CHAPTER I
In Blackburn's Library

THE fire was burning low, and after Blackburn had thrown a fresh log on the andirons, he sat down in one of the big leather chairs by the hearth, and watched the flames as they leaped singing up the brick chimney. It was midnight—the clock in the hall was just striking—and a few minutes before, Angelica had gone languidly upstairs, after their belated return from a dinner in town. The drive home had been long and dreary, and he could still see the winter landscape, sketched in vivid outlines of black and white, under a pale moon that was riding high in the heavens. Road, fields, and houses, showed as clearly as a pen and ink drawing, and against this stark background his thoughts stood out with an abrupt and startling precision, as if they had detached themselves, one by one, from the naked forms on the horizon. There was no chance of sleep, for the sense of isolation, which had attacked him like physical pain while he drove home with Angelica, seemed to make his chaotic memories the only living things in a chill and colourless universe.

Though it was midnight, he had work to do before he went up to bed—for he had not yet given his final answer to Sloane. Already Blackburn had made his decision. Already he had worked out in his own mind the phrases of the letter; yet, before turning to his writing-table, he lingered a moment in order to weigh more carefully the cost of his resolve. It was not an age when political altruism was either mentally convincing or morally expedient, and the quality of his patriotism would be estimated in the public mind, he was aware, by the numbers of his majority. Sloane, he was sure, had been sounding him as a possible candidate in some future political venture—yet, while he sat there, it was not of Sloane that he was thinking. Slowly the depression and bitterness gathered to a single image, and looked out upon him from the pure reticence of Angelica's features. It was as if his adverse destiny—that destiny of splendid purpose and frustrated effort—had assumed for an instant the human form through which it had wrought its work of destruction.

"Well, after all, why should I decline? It is what I have always wanted to do, and I am right."

The room was very still, and in this stillness the light quivered in pools on the brown rugs and the brown walls and the old yellowed engravings. From the high bookshelves, which lined the walls, the friendly covers of books shone down on him, with the genial responsiveness that creeps into the aspect of familiar inanimate things. Over the mantelpiece hung the one oil painting in the room, a portrait of his mother as a girl, by an unknown painter, who drew badly, but had a genuine feeling for colour. The face was small and heart-shaped, like some delicately tinted flower that has only half opened. The hair lay in bands of twilight on either side of the grave forehead, and framed the large, wistful eyes, which had a flower-like softness that made him think of black pansies. Though the mouth was pink and faintly smiling, it seemed to him to express an infinite pathos. It was impossible for him to believe that his mother—the woman with the pallid cameo-like profile and the saintly brow under the thin dark hair—had ever faced life with that touching, expectant smile.

There had been a strong soul in that fragile body, but her courage, which was invincible, had never seemed to him the courage of happiness. She had accepted life with the fortitude of the Christian, not the joy of the Pagan; and her piety was associated in his mind with long summer Sundays, with old hymns played softly, with bare spotless rooms, and with many roses in scattered alabaster vases. Her intellect, like her character, he recalled as a curious blending of sweetness and strength. If the speculative side of her mind had ever existed, life had long ago hushed it, for her capacity for acquiescence—for unquestioning submission to the will of God—was like the glory of martyrdom. Yet, within her narrow field, the field in which religion reigned as a beneficent shade, she had thought deeply, and it seemed to Blackburn that she had never thought harshly. Her sympathy was as wide as her charity, and both covered the universe. So exquisitely balanced, so finely tempered, was her judgment of life, that after all these years, for she had died while he was still a boy, he remembered her as one whose understanding of the human heart approached the divine. "She always wanted me to do something like this," he thought, "to look forward—to stand for the future. I remember...."

From the light and warmth of the room there streamed the sunshine and fragrance of an old summer. After a hot day the sun was growing faint over the garden, and the long, slim shadows on the grass were so pale that they quivered between light and darkness, like the gauzy wings of gigantic dragon flies. Against a flushed sky a few bats were wheeling. Up from the sun-steeped lawn, which was never mown, drifted the mingled scents of sheepmint and box; and this unforgotten smell pervaded the garden and the lane and the porch at the back of the house, where he had stopped, before bringing home the cows, to exchange a word with his mother. The lattice door was open, and she stood there, in her black dress, with the cool, dim hall behind her.

"Mother," he said, "I have been reading about William Wallace. When I grow up, I want to fight kings."

She smiled, and her smile was like one of the slow, sad hymns they sang on Sunday afternoons. "When you grow up there may be no kings left to fight, dear."

"Will they be dead, mother?"

"They may be. One never knows, my son."

All the romance faded suddenly out of the world. "Well, if there are any left," he answered resolutely, "I am going to fight them."

He could still see her face, thin and sad, and like the closed white flowers he found sometimes growing in hollows where the sun never shone. Only her eyes, large and velvet black, seemed glowing with hope.

"There are only three things worth fighting for, my son," she said, "Your love, your faith, and your country. Nothing else matters."

"Father fought for his country, didn't he?"

"Your father fought for all three." She waited a moment, and then went on more slowly in a voice that sounded as if she were reciting a prayer, "This is what you must never forget, my boy, that you are your father's son, and that he gave his all for the cause he believed in, and counted it fair service."

The scene vanished like one of the dissolving views of a magic lantern, and there rose before him a later summer, and another imperishable memory of his boyhood....

It was an afternoon in September—one of those mellow afternoons when the light is spun like a golden web between earth and sky, and the grey dust of summer flowers rises as an incense to autumn. The harvest was gathered; the apples were reddening in the orchard; and along the rail fence by the roadside, sumach and Virginia creeper were burning slowly, like a flame that smoulders in the windless blue of the weather. Somewhere, very far away, a single partridge was calling, and nearer home, from the golden-rod and life-ever-lasting, rose the slow humming of bees.

He lay in the sun-warmed grass, with his bare feet buried in sheepmint. On the long benches, from which the green paint had rubbed off, some old men were sitting, and among them, a small coloured maid, in a dress of pink calico, was serving blackberry wine and plates of the pale yellow cake his mother made every Saturday. One of the men was his uncle, a crippled soldier, with long grey hair and shining eyes that held the rapt and consecrated vision of those who have looked through death to immortality. His crutch lay on the grass at his feet, and while he sipped his wine, he said gravely:

"A new generation is springing up, David's generation, and this must give, not the South alone, but the whole nation, a leader."

At the words the boy looked up quickly, his eyes gleaming, "What must the leader be like, uncle?"

The old soldier hesitated an instant. "He must, first of all, my boy, be predestined. No man whom God has not appointed can lead other men right."

"And how will he know if God has appointed him?"

"He will know by this—that he cannot swerve in his purpose. The man whom God has appointed sees his road straight before him, and he does not glance back or aside." His voice rose louder, over the murmur of the bees, as if it were chanting, "If the woods are filled with dangers, he does not know because he sees only his road. If the bridges have fallen, he does not know because he sees only his road. If the rivers are impassable, he does not know because he sees only his road. From the journey's beginning to its end, he sees only his road...."

A log, charred through the middle, broke suddenly, scattering a shower of sparks. The multitudinous impressions of his boyhood had gathered into these two memories of summer, and of that earlier generation which had sacrificed all for a belief. It was like a mosaic in his mind, a mosaic in which heroic figures waited, amid a jewelled landscape, for the leader whom God had appointed.

The room darkened while he sat there, and from outside he heard the crackling of frost and the ceaseless rustle of wind in the junipers. On the hearthrug, across the glimmering circle of the fire, he watched those old years flock back again, in all the fantastic motley of half-forgotten recollections. He saw the long frozen winters of his childhood, when he had waked at dawn to do the day's work of the farm before he started out to trudge five miles to the little country school, where the stove always smoked and the windows were never opened. Before this his mother had taught him his lessons, and his happiest memories were those of the hours when he sat by her side, with an antiquated geography on his knees, and watched her long slender fingers point the way to countries of absurd boundaries and unpronounceable names. She had taught him all he knew—knowledge weak in science, but rich in the invisible graces of mind and heart—and afterwards, in the uninspired method of the little school, he had first learned to distrust the kind of education with which the modern man begins the battle of life. Homespun in place of velvet, stark facts instead of the texture of romance! The mornings when, swinging his hoe, he had led his chattering band of little negroes into the cornfields, had been closer to the throbbing pulse of experience.

When he was fourteen the break had come, and his life had divided. His mother had died suddenly; the old place had been sold for a song; and the boy had come up to Richmond to make his way in a world which was too indifferent to be actually hostile. At first he had gone to work in a tobacco factory, reading after hours as long as the impoverished widow with whom he lived would let the gas burn in his room. Always he had meant to "get on"; always he had felt the controlling hand of his destiny. Even in those years of unformed motives and misdirected energies, he had been searching—searching. The present had never been more than a brief approach to the future. He had looked always for something truer, sounder, deeper, than the actuality that enmeshed him.

Suddenly, while he sat there confronting the phantom he had once called himself, he was visited by a rush of thought which seemed to sweep on wings through his brain. Yet the moment afterwards, when he tried to seize and hold the vision that darted so gloriously out of the shining distance, he found that it had already dissolved into a sensation, an apprehension, too finely spun of light and shadow to be imprisoned in words. It was as if some incalculable discovery, some luminous revelation, had brushed him for an instant as it sped onward into the world. Once or twice in the past such a gleaming moment had just touched him, leaving him with this vague sense of loss, of something missing, of an infinitely precious opportunity which had escaped him. Yet invariably it had been followed by some imperative call to action.

"I wonder what it means now," he thought, "I suppose the truth is that I have missed things again." The inspiration no longer seemed to exist outside of his own mind; but under the clustering memories, he felt presently a harder and firmer consciousness of his own purpose, just as in his boyhood, he would sometimes, in ploughing, strike a rock half buried beneath the frail bloom of the meadows. It was the sense of reality so strong, so solid, that it brought him up, almost with a jerk of pain, from the iridescent cobwebs of his fancy; and this reality, he understood after a minute, was an acute perception of the great war that men were fighting on the other side of the world. His knowledge of these terrible and splendid issues had broken through the perishable surface of thought. The illusion vanished like the bloom of the meadows; what remained was the bare rocky structure of truth. He had not meant to think of this now. He had left the evening free for his work—for the decision which must be made sooner or later; yet, through some mysterious trend of thought, every personal choice of his life seemed to become a part of the impersonal choice of humanity. The infinite issues had absorbed the finite intentions. Every decision was a ripple in the world battle between the powers of good and evil, of light and darkness. And he understood suddenly that the great abstractions for which men lay down their lives are one and indivisible—that there was not a corner of the earth where this fight for liberty could not be fought.

"I can fight here as well as over there," he thought, "if I am only big enough."

Now that his mind had got down to solid facts, to steady thinking, it worked quickly and clearly. It would be a hard fight, with all the odds against him, and yet the very difficulties appealed to him. Out of the dense fog of political theories, out of the noise and confusion of the Babel of many tongues, he could discern the dim framework of a purer social order. The foundation of the Republic was sound, he believed, only the eyes of the builders had failed, the hands of the builders had trembled. That the ideal democracy was not a dream, but an unattained reality, he had never doubted. The failure lay not in the plan, but in the achievement. There was obliquity of vision, there was even blindness, for the human mind was still afflicted by the ancient error which had brought the autocracies of the past to destruction. Men and nations had still to learn that in order to preserve liberty it must first be surrendered—that there is no spiritual growth except through sacrifice. But it must be surrendered only to a broader, an ever-growing conception of what liberty means.

As in the sun-warmed grass on those Sunday afternoons, he still dreamed of America leading the nations. The great Virginians of the past had been Virginians first; the great Virginians of the future would be Americans. The urgent need in America, as he saw it, was for unity; and the first step toward this unity, the obliteration of sectional boundaries. In this, he felt, Virginia must lead the states. As she had once yielded her land to the nation, she must now yield her spirit. She must point the way by act, not by theory; she must vote right as well as think right.

"And to vote right," he said presently, thinking aloud, "we must first live right. People speak of a man's vote as if it were an act apart from the other acts of his life—as if they could detach it from his universal conceptions. There was a grain of truth in Uncle Carter's saying that he could tell by the way a man voted whether or not he believed in the immortality of the soul." It was Uncle Carter, he remembered, who had described the chronic malady of American life as a disease of manner that had passed from the skin into the body politic. "Take my word for it," the old soldier had said, "there is no such thing as sound morals without sound manners, for manners are only the outer coating—the skin, if you like—of morals. Without unselfish consideration for others there can be no morality, and if you have unselfish consideration in your heart, you will have good manners though you haven't a coat on your back. Order and sanity and precision, and all the other qualities we need most in this Republic, are only the outward forms of unselfish consideration for others, and patriotism, in spite of its plumed attire, is only that on a larger scale. After all, your country is merely a tremendous abstraction of your neighbour." Well, perhaps the old chap had been talking sense half the time when people smiled at his words!

Rising from his chair, he pushed back the last waning ember, and stood gazing down on the ashes.

"I will do my best," he said slowly. "I will fight to the last ditch for the things I believe in—for cleaner politics, for constructive patriotism, and for a fairer democracy. These are the big issues, and the little ends will flow from them."

As he finished, the clock in the hall struck twice and stopped, and at the same instant the door of the library opened slowly, and, to his amazement, he saw Mary standing beyond the threshold. She carried a candle in her hand, and by the wavering light, he saw that she was very pale and that her eyes were red as if she had been weeping.

"The lights were out. I thought you had gone upstairs," she said, with a catch in her voice.

"Do you want anything?"

"No, I couldn't sleep, so I came for a book."

With a hurried movement, she came over to the table and caught up a book without glancing at the title.

"Are you ill?" he asked. "Is anything the matter?"

"No, nothing. I am well, only I couldn't sleep."

"There is no trouble about Alan, is there? Have you quarrelled?"

"Oh, no, we haven't quarrelled." She was plainly impatient at his questioning. "Alan is all right. Really, it is nothing."

Though his affection for her was deep and strong, they had never learned to be demonstrative with each other, perhaps because they had been separated so much in childhood and early youth. It was almost with a hesitating gesture that he put out his hand now and touched her hair.

"My dear, you know you can trust me."

"Yes, I know." The words broke from her with a sob, and turning hastily away, she ran out of the room and back up the stairs.

CHAPTER II
Readjustments

IN Letty's nursery the next afternoon, Blackburn came at last to know Caroline without the barrier of her professional manner. The child was playing happily with her paper dolls in one corner, and while she marched them back and forth along a miniature road of blocks, she sang under her breath a little song she had made.

Oh, my,
I'd like to fly
Very high
In the sky,
Just you and I.

"I am very cold," said Blackburn, as he entered. "Mammy Riah has promised me a cup of tea if I am good."

"You are always good, father," replied Letty politely, but she did not rise from the floor. "I'm sorry I can't stop, but Mrs. Brown is just taking her little girl to the hospital. If I were to get up the poor little thing might die on the way."

"That must not happen. Perhaps Miss Meade will entertain me?"

"I will do my best." Caroline turned from her writing and took up a half-finished sock. "If you had come an hour earlier you might have seen some of Mrs. Blackburn's lovely clothes. She was showing us the dress she is going to wear to dinner to-night."

"You like pretty clothes." It was a careless effort to make conversation, but as he dropped into the armchair on the hearthrug, his face softened. There was a faint scent of violets in the air from a half-faded little bunch in Caroline's lap.

She met the question frankly. "On other people."

"Do you like nothing for yourself? You are so impersonal that I sometimes wonder if you possess a soul of your own."

"Oh, I like a great many things." Mammy Riah had brought tea, and Caroline put down her knitting and drew up to the wicker table. "I like books for instance. At The Cedars we used to read every evening. Father read aloud to us as long as he lived."

"Yet I never see you reading?"

"Not here." As she shook her head, the firelight touched her close, dark hair, which shone like satin against the starched band of her cap. Almost as white as her cap seemed her wide forehead, with the intense black eyebrows above the radiant blue of her eyes. "You see I want to finish these socks."

"I thought you were doing a muffler?"

"Oh, that's gone to France long ago! This is a fresh lot Mrs. Blackburn has promised, and Mrs. Timberlake and I are working night and day to get them finished in time. We can't do the large kind of work that Mrs. Blackburn does," she added, "so we have to make up with our little bit. Mrs. Timberlake says we are hewers of wood and drawers of water."

"You are always busy," he said, smiling. "I believe you would be busy if you were put into solitary confinement."

To his surprise a look of pain quivered about her mouth, and he noticed, for the first time, that it was the mouth of a woman who had suffered. "It is the best way of not thinking——" She ended with a laugh, and he felt that, in spite of her kindness and her capability, she was as elusive as thistle-down.

"I can knit a little, father," broke in Letty, looking up from her dolls. "Miss Meade is teaching me to knit a muffler—only it gets narrower all the time. I'm afraid the soldiers won't want it."

"Then give it to me. I want it."

"If I give it to you, you might go to fight, and get killed." As the child turned again to her dolls, he said slowly to Caroline, "I can't imagine how she picks up ideas like that. Someone must have talked about the war before her."

"She heard Mrs. Blackburn talking about it once in the car. She must have caught words without our noticing it."

His face darkened. "One has to be careful."

"Yes, I try to remember." He was quick to observe that she was taking the blame from Angelica, and again he received an impression that she was mentally evading him. Her soul was closed like a flower; yet now and then, through her reserve and gravity, he felt a charm that was as sweet and fresh as a perfume. She was looking tired and pale, he thought, and he wondered how her still features could have kindled into the beauty he had seen in them on that snowy afternoon. It had never occurred to him before, accustomed as he was to the formal loveliness of Angelica, that the same woman could be both plain and beautiful, both colourless and vivid.

This was perplexing him, when she clasped her hands over her knitting, and said with the manner of quiet confidence that he had grown to expect in her, "I have always meant to tell you, Mr. Blackburn, that I listened to everything you said that day on the terrace—that afternoon when you were talking to Colonel Ashburton and Mr. Sloane. I didn't mean to listen, but I found myself doing it."

"Well, I hope you are not any the worse for it, and I am sure you are not any the better."

"There is something else I want to tell you." Her pale cheeks flushed faintly, and a liquid fire shone in her eyes. "I think you are right. I agree with every word that you said."

"Traitor! What would your grandmother have thought of you? As a matter of fact I have forgotten almost all that I said, but I can safely assume that it was heretical. I think none of us intended to start that discussion. We launched into it before we knew where we were going."

Her mind was on his first sentence, and she appeared to miss his closing words. "I can't answer for my grandmother, but father would have agreed with you. He used to say that the State was an institution for the making of citizens."

"And he talked to you about such things?" It had never occurred to him that a woman could become companionable on intellectual grounds, yet while she sat there facing him, with the light on her brow and lips, and her look of distinction and remoteness as of one who has in some way been set apart from personal joy or sorrow, he realized that she was as utterly detached as Sloane had been when he discoursed on the functions of government.

"Oh, we talked and talked on Sunday afternoons, a few neighbours, old soldiers mostly, and father and I. I wonder why political arguments still make me think of bees humming?"

He laughed with a zest she had never heard in his voice before. "And the smell of sheepmint and box!"

"I remember—and blackberry wine in blue glasses?"

"No, they were red, and there was cake cut in thin slices with icing on the top of it."

"Doesn't it bring it all back again?"

"It brings back the happiest time of my life to me. You never got up at dawn to turn the cows out to pasture, and brought them home in the evening, riding the calf?"

"No, but I've cooked breakfast by candlelight."

"You've never led a band of little darkeys across a cornfield at sunrise?"

"But I've canned a whole patch of tomatoes."

"I know you've never tasted the delight of stolen fishing in the creek under the willows?"

Her reserve had dropped from her like a mask. She looked up with a laugh that was pure music. "It is hard to believe that you ever went without things."

"Oh, things!" He made a gesture of indifference. "If you mean money—well, it may surprise you to know that it has no value for me to-day except as a means to an end."

"To how many ends?" she asked mockingly.

"The honest truth is that it wouldn't cost me a pang to give up Briarlay, every stock and stone, and go back to the southside to dig for a living. I made it all by accident, and I may lose it all just as easily. It looks now, since the war began, as if I were losing some of it very rapidly. But have you ever noticed that people are very apt to keep the things they don't care about—that they can't shake them off? Now, what I've always wanted was the chance to do some work that counted—an opportunity for service that would help the men who come after me. As a boy I used to dream of this. In those days I preferred William Wallace to Monte Cristo."

"The opportunity may come now."

"If we go into this war—and, by God, we must go into it!—that might be. I'd give ten—no, twenty years of my life for the chance. Life! We speak of giving life, but what is life except the means of giving something infinitely better and finer? As if anything mattered but the opportunity to speak the thought in one's brain, to sing it, to build it in stone. There is a little piece of America deep down in me, and when I die I want to leave it somewhere above ground, embodied in the national consciousness. When this blessed Republic leaves the mud behind, and goes marching, clean and whole, down the ages, I want this little piece of myself to go marching with it."

So she had discovered the real Blackburn, the dreamer under the clay! This was the man Mrs. Timberlake had described to her—the man whose fate it was to appear always in the wrong and to be always in the right. And, womanlike, she wondered if this passion of the mind had drawn its strength and colour from the earlier wasted passion of his heart? Would he love America so much if he loved Angelica more? As she drew nearer to the man's nature, she was able to surmise how terrible must have been the ruin that Angelica had wrought in his soul. That he had once loved her with all the force and swiftness of his character, Caroline understood as perfectly as she had come to understand that he now loved her no longer.

