in town for some rehearsals."

Blackburn had gone out, and Caroline sat alone at the table while she hastily swallowed a cup of coffee. It was a serene and cloudless day, and the view of the river had never looked so lovely as it did through the falling leaves and over the russet sweep of autumn grasses. October brooded with golden wings over the distance.

"I had noticed that Letty had a sort of hacking cough for three days," said Mrs. Timberlake from the window, "but I didn't think it would amount to anything serious."

"Yes, I tried to cure it, and last night Mammy Riah doctored her. The child is so delicate that the slightest ailment is dangerous. It seems strange that she should be so frail. Mr. Blackburn looks strong, and his wife was always well until recently, wasn't she?"

For a moment Mrs. Timberlake stared through the window at a sparrow which was perched on the topmost branch of a juniper. "I never saw any one hate to have a child as much as Angelica did," she said presently in her dry tones. "She carried on like a crazy woman about it. Some women are like that, you know."

"Yes, I know, but she is devoted to Letty now."

The housekeeper did not reply, and her face grew greyer and harsher than ever.

"No one could be sweeter than she is with her," said Caroline, after a moment in which she tried to pierce mentally the armour of Mrs. Timberlake's reserve. "She isn't always so silent," she thought. "I hear her talking by the hour to Mammy Riah, but it is just as if she were afraid of letting out something if she opened her lips. I wonder if she is really so prejudiced against Mrs. Blackburn that she can't talk of her?" Though Caroline's admiration for Angelica had waned a little on closer acquaintance, she still thought her kind and beautiful, except in her incomprehensible attitude to the old sewing woman in Pine Street. The recollection of that scene, which she had found it impossible to banish entirely, was a sting in her memory; and as she recalled it now, her attitude toward Angelica changed insensibly from that of an advocate to a judge.

"Oh, Angelica is sweet enough," said the housekeeper suddenly, with a rasping sound, as if the words scraped her throat as she uttered them, "if you don't get in her way." Then facing Caroline squarely, she added in the same tone, "I'm not saying anything against Angelica, Miss Meade. Our grandmothers were sisters, and I am not the sort to turn against my own blood kin, but you'll hear a heap of stories about the way things go on in this house, and I want you to take it from me in the beginning that there are a plenty of worse husbands than David Blackburn. He isn't as meek as Moses, but he's been a good friend to me, and if I wanted a helping hand, I reckon I'd go to him now a sight quicker than I would to Angelica, though she's my kin and he isn't."

Rising hurriedly, as she finished, she gave a curt little laugh and exclaimed, "Well, there's one thing David and I have in common. We're both so mortal shutmouthed because when we once begin to talk, we always let the cat out of the bag. Now, if you're through, you can go straight upstairs and have a word with Angelica before she begins to dress."

She went over to the sideboard, and began counting the silver aloud, while Caroline pushed back her chair, and ran impatiently upstairs to Mrs. Blackburn's room. At her knock the maid, Mary, opened the door, and beyond her Angelica's voice said plaintively, "Oh, Miss Meade, Mary tells me that Letty's cold is very bad. I am so anxious about her."

A breakfast tray was before her, and while she looked down at the china coffee service, which was exquisitely thin and fragile, she broke off a piece of toast, and buttered it carefully, with the precise attention she devoted to the smallest of her personal needs. It seemed to Caroline that she had never appeared so beautiful as she did against the lace pillows, in her little cap and dressing sack of sky-blue silk.

"I came to tell you," said Caroline. "She complains of pain whenever she moves, and I'm afraid, unless something is done at once, it may turn into pneumonia."

"Well, I'm coming immediately, just as soon as I've had my coffee. I woke up with such a headache that I don't dare to stir until I've eaten. You have sent for the doctor, of course?"

"I telephoned very early, but I suppose he won't be here until after his office hours."

Having eaten the piece of toast, Angelica drank her coffee, and motioned to Mary to remove the tray from her knees. "I'll get up at once," she said. "Mary, give me my slippers. You told me so suddenly that I haven't yet got over the shock."

She looked distressed and frightened, and a little later, when she followed Caroline into the nursery and stooped over Letty's bed, her attitude was that of an early Italian Madonna. The passion of motherhood seemed to pervade her whole yearning body, curving the soft lines to an ineffable beauty.

"Letty, darling, are you better?"

The child opened her eyes and stared, without smiling, in her mother's face.

"Yes, I am better," she answered in a panting voice, "but I wish it didn't hurt so."

"The doctor is coming. He will give you some medicine to cure it."

"Mammy says that it is the night air that makes me sick, but father says that hasn't anything to do with it."

From the fire which she was tending, Mammy Riah looked up moodily. "Huh! I reckon Marse David cyarn' teach me nuttin' 'bout raisin chillun," she muttered under her breath.

"Ask the doctor. He will tell you," answered Angelica. "Do you think it is warm enough in here, Miss Meade?"

"Yes, I am careful about the temperature." Almost unconsciously Caroline had assumed her professional manner, and as she stood there in her white uniform beside Letty's bed, she looked so capable and authoritative that even Mammy Riah was cowed, though she still grumbled in a deep whisper.

"Of course you know best," said Angelica, with the relief she always felt whenever any one removed a responsibility from her shoulders, or assumed a duty which naturally belonged to her. "Has she fallen asleep so quickly?"

"No, it's stupor. She has a very high fever."

"I don't like that blue look about her mouth, and her breathing is so rapid. Do you think she is seriously ill, Miss Meade?" Angelica had withdrawn from the bed, and as she asked the question, she lowered her voice until her words were almost inaudible. Her eyes were soft and anxious under the drooping lace edge of her cap.

"I don't like her pulse," Caroline also spoke in a whisper, with an anxious glance at the bed, though Letty seemed oblivious of their presence in the room. "I am just getting ready to sponge her with alcohol. That may lower her temperature."

For a moment Mrs. Blackburn wavered between the bed and the door. "I wish I didn't have to go to town," she said nervously. "If it were for anything else except these tableaux I shouldn't think of it. But in a cause like this, when there is so much suffering to be relieved, I feel that one ought not to let personal anxieties interfere. Don't you think I am right, Miss Meade?"

"I haven't thought about it," replied Caroline with her usual directness. "But I am sure you are the best judge of what you ought to do."

"I have the most important part, you see, and if I were to withdraw, it would be such a disappointment to the committee. There isn't any one else they could get at the last moment."

"I suppose not. There is really nothing that you can do here."

"That is what I thought." Angelica's tone was one of relief. "Of course if I were needed about anything it would be different; but you are better able than I am to decide what ought to be done. I always feel so helpless," she added sadly, "when there is illness in the house."

With the relinquishment of responsibility, she appeared to grow almost cheerful. If she had suddenly heard that Letty was much better, or had discovered, after harrowing uncertainty, the best and surest treatment for pneumonia, her face would probably have worn just such a relieved and grateful expression. In one vivid instant, with a single piercing flash of insight, the other woman seemed to look straight through that soft feminine body to Mrs. Blackburn's thin and colourless soul. "I know what she is now—she is thin," said Caroline to herself. "She is thin all through, and I shall never feel the same about her again. She doesn't want trouble, she doesn't want responsibility because it makes her uncomfortable—that is why she turns Letty over to me. She is beautiful, and she is sweet when nothing disturbs her, but I believe she is selfish underneath all that softness and sweetness which costs her so little." And she concluded with a merciless judgment, "That is why she wasn't kind to that poor old woman in Pine Street. It would have cost her something, and she can't bear to pay. She wants to get everything for nothing."

The iron in her soul hardened suddenly, for she knew that this moment of revelation had shattered for her the romance of Briarlay. She might still be fascinated by Mrs. Blackburn; she might still pity her and long to help her; she might still blame Blackburn bitterly for his hardness—but she could never again wholly sympathize with Angelica.

"There isn't anything in the world that you can do," she repeated gravely.

"I knew you'd say that, and it is so good of you to reassure me." Mrs. Blackburn smiled from the threshold. "Now, I must dress, or I shall be late for the rehearsal. If the doctor comes while I am away, please ask him if he thinks another nurse is necessary. David tells me he telephoned for an extra one for night duty; but, dear Miss Meade, I feel so much better satisfied when I know that Letty is in your charge every minute."

"Oh, she is in my charge. Even if the other nurse comes, I shall still sleep in the room next to her."

"You are so splendid!" For an instant Angelica shone on her from the hall. Then the door closed behind her, and an hour afterwards, as Caroline sat by Letty's bed, with her hand on her pulse, she heard the motor start down the drive and turn rapidly into the lane.

At one o'clock the doctor came, and he was still there a quarter of an hour later, when Mrs. Blackburn rustled, with an anxious face, into the room. She wore a suit of grey cloth, and, with her stole and muff of silver fox, and her soft little hat of grey velvet, she made Caroline think of one of the aspen trees, in a high wind, on the lawn at The Cedars. She was all delicate, quivering gleams of silver, and even her golden hair looked dim and shadowy, under a grey veil, as if it were seen through a mist.

"Oh, Doctor, she isn't really so ill, is she?" Her eyes implored him to spare her, and while she questioned him, she flung the stole of silver fox away from her throat, as if the weight of the furs oppressed her.

"Well, you mustn't be too anxious. We are doing all we can, you know. In a day or two, I hope, we'll have got her over the worst." He was a young man, the son of Mrs. Colfax's friend, old Doctor Boland, and all his eager youth seemed to start from his eyes while he gazed at Angelica. "Beauty like that is a power," thought Caroline almost resentfully. "It hides everything—even vacancy." All the men she had seen with Mrs. Blackburn, except her husband, had gazed at her with this worshipful and protecting look; and, as she watched it shine now in Doctor Boland's eyes, she wondered cynically why David Blackburn alone should be lacking in this particular kind of chivalry. "He is the only man who looks at her as if she were a human being, not an angel," she reflected. "I wonder if he used to do it once, and if he has stopped because he has seen deeper than any of the others?"

"Then it isn't really pneumonia?" asked Angelica.

He hesitated, still trying to answer the appeal in her eyes, and to spare her the truth if it were possible.

"It looks now as if it might be, Mrs. Blackburn, but children pick up so quickly, you know." He reached out his arm as he answered, and led her to the couch in one corner. "Have you some aromatic ammonia at hand, Miss Meade? I think you might give Mrs. Blackburn a few drops of it."

Caroline measured the drops from a bottle on the table by Letty's bed. "Perhaps she had better lie down," she suggested.

"Yes, I think I'll go to my room," answered Angelica, rising from the couch, as she lifted a grateful face to the young doctor. "A shock always upsets me, and ever since Mary told me how ill Letty was, I have felt as if I couldn't breathe."

She looked really unhappy, and as Caroline met her eyes, she reproached herself for her harsh criticism of the morning. After all, Angelica couldn't help being herself. After all, she wasn't responsible for her limited intelligence and her coldness of nature! Perhaps she felt more in her heart than she was able to express, in spite of her perfect profile and her wonderful eyes. "Even her selfishness may be due to her bringing up, and the way everyone has always spoiled her," pursued the girl, with a swift reaction from her severe judgment.

When Angelica had gone out, Doctor Boland came over to the bed, and stood gazing thoughtfully down on the child, who stirred restlessly and stared up at him with bright, glassy eyes. It was plain to Caroline that he was more disturbed than he had admitted; and his grave young features looked old and drawn while he stood there in silence. He was a thickset man, with an ugly, intelligent face and alert, nearsighted eyes behind enormous glasses with tortoise-shell rims.