"If I can cast a shadow of the America in my mind into the sum total of American thought, I shall feel that life has been worth while," he was saying. "The only way to create a democracy,—and I see the immense future outlines of this country as the actual, not the imaginary democracy,—after all, the only way to create a thing is to think it. An act of faith isn't merely a mental process; it is a creative force that the mind releases into the world. Germany made war, not by invading Belgium, but by thinking war for forty years; and, in the same way, by thinking in terms of social justice, we may end by making a true democracy." He paused abruptly, with the glow of enthusiasm in his face, and then added slowly, in a voice that sounded curiously restrained and distant, "I must have been boring you abominably. It has been so long since I let myself go like this that I'd forgotten where I was and to whom I was talking."

It was true, she realized, without resentment; he had forgotten that she was present. Since she had little vanity, she was not hurt. It was only one of those delicious morsels that life continually offered to one's sense of humour.

"I am not quite so dull, perhaps, as you think me," she responded pleasantly. After all, though intelligence was sometimes out of place, she had discovered that pleasantness was always a serviceable quality.

At this he rose from his chair, laughing. "You must not, by the way, get a wrong impression of me. I have been talking as if money did not count, and yet there was a time when I'd willingly have given twenty years of my life for it. Money meant to me power—the kind of power one could grasp by striving and sacrifice. Why, I've walked the streets of Richmond with five cents in my pocket, and the dream of uncounted millions in my brain. When my luck turned, and it turned quickly as luck runs, I thought for a year or two that I'd got the thing that I wanted——"

"And you found out that you hadn't?"

"Oh, yes, I found out that I hadn't," he rejoined drily, as he moved toward the door, "and I've been making discoveries like that ever since. To-day I might tell you that work, not wealth, brings happiness, but I've been wrong often enough before, and who knows that I am not wrong about this." It was the tone of bitterness she had learned to watch for whenever she talked with him—the tone that she recognized as the subtle flavour of Angelica's influence. "Now I'll find Mary," he added, "and ask her if she saw the doctor this morning. The reading I heard as I came up, I suppose was for her benefit?"

"I don't know," replied Caroline, wondering if she ought to keep him from interrupting a play of Alan's. "I think Mr. Wythe had promised to read something to Mrs. Blackburn."

"Oh, well, Mary must be about, and I'll find her. She couldn't sleep last night and I thought her looking fagged."

"Yes, she hasn't been well. Mrs. Timberlake has tried to persuade her to take a tonic."

For a minute he hesitated. "There hasn't been any trouble, I hope. Anything I could straighten out?" He looked curiously young and embarrassed as he put the question.

"Nothing that I know of. I think she feels a little nervous and let-down, that's all."

The hesitation had gone now from his manner, and he appeared relieved and cheerful. "I had forgotten that you aren't the keeper of the soul as well as the body. It's amazing the way you manage Letty. She is happier than I have ever seen her." Then, as the child got up from her play and came over to him, he asked tenderly, "Aren't you happy, darling?"

"Yes, I'm happy, father," answered Letty, slowly and gravely, "but I wish mother was happy too. She was crying this morning, and so was Aunt Mary."

A wine-dark flush stained Blackburn's face, while the arms that had been about to lift Letty from the floor, dropped suddenly to his sides. The pleasure his praise had brought to Caroline faded as she watched him, and she felt vaguely disturbed and apprehensive. Was there something, after all, that she did not understand? Was there a deeper closet and a grimmer skeleton at Briarlay than the one she had discovered?

"If your mother isn't happy, Letty, you must try to make her so," he answered presently in a low voice.

"I do try, father, I try dreadfully hard, and so does Miss Meade. But I think she wants something she hasn't got," she added in a whisper, "I think she wants something so very badly that it hurts her."

"And does your Aunt Mary want something too?" Though he spoke jestingly, the red flush was still in his face.

Letty put up her arms and drew his ear down to her lips. "Oh, no, Aunt Mary cries just because mother does."

"Well, we'll see what we can do about it," he responded, as he turned away and went out of the door.

Listening attentively, Caroline heard his steps pass down the hall, descend the stairs, and stop before the door of the front drawing-room. "I wonder if Mr. Wythe is still reading," she thought; and then she went back to her unfinished letter, while Letty returned cheerfully to her play in the corner.

This is an ugly blot, mother dear, but Mr. Blackburn came in so suddenly that he startled me, and I almost upset my inkstand. He stayed quite a long time, and talked more than he had ever done to me before—mostly about politics. I have changed my opinion of him since I came here. When I first knew him I thought him wooden and hard, but the more I see of him the better I like him, and I am sure that everything we heard about him was wrong. He has an unfortunate manner at times, and he is very nervous and irritable, and little things upset him unless he keeps a tight grip on himself; but I believe that he is really kind-hearted and sincere in what he says. One thing I am positive about—there was not a word of truth in the things Mrs. Colfax wrote me before I came here. He simply adores Letty, and whatever trouble there may be between him and his wife, I do not believe that it is entirely his fault. Mrs. Timberlake says he was desperately in love with her when he married her, and I can tell, just by watching them together, how terribly she must have made him suffer. Of course, I should not say this to any one else, but I tell you everything—I have to tell you—and I know you will not read a single word of this to the girls.

I used to hope that Letty's illness would bring them together—wouldn't that have been just the way things happen in books?—but everybody blamed him because she went to the tableaux, and, as far as I can see, she lets people think what is false, without lifting a finger to correct them. It is such a pity that she isn't as fine as we once thought her—for she looks so much like an angel that it is hard not to believe that she is good, no matter what she does. If you haven't lived in the house with her, it is impossible to see through her, and even now I am convinced that if she chose to take the trouble, she could twist everyone of us, even Mr. Blackburn, round her little finger. You remember I wrote you that Mr. Wythe did not like her? Well, she has chosen to be sweet to him of late, and now he is simply crazy about her. He reads her all his plays, and she is just as nice and sympathetic as she can be about his work. I sometimes wish Miss Blackburn would not be quite so frank and sharp in her criticism. I have heard her snap him up once or twice about something he wrote, and I am sure she hurt his feelings. One afternoon, when I took Letty down to the drawing-room to show a new dress to her mother, he was reading, and he went straight on, while we were there, and finished his play. I liked it very much, and so did Mrs. Blackburn, but Miss Blackburn really showed some temper because he would not change a line when she asked him to. It was such a pity she was unreasonable because it made her look plain and unattractive, and Mrs. Blackburn was too lovely for words. She had on a dress of grey crÊpe exactly the colour of her eyes, and her hair looked softer and more golden than ever. It is the kind of hair one never has very much of—as fine and soft as Maud's—but it is the most beautiful colour and texture I ever saw.

Well, I thought that Miss Blackburn was right when she said the line was all out of character with the speaker; but Mrs. Blackburn did not agree with us, and when Mr. Wythe appealed to her, she said it was just perfect as it was, and that he must not dream of changing it. Then he said he was going to let it stand, and Miss Blackburn was so angry that she almost burst into tears. I suppose it hurt her to see how much more he valued the other's opinion; but it would be better if she could learn to hide her feelings. And all the time Mrs. Blackburn lay back in her chair, in her dove grey dress, and just smiled like a saint. You would have thought she pitied her sister-in-law, she looked at her so sweetly when she said, "Mary, dear, we mustn't let you persuade him to ruin it." You know I really began to ask myself if I had not been unjust to her in thinking that she could be a little bit mean. Then I remembered that poor old woman in Pine Street—I wrote you about her last autumn—and I knew she was being sweet because there was something she wanted to gain by it. I don't know what it is she wants, nor why she is wasting so much time on Mr. Wythe; but it is exactly as if she had bloomed out in the last month like a white rose. She takes more trouble about her clothes, and there is the loveliest glow—there isn't any word but bloom that describes it—about her skin and hair and eyes. She looks years younger than she did when I came here.

I wanted to write you about Mr. Blackburn, but his wife is so much more fascinating. Even if you do not like her, you are obliged to think about her, and even if you do not admire her, you are obliged to look at her when she is in the room. She says very little—and as she never says anything clever, I suppose this is fortunate—but somehow she just manages to draw everything to her. I suppose it is personality, but you always say that personality depends on mind and heart, and I am sure her attraction has nothing to do with either of these. It is strange, isn't it, but the whole time Mr. Blackburn was in here talking to me, I kept wondering if she had ever cared for him? Mrs. Timberlake says that she never did even when she married him, and that now she is irritated because he is having a good many financial difficulties, and they interfere with her plans. But Mr. Blackburn seems to worry very little about money. I believe his friends think that some day he may run for the Senate—Forlorn Hope Blackburn, Colonel Ashburton calls him, though he says that he has a larger following among the Independent voters than anybody suspects. I shouldn't imagine there was the faintest chance of his election—for he has anything but an ingratiating manner with people; and so much in a political candidate depends upon a manner. You remember all the dreadful speeches that were flung about in the last Presidential elections. Well, Mr. Sloane, who was down here from New York the other day, said he really thought the result might have been different if the campaign speakers had had better manners. It seems funny that such a little thing should decide a great question, doesn't it? I suppose, when the time comes for us to go into this war or stay out of it, the decision will rest upon something so small that it will never get into history, not even between the lines. You remember that remark of Turgot's—that dear father loved to quote: "The greatest evils in life have their rise from things too small to be attended to."

After hearing Mr. Blackburn talk, I am convinced that he is perfectly honest in everything he says. As far as I can gather he believes, just as we do, that men should go into politics in order to give, not to gain, and he feels that they will give freely of themselves only to something they love, or to some ideal that is like a religion to them. He says the great need is to love America—that we have not loved, we have merely exploited, and he thinks that as long as the sections remain distinct from the nation, and each man thinks first of his own place, the nation will be exploited for the sake of the sections. He says, too, and this sounds like father, that the South is just as much the nation as the North or the West, and that it is the duty of the South to do her share in the building of the future. I know this is put badly, but you will understand what I mean.

Now, I really must stop. Oh, I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Blackburn wants to know if you could find time to do some knitting for her? She says she will furnish all the wool you need, and she hopes you will make socks instead of mufflers. I told her you knitted the most beautiful socks.

I am always thinking of you and wondering about The Cedars.

Your loving,
CAROLINE.

It looks very much as if we were going to fight, doesn't it? Has the President been waiting for the country, or the country for the President?

CHAPTER III
Man's Woman

FROM the second drawing-room, where Angelica had tea every afternoon, there drifted the fragrance of burning cedar, and as Blackburn walked quickly toward the glow of the fire, he saw his wife in her favourite chair with deep wings, and Alan Wythe stretched languidly on the white fur rug at her feet. Mary was not there. She had evidently just finished tea, for her riding-crop lay on a chair by the door; but when Blackburn called her name, Alan stopped his reading and replied in his pleasant voice, "I think she has gone out to the stable. William came to tell her that one of the horses had a cough."

"Then I'll find her. She seems out of sorts, and I'm trying to make her see the doctor."

"I am sorry for that." Laying aside the book, Alan sprang to his feet, and stood gazing anxiously into the other's face. "She always appears so strong that one comes to take her fitness as a matter of course."

"Yes, I never saw her look badly until the last day or two. Have you noticed it, Angelica?"

Without replying to his question, Angelica rested her head against the pink velvet cushion, and turned a gentle, uncomprehending stare on his face. It was her most disconcerting expression, for in the soft blankness and immobility of her look, he read a rebuke which she was either too amiable or too well-bred to utter. He wondered what he had done that was wrong, and, in the very instant of wondering, he felt himself grow confused and angry and aggressive. This was always the effect of her stare and her silence—for nature had provided her with an invincible weapon in her mere lack of volubility—and when she used it as deliberately as she did now, she could, without speaking a syllable, goad him to the very limit of his endurance. It was as if her delicate hands played on his nerves and evoked an emotional discord.

"Have you noticed that Mary is not well?" he asked sharply, and while he spoke, he became aware that Alan's face had lost its friendliness.

"No, I had not noticed it." Her voice dropped as softly as liquid honey from her lips. "I thought her looking very well and cheerful at tea." She spoke without movement or gesture; but the patient and resigned droop of her figure, the sad grey eyes, and the hurt quiver of her eyelashes, implied the reproach she had been too gentle to put into words. The contrast with her meekness made him appear rough and harsh; yet the knowledge of this, instead of softening him, only increased his sense of humiliation and bitterness.

"Perhaps, then, there is no need of my speaking to her?" he said.

"It might please her." She was sympathetic now about Mary. "I am sure that she would like to know how anxious you are."

For the first time since he had entered the room she was smiling, and this slow, rare smile threw a golden radiance over her features. He thought, as Caroline had done several afternoons ago, that her beauty, which had grown a little dim and pale during the autumn, had come back with an April colour and freshness. Not only her hair and eyes, but the ivory tint of her skin seemed to shine with a new lustre, as if from some hidden fire that was burning within. For a minute the old appeal to his senses returned, and he felt again the beat and quiver of his pulses which her presence used to arouse. Then his mind won the victory, and the emotion faded to ashes before its warmth had passed to his heart.

"I'll go and find her," he said again, with the awkwardness he always showed when he was with her.

Her smile vanished, and she leaned forward with an entreating gesture, which flowed through all the slender, exquisite lines of her body. Instinctively he knew that she had not finished with him yet; that she was not ready to let him go until he had served some inscrutable purpose which she had had in view from the beginning. His mind was not trained to recognize subtleties of intention or thought; and while he waited for her to reveal herself, he began wondering what she could possibly want with him now? Clearly it was all part of some intricate scheme; yet it appeared incredible to his blunter perceptions that she should exhaust the resources of her intelligence merely for the empty satisfaction of impressing Mary's lover.

"David," she began in a pleading tone, "aren't you going to have tea with me?"

"I had it upstairs." He was baffled and at bay before an attack which he could not understand.

"In the nursery?" Her voice trembled slightly.

"Yes, in the nursery." As if she had ever expected or desired him to interrupt her amusements!"Was Cousin Matty up there?" Though he was still unable to define her motive, his ears detected the faint note of suspense that ruffled the thin, clear quality of her voice.

"No, only Letty and Miss Meade."

A tremor crossed her face, as if he had struck her; then she said, not reproachfully, but with a pathetic air of self-effacement and humility, "Miss Meade is very intelligent. I am so glad you have found someone you like to talk to. I know I am dull about politics." And her eyes added wistfully, "It isn't my fault that I am not so clever."

"Yes, she is intelligent," he answered drily; and then, still mystified and dully resentful because he could not understand, he turned and went out as abruptly as he had entered.

While his footsteps passed through the long front drawing-room and across the hall, Angelica remained motionless, with her head bent a little sadly, as if she were listening to the echo of some half-forgotten sorrow. Then, sighing gently, she looked from Alan into the fire, and reluctantly back at Alan again. She seemed impulsively, against her will and her conscience, to turn to him for understanding and sympathy; and at the sight of her unspoken appeal, he threw himself on the rug at her feet, and exclaimed in a strangled voice,

"You are unhappy!" With these three words, into which he seemed to put infinity, he had broken down the walls of reticence that divide human souls from each other. She was unhappy! Before this one torrential discovery all the restraints of habit and tradition, of conscience and honour, vanished like the imperfect structures of man in the rage of the hurricane.

She shivered, and looked at him with a long frightened gaze. There was no rebellion, there was only a passive sadness in her face. She was too weak, her eyes said, to contend with unhappiness. Some stronger hands than hers must snatch her from her doom if she were to be rescued.

"How can I be happy?" The words were wrung slowly from her lips. "You see how it is?"

"Yes, I see." He honestly imagined that he did. "I see it all, and it makes me desperate. It is unbelievable that any one should make you suffer."

She shook her head and answered in a whisper, "It is partly my fault. Whatever happens, I always try to remember that, and be just. The first mistake may have been mine."

"Yours?" he exclaimed passionately, and then dropping his face into his hands, "If only I were not powerless to protect you!"

For a moment, after his smothered cry, she said nothing. Then, with an exquisite gesture of renunciation, she put the world and its temptations away from her. "We are both powerless," she responded firmly, "and now you must read me the rest of your play, or I shall be obliged to send you home."

Blackburn, meanwhile, had stopped outside on his way to the stable, and stood looking across the garden for some faint prospect of a clearer to-morrow. Overhead the winter sky was dull and leaden; but in the west a thin silver line edged the horizon, and his gaze hung on this thread of light, as if it were prophetic not only of sunshine, but of happiness. Already he was blaming himself for the scene with Angelica; already he was resolving to make a stronger effort at reconciliation and understanding, to win her back in spite of herself, to be patient, sympathetic, and generous, rather than just, in his judgment of her. In his more philosophical moments he beheld her less as the vehicle of personal disenchantment, than as the unfortunate victim of a false system, of a ruinous upbringing. She had been taught to grasp until grasping had become not so much a habit of gesture, as a reflex movement of soul—an involuntary reaction to the nerve stimulus of her surroundings.

Though he had learned that the sight of any object she did not own immediately awoke in her the instinct of possession, he still told himself, in hours of tolerance, that this weakness of nature was the result of early poverty and lack of mental discipline, and that disappointment with material things would develop her character as inevitably as it would destroy her physical charm. So far, he was obliged to admit, she had risen superior to any disillusionment from possession, with the ironic exception of that brief moment when she had possessed his adoration; yet, in spite of innumerable failures, it was characteristic of the man that he should cling stubbornly to his belief in some secret inherent virtue in her nature, as he had clung, when love failed him, to the frail sentiments of habit and association. The richness of her beauty had blinded him for so long to the poverty of her heart, that, even to-day, bruised and humiliated as he was, he found himself suddenly hoping that she might some day change miraculously into the woman he had believed her to be. The old half-forgotten yearning for her swept over him while he thought of her, the yearning to kneel at her feet, to kiss her hands, to lift his eyes and see her bending like an angel above him. And in his thoughts she came back to him, not as she was in reality, but as he longed for her to be. With one of those delusive impersonations of memory, which torment the heart after the mind has rejected them, she came back to him with her hands outstretched to bless, not to grasp, and a look of goodness and love in her face.

He remembered his first meeting with her—the close, over-heated rooms, the empty faces, the loud, triumphant music; and then suddenly she had bloomed there, like a white flower, in the midst of all that was ineffectual and meaningless. One minute he had been lonely, tired, depressed, and the next he was rested and happy and full of wild, startled dreams of the future. She had been girlish and shy and just a little aloof—all the feminine graces adorned her—and he had surrendered in the traditional masculine way. Afterwards he discovered that she had intended from the first instant to marry him; but on that evening he had seen only her faint, reluctant flight from his rising emotion. She had played the game so well; she had used the ancient decoy so cleverly, that it had taken years to tear the veil of illusion from the bare structure of method. For he knew now that she had been methodical, that she had been utterly unemotional; and that her angelic virtue had been mere thinness of temperament. Never for a moment had she been real, never had she been natural; and he admitted, in the passing mood of confession, that if she had once been natural—as natural as the woman upstairs—the chances were that she would never have won him. Manlike, he would have turned from the blade-straight nature to pursue the beckoning angel of the faint reluctance. If she had stooped but for an instant, if she had given him so much as the touch of her fingers, she might have lost him. Life, not instinct, had taught him the beauty of sincerity in woman, the grace of generosity. In his youth, it was woman as mystery, woman as destroyer, to whom he had surrendered.

Descending the steps from the terrace, he walked slowly along the brick way to the stable, where he found Mary giving medicine to her favourite horse.

"Briar Rose has a bad cough, David."

He asked a few questions, and then, when the dose was administered, they turned together, and strolled back through the garden. Mary looked cross and anxious, and he could tell by the way she spoke in short jerks that her nerves were not steady. Her tone of chaffing had lost its ease, and the effort she made to appear flippant seemed to hurt her.

"Are you all right again, Mary?"

"Quite all right. Why shouldn't I be?"

"There's no reason that I know of," he replied seriously. "Have you decided when you will be married?"

She winced as if he had touched a nerve. "No, we haven't decided." For a minute she walked on quickly, then looking up with a defiant smile, she said, "I am not sure that we are ever going to be married."

So the trouble was out at last! He breathed heavily, overcome by some indefinable dread. After all, why should Mary's words have disturbed him so deeply? The chances were, he told himself, that it was nothing more than the usual lovers' quarrel.

"My dear, Alan is a good fellow. Don't let anything make trouble between you."

"Oh, I know he is a good fellow—only—only I am not sure we—we should be happy together. I don't care about books, and he doesn't care any longer for horses——"

"As if these things mattered! You've got the fundamental thing, haven't you?"

"The fundamental thing?" She was deliberately evading him—she, the straightforward Mary!

"I mean, of course, that you care for each other."

At this she broke down, and threw out her hands with a gesture of despair. "I don't know. I used to think so, but I don't know any longer," she answered, and fled from him into the house.

As he looked after her he felt the obscure doubt struggling again in his mind, and with it there returned the minor problem of his financial difficulties, and the conversation he must sooner or later have with Angelica. Nothing in his acquaintance with Angelica had surprised him more than the discovery that, except in the embellishment of her own attractions, she could be not only prudent, but stingy. Even her extravagance—if a habit of spending that exacted an adequate return for every dollar could be called extravagance—was cautious and cold like her temperament, as if Nature had decreed that she should possess no single attribute of soul in abundance. No impulse had ever swept her away, not even the impulse to grasp. She had always calculated, always schemed with her mind, not her senses, always moved slowly and deliberately toward her purpose. She would never speak the truth, he knew, just as she would never over-step a convention, because truthfulness and unconventionality would have interfered equally with the success of her designs. Life had become for her only a pedestal which supported an image; and this image, as unlike the actual Angelica as a Christmas angel is unlike a human being, was reflected, in all its tinselled glory, in the minds of her neighbours. Before the world she would be always blameless, wronged, and forgiving. He knew these things with his mind, yet there were moments even now when his heart still desired her.