"If we can manage to keep her temperature down," he said, and added as if he were pursuing his original train of thought, "Mrs. Blackburn is unusually sensitive."

"She is not very strong."

"For that reason it is better not to alarm her unnecessarily. I suppose Mr. Blackburn can always be reached?"

"Oh, yes, I have his telephone number. He asked me to call him up as soon as I had seen you."

After this he gave a few professional directions, and left abruptly with the remark, "I'll look in early to-morrow. There is really nothing we can do except keep up the treatment and have as much fresh air as possible in the room. If all goes well, I hope she will have pulled through the worst by Friday—and if I were you," he hesitated and a flush rose to his sandy hair, "I should be careful how I broke any bad news to Mrs. Blackburn."

He went out, closing the door cautiously, as if he feared to make any sound in the house, while Caroline sat down to wonder what it was about Angelica that made every man, even the doctor, so anxious to spare her? "I believe his chief concern about poor Letty is that this illness disturbs her mother," she mused, without understanding. "Well, I hope his prophecy will come true, and that the worst will be over by Friday. If she isn't, it will be a blow to the entertainment committee."

But when Friday came, the child was so much worse that the doctor, when he hurried out before his office hours, looked old and grey with anxiety. At eleven o'clock Blackburn sent his car back to the garage, and came up, with a book which he did not open, to sit in Letty's room. As he entered, Angelica rose from the couch on which she had been lying, and laid her hand on his arm.

"I am so glad you have come, David. It makes me better satisfied to have you in the house."

"I am not going to the works. Mayfield is coming to take down some letters, and I shall be here all day."

"It is a comfort to know that. I couldn't close my eyes last night, so if you are going to be here, I think I'll try to rest a few minutes."

She was pale and tired, and for the first time since she had been in the house, Caroline discerned a shade of sympathy in the glances they interchanged. "What a beautiful thing it would be if Letty's illness brought them together," she thought, with a wave of happiness in the midst of her apprehension. She had read of men and women who were miraculously ennobled in the crucial moments of life, and her vivid fancy was already weaving a romantic ending to the estrangement of the Blackburns. After all, more improbable things had happened, she told herself in one of her mother's favourite phrases.

At five o'clock, when Doctor Boland came, Blackburn had gone down to his library, and Caroline, who had just slipped into a fresh uniform, was alone in the room. Her eyes were unnaturally large and dark; but she looked cool and composed, and her vitality scarcely felt the strain of the three sleepless nights. Though the second nurse came on duty at six o'clock, Caroline had been too restless and wakeful to stay in her room, and had spent the nights on the couch by the nursery window.

"If we can manage to keep up her strength through the night——"

The doctor had already looked over the chart, and he held it now in his hand while he waited for a response.

"There is a fighting chance, isn't there?"

His face was very grave, though his voice still maintained its professional cheerfulness. "With a child there is always a chance, and if she pulls through the night——"

"I shall keep my eyes on her every minute." As she spoke she moved back to Letty's bed, while the doctor went out with an abrupt nod and the words, "Mr. Blackburn wishes me to spend the night here. I'll be back after dinner."

The door had hardly closed after him, when it opened again noiselessly, and Mrs. Timberlake thrust her head through the crack. As she peered into the room, with her long sallow face and her look of mutely inviting disaster, there flashed through Caroline's mind the recollection of one of her father's freckled engravings of "Hecuba Gazing Over the Ruins of Troy."

"I've brought you a cup of tea. Couldn't you manage to drink it?"

"Yes, I'd like it." There was something touching in the way Mrs. Timberlake seemed to include her in the distress of the family—to assume that her relation to Letty was not merely the professional one of a nurse to a patient.

Stepping cautiously, as if she were in reality treading on ruins, the housekeeper crossed the room and placed the tray on the table at the bedside. While she leaned over to pour out the tea, she murmured in a rasping whisper, "Mammy Riah is crying so I wouldn't let her come in. Can Letty hear us?"

"No, she is in a stupor. She has been moaning a good deal, but she is too weak to keep it up. I've just given her some medicine."

Her gaze went back to the child, who stirred and gave a short panting sob. In her small transparent face, which was flushed with fever, the blue circle about the mouth seemed to start out suddenly like the mark of a blow. She lay very straight and slim under the cover, as if she had shrunken to half her size since her illness, and her soft, fine hair, drawn smoothly back from her waxen forehead, clung as flat and close as a cap.

"I'd scarcely know her," murmured the housekeeper, with a catch in her throat.

"If she passes the crisis she will pick up quickly. I've seen children as ill as this who were playing about the room a few days afterwards." Caroline tried to speak brightly, but in spite of her efforts, there was a note of awe in her voice.

"Is it really as grave as we fear, Miss Meade?"

Caroline met the question frankly. "It is very grave, Mrs. Timberlake, but with a child, as the doctor told me a minute ago, there is always hope of a sudden change for the better."

"Have you said anything to Angelica?"

"She was in here a little while ago, just before the doctor's visit, but I tried not to alarm her. She is so easily made ill."

The windows were wide open, and Mrs. Timberlake went over to the nearest one, and stood gazing out on the lawn and the half-bared elms. A light wind was blowing, and while she stood there, she shivered and drew the knitted purple cape she wore closer about her shoulders. Beyond the interlacing boughs the sunlight streamed in a golden shower on the grass, which was still bright and green, and now and then a few sparkling drops were scattered through the broad windows, and rippled over the blanket on Letty's bed. "It is hard to get used to these new-fangled ways," observed the housekeeper presently as she moved back to the fire. "In my days we'd have thought a hot room and plenty of whiskey toddy the best things for pneumonia."

"The doctor told me to keep the windows wide open."

"I heard him say so, but don't you think you had better put on a wrap? It feels chilly."

"Oh, no, I'm quite warm." Caroline finished the cup of tea as she spoke and gave back the tray. "That did me good. I needed it."

"I thought so." From the tone in which the words were uttered Caroline understood that the housekeeper was gaining time. "Are you sure you oughtn't to say something to Angelica?"

"Say something? You mean tell her how ill Letty is? Why, the doctor gave me my instructions. He said positively that I was not to alarm Mrs. Blackburn."

"I don't think he understood. He doesn't know that she still expects to be in the tableaux to-night."

For an instant Caroline stared back at her without a word; then she said in an incredulous whisper, "Oh, she wouldn't—she couldn't!"

"She feels it to be her duty—her sacred duty, she has just told me so. You see, I don't think she in the least realizes. She seems confident that Letty is better."

"How can she be? She was in here less than an hour ago."

"And she said nothing about to-night?"

"Not a word. I had forgotten about the tableaux, but, of course, I shouldn't have mentioned them. I tried to be cheerful, to keep up her spirit—but she must have seen. She couldn't help seeing."

The housekeeper's lips twitched, and she moistened them nervously. "If you knew Angelica as well as I do," she answered flatly, "you'd realize that she can help seeing anything on earth except the thing she wants to see."

"Then you must tell her," rejoined Caroline positively. "Someone must tell her.""I couldn't." Mrs. Timberlake was as emphatic as Caroline. "And what's more she wouldn't believe me if I did. She'd pretend it was some of my crankiness. You just wait till you try to convince Angelica of something she doesn't want to believe."

"I'll tell her if you think I ought to—or perhaps it would be better to go straight to Mr. Blackburn?"

Mrs. Timberlake coughed. "Well, I reckon if anybody can convince her, David can," she retorted. "He doesn't mince matters."

"The night nurse comes on at six o'clock, and just as soon as she gets here I'll go downstairs to Mr. Blackburn. That will be time enough, won't it?"

"Oh, yes, she isn't going until half-past seven. I came to you because I heard her order the car."

When she had gone Caroline turned back to her watch; but her heart was beating so rapidly that for a moment she confused it with Letty's feverish breathing. She reproached herself bitterly for not speaking frankly to Mrs. Blackburn, for trying to spare her; and yet, recalling the last interview, she scarcely knew what she could have said. "It seemed too cruel to tell her that Letty might not live through the night," she thought. "It seemed too cruel—but wasn't that just what Mrs. Timberlake meant when she said that Mr. Blackburn 'wouldn't mince matters?'"

The night nurse was five minutes late, and during these minutes, the suspense, the responsibility, became almost unbearable. It was as if the whole burden of Angelica's ignorance, of her apparent heartlessness, rested on Caroline's shoulders. "If she had gone I could never have forgiven myself," she was thinking when Miss Webster, the nurse, entered with her brisk, ingratiating manner.

"I stopped to speak to Mrs. Blackburn," she explained. "She tells me Letty is better." Her fine plain face, from which a wealth of burnished red hair was brushed severely back, beamed with interest and sympathy. Though she had been nursing private cases for ten years, she had not lost the energy and enthusiasm of a pupil nurse in the hospital. Her tall, erect figure, with its tightly confined hips, bent back, like a steel spring, whenever she stooped over the child.

Caroline shook her head without replying, for Letty had opened her eyes and was gazing vacantly at the ceiling. "Do you want anything, darling? Miss Webster is going to sit with you a minute while I run downstairs to speak to father."

But the child had closed her eyes again, and it was impossible to tell whether or not the words had penetrated the stupor in which she had been lying for the last two or three hours. A few moments later, as Caroline descended the staircase and crossed the hall to Blackburn's library, the memory of Letty's look floated between her and the object of her errand. "If Mrs. Blackburn could see that she would know," she told herself while she raised her hand to the panel of the door. "She couldn't help knowing."

At the knock Blackburn called to her to enter, and when she pushed the door open and crossed the threshold, she saw that he was standing by the window, looking out at the afterglow. Beyond the terrace and the dark spires of the junipers, the autumn fields were changing from brown to purple under the flower-like pink of the sky. Somewhere in the distance one of the Airedale terriers was whining softly.

As soon as he caught sight of her, Blackburn crossed the floor with a rapid stride, and stood waiting for her to speak. Though he did not open his lips, she saw his face grow white, and the corners of his mouth contract suddenly as if a tight cord were drawn. For the first time she noticed that he had a way of narrowing his eyes when he stared fixedly.

"There hasn't been any change, Mr. Blackburn. I wish to speak to you about something else."

From the sharp breath that he drew, she could measure the unutterable relief that swept over him.

"You say there hasn't been any change?"

"Not since morning. She is, of course, very ill, but with a child," she had repeated the phrase so often that it seemed to have lost its meaning, "the crisis sometimes comes very quickly. If we can manage to keep up her strength for the next twenty-four hours, I believe the worst will be over."

His figure, as he stood there in the dim light, was impressed with a new vividness on her mind, and it was as he looked at this moment that she always remembered him.

"Do you wish anything?" he asked. "Is everything being done that is possible?"

"Everything. The doctor is coming to spend the night, and I shall sit up with Miss Webster."

"But don't you need rest? Can you go without sleep and not lose your strength?"

She shook her head. "I couldn't sleep until she is better."

A look of gratitude leaped to his eyes, and she became aware, through some subtle wave of perception, that for the first time, she had assumed a definite image in his thoughts.

"Thank you," he answered simply, but his tone was full of suppressed feeling.

While he looked at her the old prejudice, the old suspicion and resentment faded from her face, and she gazed back at him with trusting and friendly eyes. Though she was pale and tired, and there were lines of worry and sleeplessness in her forehead, she appeared to him the incarnation of helpfulness. The spirit of goodness and gentleness shone in her smile, and ennobled her slight womanly figure, which drooped a little in its trim uniform. She looked as if she would fight to the death, would wear herself to a shadow, for any one she loved, or for any cause in which she believed.