An hour later, when he entered her sitting-room, he found her, in a blue robe, on the sofa in front of the fire. Of late he had noticed that she seldom lay down in the afternoon, and as she was not a woman of moods, he was surprised that she had broken so easily through a habit which had become as fixed as a religious observance.

"It doesn't look as if you had had much rest to-day," he said, as he entered.

She looked up with an expression that struck him as incongruously triumphant. Though at another time he would have accepted this as an auspicious omen, he wondered now, after the episode of the afternoon, if she were merely gathering her forces for a fresh attack. He shrank from approaching her on the subject of economy, because experience had taught him that her first idea of saving would be to cut down the wages of the servants; and he had a disturbing recollection that she had met his last suggestion that they should reduce expenses with a reminder that it was unnecessary to employ a trained nurse to look after Letty. When she wanted to strike hardest, she invariably struck through the child. Though she was not clever, she had been sharp enough to discover the chink in his armour.

"Did you find Mary?" she asked.

"Yes, she seems out of sorts. What is the trouble between her and Alan?"

"Is there any trouble?" She appeared surprised.

"I fear so. She told me she was not sure that they were going to be married."

"Did she say that?"

"She said it, but she may not have meant it. I cannot understand."

Angelica pondered his words. "Well, I've noticed lately that she wasn't very nice to him."

"But she was wildly in love with him. She cannot have changed so suddenly."

"Why not?" She raised her eyebrows slightly. "People do change, don't they?"

"Not when they are like Mary." With a gesture of perplexity, he put the subject away from him. "What I really came to tell you isn't very much better," he said. "Of late, since the war began, things have been going rather badly with me. I dare say I'll manage to pull up sooner or later, but every interest in which I am heavily involved has been more or less affected by the condition of the country. If we should go into this war——"

She looked up sharply. "Don't you think we can manage to keep out of it?"

"To keep out of it?" Even now there were moments when she astonished him.

For the first time in months her impatience got the better of her. "Oh, I know, of course, that you would like us to fight Germany; but it seems to me that if you stopped to think of all the suffering it would mean——"

"I do stop to think."

"Then there isn't any use talking!"

"Not about that; but considering the uncertainty of the immediate future, don't you think we might try, in some way, to cut down a bit?"

Turning away from him, she gazed thoughtfully into the fire. "If it is really necessary——?"

"It may become necessary at any moment."

At this she looked straight up at him. "Well, since Letty is so much better, I am sure that there is no need for us to keep a trained nurse for her."

She had aimed squarely, and he flinched at the blow. "But the child is so happy."

"She would be just as happy with any one else."

"No other nurse has ever done so much for her. Why, she has been like a different child since Miss Meade came to her."

While he spoke he became aware that she was looking at him as she had looked in the drawing-room.

"Then you refuse positively to let me send Miss Meade away?"

"I refuse positively, once and for all."

Her blank, uncomprehending stare followed him as he turned and went out of the room.

CHAPTER IV
The Martyr

A fortnight later light was thrown on Blackburn's perplexity by a shrewd question from Mrs. Timberlake. For days he had been groping in darkness, and now, in one instant, it seemed to him that his discovery leaped out in a veritable blaze of electricity. How could he have gone on in ignorance? How could he have stumbled, with unseeing eyes, over the heart of the problem?

"David," said the housekeeper bluntly, "don't you think that this thing has been going on long enough?" They were in the library, and before putting the question, she had closed the door and even glanced suspiciously at the windows.

"This thing?" He looked up from his newspaper, with the vague idea that she was about to discourse upon our diplomatic correspondence with Germany.

"I am not talking about the President's notes." Her voice had grown rasping. "He may write as many as he pleases, if they will make the Germans behave themselves without our having to go to war. What I mean is the way Mary is eating her heart out. Haven't you noticed it?"

"I have been worried about her for some time." He laid the paper down on the desk. "But I haven't been able to discover what is the matter."

"If you had asked me two months ago, I could have told you it was about that young fool Alan."

"About Wythe? Why, I thought she and Wythe were particularly devoted." If he were sparring for time, there was no hint of it in his manner. It really looked, the housekeeper told herself grimly, as if he had not seen the thing that was directly before his eyes until she had pointed it out to him.

"They were," she answered tartly, "at one time."

"Well, what is the trouble now? A lovers' quarrel?"

It was a guiding principle with Mrs. Timberlake that when her conscience drove her she never looked at her road; and true to this intemperate practice, she plunged now straight ahead. "The trouble is that Alan has been making a fool of himself over Angelica." It was the first time that she had implied the faintest criticism of his wife, and as soon as she had uttered the words, her courage evaporated, and she relapsed into her attitude of caustic reticence. Even her figure, in its rusty black, looked shrunken and huddled.

"So that is it!" His voice was careless and indifferent. "You mean he has been flattered because she has let him read his plays to her?"

"He hasn't known when to stop. If something isn't done, he will go on reading them for ever."

"Well, if Angelica enjoys them?"

"But it makes Mary very unhappy. Can't you see that she is breaking her heart over it?"

"Angelica doesn't know." He might have been stating a fact about one of the belligerent nations.

"Oh, of course." She grasped at the impersonal note, but it escaped her. "If she only knew, she could so easily stop it."

"So you think if someone were to mention it?"

"That is why I came to you. I thought you might manage to drop a word that would let Angelica see how much it is hurting Mary. She wouldn't want to hurt Mary just for the sake of a little amusement. The plays can't be so very important, or they would be on the stage, wouldn't they?"

"Could you tell her, do you think?" It was the first time he had ever attempted to evade a disagreeable duty, and the question surprised her.

"Angelica wouldn't listen to a word I said. She'd just think I'd made it up, and I reckon it does look like a tempest in a teapot."

He met this gravely. "Well, it is natural that she shouldn't take a thing like that seriously."

"Yes, it's natural." She conceded the point ungrudgingly. "I believe Angelica would die before she would do anything really wrong."

If he accepted this in silence, it was not because the tribute to Angelica's character appeared to him to constitute an unanswerable argument. During the weeks when he had been groping his way to firmer ground, he had passed beyond the mental boundaries in which Angelica and her standards wore any longer the aspect of truth. He knew them to be not only artificial, but false; and Mrs. Timberlake's praise was scarcely more than a hollow echo from the world that he had left. That Angelica, who would lie and cheat for an advantage, could be held, through mere coldness of nature, to be above "doing anything really wrong," was a fallacy which had once deluded his heart, but failed now to convince his intelligence. Once he had believed in the sacred myth of her virtue; now, brought close against the deeper realities, he saw that her virtue was only a negation, and that true goodness must be, above all things, an affirmation of spirit.

"I'll see what I can do," he said, and wondered why the words had not worn threadbare.

"You mean you'll speak to Angelica?" Her relief rasped his nerves.

"Yes, I'll speak to Angelica."

"Don't you think it would be better to talk first to Mary?"

Before replying, he thought over this carefully. "Perhaps it would be better. Will you tell her that I'd like to see her immediately?"

She nodded and went out quickly, and it seemed to him that the door had barely closed before it opened again, and Mary came in with a brave step and a manner of unnatural alertness and buoyancy.

"David, do you really think we are going to have war?" It was an awkward evasion, but she had not learned either to evade or equivocate gracefully.

"I think we are about to break off diplomatic relations——"

"And that means war, doesn't it?"

"Who knows?" He made a gesture of impatience. "You are trying to climb up on the knees of the gods."

"I want to go," she replied breathlessly, "whether we have war or not, I want to go to France. Will you help me?"

"Of course I will help you."

"I mean will you give me money?"

"I will give you anything I've got. It isn't so much as it used to be."

"It will be enough for me. I want to go at once—next week—to-morrow."

He looked at her attentively, his grave, lucid eyes ranging thoughtfully over her strong, plain face, which had grown pale and haggard, over her boyish figure, which had grown thin and wasted.

"Mary," he said suddenly, "what is the trouble? Is it an honest desire for service or is it—the open door?"

For a minute she looked at him with frightened eyes; then breaking down utterly, she buried her face in her hands and turned from him. "Oh, David, I must get away! I cannot live unless I get away!"

"From Briarlay?"

"From Briarlay, but most of all—oh, most of all," she brought this out with passion, "from Alan!"

"Then you no longer care for him?"

Instead of answering his question, she dashed the tears from her eyes, and threw back her head with a gesture that reminded him of the old boyish Mary. "Will you let me go, David?"

"Not until you have told me the truth."

"But what is the truth?" She cried out, with sudden anger. "Do you suppose I am the kind of woman to talk of a man's being 'taken away,' as if he were a loaf of bread to be handed from one woman to another? If he had ever been what I believed him, do you imagine that any one could have 'taken' him? Is there any man on earth who could have taken me from Alan?"

"What has made the trouble, Mary?" He put the question very slowly, as if he were weighing every word that he uttered.

She flung the pretense aside as bravely as she had dashed the tears from her eyes. "Of course I have known all along that she was only flirting—that she was only playing the game——"

"Then you think that the young fool has been taking Angelica too seriously?"

At this her anger flashed out again. "Seriously enough to make me break my engagement!"

"All because he likes to read his plays to her?"

"All because he imagines her to be misunderstood and unhappy and ill-treated. Oh, David, will you never wake up? How much longer are you going to walk about the world in your sleep? No one has said a breath against Angelica—no one ever will—she isn't that kind. But unless you wish Alan to be ruined, you must send him away."

"Isn't she the one to send him away?"

"Then go to her. Go to her now, and tell her that she must do it to-day."

"Yes, I will tell her that." Even while he spoke the words which would have once wrung his heart, he was visited by that strange flashing sense of unreality, of the insignificance and transitoriness of Angelica's existence. Like Mrs. Timberlake's antiquated standards of virtue, she belonged to a world which might vanish while he watched it and leave him still surrounded by the substantial structure of life.

"Then tell her now. I hear her in the hall," said Mary brusquely, as she turned away.

"It is not likely that she will come in here," he answered, but the words were scarcely spoken before Angelica's silvery tones floated to them.

"David, may I come in? I have news for you." An instant later, as Mary went out, with her air of arrogant sincerity, a triumphant figure in grey velvet passed her in the doorway.

"I saw Robert and Cousin Charles a moment ago, and they told me that we had really broken off relations with Germany——"

She had not meant to linger over the news, but while she was speaking, he crossed the room and closed the door gently behind her.

"Don't you think now we have done all that is necessary?" she demanded triumphantly. "Cousin Charles says we have vindicated our honour at last."

Blackburn smiled slightly. The sense of unreality, which had been vague and fugitive a moment before, rolled over and enveloped him. "It is rather like refusing to bow to a man who has murdered one's wife."

A frown clouded her face. "Oh, I know all you men are hoping for war, even Alan, and you would think an artist would see things differently."

"Do you think Alan is hoping for it?"

"Aren't you every one except Cousin Charles? Robert told me just now that Virginia is beginning to boil over. He believes the country will force the President's hand. Oh, I wonder if the world will ever be sane and safe again?"

He was watching her so closely that he appeared to be drinking in the sound of her voice and the sight of her loveliness; yet never for an instant did he lose the feeling that she was as ephemeral as a tinted cloud or a perfume.

"Angelica," he said abruptly, "Mary has just told me that she has broken her engagement to Alan."

Tiny sparks leaped to her eyes. "Well, I suppose they wouldn't have been happy together——"

"Do you know why she did it?"

"Do I know why?" She looked at him inquiringly. "How could I know? She has not told me."

"Has Alan said anything to you about it?"

"Why, yes, he told me that she had broken it."

"And did he tell you why?"

She was becoming irritated by the cross examination. "No, why should he tell me? It is their affair, isn't it? Now, if that is all, I must go. Alan has brought the first act of a new play, and he wants my opinion."

The finishing thrust was like her, for she could be bold enough when she was sure of her weapons. Even now, though he knew her selfishness, it was incredible to him that she should be capable of destroying Mary's happiness when she could gain nothing by doing it. Of course if there were some advantage——

"Alan can wait," he said bluntly. "Angelica, can't you see that this has gone too far, this nonsense of Alan's?"

"This nonsense?" She raised her eyebrows. "Do you call his plays nonsense?"

"I call his plays humbug. What must stop is his folly about you. When Mary goes, you must send him away."

Her smile was like the sharp edge of a knife. "So it is Alan now? It was poor Roane only yesterday."

"It is poor Roane to-day as much as it ever was. But Alan must stop coming here."

"And why, if I may ask?"

"You cannot have understood, or you would have stopped it."

"I should have stopped what?"

He met her squarely. "Alan's infatuation—for he is infatuated, isn't he?"

"Do you mean with me?" Her indignant surprise almost convinced him of her ignorance. "Who has told you that?"

She was holding a muff of silver fox, and she gazed down at it, stroking the fur gently, while she waited for him to answer. He noticed that her long slender fingers—she had the hand as well as the figure of one of Botticelli's Graces—were perfectly steady.

"That was the reason that Mary broke her engagement," he responded.

"Did she tell you that?"

"Yes, she told me. She said she knew that you had not meant it—that Alan had lost his head——"

Her voice broke in suddenly with a gasp of outraged amazement. "And you ask me to send Alan away because you are jealous? You ask me this—after—after——" Her attitude of indignant virtue was so impressive that, for a moment, he found himself wondering if he had wronged her—if he had actually misunderstood and neglected her?

"You must see for yourself, Angelica, that this cannot go on."

"You dare to turn on me like this!" She cried out so clearly that he started and looked at the door in apprehension. "You dare to accuse me of ruining Mary's happiness—after all I have suffered—after all I have stood from you——"

As her voice rose in its piercing sweetness, it occurred to him for the first time that she might wish to be overheard, that she might be making this scene less for his personal benefit than for its effect upon an invisible audience. It was the only time he had ever known her to sacrifice her inherent fastidiousness, and descend to vulgar methods of warfare, and he was keen enough to infer that the prize must be tremendous to compensate for so evident a humiliation.

"I accuse you of nothing," he said, lowering his tone in the effort to reduce hers to a conversational level. "For your own sake, I ask you to be careful."

But he had unchained the lightning, and it flashed out to destroy him. "You dare to say this to me—you who refused to send Miss Meade away though I begged you to——"

"To send Miss Meade away?" The attack was so unexpected that he wavered before it. "What has Miss Meade to do with it?"

"You refused to send her away. You positively refused when I asked you."

"Yes, I refused. But Miss Meade is Letty's nurse. What has she to do with Mary and Alan?"

"Oh, are you still trying to deceive me?" For an instant he thought she was going to burst into tears. "You knew you were spending too much time in the nursery—that you went when Cousin Matty was not there—Alan heard you admit it—you knew that I wanted to stop it, and you refused—you insisted——"

But his anger had overpowered him now, and he caught her arm roughly in a passionate desire to silence the hideous sound of her words, to thrust back the horror that she was spreading on the air—out into the world and the daylight.

"Stop, Angelica, or——"

Suddenly, without warning, she shrieked aloud, a shriek that seemed to his ears to pierce, not only the ceiling, but the very roof of the house. As he stood there, still helplessly holding her arm, which had grown limp in his grasp, he became aware that the door opened quickly and Alan came into the room.

"I heard a cry—I thought——"

Angelica's eyes were closed, but at the sound of Alan's voice, she raised her lids and looked at him with a frightened and pleading gaze.

"I cried out. I am sorry," she said meekly. Without glancing at Blackburn, she straightened herself, and walked, with short, wavering steps, out of the room.

For a minute the two men faced each other in silence; then Alan made an impetuous gesture of indignation and followed Angelica.

CHAPTER V
The Choice

"Looks as if we were going to war, Blackburn." It was the beginning of April, and Robert Colfax had stopped on the steps of his club.

"It has looked that way for the last thirty-two months."

"Well, beware the anger—or isn't it the fury?—of the patient man. It has to come at last. We've been growling too long not to spring—and my only regret is that, as long as we're going to war, we didn't go soon enough to get into the fight. I'd like to have had a chance at potting a German. Every man in town is feeling like that to-day."

"You think it will be over before we get an army to France?"

"I haven't a doubt of it. It will be nothing more than a paper war to a finish."

A good many Virginians were thinking that way. Blackburn was not sure that he hadn't thought that way himself for the last two or three months. Everywhere he heard regrets that it was too late to have a share in the actual whipping of Germany—that we were only going to fight a decorous and inglorious war on paper. Suddenly, in a night, as it were, the war spirit in Virginia had flared out. There was not the emotional blaze—the flaming heat—older men said—of the Confederacy; but there was an ever-burning, insistent determination to destroy the roots of this evil black flower of Prussian autocracy. There was no hatred of Austria—little even of Turkey. The Prussian spirit was the foe of America and of the world; and it was against the Prussian spirit that the militant soul of Virginia was springing to arms. Men who had talked peace a few months before—who had commended the nation that was "too proud to fight," who had voted for the President because of the slogan "he kept us out of war"—had now swung round dramatically with the volte-face of the Government. The President had at last committed himself to a war policy, and all over the world Americans were awaiting the great word from Congress. In an hour personal interests had dissolved into an impersonal passion of service. In an hour opposing currents of thought had flowed into a single dominant purpose, and the President, who had once stood for a party, stood now for America.

For, in a broader vision, the spirit of Virginia was the spirit of all America. There were many, it is true, who had not, in the current phrase, begun to realize what war would mean to them; there were many who still doubted, or were indifferent, because the battle had not been fought at their doorstep; but as a whole the country stood determined, quiet, armed in righteousness, and waited for the great word from Congress.

And over the whole country, from North to South, from East to West, the one question never asked was, "What will America get out of it when it is over?"

"By Jove, if we do get into any actual fighting, I mean to go," said Robert, "I am not yet thirty."

Blackburn looked at him enviously. "It's rotten on us middle-aged fellows. Isn't there a hole of some sort a man of forty-three can stop up?"

"Of course they've come to more than that in England."

"We may come to it here if the war keeps up—but that isn't likely."

"No, that isn't likely unless Congress dies talking. Why, for God's sake, can't we strangle the pacifists for once? Nobody would grieve for them."

"Oh, if liberty isn't for fools, it isn't liberty. I suppose the supreme test of our civilization, is that we let people go on talking when we don't agree with them."

It was, in reality, only a few days that Congress was taking to define and emphasize the President's policy, but these days were interminable to a nation that waited. Talk was ruining the country, people said. Thirty-two months of talking were enough even for an American Congress. It was as much as a man's reputation was worth to vote against the war; it was more than it was worth to give his reasons for so voting. There was tension everywhere, yet there was a strange muffled quiet—the quiet before the storm.

"We are too late for the fun," said Robert. "Germany will back down as soon as she sees we are in earnest." This was what every one was saying, and Blackburn heard it again when he left Colfax and went into the club.

"The pity is we shan't have time to get a man over to France. It's all up to the navy."

"The British navy, you mean? Where'd we be now but for the British navy?"

"Well, thank God, the note writing is over!"

There was determination enough; but the older men were right—there was none of the flame and ardour of secession days. The war was realized vaguely as a principle rather than as a fact. It was the difference between fighting for abstract justice and knocking down a man in hot blood because he has affronted one's wife. The will to strike was all there, only one did not see red when one delivered the blow. Righteous indignation, not personal rage, was in the mind of America.

"We aren't mad yet," remarked an old Confederate soldier to Blackburn. "Just wait till they get us as mad as we were at Manassas, and we'll show the Germans!"

"You mean wait until they drop bombs on New York instead of London?"

"Good Lord, no. Just wait until our boys have seen, not read, about the things they are doing."

So there were a few who expected an American army to reach France before the end of the war.

"Never mind about taxes. We must whip the Huns, and we can afford to pay the bills!"

For here as elsewhere the one question never asked was, "What are we going to get out of it?"

Prosperity was after all a secondary interest. Underneath was the permanent idealism of the American mind.

When Blackburn reached Briarlay, he found Letty and Caroline walking under the budding trees in the lane, and stopping his car, he got out and strolled slowly back with them to the house. The shimmer and fragrance of spring was in the air, and on the ground crowds of golden crocuses were unfolding.

"Father, will you go to war if Uncle Roane does?" asked Letty, as she slipped her hand into Blackburn's and looked up, with her thoughtful child's eyes, into his face. "Uncle Roane says he is going to whip the Germans for me."

"I'll go, if they'll take me, Letty. Your Uncle Roane is ten years younger than I am." At the moment the war appeared to him, as it had appeared to Mary, as the open door—the way of escape from an intolerable situation; but he put this idea resolutely out of his mind. There was a moral cowardice in using impersonal issues as an excuse for the evasion of personal responsibility.

"But you could fight better than he could, father."

"I am inclined to agree with you. Perhaps the Government will think that way soon."

"Alan is going, too. Mother begged him not to, but he said he just had to go. Mammy Riah says the feeling is in his bones, and he can't help it. When a feeling gets into your bones you have to do what it tells you."

"It looks as if Mammy Riah knew something about it."

"But if you go and Alan goes and Uncle Roane goes, what will become of mother?"

"You will have to take care of her, Letty, you and Miss Meade."

Caroline, who had been walking in silence on the other side of the road, turned her head at the words. She was wearing a blue serge suit and a close-fitting hat of blue straw, and her eyes were as fresh and spring-like as the April sky.

"There is no doubt about war, is there?" she asked.

"It may come at any hour. Whether it will mean an American army in France or not, no one can say; but we shall have to furnish munitions, if not men, as fast as we can turn them out."

"Mr. Peyton said this morning it would be impossible to send men because we hadn't the ships."

Blackburn laughed. "Then, if necessary, we will do the impossible." It was the voice of America. Everywhere at that hour men were saying, "We will do the impossible."

"I should like to go," said Caroline. "I should like above all things to go."

They had stopped in the road, and still holding Letty's hand, he looked over her head at Caroline's face. "Miss Meade, will you make me a promise?"

Clear and radiant and earnest, her eyes held his gaze. "Unconditionally?"

"No, the conditions I leave to you. Will you promise?"

"I will promise." She had not lowered her eyes, and he had not looked away from her. Her face was pale, and in the fading sunlight he could see the little blue veins on her temples and the look of stern sweetness that sorrow had chiselled about her mouth. More than ever it seemed to him the face of a strong and fervent spirit rather than the face of a woman. So elusive was her beauty that he could say of no single feature, except her eyes, "Her charm lies here—or here——" yet the impression she gave him was one of magical loveliness. There was, he thought, a touch of the divine in her smile, as if her look drew its radiance from an inexhaustible source.

"Will you promise me," he said, "that whatever happens, as long as it is possible, you will stay with Letty?"

She waited a moment before she answered him, and he knew from her face that his words had touched the depths of her heart. "I promise you that for Letty's sake I will do the impossible," she answered.

She gave him her hand, and he clasped it over the head of the child. It was one of those rare moments of perfect understanding and sympathy—of a mental harmony beside which all emotional rapture appears trivial and commonplace. He was aware of no appeal to his senses—life had taught him the futility of all purely physical charm—and the hand that touched Caroline's was as gentle and as firm as it had been when it rested on Letty's head. Here was a woman who had met life and conquered it, who could be trusted, he felt, to fight to the death to keep her spirit inviolate.

"Only one thing will take me away from Letty," she said. "If we send an army and the country calls me."

"That one thing is the only thing?"

"The only thing unless," she laughed as if she were suggesting an incredible event, "unless you or Mrs. Blackburn should send me away!"

To her surprise the ridiculous jest confused him. "Take care of Letty," he responded quickly; and then, as they reached the porch, he dropped the child's hand, and went up the steps and into the house.

In the library, by one of the windows which looked out on the terrace and the sunset, Colonel Ashburton was reading the afternoon paper, and as Blackburn entered, he rose and came over to the fireplace.

"I was a little ahead of you, so I made myself at home, as you see," he observed, with his manner of antiquated formality. In the dim light his hair made a silvery halo above his blanched features, and it occurred to Blackburn that he had never seen him look quite so distinguished and detached from his age.

"If I'd known you were coming, I should have arranged to get here earlier."

"I didn't know it myself until it was too late to telephone you at the works." There was an unnatural constraint in his voice, and from the moment of his entrance, Blackburn had surmised that the Colonel's visit was not a casual one. The war news might have brought him; but it was not likely that he would have found the war news either disconcerting or embarrassing.

"The news is good, isn't it?" inquired Blackburn, a little stiffly, because he could think of nothing else to say.

"First rate. There isn't a doubt but we'll whip the Germans before autumn. It wasn't about the war, however, that I came."

"There is something else then?"

Before he replied Colonel Ashburton looked up gravely at the portrait of Blackburn's mother which hung over the mantelpiece. "Very like her, very like her," he remarked. "She was a few years older than I—but I'm getting on now—I'm getting on. That's the worst of being born between great issues. I was too young for the last war—just managed to be in one big battle before Lee surrendered—and I'm too old for this one. A peace Colonel doesn't amount to much, does he?" Then he looked sharply at Blackburn. "David," he asked in a curiously inanimate voice, "have you heard the things people are saying about you?"

"I have heard nothing except what has been said to my face."

"Then I may assume that the worst is still to be told you?"

"You may safely assume that, I think."

Again the Colonel's eyes were lifted to the portrait of Blackburn's mother. "There must be an answer to a thing like this, David," he said slowly. "There must be something that you can say."

"Tell me what is said."

Shaking the silvery hair from his forehead, the older man still gazed upward, as if he were interrogating the portrait—as if he were seeking guidance from the imperishable youth of the painted figure. Serene and soft as black pansies, the eyes of the picture looked down on him from a face that reminded him of a white roseleaf.

"It is said"—he hesitated as if the words hurt him—"that your wife accuses you of cruelty. I don't know how the stories started, but I have waited until they reached a point where I felt that they must be stopped—or answered. For the sake of your future—of your work—you must say something, David."

While he listened Blackburn had walked slowly to the window, gazing out on the afterglow, where some soft clouds, like clusters of lilacs, hung low above the dark brown edge of the horizon. For a moment, after the voice ceased, he still stood there in silence. Then wheeling abruptly, he came back to the hearth where the Colonel was waiting.

"Is that all?" he asked.

The Colonel made a gesture of despair. "It is rumoured that your wife is about to leave you."

Blackburn looked at him intently. "If it is only a rumour——"

"But a man's reputation may be destroyed by a rumour."

"Is there anything else?"

As he spoke it was evident to the other that his thoughts were not on his words.

"I am your oldest friend. I was the friend of your mother—I believe in your vision—in your power of leadership. For the sake of the ideas we both try to serve, I have come to you—hating—dreading my task——"

He stopped, his voice quivering as if from an emotion that defied his control, and in the silence that followed, Blackburn said quietly, "I thank you."

"It is said—how this started no one knows, and I suppose it does not matter—that your wife called in the doctor to treat a bruise on her arm, and that she admitted to him that it came from a blow. Daisy Colfax was present, and it appears that she told the story, without malice, but indiscreetly, I gathered——"

As he paused there were beads of perspiration on his forehead, and his lip trembled slightly. It had been a difficult task, but, thank God, he told himself, he had been able to see it through. To his surprise, Blackburn's face had not changed. It still wore the look of immobility which seemed to the other to express nothing—and everything.

"You must let me make some answer to these charges, David. The time has come when you must speak."

For a moment longer Blackburn was silent. Then he said slowly, "What good will it do?"

"But the lie, unless it is given back, will destroy not only you, but your cause. It will be used by your enemies. It will injure irretrievably the work you are trying to do. In the end it will drive you out of public life in Virginia."

"If you only knew how differently I am coming to think of these things," said Blackburn presently, and he added after a pause, "If I cannot bear misunderstanding, how could I bear defeat?—for work like mine must lead to temporary defeat——"

"Not defeat like this—not defeat that leaves your name tarnished."

For the first time Blackburn's face showed emotion. "And you think that a public quarrel would clear it?" he asked bitterly.

"But surely, without that, there could be a denial——"

"There can be no other denial. There is but one way to meet a lie, and that way I cannot take."

"Then things must go on, as they are, to the—end?"

"I cannot stop them by talking. If it rests with me, they must go on."

"At the cost of your career? Of your power for usefulness? Of your obligations to your country?"

Turning his head, Blackburn looked away from him to the window, which had been left open. From the outside there floated suddenly the faint, provocative scent of spring—of nature which was renewing itself in the earth and the trees. "A career isn't as big a thing at forty-three as it is at twenty," he answered, with a touch of irony. "My power for usefulness must stand on its merits alone, and my chief obligation to my country, as I see it, is to preserve the integrity of my honour. We hear a great deal to-day about the personal not counting any longer; yet the fact remains that the one enduring corner-stone of the State is the personal rectitude of its citizens. You cannot build upon any other foundation, and build soundly. I may be wrong—I often am—but I must do what I believe to be right, let the consequences be what they will."

Now that he had left the emotional issue behind him, the immobility had passed from his manner, and his thoughts were beginning to come with the abundance and richness that the Colonel associated with his public speeches. Already he had put the question of his marriage aside, as a fact which had been accepted and dismissed from his mind.

"In these last few years—or months rather—I have begun to see things differently," he resumed, with an animation and intensity that contrasted strangely with his former constraint and dumbness. "I can't explain how it is, but this war has knocked a big hole in reality. We can look deeper into things than any generation before us, and the deeper we look, the more we become aware of the outer darkness in which we have been groping. I am groping now, I confess it, but I am groping for light."

"It will leave a changed world when it is over," assented the Colonel, and he spoke the platitude with an accent of relief, as if he had just turned away from a sight that distressed him. "More changed, I believe, for us older ones than for the young who have done the actual fighting. I should like to write a book about that—the effect of the war on the minds of the non-combatants. The fighters have been too busy to think, and it is thought, after all, not action, that leaves the more permanent record. Life will spring again over the battle-fields, but the ideas born of the war will control the future destinies of mankind."

"I am beginning to see," pursued Blackburn, as if he had not heard him, "that there is something far bigger than the beliefs we were working for. Because we had got beyond the sections to the country, you and I, we thought we were emancipated from the bondage of prejudice. The chief end of the citizen appeared to us to be the glory of the nation, but I see now—I am just beginning to see—that there is a greater spirit than the spirit of nationality. You can't live through a world war, even with an ocean between—and distance, by the way, may give us all the better perspective, and enable Americans to take a wider view than is possible to those who are directly in the path of the hurricane—you can't live through a world war, and continue to think in terms of geographical boundaries. To think about it at all, one must think in universal relations."

He hesitated an instant, and then went on more rapidly, "After all, we cannot beat Germany by armies alone, we must beat her by thought. For two generations she has thought wrong, and it is only by thinking right—by forcing her to think right—that we can conquer her. The victory belongs to the nation that engraves its ideas indelibly upon the civilization of the future."

Leaning back in the shadows, Colonel Ashburton gazed at him with a perplexed and questioning look. Was it possible that he had never understood him—that he did not understand him to-day? He had come to speak of an open scandal, of a name that might be irretrievably tarnished—and Blackburn had turned it aside by talking about universal relations!

CHAPTER VI
Angelica's Triumph

CAROLINE wrote a few nights later:

Dearest mother:

So it has come at last, and we really and truly are at war. There is not so much excitement as you would have thought—I suppose because we have waited so long—but everybody has hung out flags—and Letty and I have just helped Peter put a big beautiful one over Briarlay. Mrs. Blackburn is working so hard over the Red Cross that we have barely seen her for days, and Mary has already gone to New York on her way to France. She is going to work there with one of the war charities, and I think it will be the best thing on earth for her, for any one can see that she has been very unhappy. Mr. Wythe wants to go into the army, but for some reason he has hesitated about volunteering. I think Mrs. Blackburn opposes it very strongly, and this is keeping him back. There is a new feeling in the air, though. The world is rushing on—somewhere—somewhere, and we are rushing with it.

For days I have wanted to write you about a curious thing, but I have waited hoping that I might have been mistaken about it. You remember how very sweet Mrs. Blackburn was to me when I first came here. Well, for the last month she has changed utterly in her manner. I cannot think of any way in which I could have offended her—though I have racked my brain over it—but she appears to avoid me whenever it is possible, and on the occasions when we are obliged to meet, she does not speak to me unless it is necessary. Of course there are things I am obliged to ask her about Letty; but this is usually done through the servants, and Mrs. Blackburn never comes into the nursery. Sometimes she sends for Letty to come to her, but Mammy Riah always takes her and brings her back again. I asked Mrs. Timberlake if she thought I could have done anything Mrs. Blackburn did not like, and if I had better go to her and demand an explanation. That seems to me the only sensible and straightforward way, but Mrs. Timberlake does not think it would do any good. She is as much mystified about it as I am, and so is Mammy Riah. Nobody understands, and the whole thing has worried me more than I can ever tell you. If it wasn't for Letty, and a promise I made to Mr. Blackburn not to leave her, I should be tempted to give up the place at the end of the week. It is cowardly to let one's self be vanquished by things like that, especially at a time when the whole world needs every particle of courage that human beings can create; but it is just like fighting an intangible enemy, and not knowing at what moment one may be saying or doing the wrong thing. Not a word has been spoken to me that was rude or unkind, yet the very air I breathe is full of something that keeps me apprehensive and anxious all the time. When I am with Mr. Blackburn or Mrs. Timberlake, I tell myself that it is all just my imagination, and that I am getting too nervous to be a good nurse; and then, when I pass Mrs. Blackburn in the hall and she pretends not to see me, the distrust and suspicion come back again. I hate to worry you about this—for a long time I wouldn't mention it in my letters—but I feel to-night that I cannot go on without telling you about it.

Last night after dinner—when Mrs. Blackburn is at home Mrs. Timberlake and I dine in the breakfast-room—I went to look for Letty, and found that she had slipped into the drawing-room, where Mrs. Blackburn and Mr. Wythe were engaged in their perpetual reading. The child is very fond of Mr. Wythe—he has a charming way with her—and when I went in, she was asking him if he were really going to war? Before answering her he looked for a long time at Mrs. Blackburn, and then as Letty repeated her question, he said, "Don't you think I ought to go, Letty?"

"What is the war about, Alan?" asked the child, and he replied, "They call it a war for democracy." Then, of course, Letty inquired immediately, "What is democracy?" At this Alan burst out laughing, "You've got me there, Socrates," he retorted, "Go inquire of your father." "But father says it is a war to end war," Letty replied, and her next question was, "But if you want to fight, why do you want to end war?" She is the keenest thing for her years you can imagine. I had to explain it all to her when I got her upstairs.

Well, what I started to tell you was that all the time Mrs. Blackburn said nothing, but kept looking from Alan to the child, with that wistful and plaintive expression which makes her the very image of a grieving Madonna. She never spoke a word, but I could tell all the time that she was trying to gain something, that she was using every bit of her charm and her pathos for some purpose I could not discover. In a little while she took Letty from Alan and gave her over to me, and as we went out, I heard Alan say to her, "I would give anything on earth to keep you from being hurt any more." Of course I shouldn't repeat this to any one else, but he must have known that I couldn't help hearing it.

Mr. Blackburn has been very kind to me, and I know that he would do anything for Letty's happiness. He is so impersonal that I sometimes feel that he knows ideas, but not men and women. It is hard for him to break through the wall he has built round himself, but after you once discover what he really is, you are obliged to admit that he is fine and absolutely to be trusted. In a way he is different from any one I have ever known—more sincere and genuine. I can't make what I mean very clear, but you will understand.

For the last week I have scarcely seen him for a minute—I suppose he is absorbed in war matters—but before that he used to come in and have tea with Letty, and we had some long interesting talks. The child is devoted to him, and you know she loves above all things to set her little table in the nursery, and give tea and bread and butter to whoever happens to come in. Mrs. Colfax used to drop in very often, and so did Mary when she was here; but Mrs. Blackburn always promises to come, and then is too busy, or forgets all about it, and I have to make excuses for her to Letty. I feel sorry for Letty because she is lonely, and has no child companions, and I do everything I can to make her friendly with grown people, and to put a little wholesome pleasure into her life. A delicate child is really a very serious problem in many ways besides physical ones. Letty has not naturally a cheerful disposition, though she flies off at times into a perfect gale of high spirits. For the last week I can see that she has missed her father, and she is continually asking me where he is.

Now I must tell you something I have not mentioned to any one except Mrs. Timberlake, and I spoke of it to her only because she asked me a direct question. Something very unfortunate occurred here last winter, and Mrs. Timberlake told me yesterday that everybody in Richmond has been talking about it. As long as it is known so generally—and it appears that young Mrs. Colfax was the one to let it out—there can't be any harm in my writing frankly to you. I haven't the faintest idea how it all started, but one morning—it must have been two months ago—Mrs. Blackburn showed young Mrs. Colfax a bruise on her arm, and she either told her or let her think that it had come from a blow. Of course Mrs. Colfax inferred that Mr. Blackburn had struck his wife, and, without waiting a minute, she rushed straight out and repeated this to everybody she met. She is so amazingly indiscreet, without meaning the least harm in the world, that you might as well print a thing in the newspaper as tell it to her. No one knows how much she made up and how much Mrs. Blackburn actually told her; but the town has been fairly ringing, Mrs. Timberlake says, with the scandal. People even say that he has been so cruel to her that the servants heard her cry out in his study one afternoon, and that Alan Wythe, who was waiting in the drawing-room, ran in and interfered.

It is all a dreadful lie, of course—you know this without my telling you—but Mrs. Timberlake and I cannot understand what began it, or why Mrs. Blackburn deliberately allowed Daisy Colfax to repeat such a falsehood. Colonel Ashburton told Mrs. Timberlake that the stories had already done incalculable harm to Mr. Blackburn's reputation, and that his political enemies were beginning to use them. You will understand better than any one else how much this distresses me, not only because I have grown to like and admire Mr. Blackburn, but for Letty's sake also. As the child grows up this disagreement between her parents will make such a difference in her life.

I cannot tell you how I long to be back at The Cedars, now that spring is there and all the lilacs will so soon be in bloom. When I shut my eyes I can see you and the girls in the "chamber," and I can almost hear you talking about the war. I am not quite sure that I approve of Maud's becoming a nurse. It is a hard life, and all her beauty will be wasted in the drudgery. Diana's idea of going to France with the Y. M. C. A. sounds much better, but most of all I like Margaret's plan of canning vegetables next summer for the market. If she can manage to get an extra man to help Jonas with the garden—how would Nathan's son Abraham do?—I believe she will make a great success of it. I am so glad that you are planting large crops this year. The question of labour is serious, I know, but letting out so much of the land "on shares" has never seemed to turn out very well.

It must be almost eleven o'clock, and I have written on and on without thinking. Late as it is, I am obliged to run out to Peter's cottage by the stable and give his wife, Mandy, a hypodermic at eleven o'clock. She was taken very ill this morning, and if she isn't better to-morrow the doctor will take her to the hospital. I promised him I would see her the last thing to-night, and telephone him if she is any worse. She is so weak that we are giving her all the stimulants that we can. I sometimes wish that I could stop being a trained nurse for a time, and just break loose and be natural. I'd like to run out bareheaded in a storm, or have hysterics, or swear like Uncle George.

Dearest love,
CAROLINE.

When Caroline reached the cottage, she found Mandy in a paroxysm of pain, and after giving the medicine, she waited until the woman had fallen asleep. It was late when she went back to the house, and as she crossed the garden on her way to the terrace, where she had left one of the French windows open, she lingered for a minute to breathe in the delicious roving scents of the spring night. Something sweet and soft and wild in the April air awoke in her the restlessness which the spring always brought; and she found herself wishing again that she could cast aside the professional training of the last eight or nine years, and become the girl she had been at The Cedars before love had broken her heart. "I am just as young as I was then—only I am so much wiser," she thought, "and it is wisdom—it is knowing life that has caged me and made me a prisoner. I am not an actor, I am only a spectator now, and yet I believe that I could break away again if the desire came—if life really called me. Perhaps, it's the spring that makes me restless—I could never, even at The Cedars, smell budding things without wanting to wander—but to-night there is a kind of wildness in everything. I am tired of being caged. I want to be free to follow—follow—whatever is calling me. I wonder why the pipes of Pan always begin again in the spring?" Enchantingly fair and soft, beneath a silver mist that floated like a breath of dawn from the river, the garden melted into the fields and the fields into the quivering edge of the horizon. In the air there was a faint whispering of gauzy wings, and, now and then, as the breeze stirred the veil of the landscape, little pools of greenish light flickered like glow worms in the hollows.

"I hate to go in, but I suppose I must," thought Caroline, as she went up the steps. "Fortunately Roane is off after his commission, so they can't accuse me of coming out to meet him."

For the first time she noticed that the lights were out in the house, and when she tried the window she had left open, she found that someone—probably Patrick—had fastened it. "I ought to have told them I was going out," she thought. "I suppose the servants are all in bed, and if I go to the front and ring, I shall waken everybody." Then, as she passed along the terrace, she saw that the light still glimmered beneath the curtains of the library, where Blackburn was working late, and stopping before the window, she knocked twice on the panes.

At her second knock, she heard a chair pushed back inside and rapid steps cross the floor. An instant later the window was unbolted, and she saw Blackburn standing there against the lighted interior, with a look of surprise and inquiry, which she discerned even though his face was in shadow. He did not speak, and she said hurriedly as she entered,

"I hated to disturb you, but they had locked me out."

"You have been out?" It was the question he had put to her on her first night in the house.

"Peter's wife has been ill, and I promised the doctor to give her a hypodermic at eleven o'clock. It must be midnight now. They kept me some time at the cottage."

He glanced at the clock. "Yes, it is after twelve. We are working you overtime."

She had crossed the room quickly on her way to the door, when he called her name, and she stopped and turned to look at him.

"Miss Meade, I have wanted to ask you something about Letty when she was not with us."

"I know," she responded, with ready sympathy. "It isn't easy to talk before her without letting her catch on."

"You feel that she is better?"

"Much better. She has improved every day in the last month or two."

"You think now that she may get well in time? There seems to you a chance that she may grow up well and normal?"

"With care I think there is every hope that she will. The doctor is greatly encouraged about her. In this age no physical malady, especially in a child, is regarded as hopeless, and I believe, if we keep up the treatment she is having, she may outgrow the spinal weakness that has always seemed to us so serious."