"I came to ask you," she said very quietly, "if it would not be better to tell Mrs. Blackburn the truth about Letty?"

He started in amazement. "But she knows, doesn't she?"

"She doesn't know everything. She thinks Letty is better. Miss Webster has been talking to her."

"And you think she ought to be warned?"

Her question had evidently puzzled him.

"I think it is unfair to leave her in ignorance. She does not in the least realize Letty's condition. Mrs. Timberlake tells me she heard her order the car for half-past seven."

"Order the car?" He seemed to be groping through a fog of uncertainty. If only heaven had granted intuition to men, thought Caroline impatiently, how much time might be saved!

"To go to the tableaux. You know the tableaux are to-night."

"Yes, I had forgotten." His tone changed and grew positive. "Of course she must be told. I will tell her."

"That is all." She turned away as she spoke, and laid her hand on the knob of the door. "Mrs. Timberlake and I both felt that I ought to speak to you."

"I am glad you did." He had opened the door for her, and following her a step or two into the hall, he added gratefully, "I can never thank you enough."

Without replying, she hurried to the staircase, and ran up the steps to the second storey. When she reached the door of the nursery, she glanced round before entering, and saw that Blackburn had already come upstairs and was on his way to Angelica's room. While she watched, she saw him knock, and then open the door and cross the threshold with his rapid step.

Miss Webster was sitting by Letty's bed, and after a look at the child, Caroline threw herself on the couch and closed her eyes in the hope that she might fall asleep. Though she was profoundly relieved by her conversation with Blackburn, she was still anxious about Angelica, and impatient to hear how she had borne the shock. As the time dragged on, with the interminable passage of the minutes in a sickroom, she found it impossible to lie there in silence any longer, and rising from the couch, she glanced at the clock before going to her room to wash her hands and straighten her hair for dinner. It was exactly half-past seven, and a few minutes later, when she had finished her simple preparations, and was passing the window on her way to the hall, she heard the sound of a motor in the circular drive. "I suppose they forgot to tell John," she thought, "or can it be the doctor so soon?"

The hall was empty when she entered it; but before she had reached the head of the stairs, a door opened and shut in the left wing, and the housekeeper joined her. At the bend in the staircase, beneath a copy of the Sistine Madonna, which had been crowded out of the drawing-room, the elder woman stopped and laid a detaining hand on Caroline's arm. Even through the starched sleeve her grasp felt dry and feverish.

"Miss Meade, did you get a chance to speak to David?"

"Why, yes, I spoke to him. I went straight down as soon as Miss Webster came on duty."

"Did he say he would tell Angelica?"

"He came up at once to tell her. I saw him go into her room."

Mrs. Timberlake glanced helplessly up at the Sistine Madonna. "Well, I don't know what he could have said," she answered, "for Angelica has gone. That was her motor you heard leaving the door."

CHAPTER XI
The Sacred Cult

WHEN Caroline looked back upon it afterwards, she remembered that dinner as the most depressing meal of her life. While she ate her food, with the dutiful determination of the trained nurse who realizes that she is obliged to keep up her strength, her gaze wandered for diversion to the soft blues and pinks on the wall. The tapestries were so fresh that she wondered if they were modern. More than ever the airy figure of Spring, floating in primrose-coloured draperies through a flowery grove, reminded her of Angelica. There was the same beauty of line, the same look of sweetness and grace, the same amber hair softly parted under a wreath of pale grey-green leaves. The very vagueness of the features, which left all except the pensive outline to the imagination, seemed to increase rather than diminish this resemblance.

"Have you ever noticed how much that figure is like Mrs. Blackburn?" she asked, turning to the housekeeper, for the silence was beginning to embarrass her. Mary was away and neither Blackburn nor Mrs. Timberlake had uttered a word during the four short courses, which Patrick served as noiselessly as if he were eluding an enemy.

Mrs. Timberlake lifted her eyes to the wall. "Yes, it's the living image of her, if you stand far enough off. I reckon that's why she bought it."

Blackburn, who was helping himself to coffee, glanced up to remark, "I forgot to take sugar, Patrick," and when the tray was brought back, he selected a lump of sugar and broke it evenly in half. If he had heard the question, there was no hint of it in his manner.

Having finished a pear she had been forcing herself to eat, Caroline looked inquiringly from Blackburn to Mrs. Timberlake. If only somebody would speak! If only Mary, with her breezy chatter, would suddenly return from New York! From a long mirror over the sideboard Caroline's reflection, very pale, very grave, stared back at her like a face seen in a fog. "I look like a ghost," she thought. "No wonder they won't speak to me. After all, they are silent because they can think of nothing to say." Unlike in everything else, it occurred to her that Blackburn and the housekeeper had acquired, through dissimilar experiences, the same relentless sincerity of mind. They might be blunt, but they were undeniably honest; and contrasted with the false values and the useless accessories of the house, this honesty impressed her as entirely admirable. The brooding anxiety in Blackburn's face did not change even when he smiled at her, and then rose and stood waiting while she passed before him out of the dining-room. It wasn't, she realized, that he was deliberately inconsiderate or careless in manner; it was merely that the idea of pretending had never occurred to him. The thought was in her mind, when he spoke her name abruptly, and she turned to find that he had followed her to the staircase.

"Miss Meade, I have to see a man on business for a half hour. I shall be in the library. If there is any change, will you send for me?"

She bowed. "Yes, I shall be with Letty all the time."

"As soon as Baker goes, I'll come up. I asked the doctor to spend the night."

"He said he couldn't get here before ten or eleven, but to telephone if we needed him," broke in Mrs. Timberlake. "Mammy Riah has gone to the nursery, Miss Meade. Is there any reason why she shouldn't stay?"

"None in the world." As Caroline turned away and ascended the stairs, she remembered that there had been no question of Angelica. "I wish I could understand. I wish I knew what it means," she said to herself in perplexity. She felt smothered by the uncertainty, the coldness, the reserve of the people about her. Everybody seemed to speak with tight lips, as if in fear lest something might escape that would help to clear away the obscurity. It was all so different from The Cedars, where every thought, every joy, every grief, was lived in a common centre of experience.

When she opened the nursery door, Mammy Riah glanced up from the fire, where she was crouching over the low fender. "I'se mortal feared, honey," she muttered, while she held out her wrinkled palms to the blaze. She had flung a shawl of crimson wool over her shoulders, and the splash of barbaric colour, with her high Indian cheek bones and the low crooning sound of her voice, gave her a resemblance to some Oriental crooked image of Destiny. As the wind rocked the elms on the lawn, she shivered, and rolled her glittering eyes in the direction of Letty's bed.

"Don't give up, Mammy Riah," said Caroline consolingly. "You have nursed children through worse illnesses than this."

"Yas'm, I know I is, but dar wan' noner dese yer signs dat I see now." The flames leaped up suddenly, illuminating her stooping figure in the brilliant shawl with an intense and sinister glow. "I ain't sayin' nuttin'. Naw'm, I ain' lettin' on dat I'se seen whut I'se seen; but dar's somebody done thowed a spell on dis place jes ez sho' ez you live. Dar wuz a ring out yonder on de grass de fust thing dis mawnin', en de fros' ain' never so much ez teched it. Naw, honey, de fros' hit ain' never come a nigh hit. Patrick he seed hit, too, but he ain' let on nuttin' about hit needer, dough de misery is done cotched him in bofe er his feet."

"You don't really think we're conjured, Mammy?"

Mammy Riah cast a secretive glance over her shoulder, and the dramatic instinct of her race awoke in every fibre of her body as she made a vague, mournful gesture over the ashes. "I 'members, honey, I 'members," she muttered ominously. Though Caroline had been familiar with such superstitions from infancy, there was a vividness in these mysteries and invocations which excited her imagination. She knew, as she assured herself, that there "wasn't anything in it"; yet, in spite of her reason, the image of the old woman muttering her incantations over the fire, haunted her like a prophetic vision of evil.

Turning away she went over to Letty's bed, and laid her small, cool fingers on the child's pulse.

"Has there been any change?"

Miss Webster shook her head. "She hasn't stirred."

"I don't like her pulse."

"It seemed a little stronger after the last medicine, but it was getting more rapid a minute ago. That old woman has been talking a lot of heathen nonsense," she added in a whisper. "She says she found a conjure ball at the front door this morning. I am from the Middle West, and it sounds dreadfully uncanny to me."

"I know. She thinks we are conjured. That's just their way. Don't notice her."

"Well, I hope she isn't going to sit up all night with me." Then, as Mammy Riah glanced suspiciously round, and began shaking her head until the shadows danced like witches, Miss Webster added in a more distinct tone, "Is Mrs. Blackburn still hopeful? She is so sweet that I've quite lost my heart to her."

"She wasn't at dinner," answered Caroline, and going back to the fire, she sat down in a chintz-covered chair, with deep arms, and shaded her eyes from the flames. In some incomprehensible way Mammy Riah and Blackburn and Angelica, all seemed to hover in spirit round the glowing hearth.

She was still sitting there, and her hand had not dropped from her eyes, when Blackburn came in and crossed the floor to a chair at the foot of Letty's bed. After a whispered word or two with Miss Webster, he opened a book he had brought with him, and held it under the night lamp on the candle-stand. When a quarter of an hour had passed Caroline noticed that he had not turned a page, and that he appeared to be reading and re-reading the same paragraph, with the dogged determination which was his general attitude toward adversity. His face was worn and lined, and there were heavy shadows under his eyes; but he gave her still the impression of a man who could not be conquered by events. "There is something in him, some vein of iron, that you can't break, you can't even bend," she thought. She remembered that her father had once told her that after the worst had happened you began to take things easier; and this casual recollection seemed to give her a fresh understanding of Blackburn. "Father knew life," she thought, "I wonder what he would have seen in all this? I wonder how he would have liked Mr. Blackburn and his political theories?" The profile outlined darkly against the shade of the night lamp, held her gaze in spite of the effort she made, now and then, to avert it. It was a strong face, and seen in this light, with the guard of coldness dropped, it was a noble one. Thought and feeling and idealism were there, and the serenity, not of the philosopher, but of the soldier. He had fought hard, she saw, and some deep instinct told her that he had conquered. A phrase read somewhere long ago returned to her as clearly as if it were spoken aloud. "He had triumphed over himself." That was the meaning of his look. That was the thought for which she had been groping. He had triumphed over himself.

She started up quickly, and ran with noiseless steps to the bed, for Letty had opened her eyes and cried out.

"Is she awake?" asked Blackburn, and closing his book, he moved nearer.

Caroline's hand was on Letty's pulse, and she replied without looking at him, "She is getting restless. Miss Webster, is it time for the medicine?"

"It is not quite half-past ten. That must be the doctor now at the door."

Rising hurriedly, Blackburn went out into the hall, and when he came back, Doctor Boland was with him. As Caroline left the bedside and went to the chair by the fire, she heard Blackburn ask sharply, "What does the change mean, doctor?" and Doctor Boland's soothing response, "Wait a while. Wait a while." Then he stooped to make an examination, while Miss Webster prepared a stimulant, and Letty moaned aloud as if she were frightened. A clock outside was just striking eleven when the doctor said in a subdued tone, too low to be natural, yet too clear to be a whisper, "Her pulse is getting weaker." He bent over the bed, and as Caroline stood up, she saw Letty's face as if it were in a dream—the flat, soft hair, the waxen forehead, the hard, bright eyes, and the bluish circle about the small, quivering mouth. Then she crossed the floor like a white shadow, and in a little while the room sank back into stillness. Only the dropping of the ashes, and the low crooning of Mammy Riah, disturbed the almost unendurable silence.