For a moment he was silent. "Whatever improvement there may be is due to you," he said presently, in a voice that was vibrant with feeling. "I cannot put my gratitude into words, but you have made me your debtor for life."

"I have done my best," she replied gravely, "and it has made me happy to do it."

"I recognize that. The beauty of it has been that I recognized that from the beginning. You have given yourself utterly and ungrudgingly to save my child. Before you came she was misunderstood always, she was melancholy and brooding and self-centred, and you have put the only brightness in her life that has ever been there. All the time she becomes more like other children, more cheerful and natural."

"I felt from the first that she needed companionship and diversion. She won my heart immediately, for she is a very lovable child, and if I have done anything over and above my task, it has been because I loved Letty."

His look softened indescribably, but all he said was, "If I go away, I shall feel that I am leaving her in the best possible care."

"You expect to go away?"

"I have offered my services, and the Government may call on me. I hope there is some work that I can do."

"Everyone feels that way, I think. I feel that way myself, but as long as I can, I shall stay with Letty. It is so hard sometimes to recognize one's real duty. If the call comes, I suppose I shall have to go to France, but I shan't go just because I want to, as long as the child needs me as much as she does now. Mother says the duty that never stays at home is seldom to be trusted."

"I know you will do right," he answered gravely. "I cannot imagine that you could ever waver in that. For myself the obligation seems now imperative, yet I have asked myself again and again if my reasons for wishing to go are as——"

He broke off in amazement, and glanced, with a startled gesture, at the door, for it was opening very slowly, and, as the crack widened, there appeared the lovely disarranged head of Angelica. She was wearing a kimono of sky-blue silk, which she had thrown on hastily over her nightgown, and beneath the embroidered folds, Caroline caught a glimpse of bare feet in blue slippers. In the hall beyond there was the staring face of the maid, and at the foot of the stairs, the figure of Mammy Riah emerged, like a menacing spirit, out of the shadow.

"I heard Mammy Riah asking for Miss Meade. She was not in her room," began Angelica in her clear, colourless voice. "We were anxious about her—but I did not know—I did not dream——" She drew her breath sharply, and then added in a louder and firmer tone, "Miss Meade, I must ask you to leave the house in the morning."

In an instant a cold breath blowing over Caroline seemed to turn her living figure into a snow image. Her face was as white as the band of her cap, but her eyes blazed like blue flames, and her voice, when it issued from her frozen lips, was stronger and steadier than Angelica's.

"I cannot leave too soon for my comfort," she answered haughtily. "Mr. Blackburn, if you will order the car, I shall be ready in an hour——" Though she saw scarlet as she spoke, she would have swept by Angelica with the pride and the outraged dignity of an insulted empress.

"You shall not go," said Blackburn, and she saw him put out his arm, as if he would keep the two women apart.

"I would not stay," replied Caroline, looking not at him, but straight into Angelica's eyes. "I would not stay if she went on her knees to me. I will not stay even for Letty——"

"Do you know what you have done?" demanded Blackburn, in a quivering voice, of his wife. "Do you know that you are ruining your child's future—your child's chance——" Then, as if words were futile to convey his meaning, he stopped, and looked at her as a man looks at the thing that has destroyed him.

"For Letty's sake I shut my eyes as long as I could," said Angelica, and of the three, she appeared the only one who spoke in sorrow and regret, not in anger. "After to-night I can deceive myself no longer. I can deceive the servants no longer——"

Her kimono was embroidered in a lavish design of cranes and water-lilies; and while Caroline gazed at it, she felt that the vivid splashes of yellow and blue and purple were emblazoned indelibly on her memory. Years afterwards—to the very end of her life—the sight of a piece of Japanese embroidery was followed by an icy sickness of the heart, and a vision of Angelica's amber head against the background of the dimly lighted hall and the curious faces of the maid and Mammy Riah.

"You shall not——" said Blackburn, and his face was like the face of a man who has died in a moment of horror. "You shall not dare do this thing——"

He was still keeping Caroline back with his outstretched hand, and while she looked at him, she forgot her own anger in a rush of pity for the humiliation which showed in every quiver of his features, in every line of his figure. It was a torture, she knew, which would leave its mark on him for ever.

"You shall not dare——" he repeated, as if the words he sought would not come to him.

Beneath his gaze Angelica paled slowly. Her greatest victories had always been achieved through her dumbness; and the instinct which had guided her infallibly in the past did not fail her in this moment, which must have appeared to her as the decisive hour of her destiny. There was but one way in which she could triumph, and this way she chose, not deliberately, but in obedience to some deep design which had its source in the secret motive-power of her nature. The colour of her skin faded to ivory, her long, slender limbs trembled and wavered, and the pathos of her look was intensified into the image of tragedy.

"I tried so hard not to see——" she began, and the next instant she gave a little gasping sob and dropped, like a broken flower, at his feet.

For a second Caroline looked down on her in silence. Then, without stooping, without speaking, she drew her skirt aside, and went out of the room and up the stairs. Her scorn was the scorn of the strong who is defeated for the weak who is victorious.

CHAPTER VII
Courage

WHEN she reached her room, Caroline took off her cap and uniform and laid them smoothly away in her trunk. Then she began packing with deliberate care, while her thoughts whirled as wildly as autumn leaves in a storm. Outwardly her training still controlled her; but beneath her quiet gestures, her calm and orderly movements, she felt that the veneer of civilization had been stripped from the primitive woman. It was as if she had lived years in the few minutes since she had left Angelica lying, lovely and unconscious, on the floor of the library.

She was taking her clothes out of the closet when there was a low knock at her door, and Mammy Riah peered inquiringly into the room.

"Marse David tole me ter come," she said. "Is you gwine away, honey?"

Before she replied, Caroline crossed the floor and closed the door of the nursery. "I am going home on the earliest train in the morning. Will you be sure to order the car?"

The old woman came in and took the clothes out of Caroline's hands. "You set right down, en wait twell I git thoo wid dis yer packin'. Marse David, he tole me ter look atter you de same ez I look atter Letty, en I'se gwine ter do whut he tells me."

She looked a thousand years old as she stood there beside the shaded electric light on the bureau; but her dark and wrinkled face contained infinite understanding and compassion. At the moment, in the midst of Caroline's terrible loneliness, Mammy Riah appeared almost beautiful.

"I have to move about, mammy, I can't sit still. You were there. You saw it all."

"I seed hit comin' befo' den, honey, I seed hit comin'."

"But you knew I'd gone out to see Mandy? You knew she was suffering?"

"Yas'm, I knows all dat, but I knows a heap mo'n dat, too."

"You saw Mrs. Blackburn? You heard?——"

"I 'uz right dar all de time. I 'uz right dar at de foot er de steers."

"Do you know why? Can you imagine why she should have done it?"

Mammy Riah wrinkled her brow, which was the colour and texture of stained parchment. "I'se moughty ole, and I'se moughty sharp, chile, but I cyarn' see thoo a fog. I ain' sayin' nuttin' agin Miss Angy, caze she wuz oner de Fitzhugh chillun, ef'n a wi'te nuss did riz 'er. Naw'm, I ain' sayin' nuttin 't'all agin 'er—but my eyes dey is done got so po' dat I cyarn' mek out whar she's a-gwine en whut she's a-fishin' fur."

"I suppose she was trying to make me leave. But why couldn't she have come out and said so?"

"Go 'way f'om yer, chile! Ain't you knowed Miss Angy better'n dat? She is jes' erbleeged ter be meally-mouthed en two-faced, caze she wuz brung up dat ar way. All de chillun dat w'ite nuss riz wuz sorter puny en pigeon-breasted inside en out, en Miss Angy she wuz jes' like de res' un um. She ain' never come right spang out en axed fur whut she gits, en she ain' never gwine ter do hit. Naw'm, dat she ain't. She is a-gwine ter look put upon, en meek ez Moses, en jes like butter wouldn't melt in 'er mouf, ef'n hit kills 'er. I'se done knowed 'er all 'er lifetime, en I ain' never seed 'er breck loose, nairy oncet. Ole Miss use'n ter say w'en she wuz live, dat Miss Angy's temper wuz so slow en poky, she'd git ter woner sometimes ef'n she reely hed a speck er one."

"That must be why everybody thinks her a martyr," said Caroline sternly. "Even to-night she didn't lose her temper. You saw her faint away at my feet?"

A shiver shook her figure, as the vision of the scene rushed before her; and bending down, with a dress still in her arms, the old woman patted and soothed her as if she had been a child.

"Dar now, dar now," she murmured softly. Then, raising her head, with sudden suspicion, she said in a sharp whisper, "Dat warn' no sho' nuff faintin'. She wuz jes' ez peart ez she could be w'en she flopped down dar on de flo'."

"I didn't touch her. I wouldn't have touched her if she had been dying!" declared Caroline passionately.

Mammy Riah chuckled. "You is git ter be a reel spit-fire, honey."

"I'm not a spit-fire, but I'm so angry that I see red."

"Cose you is, cose you is, but dat ain' no way ter git erlong in dis worl', perticular wid men folks. You ain' never seed Miss Angy git ez mad ez fire wid nobody, is you? Dar now! I low you ain' never seed hit. You ain' never seed 'er git all in a swivet 'bout nuttin? Ain't she al'ays jes' ez sof ez silk, no matter whut happen? Dat's de bes' way ter git erlong, honey, you lissen ter me. De mo' open en above boa'd you is, de mo' you is gwine ter see de thing you is atter begin ter shy away f'om you. Dar's Miss Matty Timberlake now! Ain't she de sort dat ain' got no sof' soap about 'er, en don't she look jes egzactly ez ef'n de buzzards hed picked 'er? Naw'm, you teck en watch Miss Angy, en she's gwine ter sho' you sump'n. She ain' never let on ter nobody, she ain't. Dar ain' nobody gwine ter know whut she's a-fishin' fur twell she's done cotched hit." There was an exasperated pride in her manner, as if she respected, even while she condemned, the success of Angelica's method.

"Yas, Lawd! I'se knowed all de Fitzhughs f'om way back, en I ain' knowed nairy one un um dat could beat Miss Angy w'en hit comes ter gettin' whut she wants—in perticular ef'n hit belongst ter somebody else. I'se seed 'er wid 'er pa, en I'se seed 'er wid Marse David, en dey warn' no mo' den chillun by de time she got thoo wid um. Is you ever seed a man, no matter how big he think hisself, dat warn' ready ter flop right down ez' weak ez water, ez soon as she set 'er een on 'im? I'se watched 'er wid Marse David way back yonder, befo' he begunst his cotin', en w'en I see 'er sidle up ter 'im, lookin ez sweet ez honey, en pertendin' dat she ain' made up 'er min' yit wedder she is mos' pleased wid 'im er feared un 'im, den I knows hit wuz all up wid 'im, ef'n he warn't ez sharp ez a needle. Do you reckon she 'ould ever hev cotched Marse David ef'n he'd a knowed whut 't'wuz she wuz atter? Naw'm, dat she 'ouldn't, caze men folks dey ain' made dat ar way. Deys erbleeged ter be doin' whut dey think you don't want 'um ter do, jes' like chillun, er dey cyarn' git enny spice outer doin' hit. Dat's de reason de 'ooman dey mos' often breecks dere necks tryin' ter git is de v'ey las' one dat deys gwinter want ter keep atter deys got 'er. A she fox is a long sight better in de bushes den she is in de kennel; but men folks dey ain' never gwine ter fin' dat out twell she's done bitten um."

While she rambled on, she had been busily folding the clothes and packing them into the trunk, and pausing now in her work, she peered into Caroline's face. "You look jes' egzactly ez ef'n you'd seed a ha'nt, honey," she said. "Git in de baid, en try ter go right straight ter sleep, w'ile I git thoo dis yer packin' in a jiffy."

Aching in every nerve, Caroline undressed and threw herself into bed. The hardest day of nursing had never left her like this—had never exhausted her so utterly in body and mind. She felt as if she had been beaten with rocks; and beneath the sore, bruised feeling of her limbs there was the old half-forgotten quiver of humiliation, which brought back to her the vision of that autumn morning at The Cedars—of the deep blue of the sky, the shivering leaves of the aspens, and the long straight road drifting through light and shadow into other roads that led on somewhere—somewhere. Could she never forget? Was she for ever chained to an inescapable memory?

"Is you 'bleeged ter go?" inquired the old woman, stopping again in her packing.

"Yes, I'm obliged to go. I wouldn't stay now if they went down on their knees to me."

"You ain't mad wid Marse David, is you?"

"No, I'm not angry with Mr. Blackburn. He has been very kind to me, and I am sorry to leave Letty." For the first time the thought of the child occurred to her. Incredible as it seemed she had actually forgotten her charge.

"She sutney is gwine ter miss you."

"I think she will, poor little Letty. I wonder what they will make of her?"

Closing her eyes wearily, she turned her face to the wall, and lay thinking of the future. "I will not be beaten," she resolved passionately. "I will not let them hurt me." Some old words she had said long ago at The Cedars came back to her, and she repeated them over and over, "People cannot hurt you unless you let them. They cannot hurt you unless you submit—unless you deliver your soul into their hands—and I will never submit. Life is mine as much as theirs. The battle is mine, and I will fight it." She remembered her first night at Briarlay, when she had watched the light from the house streaming out into the darkness, and had felt that strange forewarning of the nerves, that exhilarating sense of approaching destiny, that spring-like revival of her thoughts and emotions. How wonderful Mrs. Blackburn had appeared then! How ardently she might have loved her! For an instant the veiled figure of her imagination floated before her, and she was tormented by the pang that follows not death, but disillusionment. "I never harmed her. I would have died for her in the beginning. Why should she have done it?"

Opening her eyes she stared up at the wall beside her bed, where Mammy Riah's shadow hovered like some grotesque bird of prey.

"Did you order the car, Mammy Riah?"

"Yas'm, I tole John jes' like you axed me. Now, I'se done got de las' one er dese things packed, en I'se gwine ter let you git some sleep." She put out the light while she spoke, and then went out softly, leaving the room in darkness.

"Why should she have done it? Why should she have done it?" asked Caroline over and over, until the words became a refrain that beat slowly, with a rhythmic rise and fall, in her thoughts: "Why should she have done it? I thought her so good and beautiful. I would have worked my fingers to the bone for her if she had only been kind to me. Why should she have done it? I should always have taken her part against Mr. Blackburn, against Mrs. Timberlake, against Mammy Riah. It would have been so easy for her to have kept my love and admiration. It would have cost her nothing. Why should she have done it? There is nothing she can gain by this, and it isn't like her to do a cruel thing unless there is something she can gain. She likes people to admire her and believe in her. That is why she has taken so much trouble to appear right before the world, and to make Mr. Blackburn appear wrong. Admiration is the breath of life to her, and—and—oh, why should she have done it? I must go to sleep. I must put it out of my mind. If I don't put it out of my mind, I shall go mad before morning. I ought to be glad to leave Briarlay. I ought to want to go, but I do not. I do not want to go. I feel as if I were tearing my heart to pieces. I cannot bear the thought of never seeing the place again—of never seeing Letty again. Why should she have done it?——"

In the morning, when she was putting on her hat, Mrs. Timberlake came in with a breakfast tray in her hands.

"Sit down, and try to eat something, Caroline. I thought you would rather have a cup of coffee up here."

Caroline shook her head. "I couldn't touch a morsel in this house. I feel as if it would choke me."

"But you will be sick before you get home. Just drink a swallow or two."

Taking the cup from her, Caroline began drinking it so hurriedly that the hot coffee burned her lips. "Yes, you are right," she said presently. "I cannot fight unless I keep up my strength, and I will fight to the bitter end. I will not let her hurt me. I am poor and unknown, and I work for my living, but the world is mine as much as hers, and I will not give in. I will not let life conquer me."

"You aren't blaming David, are you, dear?"

"Oh, no, I am not blaming Mr. Blackburn. He couldn't have helped it." Her heart gave a single throb while she spoke; and it seemed to her that, in the midst of the anguish and humiliation, something within her soul, which had been frozen for years, thawed suddenly and grew warm again. It was just as if a statue had come to life, as if what had been marble yesterday had been blown upon by a breath of the divine, and changed into flesh. For eight years she had been dead, and now, in an instant, she was born anew, and had entered afresh into her lost heritage of joy and pain.

Mrs. Timberlake, gazing at her through dulled eyes, was struck by the intensity of feeling that glowed in her pale face and in the burning blue of her eyes. "I didn't know she could look like that," thought the housekeeper. "I didn't know she had so much heart." Aloud she said quietly, "David and I are going to the train with you. That is why I put on my bonnet."

"Is Mr. Blackburn obliged to go with us?" Caroline's voice was almost toneless, but there was a look of wonder and awe in her face, as of one who is standing on the edge of some undiscovered country, of some virgin wilderness. The light that fell on her was the light of that celestial hemisphere where Mrs. Timberlake had never walked.

"He wishes to go," answered the older woman, and she added with an after-thought, "It will look better."

"As if it mattered how things look? I'd rather not see him again, but, after all, it makes no difference."

"It wasn't his fault, Caroline."

"No, it wasn't his fault. He has always been good to me."

"If anything, it has been harder on him than on you. It is only a few hours of your life, but it is the whole of his. She has spoiled his life from the first, and now she has ruined his career forever. Even before this, Colonel Ashburton told me that all that talk last winter had destroyed David's future. He said he might have achieved almost anything if he had had half a chance, but that he regarded him now merely as a brilliant failure. Angelica went to work deliberately to ruin him."

"But why?" demanded Caroline passionately. "What was there she could gain by it?"

Mrs. Timberlake blinked at the sunlight. "For the first time in my life," she confessed, "I don't know what she is up to. I can't, to save my life, see what she has got in her mind."

"She can't be doing it just to pose as an ill-treated wife? The world is on her side already. There isn't a person outside of this house who doesn't look upon her as a saint and martyr."

"I know there isn't. That is what puzzles me. I declare, if it didn't sound so far-fetched, I'd be almost tempted to believe that she was trying to get that young fool for good."

"Mr. Wythe? But what would she do with him? She is married already, and you know perfectly well that she wouldn't do anything that the world calls really wrong."

"She'd be burned at the stake first. Well, I give it up. I've raked my brain trying to find some reason at the bottom of it, but it isn't any use, and I've had to give it up in the end. Then, last night after David told me about that scene downstairs—he waked me up to tell me—it suddenly crossed my mind just like that—" she snapped her fingers—"that perhaps she's sharper than we've ever given her credit for being. I don't say it's the truth, because I don't know any more than a babe unborn whether it is or not; but the idea did cross my mind that maybe she felt if she could prove David really cruel and faithless to her—if she could make up a case so strong that people's sympathy would support her no matter what she did—then she might manage to get what she wanted without having to give up anything in return. You know Angelica could never bear to give up anything. She has got closets and closets filled with old clothes, which she'd never think of wearing, but just couldn't bear to give away——"

"You mean——?" The blackness of the abyss struck Caroline speechless.

"I don't wonder that you can't take it in. I couldn't at first. It seems so unlike anything that could ever happen in Virginia."

"It would be so—" Caroline hesitated for a word—"so incredibly common."

"Of course you feel that way about it, and so would Angelica's mother. I reckon she would turn in her grave at the bare thought of her daughter's even thinking of a divorce."

"You mean she would sacrifice me like this? She would not only ruin her husband, she would try to destroy me, though I've never harmed her?"

"That hasn't got anything in the world to do with it. She isn't thinking of you, and she isn't thinking of Alan. She is thinking about what she wants. It is surprising how badly you can want a thing even when you have neither feeling nor imagination. Angelica isn't any more in love with that young ass than I am; but she wants him just as much as if she were over head and ears in love. There is one thing, however, you may count on—she is going to get him if she can, and she is going to persuade herself and everybody else, except you and David and me, that she is doing her duty when she goes after her inclinations. I don't reckon there was ever anybody stronger on the idea of duty than Angelica," she concluded in a tone of acrid admiration.

"Of course, she will always stand right before the world," assented Caroline, "I know that."

"Well, it takes some sense to manage it, you must admit?"

"I wish I'd never come here. I wish I'd never seen Briarlay," cried Caroline, in an outburst of anger. "There is the car at the door. We'd better go."

"Won't you tell Letty good-bye?"

For the first time tears rushed to Caroline's eyes. "No, I'd rather not. Give her my love after I'm gone."

In the hall Blackburn was waiting for them, and Caroline's first thought, as she glanced at him, was that he had aged ten years since the evening before. A rush of pity for him, not for herself, choked her to silence while she put her hand into his, which felt as cold as ice when she touched it. In that moment she forgot the wrong that she had suffered, she forgot her wounded pride, her anguish and humiliation, and remembered only that he had been hurt far more deeply.

"I hope you slept," he said awkwardly, and she answered, "Very little. Is the car waiting?"

Then, as he turned to go down the steps, she brushed quickly past him, and entered the car after Mrs. Timberlake. She felt that her heart was breaking, and she could think of no words to utter. There were trivial things, she knew, that might be said, casual sounds that might relieve the strain of the silence; but she could not remember what they were, and where her thoughts had whirled so wildly all night long, there was now only a terrible vacancy, round which sinister fears moved but into which nothing entered. A strange oppressive dumbness, a paralysis of the will, seized her. If her life had depended on it, she felt that she should have been powerless to put two words together with an intelligible meaning.

Blackburn got into the car, and a moment later they started round the circular drive, and turned into the lane.

"Did John put in the bag?" inquired Mrs. Timberlake nervously.

"Yes, it is in front." As he replied, Blackburn turned slightly, and the sunshine falling aslant the boughs of the maples, illumined his face for an instant before the car sped on into the shadows. In that minute it seemed to Caroline that she could never forget the misery in his eyes, or the look of grimness and determination the night had graven about his mouth. Every line in his forehead, every thread of grey in his dark hair, would remain in her memory for ever. "He looked so much younger when I came here," she thought. "These last months have cost him his youth and his happiness."

"I am so glad you have a good day for your trip," said Mrs. Timberlake, and almost to her surprise Caroline heard her own voice replying distinctly, "Yes, it is a beautiful day."

"Will you telegraph your mother from the station?"

"She wouldn't get it. There is no telephone, and we send only once a day for the mail."

"Then she won't be expecting you?"

"No, she won't be expecting me."

At this Blackburn turned. "What can we do, Miss Meade, to help you?"

Again she seemed to herself to answer with her lips before she had selected the words, "Nothing, thank you. There is absolutely nothing that you can do." The soft wind had loosened a lock of hair under her veil, and putting up her hand, she pushed it back into place.

Rain had fallen in the night, and the morning was fresh and fine, with a sky of cloudless turquoise blue. The young green leaves by the roadside shone with a sparkling lustre, while every object in the landscape appeared to quiver and glisten in the spring sunlight.

"I shall never see it again—I shall never see it again." Suddenly, without warning, Caroline's thoughts came flocking back as riotously as they had done through the long, sleepless night. The external world at which she looked became a part of the intense inner world of her mind; and the mental vacancy was crowded in an instant with a vivid multitude of figures. Every thought, every sensation, every image of the imagination and of memory, seemed to glitter with a wonderful light and freshness, as the objects in the landscape glittered when the April sunshine streamed over them.

"Yes, I am leaving it forever. I shall never see it again, but why should I care so much? Why does it make me so unhappy, as if it were tearing the heart out of my breast? Life is always that—leaving things forever, and giving up what you would rather keep. I have left places I cared for before, and yet I have never felt like this, not even when I came away for the first time from The Cedars. Every minute I am going farther and farther away. We are in the city now; flags are shining, too, in the sun. I have never seen so many flags—as if flags alone meant war! War! Why, I had almost forgotten the war! And yet it is the most tremendous thing that has ever been on the earth, and nothing else really matters—neither Briarlay, nor Mrs. Blackburn, nor my life, nor Mr. Blackburn's, nor anything that happened last night. It was all so little—as little as the thing Mrs. Blackburn is trying to get, the thing she calls happiness. It is as little as the thing I have lost—as little as my aching heart——"

"Do you know," said Mrs. Timberlake, "I had not realized that we were at war—but look at the flags!" Her lustreless eyes were lifted, with a kind of ecstasy, in the sunlight, and then as no one answered, she added softly, "It makes one stop and think."

"I must try to remember the war," Caroline was telling herself. "If I remember the war, perhaps I shall forget the ache in my heart. The larger pain will obliterate the smaller. If I can only forget myself——" But, in spite of the effort of will, she could not feel the war as keenly as she felt the parting from something which seemed more vital to her than her life. "We are at war," she thought, and immediately, "I shall never see it again—I shall never see it again."

The car stopped at the station, and a minute afterwards she followed Mrs. Timberlake across the pavement and through the door, which Blackburn held open. As she entered, he said quickly, "I will get your ticket and meet you at the gate."

"Has John got the bag?" asked Mrs. Timberlake, glancing back.

"Yes, he is coming." Caroline was looking after Blackburn, and while she did so, she was conscious of a wish that she had spoken to him in the car while she still had the opportunity. "I might at least have been kinder," she thought regretfully, "I might have shown him that I realized it was not his fault—that he was not to blame for anything from the beginning——" A tall countryman, carrying a basket of vegetables, knocked against her, and when she turned to look back again, Blackburn had disappeared. "It is too late now. I shall never see him again."

The station was crowded; there was a confused rumble of sounds, punctuated by the shrill cries of a baby, in a blue crocheted hood, that was struggling to escape from the arms of a nervous-looking mother. In front of Mrs. Timberlake, who peered straight ahead at the gate, there was a heavy man, with a grey beard, and beside him a small anxious-eyed woman, who listened, with distracted attention, to the emphatic sentences he was uttering. "Why doesn't he stop talking and let us go on," thought Caroline. "What difference does it make if the whole world is going to ruin?" Even now, if she could only go faster, there might be time for a few words with Blackburn before the train started. If only she might tell him that she was not ungrateful—that she understood, and would be his friend always. A hundred things that she wanted to say flashed through her mind, and these things appeared so urgent that she wondered how she could have forgotten them on the long drive from Briarlay. "I must tell him. It is the only chance I shall ever have," she kept saying over and over; but when at last she heard his voice, and saw him awaiting them in the crowd, she could recall none of the words that had rushed to her lips the moment before. "It is the only chance I shall ever have," she repeated, though the phrase meant nothing to her any longer.

"I tell you it's the farmers that pay for everything, and they are going to pay for the war," declared the grey-bearded man, in a harsh, polemical voice, and the anxious-eyed woman threw a frightened glance over her shoulder, as if the remark had been treasonable. Mrs. Timberlake had already passed through the gate, and was walking, with a hurried, nervous air, down the long platform. As she followed at Blackburn's side, it seemed to Caroline that she should feel like this if she were going to execution instead of back to The Cedars. She longed with all her heart to utter the regret that pervaded her thoughts, to speak some profound and memorable words that would separate this moment from every other moment that would come in the future—yet she went on in silence toward the waiting train, where the passengers were already crowding into the cars.

At the step Mrs. Timberlake kissed her, and then drew back, wiping her reddened lids.

"Good-bye, my dear, I shall write to you."

"Good-bye. I can never forget how kind you have been to me."

Raising her eyes, she saw Blackburn looking down on her, and with an effort to be casual and cheerful, she held out her hand, while a voice from somewhere within her brain kept repeating, "You must say something now that he will remember. It is the last chance you will ever have in your life."

"Good-bye." Her eyes were smiling.

"Your chair is sixteen. Good-bye."

It was over; she was on the platform, and the passengers were pushing her into the car. She had lost her last chance, and she had lost it smiling. "It doesn't matter," she whispered. "I am glad to be going home—and life cannot hurt you unless you let it."

The smile was still on her lips, but the eyes with which she sought out her chair were wet with tears.

CHAPTER VIII
The Cedars

NO one met her at the little country station, and leaving her bag for old Jonas, she started out alone to walk the two miles to The Cedars. Straight ahead the long, empty road trailed beneath the fresh young foliage of the woods, the little curled red velvet leaves of the oaks shining through the sea-green mist of the hickories and beeches; and she felt that within her soul there was only a continuation of this long, straight emptiness that led on to nothing. Overhead flocks of small fleecy clouds, as white as swans-down, drifted across the changeable April sky, while the breeze, passing through the thick woods, stirred the delicate flower-like shadows on the moist ground. "Spring is so sad," she thought. "I never understood before how much sadder spring is than autumn." This sadness of budding things, of renewing life, of fugitive scents and ephemeral colours, had become poignantly real. "It makes me want something different—something I have never had; and that is the sharpest desire on earth—the desire for a happiness that hasn't a name." A minute afterwards she concluded resolutely, "That is weakness, and I will not be weak. One must either conquer or be conquered by life—and I will not be conquered. Anybody can be miserable, but it takes courage to be happy. It takes courage and determination and intelligence to get the best out of whatever happens, and the only way to begin is to begin by getting the best out of yourself. Now I might have been hurt, but I am not because I won't let myself be. I might be unhappy, but I am not because my life is my own, and I can make of it anything that I choose." Then suddenly she heard an inner voice saying from a great distance, "It is my last chance. I shall never see him again." With the words her memory was illuminated by a flame; and in the burning light she saw clearly the meaning of everything that had happened—of her sorrow, her dumbness, her longing to speak some splendid and memorable word at the last. It was not to Briarlay, it was not even to Letty, that her thoughts had clung at the moment of parting. She had wanted David Blackburn to remember because it was the separation from him, she knew now, that would make her unhappy. Unconsciously, before she had suspected the truth, he had become an inseparable part of her world; unconsciously she had let the very roots of her life entwine themselves about the thought of him.

Standing there in the deserted road, beneath the changeable blue of the sky, she turned to fight this secret and pitiless enemy. "I will not let it conquer me. I will conquer, as I have conquered worse things than this. I believed myself dead because I had once been disappointed. I believed myself secure because I had once been stabbed to the heart. This is the punishment for my pride—this humiliation and bitterness and longing from which I shall never be free." An unyielding cord stretched from her heart back to Briarlay, drawing stronger and tighter with every step of the distance. It would always be there. The pain would not lessen with time. The flame of memory would grow brighter, not paler, with the days, months, and years.

The April wind, soft, provocative, sweet-scented, blew in her face as she looked back; and down the long road, between the rose and green of the woods, an unbroken chain of memories stretched toward her. She saw Blackburn as he had appeared on that first night at Briarlay, standing in the door of his library when she came in from the terrace; she saw him in Letty's room at midnight, sitting beside the night lamp on the candle-stand, with the book, which he did not read, open before him; she saw him in the day nursery, his face enkindled with tenderness; she saw him in the midst of the snowy landscape, when there had been rage in his look at the half-drunken Roane; and she saw him, most clearly of all, as he looked facing, on that last night, the hour that would leave its mark on him for ever. It was as if this chain of memories, beginning in the vague sunshine and shadow of the distance, grew more distinct, more vivid, as it approached, until at last the images of her mind gathered, like actual presences, in the road before her. She could not escape them, she knew. They were as inevitable as regret, and would follow her through the bitter years ahead, as they had followed her through the hours since she had left him. She must stand her ground, and fight for peace as valiantly as she had ever fought in the past.

"I cannot escape it," she said, as she turned to go on, "I must accept it and use it because that is the only way. Mine is only one among millions of aching hearts, and all this pain must leave the world either better or worse than it was—all this pain will be used on the side either of light or of darkness. Even sorrow may stand in the end for the world's happiness, just as the tragedy of this war may make a greater peace in the future. If I can only keep this thought, I shall conquer—war may bring peace, and pain may bring joy—in the end."

Beyond the white gate, the old aspens glimmered silver green in the sunlight, and, half-hidden in a dusky cloud of cedars, she saw the red chimneys and the dormer-windows of the house. Home at last! And home was good however she came to it. With a smile she drew out the bar, and after replacing it, went on with an energetic and resolute step.

The door was open, and looking through the hall, she saw her mother crossing the back porch, with a yellow bowl of freshly churned butter in her hands.

Mrs Meade had grown older in the last six months, and she limped slightly from rheumatism; but her expression of sprightly cheerfulness had not changed, and her full pink face was still pretty. There was something strangely touching in the sight of her active figure, which was beginning at last to stoop, and in her brisk, springy step, which appeared to ignore, without disguising, the limp in her walk. Never, it seemed to Caroline, had she seen her so closely—with so penetrating a flash of understanding and insight. Bare and hard as life had been, she had cast light, not shadow, around her; she had stood always on the side of the world's happiness.

"Mother, dear, I've come home to see you!" cried Caroline gaily.

The old lady turned with a cry. "Why, Caroline, what on earth?" she exclaimed, and carefully set down the bowl she was carrying.

The next instant Caroline was in her arms, laughing and crying together.

"Oh, mother, I wanted to see you, so I came home!"

"Is anything wrong, dear?"

"Nothing that cannot be made right. Nothing in the world that cannot be made right."

Drawing her out on the porch, Mrs. Meade gazed earnestly into her face. "You are a little pale. Have you been ill, Caroline?"

"I never had much colour, you know, but I am perfectly well."

"And happy, darling?" The dear features, on which time was beginning to trace tender lines of anxiety, beamed on her daughter, with the invincible optimism that life had granted in place of bodily ease. As the wind stirred the silvery hair, Caroline noticed that it had grown a little thinner, though it was still as fine and light as spun flax. For the first time she realized that her mother possessed the beauty which is permanent and indestructible—the beauty of a fervent and dominant soul. Age could soften, but it could not destroy, the charm that was independent of physical change.

Caroline smiled brightly. "Happy to be with you, precious mother."

"Maud is in the hospital, you know, and Diana is in New York getting ready to sail. Only Margaret is left with me, and she hasn't been a bit well this winter. She is working hard over her garden."

"Yes, you wrote me. While I am here, I will help her. I want to work very hard."

"Can you stay long now? It will be such a comfort to have you. Home never seems just right when one of you is away, and now there will be three. You knew old Docia was sick, didn't you? We have had to put her daughter Perzelia in the kitchen, and she is only a field hand. The cooking isn't very good, but you won't mind. I always make the coffee and the batter bread."

"You know I shan't mind, but I must go back to work in a week or two. Somebody must keep the dear old roof mended."

Mrs. Meade laughed, and the sound was like music. "It has been leaking all winter." Then she added, while the laugh died on her lips, "Have you left Briarlay for good?"

"Yes, for good. I shall never go back."

"But you seemed so happy there?"

"I shall be still happier somewhere else—for I am going to be happy, mother, wherever I am." Though she smiled as she answered, her eyes left her mother's face, and sought the road, where the long procession of the aspens shivered like gray-green ghosts in the wind.

"I am so glad, dear, but there hasn't been anything to hurt you, has there? I hope Mr. Blackburn hasn't been disagreeable."

"Oh, no, he has been very kind. I cannot begin to tell you how kind he has been." Her voice trembled for an instant, and then went on brightly, "And so has Mrs. Timberlake. At first I didn't like her. I thought she was what Docia calls 'ficy,' but afterwards, as I wrote you so often, she turned out to be very nice and human. First impressions aren't always reliable. If they were life would be easier, and there wouldn't be so many disappointments—but do you know the most valuable lesson I've learned this winter? Well, it is not to trust my first impression—of a cat. The next time old Jonas brings me a lot of kittens and asks me what I think of them, I'm going to answer, 'I can't tell, Jonas, until I discover their hidden qualities.' It's the hidden qualities that make or mar life, and yet we accept or reject people because of something on the surface—something that doesn't really matter at all."

She was gay enough; her voice was steady; her laugh sounded natural; the upward sweep of the black brows was as charming as ever; and the old sunny glance was searching the distance. There was nothing that Mrs. Meade could point to and say "this is different"; yet the change was there, and the mother felt, with the infallible instinct of love, that the daughter who had come home to her was not the Caroline who had left The Cedars six months ago. "She is keeping something from me," thought Mrs. Meade. "For the first time in her life she is keeping something from me."

"Now I must take off my hat and go to work," said Caroline, eagerly, and she added under her breath, "It will rest me to work."

The fragrance of spring was in the air, and through the fortnight that she stayed at The Cedars, it seemed to her that this inescapable sweetness became a reminder and a torture—a reminder of the beauty and the evanescence of youth, a torture to all the sensitive nerves of her imagination, which conjured up delusive visions of happiness. In the beginning she had thought that work would be her salvation, as it had been when she was younger, that every day, every week, would soften the pain, until at last it would melt into the shadows of memory, and cease to trouble her life. But as the days went by, she realized that this emotion differed from that earlier one as maturity differs from adolescence—not in weakness, but in the sharper pang of its regret. Hour by hour, the image of Blackburn grew clearer, not dimmer, in her mind; day by day, the moments that she had spent with him appeared to draw closer instead of retreating farther away. Because he had never been to The Cedars she had believed that she could escape the sharper recollections while she was here; yet she found now that every object at which she looked—the house, the road, the fields, the garden, even the lilacs blooming beneath her window—she found now that all these dear familiar things were attended by a thronging multitude of associations. The place that he had never known was saturated with his presence. "If I could only forget him," she thought. "Caring wouldn't matter so much, if I could only stop thinking." But, through some perversity of will, the very effort that she made to forget him served merely to strengthen the power of remembrance—as if the energy of mind were condensed into some clear and sparkling medium which preserved and intensified the thought of him. After hours of work, in which she had buried the memories of Briarlay, they would awake more ardently as soon as she raised her head and released her hands from her task. The resolution which had carried her through her first tragedy failed her utterly now, for this was a situation, she found, where resolution appeared not to count.

And the bitterest part was that when she looked back now on those last months at Briarlay, she saw them, not as they were in reality, filled with minor cares and innumerable prosaic anxieties, but irradiated by the rosy light her imagination had enkindled about them. She had not known then that she was happy; but it seemed to her now that, if she could only recover the past, if she could only walk up the drive again and enter the house and see Blackburn and Letty, it would mean perfect and unalterable happiness. At night she would dream sometimes of the outside of the house and the drive and the elms, which she saw always shedding their bronze leaves in the autumn; but she never got nearer than the white columns, and the front door remained closed when she rang the bell, and even beat vainly on the knocker. These dreams invariably left her exhausted and in a panic of terror, as if she had seen the door of happiness close in her face. The day afterwards her regret would become almost unendurable, and her longing, which drowned every other interest or emotion, would overwhelm her, like a great flood which had swept away the natural boundaries of existence, and submerged alike the valleys and the peaks of her consciousness. Everything was deluged by it; everything surrendered to the torrent—even the past. Because she had once been hurt so deeply, she had believed that she could never be hurt in the same way again; but she discovered presently that what she had suffered yesterday had only taught her how to suffer more intensely to-day. Nothing had helped her—not blighted love, not disillusionment, not philosophy. All these had been swept like straws on the torrent from which she could not escape.

The days were long, but the nights were far longer, for, with the first fall of the darkness, her imagination was set free. While she was working with Margaret in the garden, or the kitchen, she could keep her mind on the object before her—she could plant or weed until her body ached from fatigue, and the soft air and the smell of earth and of lilacs, became intermingled. But it was worse in the slow, slow evenings, when the three of them sat and talked, with an interminable airy chatter, before the wood-fire, or round the lamp, which still smoked. Then she would run on gaily, talking always against time, longing for the hour that would release her from the presence of the beings she loved best, while some memory of Blackburn glimmered in the fire, or in the old portraits, or through the windows, which looked, uncurtained, out on the stars. There were moments even when some quiver of expression on her mother's face or on Margaret's, some gleam of laughter or trick of gesture, would remind her of him. Then she would ask herself if it were possible that she had loved him before she had ever seen him, and afterwards at Briarlay, when she had believed herself to be so indifferent? And sitting close to her mother and sister, divided from them by an idea which was more impregnable than any physical barrier, she began to feel gradually that her soul was still left there in the house which her mind inhabited so persistently—that her real life, her vital and perpetual being, still went on there in the past, and that here, in the present, beside these dear ones, who loved her so tenderly, there was only a continuous moving shadow of herself. "But how do I know that these aren't the shadows of mother and of Margaret?" she would demand, startled out of her reverie.

At the end of a fortnight a letter came from Mrs. Timberlake, and she read it on the kitchen porch, where Perzelia, the field hand, was singing in a high falsetto, as she bent over the wash-tub.

"We is jew-els—pre-cious—jew-els in—His—c-r-ow-n!" sang Perzelia shrilly, and changing suddenly from hymn to sermon, "Yas, Lawd, I tells de worl'. I tells de worl' dat ef'n dat nigger 'oman don' stop 'er lies on me, I'se gwine ter cut 'er heart out. I'se gwine ter kill 'er jes' de same ez I 'ould a rat. Yas, Lawd, I tells 'er dat. 'We is jew-els—pre-cious—jew-els in His c-r-o-w-n.'"

Mrs. Timberlake wrote in her fine Italian hand:

MY DEAR CAROLINE,

I have thought of you very often, and wanted to write to you, but ever since you left we have been rather upset, and I have been too busy to settle down to pen and paper. For several weeks after you went away Letty was not a bit well. Nobody knew what was the matter with her, and Doctor Boland's medicine did not do her any good. She just seemed to peak and pine, and I said all along it was nothing in the world except missing you that made her sick. Now she is beginning to pick up as children will if you do not worry them too much, and I hope she will soon get her colour back and look as natural as she did while you were here. We have a new trained nurse—a Miss Bradley, from somewhere up in the Shenandoah Valley, but she is very plain and uninteresting, and, between you and me, I believe she bores Letty to death. I never see the child that she does not ask me, "When is Miss Meade coming back?"

We were very anxious to have a word from you after you went away. However, I reckon you felt as if you did not care to write, and I am sure I do not blame you. I suppose you have heard all the gossip that has been going on here—somebody must have written you, for somebody always does write when there is anything unpleasant to say. You know, of course, that Angelica left David the very day you went away, and the town has been fairly ringing with all sorts of dreadful scandals. People believe he was cruel to her, and that she bore his ill-treatment just as long as she could before leaving his house. Only you and I and Mammy Riah will ever know what really happened, and nobody would believe us if we were to come out and tell under oath—which, of course, we can never do. I cannot make out exactly what Angelica means to do, but she has gone somewhere out West, and I reckon she intends to get a divorce and marry Alan, if he ever comes back from the war. You may not have heard that he has gone into the army, and I expect he will be among the very first to be sent to France. Roane is going, too. You cannot imagine how handsome he is in his uniform. He has not touched a drop since we went to war, and I declare he looks exactly like a picture of a crusader of the Middle Ages, which proves how deceptive the best appearances are.