For the first hour, while she sat there, Caroline felt that the discipline of her training had deserted her, and that she wanted to scream. Then gradually the stillness absorbed her, and there swept over her in waves a curious feeling of lightness and buoyancy, as if her mind had detached itself from her body, and had become a part of the very pulse and rhythm of the life that surrounded her. She had always lived vividly, with the complete reaction to the moment of a vital and sensitive nature; and she became aware presently that her senses were responsive to every external impression of the room and the night. She heard the wind in the elms, the whispering of the flames, the muttering of Mammy Riah, the short, fretful moans that came from Letty's bed; and all these things seemed a part, not of the world outside, but of her own inner consciousness. Even the few pale stars shining through the window, and the brooding look of the room, with its flickering firelight and its motionless figures, appeared thin and unsubstantial as if they possessed no objective reality. And out of this vagueness and evanescence of the things that surrounded her, there stole over her a certainty, as wild and untenable as a superstition of Mammy Riah's, that there was a meaning in the smallest incident of the night, and that she was approaching one of the cross-roads of life.

A coal dropped on the hearth; she looked up with a start, and found Blackburn's eyes upon her. "Miss Meade, have you the time? My watch has run down."

She glanced at the little clock on the mantelpiece. "It is exactly one o'clock."

"Thank you." His gaze passed away from her, and she leaned back in her chair, while the sense of strangeness and unreality vanished as quickly as it had come. The old negress was mending the fire with kindling wood, and every now and then she paused and shook her head darkly at the flames. "I ain' sayin' nuttin', but I knows, honey," she repeated.

"Hadn't you better go to bed, Mammy Riah?" asked Caroline pityingly.

"Naw'm, I 'ouldn't better git to baid. I'se got ter watch."

"There isn't anything that you can do, and I'll call you, if there is a change."

But the old woman shook her head stubbornly. "I'se got ter watch, honey," she replied. "Dat's one er dem ole squitch-owls out dar now. Ain't he hollerin' jes like he knows sump'n?"

Her mind was plainly wandering, and seeing that persuasion was useless, Caroline left her to her crooning grief, and went over to Letty's bed. As she passed the door, it opened without sound, as if it were pushed by a ghost, and Mrs. Timberlake looked in with the question, "Is she any better, doctor?"

The doctor raised his head and glanced round at her. "She is no better," he answered. "Her pulse gets worse all the time."

Unconsciously, while they spoke, they had drawn together around Letty's bed, and stooping over, Caroline listened with a rapidly beating heart, to the child's breathing. Then, dropping on her knees, she laid her arms about the pillow, as if she would hold the fragile little body to life with all her strength.

She was kneeling there, it seemed to her hours later, when the door swung wide on its hinges, and Angelica, in her white robes, with the wreath of leaves on her hair, paused on the threshold like some Luca della Robbia angel. Her golden hair made a light on her temples; her eyes were deep and starry with triumph; and a glow hung about her that was like the rosy incandescence of the stage. For a minute she stood there; then, flushed, crowned, radiant, she swept into the room.

Blackburn had not lifted his head; there was no sign in his stooping figure that he heard her when she cried out.

"Is Letty really so ill? Is she worse, Doctor Boland?"

The doctor moved a step from the bed, and reached out a protecting hand. "She has been getting weaker."

"I'd sit down and wait, if I were you, Angelica," said Mrs. Timberlake, pushing forward a chair. "There isn't anything else that you can do now."

But, without noticing her, Angelica had dropped to her knees at Caroline's side. A cry that was half a sob burst from her lips, and lifting her head, she demanded with passionate reproach and regret, "Why did nobody tell me? Oh, why did he let me go?" The words seemed driven from her against her will, and when she had uttered them, she fell forward across the foot of the bed, with her bare arms outstretched before her.

The doctor bent over her, and instinctively, as he did so, he glanced up at Blackburn, who stood, white and silent, looking down on his wife with inscrutable eyes. He uttered no word of defence, he made no movement to help her, and Caroline felt suddenly that the sympathy around him had rushed back like an eddying wave to Angelica. "If he would only speak, if he would only defend himself," she thought almost angrily. Without turning, she knew that Angelica was led to the couch by the window, and she heard Mrs. Timberlake say in unemotional tones, "I reckon we'd better give her a dose of ammonia."

The voices were silent, and except for Mrs. Blackburn's sobs and Letty's rapid breathing, there was no sound in the room. Suddenly from somewhere outside there floated the plaintive whining of the dog that Caroline had heard in the afternoon. "He must be missing Mary," she found herself thinking, while Mammy Riah murmured uneasily from the hearth, "Hit's a bad sign, w'en a dawg howls in de daid er night."

The hours dragged on like eternity, and without moving, without stirring or lifting her eyes, Caroline knelt there, pouring her strength into the life of the unconscious child. Every thought, every feeling, every throbbing nerve, was concentrated upon this solitary consuming purpose—"Letty must live." Science had done all it could; it remained now for hope and courage to fight the losing fight to the end. "I will never give up," she said sternly under her breath, "I will never give up." If hope and courage could save, if it were possible for the human will to snatch the victory from death, she felt, deep down in the passionate depths of her heart, that, while she watched over her, Letty could not die.

And then gradually, while she prayed, a change as light as a shadow stole over the face of the child. The little features grew less waxen, the glittering eyes melted to a dewy warmth, and it seemed that the blue circles faded slowly, and even the close brown hair looked less dull and lifeless. As the minutes passed, Caroline held her breath in torture, lest the faintest sound, the slightest movement, might check the invisible beneficent current.

At last, when the change had come, she rose from her knees, and with her hand on Letty's pulse, looked up at Blackburn.

"The crisis is past. Her hand is moist, and her pulse is better," she said.

He started up, and meeting her joyous eyes, stood for an instant perfectly motionless, with his gaze on her face. "Thank God!" he exclaimed in a whisper.

As he turned away and went out of the door, Caroline glanced over her shoulder, and saw that there was a glimmer of dawn at the window.

ON a cloudy morning in December, Caroline ran against Daisy Colfax as she came out of a milliner's shop in Broad Street.

"Oh, Miss Meade, I've been dying to see you and hear news of Letty!" exclaimed the young woman in her vivacious manner. She was wearing a hat of royal purple, with a sweeping wing which intensified the brilliant dusk of her hair and eyes.

"She is quite well again, though of course we are very careful. I came in to look for some small artificial flowers for a doll's hat. We are dressing a doll."

"It must have been a dreadful strain, and Cousin Matty Timberlake told mother she didn't know what they would have done without you. I think it is wonderful the way you keep looking so well."

"Oh, the work is easy," responded Caroline gravely.

"I am sure you are a perfect blessing to them all, especially to poor Angelica," pursued Daisy, in her rippling, shallow voice. Then, in the very centre of the crowded street, regardless of the pedestrians streaming by on either side of her, she added on a higher note: "Have you heard what everybody is saying about the way David Blackburn behaved? Robert insists he doesn't believe a word of it; but then Robert never believes anything except the Bible, so I told him I was going to ask you the very first chance I got. There isn't a bit of use trying to find out anything from Cousin Matty Timberlake because she is so awfully close-mouthed, and I said to Robert only this morning that I was perfectly sure you would understand why I wanted to know. It isn't just gossip. I am not repeating a thing that I oughtn't to; but the stories are all over town, and if they aren't true, I want to be in a position to deny them."

"What are the stories?" asked Caroline, and she continued immediately, before she was submerged again in the bubbling stream of Daisy's narrative, "Of course it isn't likely that I can help you. This is the first time I have been in town since Letty's illness."

"But that is exactly why you ought to know." As Daisy leaned nearer her purple wing brushed Caroline's face. "It is all over Richmond, Miss Meade," her voice rang out with fluting sweetness, "that David Blackburn kept Letty's condition from Angelica because he was so crazy about her being in those tableaux. They say he simply made her go, and that she never knew the child was in danger until she got back in the night. Mrs. Mallow declares she heard it straight from an intimate friend of the family, and somebody, who asked me not to mention her name, told me she knew positively that Doctor Boland hadn't any use in the world for David Blackburn. She said, of course, he hadn't said anything outright, but she could tell just by the way he looked. Everybody is talking about it, and I said to Robert at breakfast that I knew you could tell exactly what happened because we heard from Cousin Matty that you never left Letty's room."

"But why should Mr. Blackburn have wanted her to go? Why should he care?" Though Daisy's sprightly story had confused her a little, Caroline gathered vaguely that somebody had been talking too much, and she resolved that she would not contribute a single word to the gossip.

"Oh, he has always been wild about Angelica's being admired. Don't you remember hearing her say at that committee meeting at Briarlay that her husband liked her to take part in public affairs? I happen to know that he has almost forced her to go into things time and again when Doctor Boland has tried to restrain her. Mother thinks that is really why he married Angelica, because he was so ambitious, and he believed her beauty and charm would help him in the world. I suppose it must have been a blow to him to find that she couldn't tolerate his views—for she is the most loyal soul on earth—and there are a great many people who think that he voted with the Republicans in the hope of an office, and that he got mad when he didn't get one and turned Independent——"

The flood of words was checked for a moment, while the chauffeur came to ask for a direction, and in the pause Caroline remarked crisply, "I don't believe one word—not one single word of these stories."

"You mean you think he didn't make her go?"

"I know he didn't. I'm perfectly positive."

"You can't believe that Angelica really knew Letty was so ill?" her tone was frankly incredulous.

"Of course I can't answer that. I don't know anything about what she thought; but I am certain that if she didn't understand, it wasn't Mr. Blackburn's fault." Afterwards, when she recalled it, her indignant defence of David Blackburn amused her. Why should she care what people said of him?

"But they say she didn't know. Mrs. Mallow told me she heard from someone who was there that Angelica turned on her husband when she came in and asked him why he had kept it from her?"

The hopelessness of her cause aroused Caroline's fighting blood, and she remembered that her father used to say the best battles of the war were fought after defeat. Strange how often his philosophy and experience of life came back to inspirit her!

"Well, perhaps she didn't understand, but Mr. Blackburn wasn't to blame. I am sure of it," she answered firmly.

Mrs. Colfax looked at her sharply. "Do you like David Blackburn?" she inquired without malice.

Caroline flushed. "I neither like nor dislike him," she retorted courageously, and wondered how long it would take the remark to circulate over Richmond. Mrs. Colfax was pretty, amiable, and amusing; but she was one of those light and restless women, as clear as running water, on whose sparkling memories scandals float like straws. Nothing ever sank to the depths—or perhaps there were no depths in the luminous shoals of her nature.

"Well, the reason I asked," Daisy had become ingratiating, "is that you talk exactly like Cousin Matty."

"Do I?" Caroline laughed. "Mrs. Timberlake is a very sensible woman."

"Yes, mother insists that she is as sharp as a needle, even if it is so hard to get anything out of her. Oh, I've kept you an age—and, good Heavens, it is long past my appointment at the dentist's! I can't tell you how glad I am that I met you, and you may be sure that whenever I hear these things repeated, I am going to say that you don't believe one single word of them. It is splendid of you to stand up for what you think, and that reminds me of the nice things I heard Roane Fitzhugh saying about you at the Mallow's the other night. He simply raved over you. I couldn't make him talk about anything else."

"I don't like to be disagreeable, but what he thinks doesn't interest me in the least," rejoined Caroline coldly.