David has not changed a particle through it all. You remember how taciturn he always was, and how he never let anybody even mention Angelica's name to him? Well, it is just the same now, and he is, if possible, more tight-lipped than ever. Nobody knows how he feels, or what he thinks of her behaviour—not even Colonel Ashburton, and you know what close and devoted friends they are. The Colonel told me that once, when he first saw how things were going, he tried to open the subject, and that he could never forget how Blackburn turned him off by talking about something that was way up in the air and had nothing to do with the subject. I am sure David has been cut to the heart, but he will never speak out, and everybody will believe that Angelica has been perfectly right in everything she has done. If it goes on long enough, she will even believe it herself, and that, I reckon, is the reason she is so strong, and always manages to appear sinned against instead of sinning. Nothing can shake her conviction that whatever she wants she ought to have.

Well, my dear, I must stop now and see about dinner. The house is so lonely, though, as far as I can tell, Letty hardly misses her mother at all, and this makes it so provoking when people like Daisy Colfax cry over the child in the street, and carry on about, "poor dear Angelica, who is so heartbroken." That is the way Daisy goes on whenever I see her, and it is what they are saying all over Richmond. They seem to think that David is just keeping Letty out of spite, and I cannot make them believe that Angelica does not want her, and is glad to be relieved of the responsibility. When I say this they put it down as one of my peculiarities—like blinking eyes, or the habit of stuttering when I get excited.

Give my love to your mother, though I reckon she has forgotten old Matty Timberlake, and do drop me a line to let me hear how you are.

Your affectionate friend,
MATTY TIMBERLAKE.

Letty sends her dearest, dearest, dearest love.

When she had finished the letter, Caroline looked over the lilacs by the kitchen porch and the broken well-house, to the road beneath the aspens, which still led somewhere—somewhere—to the unattainable. At one corner of the porch Perzelia was singing again, and the sound mingled with the words that Mrs. Timberlake had written.

"We is jew-els, pre-cious jew-els in His c-r-o-w-n."

A fever of restlessness seized Caroline while she listened. The letter, instead of quieting her, had merely sharpened the edge of her longing, and she was filled with hunger for more definite news. In an hour The Cedars had become intolerable to her. She felt that she could not endure another day of empty waiting—of waiting without hope—of the monotonous round of trivial details that led to nothing, of the perpetual, interminable effort to drug feeling with fatigue, to thrust the secondary interests and the things that did not matter into the foreground of her life. "He has never wasted a regret on me," she thought. "He never cared for a minute. I was nothing to him except a friend, a woman who could be trusted." The confession was like the twist of a knife in her heart; and springing to her feet, she picked up the letter she had dropped, and ran into the house.

"I must go back to work, mother darling," she said. "The money I saved is all gone, and I must go back to work."

CHAPTER IX
The Years Ahead

TOWARD the close of an afternoon in November, Caroline was walking from the hospital to a boarding-house in Grace Street, where she was spending a few days between cases. All summer she had nursed in Richmond; and now that the autumn, for which she had longed, had at last come, she was beginning to feel the strain of hard work and sleepless nights. Though she still wore her air of slightly defiant courage, a close observer would have noticed the softer depths in her eyes, the little lines in her face, and the note of sadness that quivered now and then in her ready laughter. It was with an effort now that she moved with her energetic and buoyant step, for her limbs ached, and a permanent weariness pervaded her body.

A high wind was blowing, and from the scattered trees on the block, a few brown and wrinkled leaves were torn roughly, and then whirled in a cloud of dust up the street. The block ahead was deserted, except for an aged negro wheeling a handcart full of yellow chrysanthemums, but as Caroline approached the crossing, Daisy Colfax came suddenly from the corner of a church, and hesitated an instant before speaking. The last time that Caroline had seen her, old Mrs. Colfax had been in the car, and they had not spoken; but now that Daisy was alone, she pounced upon her with the manner of an affectionate and playful kitten.

"Oh, I didn't know you at first, Miss Meade! You are so much thinner. What have you been doing?"

She held out her hand, diffusing life, love, joy, with the warmth of her Southern charm; and while Caroline stood there, holding the soft, gloved hand in her own, a dart of envy pierced the armour of her suffering and her philosophy. How handsome Daisy looked! How happy! Her hat of the royal purple she favoured made her black hair gleam like velvet; her sealskin coat, with its enormous collar of ermine, wrapped her luxuriously from head to foot; her brilliant complexion had the glow of a peach that is just ready to drop. She also had had an unfortunate romance somewhere in the past; she had married a man whom she did not love; yet she shone, she scintillated, with the genuine lustre of happiness. Never had the superior advantages of a shallow nature appeared so incontestable.

"I saw you go by yesterday, Miss Meade, and I said to myself that I was going to stop and speak to you the first chance I got. I took such a fancy to you when you were out at Briarlay, and I want to tell you right now that I never believed there was anything queer in your going away like that so early in the morning, without saying a word to anybody. At first people didn't understand why you did it, and, of course, you know that somebody tried to start gossip; but as soon as Mrs. Timberlake told me your sister was ill, I went straight about telling everybody I saw. You were the last woman on earth, I always said, to want anything like a flirtation with a man, married or single, and I knew you used to sympathize so with Angelica. I shall never forget the way you looked at David Blackburn the night you came there, when he was so dreadfully rude to her at the table. I told mother afterwards that if a look could have killed, he would have fallen dead on the spot." She paused an instant, adjusted a loosened pin in her lace veil, and glided on smoothly again without a perceptible change in her voice, "Poor, dear Angelica! All our hearts are broken over her. I never knew David Blackburn well, but I always despised him from the beginning. A man who will sit through a whole dinner without opening his mouth, as I've known him to do, is capable of anything. That's what I always say when Robert tells me I am prejudiced. I am really not in the least prejudiced, but I just can't abide him, and there's no use trying to make me pretend that I can. Even if he hadn't ruined Angelica's life, I should feel almost as strongly about him. Everybody says that she is going to get a divorce for cruelty, though one of the most prominent lawyers in town—I don't like to mention his name, but you would know it in a minute—told me that she could get it on any grounds that she chose. Angelica has such delicacy of feeling that she went out West, where you don't have to make everything so dreadfully public, and drag in all kinds of disgraceful evidence—but they say that David Blackburn neglected her from the very first, and that he has had affairs with other women for years and years. He must have selected those nobody had ever heard of, or he couldn't have kept it all so secret, and that only proves, as I said to Robert, that his tastes were always low——"

"Why do people like to believe these things?" demanded Caroline resentfully. "Why don't they try to find out the truth?"

"Well, how in the world are they going to find out any more than they are told? I said that to Mrs. Ashburton—you know they stand up for Mr. Blackburn through thick and thin—but even they can't find a word to say against Angelica, except that she isn't sincere, and that she doesn't really care about Letty. There isn't a word of truth in that, and nobody would believe it who had seen Angelica after she told Letty good-bye. She was heartbroken—simply heartbroken. Her face was the loveliest thing I ever looked at, and, as Alan Wythe said to me the next day—it was the very afternoon before he went off to camp—there was the soul of motherhood in it. I thought that such a beautiful way of putting it, for it suited Angelica perfectly. Didn't you always feel that she was full of soul?"

"I wonder how Letty is getting on?" asked Caroline, in the pause. "Have you heard anything of her?"

"Oh, she is all right, I think. They have a nurse there who is looking after her until they find a good governess. She must miss her mother terribly, but she doesn't show it a bit. I must say she always seemed to me to be a child of very little feeling. If I go away for a week, my children cry their eyes out, and Letty has lost her mother, and no one would ever know it to watch her."

"She is a reserved child, but I am sure she has feeling," said Caroline.

"Of course you know her better than I do, and, anyhow, you couldn't expect a child not to show the effects of the kind of home life she has had. I tell Robert that our first duty in life is to provide the memory of a happy home for our children. It means so much when you're grown, don't you think, to look back on a pleasant childhood? As for Letty she might as well be an orphan now that David Blackburn has gone to France——"

"To France?" For a minute it seemed to Caroline that claws were tearing her heart, and the dull ache which she had felt for months changed into a sharp and unendurable pain. Then the grey sky and grey street and grey dust intermingled, and went round and round in a circle.

"You hadn't heard? Why, he went last week, or it may be that he is going next week—I can't remember which. Robert didn't know exactly what he was to do—some kind of constructive work, he said, for the Government. I never get things straight, but all I know is that everything seems to be for the Government now. I declare, I never worked so hard in my life as I have done in the last six or eight months, and Robert has been in Washington simply slaving his head off for a dollar a year. It does one good, I suppose. Mr. Courtland preached a beautiful sermon last Sunday about it, and I never realized before how wonderfully we have all grown in spirit since the war began. I said to Mrs. Mallow, as I came out, that it was so comforting to feel that we had been developing all the time without knowing it, or having to bother about it. Of course, we did know that we had been very uncomfortable, but that isn't quite the same, and now I can stand giving up things so much better when I realize that I am getting them all back, even if it's just spiritually. Don't you think that is a lovely way to feel about it?"

"I must go," said Caroline breathlessly. Her pulses were hammering in her ears, and she could scarcely hear what Daisy was saying.

"Well, good-bye. I am so glad to have seen you. Are you going to France like everybody else?"

"I hope so. I have offered my services."

"Then you are just as wild about war work as I am. I'd give anything on earth to go over with the Y. M. C. A., and I tell Robert that the only thing that keeps me back is the children."

She floated on to her car at the corner, while Caroline crossed the street, and walked slowly in the direction of the boarding-house. "It can make no possible difference to me. Why should I care?" she asked herself. Yet the clutch of pain had not relaxed in her heart, and it seemed to her that all the life and colour had gone out of the town. He was not here. He was across the world. Until this instant she had not realized how much it meant to her that he should be in the same city, even though she never saw him.

She reached the house, opened the drab iron gate, went up the short brick walk between withered weeds, and rang the bell beside the inhospitable door, from which the sallow paint was peeling in streaks. At the third ring, a frowzy coloured maid, in a soiled apron, which she was still frantically tying, opened the door; and when she saw Caroline, a sympathetic grin widened her mouth.

"You is done hed a caller, en he lef' his name over dar on de table. I axed 'im ef'n he wouldn't set down en res' his hat, but he jes' shuck his haid en walked right spang out agin."

Entering the hall, Caroline picked up the card, and passed into the shabby living-room, which was empty during the afternoon hours. In the centre of the hideous room, with its damaged Victorian furniture, its open stove, its sentimental engravings, and its piles of magazines long out of date—in the midst of the surroundings of a contented and tasteless period, she stared down, with incredulous eyes, at the bit of paper she was holding. So he had been there. He had come at the last moment, probably on his last day in Richmond, and she had missed him! Life had accorded her one other opportunity, and, with the relentless perversity of her fate, she had lost it by an accident, by a quarter of an hour, by a chance meeting with Daisy! It was her destiny to have the things that she desired held within reach, to watch them approach until she could almost touch them, to see them clearly and vividly for a minute, and then to have them withdrawn through some conspiracy of external events. "I didn't ask much," she thought, "only to see him once more—only the chance to let him see that I can still hold my head high and meet the future with courage." In an instant she felt that the utter futility and emptiness of the summer, of every day that she had passed since she left Briarlay, enveloped and smothered her with the thickness of ashes. "It is not fair," she cried, in rebellion, "I have had a hard life. I asked so little. It is not fair."

Going over to the window, she put the cheap curtains aside, and looked out into the street, as if searching the pavement for his vanishing figure. Nothing there except emptiness! Nothing except the wind and falling leaves and grey dust and the footsteps of a passer-by at the corner. It was like her life, that long, deserted street, filled with dead leaves and the restless sound of things that went by a little way off.

For a minute the idea stayed with her. Then, raising her head, with a smile, she looked up at the bare trees and the sombre sky over the housetops. "Life cannot hurt you unless you let it," she repeated. "I will not let it. I will conquer, if it kills me." And, so inexplicable are the processes of the soul, the resolution arising in her thoughts became interfused not only with her point of view, but with the bleak external world at which she was looking. The will to fight endowed her with the physical power of fighting; the thought created the fact; and she knew that as long as she believed herself to be unconquered, she was unconquerable. The moment of weakness had served its purpose—for the reaction had taught her that destiny lies within, not without; that the raw material of existence does not differ; and that our individual lives depend, not upon things as they are in themselves, but upon the thought with which we have modified or enriched them. "I will not be a coward. I will not let the world cheat me of happiness," she resolved; and the next instant, as she lowered her eyes from the sky, she saw David Blackburn looking up at her from the gate.

For a moment she felt that life stopped in its courses, and then began again, joyously, exuberantly, drenched with colour and sweetness. She had asked so little. She had asked only to see him again—only the chance to show him that she could be brave—and he stood here at the gate! He was still her friend, that was enough. It was enough to have him stand there and look up at her with his grave, questioning eyes.

Turning quickly away from the window, she ran out of the house and down the brick walk to the gate.

"I thought I had missed you," she said, her eyes shining with happiness.

"It is my last day in Richmond. I wanted to say good-bye." He had touched her hand with the briefest greeting; but in his face she read his gladness at seeing her; and she felt suddenly that everything had been made right, that he would understand without words, that there was nothing she could add to the joy of the meeting. It was friendship, not love, she knew; and yet, at the moment, friendship was all that she asked—friendship satisfied her heart, and filled the universe with a miraculous beauty. After the torment of the last six months, peace had descended upon her abundantly, ineffably, out of the heavens. All the longing to explain faded now into the knowledge that explanation was futile, and when she spoke again it was to say none of the things with which she had burdened her mind.

"How is Letty?" she asked, "I think of her so often."

"She is very well, but she misses you. Will you walk a little way? We can talk better in the street."

"Yes, the house will soon be full of boarders." Weariness had left her. She felt strong, gay, instinct with energy. As she moved up the deserted street, through the autumn dust, laughter rippled on her lips, and the old buoyant grace flowed in her walk. It was only friendship, she told herself, and yet she asked nothing more. She had been born again; she had come to life in a moment.

And everything at which she looked appeared to have come to life also. The heavy clouds; the long, ugly street, with the monotonous footsteps of the few passers-by; the wind blowing the dried leaves in swirls and eddies over the brick pavement; the smell of autumn which lingered in the air and the dust—all these things seemed not dead, but as living as spring. The inner radiance had streamed forth to brighten the outward greyness; the April bloom of her spirit was spreading over the earth.

"This is my hour," her heart told her. "Out of the whole of life I have this single short hour of happiness. I must pour into it everything that is mine, every memory of joy I shall ever have in the future. I must make it so perfect that it will shed a glow over all the drab years ahead. It is only friendship. He has never thought of me except as a friend—but I must make the memory of friendship more beautiful than the memory of love."

He looked at her in the twilight, and she felt that peace enveloped her with his glance.

"Tell me about yourself," he said gently. "What has life done to you?"

"Everything, and nothing." Her voice was light and cheerful. "I have worked hard all summer, and I am hoping to go to France if the war lasts——"

"All of us hope that. It is amazing the way the war has gripped us to the soul. Everything else becomes meaningless. The hold it has taken on me is so strong that I feel as if I were there already in part, as if only the shell of my body were left over here out of danger." He paused and looked at her closely. "I can talk to you of the things I think—impersonal things. The rest you must understand—you will understand?"

Her heart rose on wings like a bird. "Talk to me of anything," she answered, "I shall understand."

"No one, except my mother, has ever understood so completely. I shall always, whatever happens, look back on our talks at Briarlay as the most helpful, the most beautiful of my life."

Her glance was veiled with joy as she smiled up at him. This was more than she had ever demanded even in dreams. It was the bread of life in abundance, and she felt that she could live on it through all the barren years of the future. To have the best in her recognized, to be judged, not by a momentary impulse, but by a permanent ideal—this was what she had craved, and this was accorded her.

"For the time I can see nothing but the war," he was saying in a changed voice. "The ground has been cut from under my feet. I am groping through a ruined world toward some kind of light, some kind of certainty. The things I believed in have failed me—and even the things I thought have undergone modifications. I can find but one steadfast resolve in the midst of this fog of disappointment, and that is to help fight this war to a finish. My personal life has become of no consequence. It has been absorbed into the national will, I suppose. It has become a part of America's determination to win the war, let it cost what it may."

The old light of vision and prophecy had come back to his face while she watched it; and she realized, with a rush of mental sympathy, that his ideas were still dynamic—that they possessed the vital energy of creative and constructive forces.

"Talk to me of your work—your life," she said, and she thought exultantly, "If I cannot hold him back, I can follow him. I, too, can build my home on ideas."

"You know what I have always felt about my country," he said slowly. "You know that I have always hoped to be of some lasting service in building a better State. As a boy I used to dream of it, and in later years, in spite of disappointments—of almost unbearable disappointments and failures—the dream has come back more vividly. For a time I believed that I could work here, as well as away, for the future of America—for the genuine democracy that is founded not on force, but on freedom. For a little while this seemed to me to be possible. Then I was pushed back again from the ranks of the fighters—I became again merely a spectator of life—until the war called me to action. As long as the war lasts it will hold me. When that is over there will be fresh fields and newer problems, and I may be useful."

"It is constructive work, not fighting now, isn't it?"

"It is the machinery of war—but, after all, what does it matter if it only helps to win?"

"And afterwards? When it is over?"

His eyes grew very gentle. "If I could only see into the future! Words may come to me some day, and I may answer you—but not now—not yet. I know nothing to-day except that there is work for my hand, and I must do it. Trust me for the rest. You do trust me?"

There was a glory in her face as she answered, "To do right always. Until death—and beyond."

"If we have trust, we have everything," he said, and a note of sadness had crept into his voice. "Life has taught me that without it the rest is only ashes."

"I am glad for your sake that you can go," she replied. "It would be harder here."

The man's part was his, and though she would not have had it otherwise, she understood that the man's part would be the easier. He would go away; he would do his work; his life would be crowded to the brim with incident, with practical interests; and, though she could trust him not to forget, she knew that he would not remember as she remembered in the place where she had known him.

"The work will be worth doing," he answered, "even if the record is soon lost. It will mean little in the way of ambition, but I think that ambition scarcely counts with me now. What I am seeking is an opportunity for impersonal service—a wider field in which to burn up my energy." His voice softened, and she felt, for the first time, that he was talking impersonally because he was afraid of the danger that lay in the silence and the twilight—that he was speaking in casual phrases because the real thought, the true words, were unutterable. She was sure now, she was confident; and the knowledge gave her strength to look with clear eyes on the parting—and afterwards——

He began to talk of his work, while they turned and walked slowly back to the boarding-house.

"I will write to you," he said, "but remember I shall write only of what I think. I shall write the kind of letters that I should write to a man."

"It all interests me," she answered. "Your thought is a part of you—it is yourself."

"It is the only self I dare follow for the present, and even that changes day by day. I see so many things now, if not differently—well, at least in an altered perspective. It is like travelling on a dark road, as soon as one danger is past, others spring up out of the obscurity. The war has cast a new light on every belief, on every conviction that I thought I possessed. The values of life are changing hourly—they are in a process of readjustment. Facts that appeared so steadfast, so clear, to my vision a year ago, are now out of focus. I go on, for I always sought truth, not consistency, but I go on blindly. I am trying to feel the road since I cannot see it. I am searching the distance for some glimmer of dawn—for some light I can travel by. I know, of course, that our first task is winning the war, that until the war is won there can be no security for ideas or mankind, that unless the war is won, there can be no freedom for either individual or national development."

As they reached the gate, he broke off, and held out his hand. "But I meant to write you all this. It is the only thing I can write you. You will see Letty sometimes?"

"Whenever I can. Mrs. Timberlake will bring her to see me."

"And you will think of yourself? You will keep well?"

He held her hand; her eyes were on his; and though she heard his questions and her answers, she felt that both questions and answers were as trivial as the autumn dust at her feet. What mattered was the look in his eyes, which was like a cord drawing her spirit nearer and nearer. She knew now that he loved her; but she knew it through some finer and purer medium of perception than either speech or touch. If he had said nothing in their walk together, if he had parted from her in silence, she would have understood as perfectly as she understood now. In that moment, while her hand was in his and her radiant look on his face, the pain and tragedy of the last months, the doubt, the humiliation, the haunting perplexity and suspense, the self-distrust and the bitterer distrust of life—all these things, which had so tormented her heart, were swept away by a tide of serene and ineffable peace. She was not conscious of joy. The confidence that pervaded her spirit was as far above joy as it was above pain or distress. What she felt with the profoundest conviction was that she could never really be unhappy again in the future—that she had had all of life in a moment, and that she could face whatever came with patience and fortitude.

"Stand fast, little friend," he said, "and trust me." Then, without waiting for her reply, he turned from her and walked away through the twilight.

CHAPTER X
The Light on the Road

WHEN Caroline entered the house, the sound of clinking plates and rattling knives told her that the boarders had already assembled at supper; and it surprised her to discover that she was hungry for the first time in months. Happiness had made everything different, even her appetite for the commonplace fare Mrs. Dandridge provided. It was just as if an intense physical pain had suddenly ceased to throb, and the relief exhilarated her nerves, and made her eager for the ordinary details which had been so irksome a few hours before. Life was no longer distorted and abnormal. Her pride and courage had come back to her; and she understood at last that it was not the unfulfilment of love, but the doubt of its reality, that had poisoned her thoughts. Since she knew that it was real, she could bear any absence, any pain. The knowledge that genuine love had been hers for an hour, that she had not been cheated out of her heritage, that she had not given gold for sand, as she had done as a girl—the knowledge of these things was the chain of light that would bind together all the dull years before her. Already, though her pulses were still beating rapturously, she found that the personal values were gradually assuming their right position and importance in her outlook. There were greater matters, there were more significant facts in the world to-day than her own particular joy or sorrow. She must meet life, and she must meet it with serenity and fortitude. She must help where the immediate need was, without thought of the sacrifice, without thought even of her own suffering. How often in the past eight years had she told herself, "Love is the greatest good in the world, but it is not the only good. There are lives filled to overflowing in which love has no place." Now she realized that her love must be kept like some jewel in a secret casket, which was always there, always hidden and guarded, yet seldom brought out into the daylight and opened. "I must think of it only for a few minutes of the day," she said, "only when I am off duty, and it will not interfere with my work." And she resolved that she would keep this pledge with all the strength of her will. She would live life whole, not in parts.