Daisy laughed delightedly. "Now, that's too bad, because I believe he is falling in love with you. He told me he went motoring with you and Angelica almost every afternoon. Take my word for it, Miss Meade, Roane isn't half so black as he is painted, and he's just the sort that would settle down when he met the right woman. Good-bye again! I have enjoyed so much my little chat with you."

She rushed off to her car, while Caroline turned quickly into a cross street, and hastened to meet Angelica at the office of a new doctor, who was treating her throat. A few drops of rain were falling, and ahead of her, when she reached Franklin Street, the city, with its church spires and leafless trees, emerged indistinctly out of the mist. Here the long street was almost deserted, except for a blind negro beggar, whose stick tapped the pavement behind her, and a white and liver-coloured setter nosing adventurously in the gutter. Then, in the middle of the block, she saw Angelica's car waiting, and a minute later, to her disgust, she discerned the face of Roane Fitzhugh at the window. As she recognized him, the anger that Mrs. Colfax's casual words had aroused, blazed up in her without warning; and she told herself that she would leave Briarlay before she would allow herself to be gossiped about with a man she detested.

While she approached, Roane opened the door and jumped out. "Come inside and wait, Miss Meade," he said. "Anna Jeannette is still interviewing old skull and cross-bones."

"I'd rather wait in the office, thank you." She swept past him with dignity, but before she reached the steps of the doctor's house, he had overtaken her.

"Oh, I say, don't crush a chap! Haven't you seen enough of me yet to discover that I am really as harmless as I look? You don't honestly think me a rotter, do you?"

"I don't think about you."

"The unkindest cut of all! Now, if you only knew it, your thinking of me would do a precious lot of good. By the way, how is my niece?"

"Very well. You'd scarcely know she'd been ill."

"And she didn't see the tableaux, after all, poor kid. Well, Anna Jeannette was a stunner. I suppose you saw her picture in the papers. The Washington Examiner spoke of her as the most beautiful woman in Virginia. That takes old Black, I bet!"

Caroline had ascended the steps, and as she was about to touch the bell, the door opened quickly, and Angelica appeared, lowering a net veil which was covered with a large spiral pattern. She looked slightly perturbed, and when she saw Roane a frown drew her delicate eyebrows together. Her colour had faded, leaving a sallow tone to her skin, which was of the fine, rose-leaf texture that withers early.

"I can't take you to-day, Roane," she remarked hastily. "We must go straight back to Briarlay. Miss Meade came in to do some shopping for Letty."

"You'll have to take me as far as Monument Avenue." He was as ready as ever. "It is a long way, Anna Jeannette. I cannot walk, to crawl I am ashamed."

"Well, get in, and please try to behave yourself."

"If behaviour is all that you expect, I shall try to satisfy you. The truth is I'm dead broke, and being broke always makes a Christian of me. I feel as blue as old Black."

"Oh, Roane, stop joking!" Her sweetness was growing prickly. "You don't realize that when you run on like this people think you are serious. I have just heard some silly talk about Miss Meade and you, and it came from nothing in the world except your habit of saying everything that comes into your mind."

"In the first place, my dear Anna, nothing that you hear of Miss Meade could be silly, and in the second place, I've never spoken her name except when I was serious."

"Well, you ought to be more careful how you talk to Daisy Colfax. She repeats everything in the world that she hears."

He laughed shortly. "You'd say that if you'd heard the hot shot she gave me last night about you and Blackburn. Look here, Anna Jeannette, hadn't you better call a halt on the thing?"

She flushed indignantly. "I haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about."

"Oh, it's all rot, I know, but how the deuce does such tittle-tattle get started? I beg your pardon, Miss Meade, I am addressing you not as a woman, but as a fount of justice and equity, and in the presence of Anna Jeannette, I ask you frankly if you don't think it's a bit rough on old Black? We had our quarrel, and I assure you that I have no intention of voting with him; but when it comes to knifing a man in the back, then I must beg the adorable Daisy to excuse me. It takes a woman to do that—and, by Jove, old Black may be a bit of a heavyweight, but he is neither a coward nor a liar."

"I think you are right," responded Caroline, and it was the first time that she had ever agreed with an opinion of Roane's.

"I wish I knew what you are talking about," said Angelica wearily, "Roane, do you get out here?"

"I do, with regret." As he glanced back from the pavement, his face, except for the droop of the well-cut lips and the alcoholic puffs under the gay blue eyes, might have been a thicker and grosser copy of Angelica's. "Will you take me to-morrow?"

Mrs. Blackburn shook her head. "I am obliged to go to a meeting."

He appeared to catch at the idea. "Then perhaps Miss Meade and Letty may take pity on me?"

A worried look sharpened Angelica's features, but before she could reply, Caroline answered quickly, "We are not going without Mrs. Blackburn. Letty and I would just as soon walk."

"Ah, you walk, do you? Then we may meet some day in the road." Though he spoke jestingly, there was an undercurrent of seriousness in his voice.

"We don't walk in the road, and we like to go by ourselves. We are studying nature." As she responded she raised her eyes, and swept his face with a careless and indifferent glance.

"Take your hand from the door, Roane," said Mrs. Blackburn, "and the next time you see Daisy Colfax, please remember what I told you."

The car started while she was speaking, and a minute later, as Roane's figure passed out of sight, she observed playfully, "You mustn't let that bad brother of mine annoy you, Miss Meade. He doesn't mean all that he says."

"I am sure that he doesn't mean anything," returned Caroline with a smile, "but, if you don't mind, I'd rather not go to drive with him again."

The look of sharpness and worry disappeared from Angelica's face. "It is such a comfort, the way you take things," she remarked. "One can always count on your intelligence."

"I shouldn't have thought that it required intelligence to see through your brother," retorted Caroline gaily. "Any old common sense might do it!"

"Can you understand," Angelica gazed at her as if she were probing her soul, "what his attraction is for women?"

"No, I can't. I hope you don't mind my speaking the truth?"

"Not in the least." Angelica was unusually responsive. "But you couldn't imagine how many women have been in love with him. It isn't any secret that Daisy Colfax was wild about him the year she came out. The family broke it up because Roane was so dissipated, but everybody knows she still cared for Roane when she married Robert."

"She seems happy now with Mr. Colfax."

"Well, I don't mean that she isn't. There are some women who can settle down with almost any man, and though I am very fond of dear Daisy, there isn't any use pretending that she hasn't a shallow nature. Still there are people, you know, who say that she isn't really as satisfied as she tries to make you believe, and that her rushing about as much as she does is a sign that she regrets her marriage. I am sure, whatever she feels or doesn't feel, that she is the love of poor Roane's life."

It was not Angelica's habit to gossip, and while she ran on smoothly, reciting her irrelevant detail as if it were poetry, Caroline became aware that there was a serious motive beneath her apparent flippancy. "I suppose she is trying to warn me away from Roane," she thought scornfully, "as if there were any need of it!"

After this they were both silent until the car turned into the drive and stopped before the white columns. The happiness Caroline had once felt in the mere presence of Angelica had long ago faded, though she still thought her lovely and charming, and kind enough if one were careful not to cross her desires. She did not judge her harshly for her absence on the night of Letty's illness, partly because Letty had recovered, and partly because she was convinced that there had been an unfortunate misunderstanding—that Blackburn had failed to speak as plainly as he ought to have done. "Of course he thought he did," she had decided, in a generous effort to clear everybody from blame, "but the fact remains that there was a mistake—that Mrs. Blackburn did not take it just as he meant it." This, in the circumstances, was the best she felt that anybody could do. If neither Blackburn nor Angelica was to blame, then surely she must shift the responsibility to that flimsy abstraction she defined as "the way things happen in life."

Upstairs in the nursery they broke in upon a flutter of joyous excitement. Mary had just returned after a month's absence, and Letty was busily arranging a doll's tea party in honour of her aunt's arrival. The child looked pale and thin, but she had on a new white dress, and had tied a blue bow on her hair, which was combed primly back from her forehead. Mammy Riah had drawn the nursery table in front of the fire, and she was now placing a row of white and blue cups, and some plates of sponge cake and thinly sliced bread and butter, on the embroidered cloth she had borrowed from Mrs. Timberlake. The dignified old negress, in her full-waisted dress of black bombazine and her spotless white turban, was so unlike the demented figure that had crouched by the hearth on the night of Letty's illness, that, if Caroline had been less familiar with the impressionable mind of the negro, she would not have recognized her.

"So I'm back," said Mary, looking at them with her kind, frank glance, as they entered. She was still in her travelling clothes, and Caroline thought she had never seen her so handsome as she was in the smartly cut suit of brown homespun. "Letty is going to give me a party, only she must hurry, for if I don't get on a horse soon I'll forget how to sit in the saddle. Well, Angelica, I hear you were the whole show in the tableaux," she pursued in her nice, slangy manner, which was so perfectly in character with her boyish face and her straight, loose-limbed figure. "Your picture was in at least six magazines, though, I must say, they made you look a little too spectral for my taste. How are you feeling? You are just a trifle run down, aren't you?"

"Of course Letty's illness was a great strain," replied Angelica. "One never realizes how such shocks tell until they are over."

"Poor lamb! Look here, Letty, who is coming to this feast of joy? Do you mind if I bolt in the midst of it?"

"Father's coming and Aunt Matty," replied the child. "I couldn't have anybody else because mammy thought mother wouldn't like me to ask John. I like John, and he's white anyway."

"Oh, the footman! Well, as long as you haven't invited him, I suppose there'll be only home folks. I needn't stand on formality with your father and Cousin Matty."

"And there's mother—you'll come, won't you, mother?—and Miss Meade," added Letty.

"Yes, I'll come," responded Angelica. "I'm dying for my tea, dear, isn't it ready?"

"May I pour it for you? I'll be very careful, and I know just how you like it."

"Yes, you may pour it, but let Mammy Riah help you. Here's your father now, and Cousin Matty."

"Hallo, David!" Mary's voice rang out clearly. "You look just a bit seedy, don't you? Letty's illness seems to have knocked out everybody except the youngster herself. Even Miss Meade looks as if she'd been giving too much medicine." Then she turned to embrace Mrs. Timberlake, while Blackburn crossed the room and sat down near the fireplace.

"Well, daughter, it isn't a birthday, is it?"

Letty, with her head bent sideways, and her small mouth screwed up very tight, was pouring Angelica's tea with the aid of Mammy Riah. "You mustn't talk to me while I am pouring, father," she answered seriously. "I am so afraid I shall spill it, and mother can't bear to have it spilt."

"All right. I'll talk to your Aunt Mary. Any news, Mary?"

"Yes, there's news, David. Alan is coming in for his own, and it looks as if his own were enough for us."

"You mean the old man in Chicago——?"

"He died last week, just as he was celebrating his ninetieth birthday. At ninety one couldn't reasonably have asked for very much more, do you think?"

"And is Alan his heir?"

"His one and only. To be sure he wrote a will a few weeks ago and left every cent of it—I can't begin to remember the millions—to some missionary society, but fortunately he had neglected or forgotten to sign it. So Alan gets the whole thing, bless his heart, and he's out there now in Chicago having legal bouts with a dozen or more lawyers."

For the first time Angelica spoke. "Is it true that Alan will be one of the richest men in the West?" she asked slowly. "Thank you, Letty, darling, my tea is exactly right."

"If he gets it all, and he is going to unless another will and a missionary society come to light. My dear Angelica, when you see me a year hence," she continued whimsically, "you won't recognize your dependent sister. Alan says he is going to give me a string of pearls even finer than yours."

She spoke jestingly, yet as Caroline watched Angelica's face, it occurred to her that Mary was not always tactful. The girl ought to have known by this time that Angelica had no sense of humour and could not bear to be teased.

"It's funny, isn't it, the way life works out?" said Mrs. Timberlake. "To think of Mary's having more things than Angelica! It doesn't seem natural, somehow."

"No, it doesn't," assented Mary, in her habitual tone of boyish chaffing. "But as far as the 'things' go, Angelica needn't begin to worry. Give me Alan and a good horse, and she may have all the pearls that ever came out of the ocean."

"I read an account in some magazine of the jewels old Mrs. Wythe left," remarked Angelica thoughtfully. "She owned the finest emeralds in America." Her reflections, whatever they were, brought the thin, cold look to her features.

"Can you imagine me wearing the finest emeralds in America?" demanded Mary. "There's a comfort for you, at any rate, in the thought that they wouldn't be becoming to you. Green isn't your colour, my dear, and white stones are really the only ones that suit you. Now, I am so big and bold that I could carry off rubies." Her laughing tone changed suddenly, "Why, Angelica, what is the matter? Have you a headache?"

"I feel very tired. The truth is I haven't quite got over the strain of Letty's illness. When does Alan come back, dear? I suppose you won't put off the wedding much longer? Mother used to say that a long engagement meant an unhappy marriage."

"Alan gets back next week, I hope, and as for the wedding—well, we haven't talked it over, but I imagine we'll settle on the early summer—June probably. It's a pity it has to be so quiet, or I might have Miss Meade for a bridesmaid. She'd make an adorable bridesmaid in an orchid-coloured gown and a flower hat, wouldn't she, Cousin Matty?"

"I'd rather dress you in your veil and orange blossoms," laughed Caroline. "Diana or I have pinned on almost every wedding veil of the last five years in southside Virginia."

"Oh, is Aunt Mary really going to be married at last?" asked Letty, with carefully subdued excitement, "and may I go to church? I do hope I shan't have to miss it as I did mother's tableau," she added wistfully.

"You shan't miss it, dearie," said Mary, "not if I have to be married up here in the nursery."

Angelica had risen, and she stooped now to pick up her furs which she had dropped.

"Your tea was lovely, Letty dear," she said gently, "but I'm so tired that I think I'll go and lie down until dinner."

"You must pick up before Alan gets back," remarked Mary lightly. "He thinks you the most beautiful woman in the world, you know."

"He does? How very sweet of him!" exclaimed Angelica, turning in the doorway, and throwing an animated glance back into the room. Her face, which had been wan and listless an instant before, was now glowing, while her rare, lovely smile irradiated her features.

When she had gone, Mary went to change into her riding clothes, and Caroline slipped away to take off her hat. A few minutes later, she came back with some brown yarn in her hand, and found that Blackburn was still sitting in the big chintz-covered chair by the hearth. Letty had dragged a footstool to the rug, and she was leaning against her father's knee while he questioned her about the stories in her reader.

"I know Miss Meade can tell you," said the child as Caroline entered. "Miss Meade, do you remember the story about the little girl who got lost and went to live with the fairies? Is it in my reader? Father, what is the difference between an angel and a fairy? Mrs. Aylett says that mother is an angel. Is she a fairy too?"

"You'd think she was sometimes to look at her," replied Blackburn, smiling.

"Well, if mother is an angel, why aren't you one? I asked Mrs. Aylett that, but she didn't tell me."

"You could scarcely blame her," laughed Blackburn. "It is a hard question."

"I asked Miss Meade, too, but she didn't tell me either."

"Now, I should have thought better of Miss Meade." As Blackburn lifted his face, it looked young and boyish. "Is it possible that she is capable of an evasion?"

"What does that word mean, father?"

"It means everything, my daughter, that Miss Meade is not."

"You oughtn't to tease the child, David," said Mrs. Timberlake. "She is so easily excited."

Caroline and the old lady had both unfolded their knitting; and the clicking of their needles made a cheerful undercurrent to the conversation. The room looked homelike and pleasant in the firelight, and leaning back in his chair, Blackburn gazed with half-closed eyes at the two women and the child outlined against the shimmering glow of the flames.

"You are like the Fates," he said presently after a silence in which Letty sank drowsily against him. "Do you never put down your knitting?"

"Well, Angelica promised so many, and it makes her nervous to hear the needles," rejoined Mrs. Timberlake.

"It is evidently soothing to you and Miss Meade."

"The difference, I reckon, is that we don't stop to think whether it is or not." Mrs. Timberlake was always curt when she approached the subject of Angelica. "I've noticed that when you can't afford nerves, you don't seem to have them."

"That's considerate of nature, to say the least." His voice had borrowed the chaffing tone of Mary's.

As if in response to his words, Mrs. Timberlake rolled up the half-finished muffler, thrust her long knitting needles through the mesh, and leaned forward until she met Blackburn's eyes.

"David," she said in a low, harsh voice, "there is something I want to ask you, and Miss Meade might as well hear it. Is Letty asleep?"

"She is dozing, but speak guardedly. This daughter of mine is a keen one."

"Well, she won't understand what I am talking about. Did you or did you not think that you had spoken plainly to Angelica that evening?"

He looked at her through narrowed lids.

"What does she say?"

"She says she didn't understand. It is all over town that she didn't know Letty's condition was serious."

"Then why do you ask me? If she didn't understand, I must have blundered in the telling. That's the only possible answer to your question."

He rose as he spoke, and lifting Letty from the footstool, placed her gently between the deep arms of the chair.

"Isn't there anything that you can say, David?"

"No, that seems to be the trouble. There isn't anything that I can say." Already he was on his way to the door, and as he glanced back, Caroline noticed that, in spite of his tenderness with the child, his face looked sad and stern. "There's a man waiting for me downstairs," he added, "but I'll see you both later. Wake Letty before long or she won't sleep to-night."

Then he went out quickly, while Mrs. Timberlake turned to take up her knitting.

"If I didn't know that David Blackburn had plenty of sense about some things," she remarked grimly while she drew the needle from the roll, "I'd be tempted to believe that he was a perfect fool."

CHAPTER XIII
Indirect Influence

IN January a heavy snow fell, and Letty, who had begun to cough again, was kept indoors for a week. After the morning lessons were over, Mammy Riah amused the child, while Caroline put on her hat and coat, and went for a brisk walk down the lane to the road. Once or twice Mary joined her, but since Alan's return Caroline saw the girl less and less, and no one else in the house appeared to have the spirit for exercise. Blackburn she met only at breakfast and luncheon, and since Christmas he seemed to have become completely engrossed in his plans. After the talk she had heard on the terrace, his figure slowly emerged out of the mist of perplexity in her mind. He was no longer the obscure protagonist of a vague political unrest, for the old dishonourable bond which had linked him, in her imagination, to the Southern Republicans of her father's day, was broken forever. She was intelligent enough to grasp the difference between the forces of reaction and development; and she understood now that Blackburn had worked out a definite theory—that his thinking had crystallized into a constructive social philosophy. "He knows the South, he understands it," she thought. "He sees it, not made, but becoming. That is the whole difference between him and father. Father was as patriotic as Mr. Blackburn, but father's patriotism clung to the past—it was grateful and commemorative—and Mr. Blackburn's strives toward the future, for it is active and creative. Father believed that the South was separate from the Union, like one of the sacred old graveyards, with bricked-up walls, in the midst of cornfields, while the younger man, also believing it to be sacred, is convinced that it must be absorbed into the nation—that its traditions and ideals must go to enrich the common soil of America." Already she was beginning insensibly to associate Blackburn with the great group of early Virginians, with the men in whom love of country was a vital and living thing, the men who laid the foundation and planned the structure of the American Republic.

"Do you think Mr. Blackburn feels as strongly as he talks?" she asked Mrs. Timberlake one afternoon when they were standing together by the nursery window. It had been snowing hard, and Caroline, in an old coat with a fur cap on her head, was about to start for a walk.

Mrs. Timberlake was staring intently through her spectacles at one of the snow-laden evergreens on the lawn. A covering of powdery white wrapped the drive and the landscape, and, now and then, when the wind rattled the ice-coated branches of the elms, there was a sharp crackling noise as of breaking boughs.

"I reckon he does," she replied after a pause, "though I can't see to save my life what he expects to get out of it."

"Do you think it is ambition with him? It seems to me, since I heard him talk, that he really believes he has a message, that he can serve his country. Until I met him," Caroline added, half humorously, "I had begun to feel that the men of to-day loved their country only for what they could get out of it."

"Well, I expect David is as disinterested as anybody else," observed Mrs. Timberlake drily, "but that seems to me all the more reason why he'd better let things jog along as they are, and not try to upset them. But there isn't any use talking. David sets more store by those ideas of his than he does by any living thing in the world, unless it's Letty. They are his life, and I declare I sometimes think he feels about them as he used to feel about Angelica before he married her—the sort of thing you never expect to see outside of poetry." She had long ago lost her reserve in Caroline's presence, and the effect of what she called "bottling up" for so many years, gave a crispness and roundness to her thoughts which was a refreshing contrast to Angelica's mental vagueness.

"I can understand it," said Caroline, "I mean I can understand a man's wanting to have some part in moulding the thought of his time. Father used to be like that. Only it was Virginia, not America, that he cared for. He wanted to help steer Virginia over the rapids, he used to say. I was brought up in the midst of politics. That's the reason it sounded so natural to me when Mr. Blackburn was talking."

Letty, who had been playing with her dolls on the hearthrug, deserted them abruptly, and ran over to the window.

"Oh, Miss Meade, do you think I am going to be well for Aunt Mary's wedding?"

"Why, of course you are. This is only January, darling, and the wedding won't be till June."

"And is that a very long time?"

"Months and months. The roses will be blooming, and you will have forgotten all about your cold."

"Well, I hope I shan't miss that too," murmured the child, going gravely back to her dolls.

"I never heard anything like the way that child runs on," said Mrs. Timberlake, turning away from the window. "Are you really going out in this cold? There doesn't seem a bit of sense in getting chilled to the bone unless you are obliged to."

"Oh, I like it. It does me good."

"You've stopped motoring with Angelica, haven't you?"

"Yes, we haven't been for several weeks. For one thing the weather has been so bad."

"I got an idea it was because of Roane Fitzhugh," said the old lady, in her tart way. "I hope you won't think I am interfering, but I'm old and you're young, and so you won't mind my giving you a little wholesome advice. If I were you, my dear, I shouldn't pay a bit of attention to anything that Roane says to me."

"But I don't. I never have," rejoined Caroline indignantly. "How on earth could you have got such an idea?"

A look of mystification flickered over Mrs. Timberlake's face. "Well, I am sure I don't mean any harm, my child," she responded soothingly. "I didn't think you would mind a word of warning from an old woman, and I know that Roane can have a very taking way when he wants to."

"I think he's hateful—perfectly hateful," replied Caroline. Then, drawing on her heavy gloves, she shook her head with a laugh as she started to the door. "If that's all you have to worry about, you may rest easy," she tossed back gaily. "Letty, darling, when I come in I'll tell you all about my adventures and the bears I meet in the lane."

The terrace and the garden were veiled in white, and the only sound in the intense frozen stillness was the crackling of elm boughs as the wind rocked them. A heavy cloud was hanging low in the west, and beneath it a flock of crows flew slowly in blue-black curves over the white fields. For a minute or two Caroline stood watching them, and, while she paused there, a clear silver light streamed suddenly in rays over the hills, and the snow-covered world looked as if it were imprisoned in crystal. Every frosted branch, every delicate spiral on the evergreens, was intensified and illuminated. Then the wind swept up with a rush of sound from the river, and it was as if the shining landscape had found a melodious voice—as if it were singing. The frozen fountain and the white trees and the half buried shrubs under the mounds of snow, joined in presently like harps in a heavenly choir. "I suppose it is only the wind," she thought, "but it is just as if nature were praising God with music and prayer."

In the lane the trees were silvered, and little darting shadows, like violet birds, chased one another down the long white vista to the open road. Walking was difficult on the slippery ground, and Caroline went carefully, stopping now and then to look up into the swinging boughs overhead, or to follow the elusive flight of the shadows. When she reached the end of the lane, she paused, before turning, to watch a big motor car that was ploughing through the heavy snowdrifts. A moment later the car stopped just in front of her, a man jumped out into a mound of snow, and she found herself reluctantly shaking hands with Roane Fitzhugh.

"Tom Benton was taking me into town," he explained, "but as soon as I saw you, I told him he'd have to go on alone. So this is where you walk? Lucky trees."

"I was just turning." As she spoke she moved back into the lane. "It is a pity you got out."

"Oh, somebody else will come along presently. I'm in no sort of hurry."

His face was flushed and mottled, and she suspected, from the excited look in his eyes, that he had been drinking. Even with her first impulse of recoil, she felt the pity of his wasted and ruined charm. With his straight fine features, so like Angelica's, his conquering blue eyes, and his thick fair hair, he was like the figure of a knight in some early Flemish painting.

"It's jolly meeting you this way," he said, a trifle thickly. "By Jove, you look stunning—simply stunning."

"Please don't come with me. I'd rather go back alone," she returned, with chill politeness. "Your sister went into Richmond an hour ago. I think she is at a reception Mrs. Colfax is giving."

"Well, I didn't come to see Anna Jeannette." He spoke this time with exaggerated care as if he were pronouncing a foreign language. "Don't hurry, Miss Meade. I'm not a tiger. I shan't eat you. Are you afraid?"

"Of you?" she glanced at him scornfully. "How could you hurt me?"

"How indeed? But if not of me, of yourself? I've seen women afraid of themselves, and they hurried just as you are doing."

Unconsciously her steps slackened. "I am not afraid of myself, and if I were, I shouldn't run away."

"You mean you'd stay and fight it out?"

"I mean I'd stay and get the better of the fear, or what caused it. I couldn't bear to be afraid."

His careless gaze became suddenly intense, and before the red sparks that glimmered in his eyes, she drew hastily to the other side of the lane. A wave of physical disgust, so acute that it was like nausea, swept over her. Even in the hospital the sight of a drunken man always affected her like this, and now it was much worse because the brute—she thought of him indignantly as "the brute"—was actually trying to make love to her—to her, Caroline Meade!

"Then if you aren't afraid of me, why do you avoid me?" he demanded.

At this she stopped short in order to face him squarely. "Since you wish to know," she replied slowly, "I avoid you because I don't like the kind of man you are."

He lowered his eyes for an instant, and when he raised them they were earnest and pleading. "Then make me the kind of man you like. You can if you try. You could do anything with me if you cared—you are so good."

"I don't care." A temptation to laugh seized her, but she checked it, and spoke gravely. The relations between men and women, which had seemed as natural and harmonious as the interdependence of the planets, had become jangled and discordant. Something had broken out in her universe which threatened to upset its equilibrium. "I don't doubt that there are a number of good women who would undertake your regeneration, but I like my work better," she added distantly. She was sure now that he had been drinking, and, as he came nearer and the smell of whiskey reached her, she quickened her steps almost into a run over the frozen ground. Some deep instinct told her that at her first movement of flight he would touch her, and she thought quite calmly, with the clearness and precision of mind she had acquired in the hospital, that if he were to touch her she would certainly strike him. She was not frightened—her nerves were too robust for fear—but she was consumed with a still, cold rage, which made even the icy branches feel warm as they brushed her cheek.

"Now, you are running again, Miss Meade. Why won't you be kind to me? Can't you see that I am mad about you? Ever since the first day I saw you, you've been in my thoughts every minute. Honestly you could make a man out of me, if you'd only be a little bit human. I'll do anything you wish. I'll be anything you please, if you'll only like me."

For a moment she thought he was going to break down and cry, and she wondered, with professional concern, if a little snow on his forehead would bring him to his senses. This was evidently the way he had talked to Mary when Blackburn ordered him out of the house.

"I wish you would go back," she said in a tone she used to delirious patients in the hospital. "We are almost at the house, and Mr. Blackburn wouldn't like your coming to Briarlay."

"Well, the old chap's in town, isn't he?"

"It is time for him to come home. He may be here any moment." Though she tried to reason the question with him, she was conscious of a vague, uneasy suspicion that they were rapidly approaching the state where reasoning would be as futile as flight. Then she remembered hearing somewhere that a drunken man would fall down if he attempted to run, and she considered for an instant making an open dash for the house.

"I'll go, if you'll let me come back to-morrow. I'm not a bad fellow, Miss Meade." A sob choked him. "I've got a really good heart—ask Anna Jeannette if I haven't——"

"I don't care whether you are bad or not. I don't want to know anything about you. Only go away. Nothing that you can do will make me like you," she threw out unwisely under the spur of anger. "Women never think that they can cajole or bully a person into caring—only men imagine they have the power to do that, and it's all wrong because they can't, and they never have. Bullying doesn't do a bit more good than whining, so please stop that, too. I don't like you because I don't respect you, and nothing you can say or do will have the slightest effect unless you were to make yourself into an entirely different sort of man—a man I didn't despise." Her words pelted him like stones, and while he stood there, blinking foolishly beneath the shower, she realized that he had not taken in a single sentence she had uttered. He looked stunned but obstinate, and a curious dusky redness was beating like a pulse in his forehead.

"You can't fight me," he muttered huskily. "Don't fight me."

"I am not fighting you. I am asking you to go away."

"I told you I'd go, if you'd let me come back to-morrow."

"Of course I shan't. How dare you ask me such a thing? Can't you see how you disgust me?"

As she spoke she made a swift movement toward the turn in the lane, and the next minute, while her feet slipped on the ice, she felt Roane's arms about her, and knew that he was struggling frantically to kiss her lips. For years no man had kissed her, and as she fought wildly to escape, she was possessed not by terror, but by a blind and primitive fury. Civilization dropped away from her, and she might have been the first woman struggling against attack in the depths of some tropic jungle. "I'd like to kill you," she thought, and freeing one arm, she raised her hand and struck him between the eyes. "I wonder why some woman hasn't killed him before this? I believe I am stronger than he is."

The blow was not a soft one, and his arms fell away from her, while he shook his head as if to prevent a rush of blood to the brain. "You hurt me—I believe you wanted to hurt me," he muttered in a tone of pained and incredulous surprise. Then recovering his balance with difficulty, he added reproachfully, "I didn't know you could hit like that. I thought you were more womanly. I thought you were more womanly," he repeated sorrowfully, while he put his hand to his head, and then gazed at it, as if he expected to find blood on his fingers.

"Now, perhaps you'll go," said Caroline quietly. While the words were on her lips, she became aware that a shadow had fallen over the snow at her side, and glancing round, she saw Blackburn standing motionless in the lane. Her first impression was that he seemed enormous as he stood there, with his hands hanging at his sides, and the look of sternness and immobility in his face. His eyelids were half closed with the trick he had when he was gazing intently, and the angry light seemed to have changed his eyes from grey to hazel.

"I am sorry to interrupt you," he said in a voice that had a dangerous quietness, "but I think Roane is scarcely in a fit state for a walk."

"I'd like to know why I am not?" demanded Roane, sobered and resentful. "I'm not drunk. Who says I am drunk?"

"Well, if you aren't, you ought to be." Then the anger which Blackburn had kept down rushed into his voice. "You had better go!"

Roane had stopped blinking, and while the redness ebbed from his forehead, he stood staring helplessly not at Blackburn, but at Caroline. "I'll go," he said at last, "if Miss Meade will say that she forgives me."

But there was little of the sister of mercy in Caroline's heart. She had been grossly affronted, and anger devoured her like a flame. Her blue eyes shone, her face flushed and paled with emotion, and, for the moment, under the white trees, in the midst of the frosted world, her elusive beauty became vivid and dazzling.

"I shall not forgive you, and I hope I shall never see you again," she retorted.

"You'd better go, Roane," repeated Blackburn quietly, and as Caroline hurried toward the house, he overtook her with a rapid step, and said in a troubled voice, "It is partly my fault, Miss Meade. I have intended to warn you."

"To warn me?" Her voice was crisp with anger.

"I felt that you did not understand."

"Understand what?" She looked at him with puzzled eyes. "I may be incredibly stupid, but I don't understand now."

For an instant he hesitated, and she watched a deeper flush rise in his face. "In a way you are under my protection," he said at last, "and for this reason I have meant to warn you against Roane Fitzhugh—against the danger of these meetings."

"These meetings?" Light burst on her while she stared on him. "Is it possible that you think this was a meeting? Do you dream that I have been seeing Roane Fitzhugh of my own accord? Have you dared to think such a thing? To imagine that I wanted to see him—that I came out to meet him?" The note of scorn ended in a sob while she buried her face in her hands, and stood trembling with shame and anger before him.

"But I understood. I was told——" He was stammering awkwardly. "Isn't it true that you felt an interest—that you were trying to help him?"

At this her rage swept back again, and dropping her hands, she lifted her swimming eyes to his face. "How dare you think such a thing of me?"

"I am sorry." He was still groping in darkness. "You mean you did not know he was coming to-day?"

"Of course I didn't know. Do you think I should have come out if I had known?"

"And you have never met him before? Never expected to meet him?"

"Oh, what are you saying? Why can't you speak plainly?" A shiver ran through her.

"I understood that you liked him." After her passionate outburst his voice sounded strangely cold and detached.

"And that I came out to meet him?"

"I was afraid that you met him outside because I had forbidden him to come to Briarlay. I wanted to explain to you—to protect you——"

"But I don't need your protection." She had thrown back her head, and her shining eyes met his bravely. Her face had grown pale, but her lips were crimson, and her voice was soft and rich. "I don't need your protection, and after what you have thought of me, I can't stay here any longer. I can't——"

As her words stopped, checked by the feeling of helplessness that swept her courage away, he said very gently, "But there isn't any reason—— Why, I haven't meant to hurt you. I'm a bit rough, perhaps, but I'd as soon think of hurting Letty. No, don't run away until I've said a word to you. Let's be reasonable, if there has been a misunderstanding. Come, now, suppose we talk it out as man to man."

His tone had softened, but in her resentment she barely noticed the change. "No, I'd rather not. There isn't anything to say," she answered hurriedly. Then, as she was about to run into the house, she paused and added, "Only—only how could you?"

He said something in reply, but before it reached her, she had darted up the steps and into the hall. She felt bruised and stiff, as if she had fallen and hurt herself, and the one thought in her mind was the dread of meeting one of the household—of encountering Mary or Mrs. Timberlake, before she had put on her uniform and her professional manner. It seemed impossible to her that she should stay on at Briarlay, and yet what excuse could she give Angelica for leaving so suddenly? Angelica, she surmised, would not look tolerantly upon any change that made her uncomfortable.

The dazzling light of the sunset was still in Caroline's eyes, and, for the first moment or two after she entered the house, she could distinguish only a misty blur from the open doors of the drawing-room. Then the familiar objects started out of the gloom, and she discerned the gilt frame and the softly blended dusk of the Sistine Madonna over the turn in the staircase. As she reached the floor above, her heart, which had been beating wildly, grew gradually quiet, and she found herself thinking lucidly, "I must go away. I must go away at once—to-night." Then the mist of obscurity floated up to envelop the thought. "But what does it mean? Could there be any possible reason?"

The nursery door was open, and she was about to steal by noiselessly, when Mrs. Timberlake's long, thin shadow stretched, with a vaguely menacing air, over the threshold.

"I wanted to speak to you, my dear. Why, what is the matter?" As the housekeeper came out into the hall, she raised her spectacles to her forehead, and peered nervously into Caroline's face. "Has anybody hurt your feelings?"

"I am going away. I can't stay." Though Caroline spoke clearly and firmly, her lips were trembling, and the marks of tears were still visible under her indignant eyes, which looked large and brilliant, like the eyes of a startled child.

"You are going away? What on earth is the reason? Has anything happened?" Then lowering her voice, she murmured cautiously, "Come into my room a minute. Letty is playing and won't miss you." Putting her lean arm about Caroline's shoulders, she led her gently down the hall and to her room in the west wing. Not until she had forced her into an easy chair by the radiator, and turned back to close the door carefully, did she say in an urgent tone, "Now, my dear, you needn't be afraid to tell me. I am very fond of you—I feel almost as if you were my own child—and I want to help you if you will let me."

"There isn't anything except—except there has been a misunderstanding——" Caroline looked up miserably from the big chair, with her lips working pathetically. All the spirit had gone out of her. "Mr. Blackburn seems to have got the idea that I care for Roane Fitzhugh—that I even went out to meet him."

Mrs. Timberlake, whose philosophy was constructed of the bare bones of experience, stared out of the window with an expression that made her appear less a woman than a cynical point of view. Her profile grew sharper and flatter until it gave the effect of being pasted on the glimmering pane.

"Well, I reckon David didn't make that up in his own mind," she observed with a caustic emphasis.

"I met him—I mean Roane Fitzhugh to-day. Of course it was by accident, but he had been drinking and behaved outrageously, and then Mr. Blackburn found us together," pursued Caroline slowly, "and—and he said things that made me see what he thought. He told me that he believed I liked that dreadful man—that I came out by appointment——"

"But don't you like him, my dear?" The housekeeper had turned from the sunset and taken up her knitting.

"Of course I don't. Why in the world—how in the world——"

"And David told you that he thought so?" The old lady looked up sharply.

"He said he understood that I liked him—Roane Fitzhugh. I didn't know what he meant. He was obliged to explain." After all, the tangle appeared to be without beginning and without end. She realized that she was hopelessly caught in the mesh of it.

"Well, I thought so, too," said Mrs. Timberlake, leaning forward and speaking in a thin, sharp voice that pricked like a needle.

"You thought so? But how could you?" Caroline stretched out her hand with an imploring gesture. "Why, I've never seen him alone until to-day—never."

"And yet David believed that you were meeting him?"

"That is what he said. It sounds incredible, doesn't it?"

For a few minutes Mrs. Timberlake knitted grimly, while the expression, "I know I am a poor creature, but all the same I have feelings" seemed to leap out of her face. When at last she spoke it was to make a remark which sounded strangely irrelevant. "I've had a hard time," she said bluntly, "and I've stood things, but I'm not one to turn against my own blood kin just because they haven't treated me right." Then, after another and a longer pause, she added, as if the words were wrung out of her, "If I didn't feel that I ought to help you I'd never say one single word, but you're so trusting, and you'd never see through things unless somebody warned you."

"See through things? You mean I'd never understand how Mr. Blackburn got that impression?"

Mrs. Timberlake twisted the yarn with a jerk over her little finger. "My dear, David never got that idea out of his own head," she repeated emphatically. "Somebody put it there as sure as you were born, and though I've nothing in the world but my own opinion to go on, I'm willing to bet a good deal that it was Angelica."

"But she couldn't have. She knew better. There couldn't have been any reason."

"When you are as old as I am, you will stop looking for reasons in the way people act. In the first place, there generally aren't any, and in the second place, when reasons are there, they don't show up on the surface."

"But she knew I couldn't bear him."

"If you'd liked him, she wouldn't have done it. She'd have been trying too hard to keep you apart."

"You mean, then, that she did it just to hurt me?"

Lifting her slate-coloured eyes, the old lady brushed a wisp of hair back from her forehead. "I don't believe Angelica ever did a thing in her life just to hurt anybody," she answered slowly.

"Then you wouldn't think for an instant——"

"No, I shouldn't think for an instant that she did it just for that. There was some other motive. I don't reckon Angelica would ever do you any harm," she concluded with a charitable intonation, "unless there was something she wanted to gain by it." From her manner she might have been making a point in Angelica's favour.

"But even then? What could she possibly gain?"

"Well, I expect David found out that Roane had been here—that he had been motoring with you—and Angelica was obliged to find some excuse. You see, responsibility is one of the things Angelica can't stand, and whoever happens to be about when it is forced on her, usually bears it. Sometimes, you know, when she throws it off like that, it chances to light by accident just in the proper place. The strangest thing about Angelica, and I can never get used to it, is the way she so often turns out to be right. Look at the way it all happened in Letty's illness. Now, Angelica always stuck out that Letty wouldn't die, and, as it turned out, she didn't. I declare, it looks, somehow, as if not only people, but circumstances as well, played straight into her hands."

"You mean she told him that about me just to spare herself?" Caroline's voice was angry and incredulous.

"That's how it was, I reckon. I don't believe she would have done it for anything else on earth. You see, my dear, she was brought up that way—most American girls are when they are as pretty as Angelica—and the way you're raised seems to become a habit with you. At home the others always sacrificed themselves for her, until she got into the habit of thinking that she was the centre of the universe, and that the world owed her whatever she took a fancy for. Even as a girl, Roane used to say that her feelings were just inclinations, and I expect that's been true of her ever since. She can want things worse than anybody I've ever seen, but apart from wanting, I reckon she's about as cold as a fish at heart. It may sound mean of me to say it, but I've known Cousin Abby to sit up at night and sew her eyes out, so the girl might have a new dress for a party, and all the time Angelica not saying a word to prevent it. There never was a better mother than Cousin Abby, and I've always thought it was being so good that killed her."

"But even now I can't understand," said Caroline thoughtfully. "I felt that she really liked me."

"Oh, she likes you well enough." Mrs. Timberlake was counting some dropped stitches. "She wasn't thinking about you a minute. I doubt if she ever in her life thought as long as that about anybody except herself. The curious part is," she supplemented presently, "that considering how shallow she is, so few people ever seem to see through her. It took David five years, and then he had to be married to her, to find out what I could have told him in ten minutes. Most of it is the way she looks, I expect. It is so hard for a man to understand that every woman who parts her hair in the middle isn't a Madonna."

"I knew she was hard and cold," confessed Caroline sadly, "but I thought she was good. I never dreamed she could be bad at heart."

Mrs. Timberlake shook her head. "She isn't bad, my dear, that's where you make a mistake. I believe she'd let herself be burned at the stake before she'd overstep a convention. When it comes to that," she commented with acrid philosophy, "I reckon all the bad women on earth could never do as much harm as some good ones—the sort of good ones that destroy everything human and natural that comes near them. We can look out for the bad ones—but I've come to believe that there's a certain kind of virtue that's no better than poison. It poisons everything it touches because all the humanity has passed out of it, just like one of those lovely poisonous flowers that spring up now and then in a swamp. Nothing that's made of flesh and blood could live by it, and yet it flourishes as if it were as harmless as a lily. I know I'm saying what I oughtn't to, but I saw you were getting hurt, and I wanted to spare you. It isn't that Angelica is wicked, you know, I wouldn't have you believe that for a minute. She is sincere as far as her light goes, and if I hadn't seen David's life destroyed through and through, I suppose I shouldn't feel anything like so bitterly. But I've watched all his trust in things and his generous impulses—there was never a man who started life with finer impulses than David—wither up, one after one, just as if they were blighted."

The sunset had faded slowly, and while Caroline sat there in the big chair, gazing out on the wintry garden, it seemed to her that the advancing twilight had become so thick that it stifled her. Then immediately she realized that it was not the twilight, but the obscurity in her own mind, that oppressed and enveloped her with these heavy yet intangible shadows. Her last illusion had perished, and she could not breathe because the smoke of its destruction filled the air. At the moment it seemed to her that life could never be exactly what it was before—that the glow and magic of some mysterious enchantment had vanished. Even the garden, with its frozen vegetation and its forlorn skeletons of summer shrubs emerging from mounds of snow, appeared to have undergone a sinister transformation from the ideal back to the actuality. This was the way she had felt years ago, on that autumn day at The Cedars.

"And he never defended himself—never once," she said after a silence.

"He never will, that's not his way," rejoined Mrs. Timberlake. "She knows he never will, and I sometimes think that makes matters worse."

As Caroline brooded over this, her face cleared until the light and animation returned. "I know him better," she murmured presently, "but everything else has become suddenly crooked."

"I've thought that at times before I stopped trying to straighten out things." Mrs. Timberlake had put down the muffler, and while she spoke, she smoothed it slowly and carefully over her knee. In the wan light her face borrowed a remote and visionary look, like a face gazing down through the thin, cold air of the heights. She had passed beyond mutable things, this look seemed to say, and had attained at last the bleak security of mind that is never disappointed because it expects nothing. "I reckon that's why I got into the habit of keeping my mouth shut, just because I was worrying myself sick all the time thinking how different things ought to be." A chill and wintry cheerfulness flickered across the arid surface of her manner. "But I don't now. I know there isn't any use, and I get a good deal of pleasure just out of seeing what will happen. Now, you take David and Angelica. I'm wondering all the time how it will turn out. David is a big man, but even if Angelica isn't smart, she's quick enough about getting anything she wants, and I believe she is beginning to want something she hasn't got."

"When I came I didn't like Mr. Blackburn." Though the barriers of the old lady's reserve had fallen, Caroline was struggling still against an instinct of loyalty.

"Well, I didn't like him once." Mrs. Timberlake had risen, and was looking down with her pitiful, tormented smile. "It took me a long time to find out the truth, and I want to spare you all I suffered while I was finding it out. I sometimes think that nobody's experience is worth a row of pins to any one else, but all the same I am trying to help you by telling you what I know. David has his faults. I'm not saying that he is a saint; but he has been the best friend I ever had, and I'm going to stand up for him, Angelica or no Angelica. There are some men, my poor father used to say, that never really show what they are because they get caught by life and twisted out of shape, and I reckon David is one of these. Father said, though I don't like heathen terms, that it was the fate of a man like David always to appear in the wrong and yet always to be in the right. That's a queer way of putting it, but father was a great scholar—he translated the "Iliad" before he was thirty—and I reckon he knew what he was talking about. Life was against those men, he told me once, but God was for them, and they never failed to win in the end." With the last words she faltered and broke off abruptly. "I have been talking a great deal more than I ought to, but when once I begin I never know when to stop. Angelica must have come home long ago." Bending over she laid her cheek against Caroline's hair. "You won't think of going away now, will you?"

Surprised and touched by the awkward caress, Caroline looked up gratefully. "No, I shan't think of going away now."