Without taking off her hat, she went into the dining-room, and tried to slip unnoticed into her chair at a small table in one corner. The other seats were already occupied, and a pretty, vivacious girl she had known at the hospital, looked up and remarked, "You look so well, Miss Meade. Have you been for a walk?"

"Yes, I've been for a walk. That is why I am late."

Down the centre of the room, beneath the flickering gas chandelier and the fly-specked ceiling, there was a long, narrow table, and at the head of it, Mrs. Dandridge presided with an air as royal as if she were gracing a banquet. She was a stately, white-haired woman, who had once been beautiful and was still impressive—for adversity, which had reduced her circumstances and destroyed her comfort, had failed to penetrate the majestic armour of her manner. In the midst of drudgery and turmoil and disaster, she had preserved her mental poise as some persons are able to preserve their equilibrium in a rocking boat. Nothing disturbed her; she was as superior to accidents as she was to inefficiency or incompetence. Her meals were never served at the hour; the food was badly cooked; the table was seldom tidy; and yet her house was always crowded, and there was an unimpeachable tradition that she had never received a complaint from a boarder.

As she sat now at the head of her unappetizing table, eating her lukewarm potato soup as if it were terrapin, she appeared gracious, charming, supported by the romantic legends of her beauty and her aristocratic descent. If life had defeated her, it was one of those defeats which the philosopher has pronounced more triumphant than victories.

"I spent the afternoon at the Red Cross rooms," she remarked, regal, serene, and impoverished. "That is why supper was a little late to-night. Since I can give nothing else, I feel that it is my duty to give my time. I even ask myself sometimes if I have a moral right to anything we can send over to France?"

Inadvertently, or through some instinct of tact which was either divine or diabolical, she had touched a responsive cord in the heart of every man or woman at the table. There was no motive beyond impulsive sympathy in the words, for she was as incapable of deliberate design as she was of systematic economy; but her natural kindliness appeared to serve her now more effectively than any Machiavellian subtlety could have done. The discontented and dejected look vanished from the faces about her; the distinguished widow, with two sons in the army, stopped frowning at the potato soup; the hungry but polite young man, who travelled for a clothing house, put down the war bread he was in the act of passing; and the studious-looking teacher across the table lost the critical air with which she had been regarding the coloured waitress. As Caroline watched the change, she asked herself if the war, which was only a phrase to these people a few months ago, had become at last a reality? "We are in it now, body and soul," she thought, "we are in it just as France and England have been in it from the beginning. It is our war as much as theirs because it has touched our hearts. It has done what nothing has been able to do before—it has made us one people."

Into these different faces at Mrs. Dandridge's table, a single idea had passed suddenly, vitalizing and ennobling both the bright and the dull features—the idea of willing sacrifice. Something greater than selfish needs or desires had swept them out of themselves on a wave of moral passion that, for the moment, exalted them like a religious conversion. What had happened, Caroline knew, was that the patriotism in one of the most patriotic nations on earth had been stirred to the depths.

The talk she heard was the kind that was going on everywhere. She had listened to it day after day, as it echoed and re-echoed from the boarding-houses, the hospitals, and the streets—and through the long, bitter months, when coal was scarce and heatless and meatless days kept the blood down, she was aware of it, as of a persistent undercurrent of cheerful noise. There were no complaints, but there were many jests, and the characteristic Virginian habit of meeting a difficult situation with a joke, covered the fuel administration with ridicule. For weeks ice lay on the pavements, a famine in coal threatened; and as the winter went by, bread, instead of growing better, became steadily worse. But, after all, people said, these discomforts and denials were so small compared to the colossal sacrifices of Europe. Things were done badly, but what really counted was that they were done. Beneath the waste and extravagance and incompetence, a tremendous spirit was moving; and out of the general aspect of bureaucratic shiftlessness, America was gathering her strength. In the future, as inevitably as history develops from a fact into a fable, the waste would be exalted into liberality, the shiftlessness into efficiency. For it is the law of our life that the means pass, and the end remains, that the act decays, but the spirit has immortality.

For the next six months, when the calls were many and nurses were few, Caroline kept her jewel in the secret casket. She did not think of herself, because to think of herself was the beginning of weakness, and she had resolved long ago to be strong. When all was said, the final result of her life depended simply on whether she overcame obstacles or succumbed to them. It was not the event, she knew, that coloured one's mental atmosphere; it was the point of view from which one approached it. "It is just as easy to grow narrow and bitter over an unfulfilled love as it is to be happy and cheerful," she thought, "and whether it is easy or not, I am not going to let myself grow narrow and bitter. Of course, I might have had more, but, then, I might have had so much less—I might not have had that one hour—or his friendship. I am going to be thankful that I have had so much, and I am going to stop thinking about it at all. I may feel all I want to deep down in my soul, but I must stop thinking. When the whole country is giving up something, I can at least give up selfish regret."

The winter passed, filled with work, and not unhappily, for time that is filled with work is seldom unhappy. From Blackburn she had heard nothing, though in April a paragraph in the newspaper told her that Angelica was about to sue for a divorce in some Western state; and Daisy Colfax, whom she met one day in the waiting-room of the hospital, breezily confirmed the vague announcement.

"There really wasn't anything else that she could do, you know. We were all expecting it. Poor Angelica, she must have had to overcome all her feelings before she could make up her mind to take a step that was so public. Her delicacy is the most beautiful thing about her—except, as Robert always insists, the wonderful way she has of bringing out the best in people."

As the irony of this was obviously unconscious, Caroline responded merely with a smile; but that same afternoon, when Mrs. Timberlake paid one of her rare visits, she repeated Daisy's remark.

"Do you suppose she really believes what she says?"

"Of course she doesn't. Things don't stop long enough in her mind to get either believed or disbelieved. They just sift straight through without her knowing that they are there."

They were in the ugly little green-papered room at the hospital, and Caroline was holding Letty tight in her arms, while she interpolated cryptic phrases into the animated talk.

"Oh, Miss Meade, if you would only come back! Do you think you will come back when mother and father get home again? I wrote to father the other day, but I had to write in pencil, and I'm so afraid it will all fade out when it goes over the ocean. Will it get wet, do you think?"

"I am sure it won't, dear, and he will be so glad to hear from you. What did you tell him?"

"I told him how cold it was last winter, and that I couldn't write before because doing all the doctor told me took up every single minute, and I had had to leave off my lessons, and that the new nurse made them very dull, anyhow. Then I said that I wanted you to come back, and that I hadn't been nearly so strong since you went away."

She was looking pale, and after a few moments, Caroline sent her, with a pot of flowers, into an adjoining room.

"I don't like Letty's colour," she said anxiously to the housekeeper, in the child's absence.

"She is looking very badly. It is the hard winter, I reckon, but I am not a bit easy about her. She hasn't picked up after the last cold, and we don't seem able to keep her interested. Children are so easily bored when they are kept indoors, and Letty more easily than most, for she has such a quick mind. I declare I never lived through such a winter—at least not since I was a child in the Civil War, and of course that was a thousand times worse. But we couldn't keep Briarlay warm, even the few rooms that we lived in. It was just like being in prison—and a cold one at that! I can't help wishing that David would come home, for I feel all the time as if anything might happen. I reckon the winter put my nerves on edge; but the war seems to drag on so slowly, and everybody has begun to talk in such a pessimistic way. It may sound un-Christian, but I sometimes feel as if I could hardly keep my hands off the Germans. I get so impatient of the way things are going, I'd like to get over in France, and kill a few of them myself. It does look, somehow, as if the Lord had forgotten that vengeance belongs to Him."

"Doctor Boland told me yesterday that he thought it would last at least five years longer."

"Then it will outlast us, that's all I've got to say." She cleared her throat, and added with tart irrelevancy, "I had a letter from Angelica a few weeks ago."

"Is it true? What the paper said?"

"There wasn't a word about it in the letter. She wrote because she wanted me to send her some summer clothes she had left here, and then she asked me to let her know about Letty. She said she had been operated on in Chicago a month ago, and that she was just out of the hospital, and feeling like the wreck of herself. Everybody told her, she added, how badly she looked, and the letter sounded as if she were very much depressed and out of sorts."

"Do you think she may really have cared for Mr. Wythe?"

Mrs. Timberlake shook her head. "It wasn't that, my dear. She just couldn't bear to think of Mary's having more than she had. If she had ever liked David, it might have been easier for her to stand it, but she never liked him even when she married him; and though a marriage may sometimes manage very well without love, I've yet to see one that could get along without liking."

She rose as Letty came back from her errand, and a minute or two later, Caroline tucked the child in the car, and stood watching while it started for Briarlay.

The air was mild and fragrant, for after the hard, cold winter, spring had returned with a profusion of flowers. In the earth, on the trees, and in the hearts of men and women, April was bringing warmth, hope, and a restoration of life. The will to be, to live, and to struggle, was released, with the flowing sap, from the long imprisonment of winter. In the city yards the very grass appeared to shoot up joyously into the light, and the scent of hyacinths was like the perfume of happiness. The afternoon was as soft as a day in summer, and this softness was reflected in the faces of the people who walked slowly, filled with an unknown hope, through the warm sunshine.

"Love is the greatest good in the world, but it is not the only good," repeated Caroline, wondering who had first said the words.

It was then, as she turned back to enter the hospital, that the postman put some letters into her hand, and looking down, she saw that one was from Blackburn.

CHAPTER XI
The Letter

FOR the rest of the afternoon she carried the letter hidden in her uniform, where, from time to time, she could pause in her task, and put her hand reassuringly on the edge of the envelope. Not until evening, when she had left her patient and was back in her room, did she unfold the pages, and begin slowly to read what he had written. The first sentences, as she had expected, were stiff and constrained—she had known that until he could speak freely he would speak no word of love to her—but, as soon as he had passed from the note of feeling to the discussion of impersonal issues, he wrote as earnestly and spontaneously as he had talked to Sloane on that October afternoon at Briarlay. Another woman, she realized, might have been disappointed; but the ironic past had taught her that emotion, far from being the only bond with a man like Blackburn, was perhaps the least enduring of the ties that held them together. His love, if it ever came to her, would be the flower, not of transient passion, but of the profound intellectual sympathy which had first drawn their minds, not their hearts, to each other. Both had passed through the earlier fires of racial impulse; both had been scorched, not warmed by the flames; and both had learned that the only permanent love is the love that is rooted as deeply in thought as in desire.

In France.

MY DEAR CAROLINE:

I have tried to write to you many times, but always something has held me back—some obscure feeling that words would not help things or make them easier, and that your friendship could be trusted to understand all that I was obliged to leave to the silence. You will see how badly I have put this, even though I have rewritten the beginning of this letter several times. But it is just as if I were mentally tongue-tied. I can think of nothing to say that it does not seem better to leave unsaid. Then I remembered that when we parted I told you I should write of what I thought, not of what I felt, and this makes it simpler. When I relax my mental grip, the drift of things whirls like a snow-storm across my mind, and I grow confused and bewildered——

In the last year I have thought a great deal about the questions before us. I have tried to look at them from a distance and on the outside, as well as from a closer point of view. I have done my best to winnow my convictions from the ephemeral chaff of opinions; and though I am groping still, I am beginning to see more clearly the road we must travel, if we are ever to come out of the jungle of speculation into the open field of political certainty. Behind us—behind America, for it is of my own country that I am thinking—the way is strewn with experiments that have met failure, with the bones of political adventurers who have died tilting at the windmill of opportunity. For myself, I see now that, though some of my theories have survived, many of them have been modified or annulled by the war. Two years ago you heard me tell Sloane that our most urgent need was of unity—the obliteration of sectional lines. I still feel this need, but I feel it now as a necessary part of a far greater unity, of the obliteration of world boundaries of understanding and sympathy. This brings us to the vital question before us as a people—the development of the individual citizen within the democracy, of the national life within the international. Here is the problem that America must solve for the nations, for only America, with her larger views and opportunities, can solve it. For the next generation or two this will be our work, and our chance of lasting service. Our Republic must stand as the great example of the future, as the morning star that heralds the coming of a new day. It is the cause for which our young men have died. With their lives they have secured our democracy, and the only reward that is worthy of them is a social order as fair as their loyalty and their sacrifice.

And so we approach our great problem—individuality within democracy, the national order within the world order. Already the sectional lines, which once constituted an almost insurmountable obstacle, have been partly dissolved in the common service and sacrifice. Already America is changing from a mass of divergent groups, from a gathering of alien races, into a single people, one and indivisible in form and spirit. The war has forged us into a positive entity, and this entity we must preserve as far as may be compatible with the development of individual purpose and character. Here, I confess, lies the danger; here is the political precipice over which the governments of the past have almost inevitably plunged to destruction. And it is just here, I see now, in the weakest spot of the body politic, that the South, and the individualism of the South, may become, not a national incubus, but the salvation of our Republic. The spirit that fought to the death fifty years ago for the sovereignty of the States, may act to-day as a needed check upon the opposing principle of centralization in government, the abnormal growth of Federal power; and in the end may become, like the stone which the builders rejected, the very head of the corner. As I look forward to-day, the great hope for America appears to be the interfusion of the Northern belief in solidarity with the ardent Southern faith in personal independence and responsibility. In this blending of ideals alone, I see the larger spirit that may redeem nationality from despotism.

I am writing as the thoughts rush through my mind, with no effort to clarify or co-ordinate my ideas. From childhood my country has been both an ideal and a passion with me; and at this hour, when it is facing new dangers, new temptations, and new occasions for sacrifice, I feel that it is the duty of every man who is born with the love of a soil in his heart and brain, to cast his will and his vision into the general plan of the future. To see America avoid alike the pitfall of arbitrary power and the morass of visionary socialism; to see her lead the nations, not in the path of selfish conquest, but, with sanity and prudence, toward the promised land of justice and liberty—this is a dream worth living for, and worth dying for, God knows, if the need should ever arise.

The form of government which will yield us this ideal union of individualism with nationalism, I confess, lies still uninvented or undiscovered. Autocracies have failed, and democracies have been merely uncompleted experiments. The republics of the past have served mainly as stepping-stones to firmer autocracies or oligarchies. Socialism as a state of mind, as a rule of conduct, as an expression of pity for the disinherited of the earth—Socialism as the embodiment of the humane idea, is wholly admirable. So far as it is an attempt to establish the reign of moral ideas, to apply to the community the command of Christ, 'Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them;' so far as it expresses the obscure longing in the human heart for justice and right in the relations of mankind—so far as it embodies the instincts of compassion and sympathy, it must win the approval of every man who has looked deeply into human affairs. The evil of Socialism lies not in these things; nor does it rest in the impracticability of its theory—in the generous injustice of "robbing the rich to pay the poor." The evil of it consists in the fact that it would lend itself in practice even more readily than democracy, to the formation of that outer crust of officialism which destroys the blood and fibre of a nation. Socialism obeying the law of Christ might be a perfect system—but, then, so would despotism, or democracy, or any other form of government man has invented.

But all theories, however exalted, must filter down, in application, through the brackish stream of average human nature. The State cannot rest upon a theory, any more than it can derive its true life from the empty husks of authority. The Republic of man, like the Kingdom of God, is within, or it is nowhere.

To-day, alone among the nations, the American Republic stands as the solitary example of a State that came into being, not through the predatory impulse of mankind, but, like its Constitution, as an act of intellectual creation. In this sense alone it did not grow, it was made; in this sense it was founded, not upon force, but upon moral ideas, upon everlasting and unchanging principles. It sprang to life in the sunrise of liberty, with its gaze on the future—on the long day of promise. It is the heir of all the ages of political experiment; and yet from the past, it has learned little except the things that it must avoid.

There was never a people that began so gloriously, that started with such high hearts and clear eyes toward an ideal social contract. Since then we have wandered far into the desert. We have followed mirage after mirage. We have listened to the voice of the false prophet and the demagogue. Yet our Republic is still firm, embedded, as in a rock, in the moral sense of its citizens. For a democracy, my reason tells me, there can be no other basis. When the State seeks other authority than the conscience of its citizens, it ceases to be a democracy, and becomes either an oligarchy or a bureaucracy. Then the empty forms of hereditary right, or established officialdom, usurp the sovereignty of moral ideas, and the State decays gradually because the reservoir of its life has run dry.

For our Republic, standing as it does between hidden precipices, the immediate future is full of darkness. We have shown the giant's strength, and we must resist the temptation to use it like a giant. When the war is won, we shall face the vital and imminent danger, the danger that is not material, but spiritual—for what shall it profit a nation, if it shall gain the whole world, and lose its own soul? In a time of danger arbitrary power wears always a benevolent aspect; and since man first went of his own will into bondage, there has never been absolutism on earth that has not masqueraded in the doctrine of divine origin—whether it be by the custom of kingship, or by the voice of the people. War, which is an abnormal growth on the commonwealth, may require abnormal treatment; but history shows that it is easier to surrender rights in war than it is to recover them in peace, and a temporary good has too often developed into a permanent evil. The freedom of the seas will be a poor substitute for the inalienable rights of the individual American. A League of Nations cannot insure these; it is doubtful even if it can insure peace on earth and good will toward men. Men can hate as bitterly and fight as fiercely within a league as outside of one.

We shall go forth, when victory is won, to enlighten the world with liberty and with far-seeing statesmanship; but just as the far-sighted physical vision perceives distant objects more clearly than near ones, there is, also, a world vision of duty which overlooks immediate obligations while it discerns universal responsibilities. In this mental view the present is invariably sacrificed to the future, the personal rights to the general security. Yet to the more normal faculty of vision, it would appear that the perfect whole must result from the perfect parts; and that only by preserving our individual liberties can we make a League of Free Nations. International treaties are important, but national morality is vital—for the treaty that is not confirmed by the national honour is only a document.

And now, after a year's thinking, I have come back to the conviction from which I started—that the only substantial groundwork of a republic is the conscience of its citizens. The future of our democracy rests not in the Halls of Congress, but in the cradle; and to build for permanency, we must build, not on theory, but on personal rectitude. We hear a great deal said now, and said unthinkingly, about the personal values not counting in a war that is fought for world freedom. Yet there was never an age, and I say this with certainty, in which personality was of such supreme significance as it is to-day. For this, after all, is the end to which my thinking has brought me—nationalism is nothing, internationalism is nothing, unless it is an expression of individual aspirations and ideals—for the end of both nationalism and internationalism is the ultimate return to racial character. Cultivate the personal will to righteousness, teach the citizen that he is the State, and the general good may take care of itself.

And so our first duty appears to be, not national expansion, but the development of moral fibre. Before we teach other nations to stand alone, we must learn to walk straight; before we sow the seeds of the future, we must prepare our own ground for planting. National greatness is a flower that has often flourished over a sewer of class oppression and official corruption; and the past teaches us that republics, as well as autocracies, may be founded on slavery and buttressed by inequalities. As I look ahead now, I see that we may win freedom for smaller nations, and yet lose our own liberties to a Federal power that is supported by a civilian army of office-holders. For power is never more relentless in exercise than when it has transformed the oppressed of yesterday into the oppressors of to-day; and it is well to remember that democracy means not merely the tyranny of the many instead of the few; it means equal obligations and responsibilities as well as equal rights and opportunities. If we have failed to reach this ideal, it has been because the individual American has grasped at opportunity while he evaded responsibility; and the remedy for the failure lies not in a change of institutions, but in a change of heart. We must realize that America is a faith as well as a fact—that it is, for many, a divine hypothesis. We must realize that it means the forward-looking spirit, the fearless attitude of mind, the belief in the future, the romantic optimism of youth, the will to dare and the nerve to achieve the improbable. This is America, and this is our best and greatest gift to the world—and to the League of Free Nations.

With the end of the war the danger will be threatening; and we must meet it as we met the feebler menace of Prussian militarism—but we must meet it and conquer it with intangible weapons. No nation has ever fought for a greater cause; no nation has ever fought more unselfishly; and no nation has ever drawn its sword in so idealistic a spirit. We have entered this war while our hearts were full, while the high and solemn mood was upon us. If we keep to this mood, if we seek in victory the immaterial, not the material advantage, if our only reward is the opportunity for world service, and our only conquered territory the provinces of the free spirit—if we keep fast to this ideal, and embody its meaning in our national life and actions, then we may save the smaller nations because we have first saved our Republic. For, if it is a day of peril, it is also a day of glory. The seal of blood is upon us, but it is the prophetic mark of the future, and it has sealed us for the union of justice with liberty. We have given our dead as a pledge of the greater America—the America of invisible boundaries. There is but one monument that we can build in remembrance, and that monument is a nobler Republic. If we lose the inspiration of the ideal, if we turn aside from the steady light of democracy to pursue the ignis fatuus of imperialistic enterprise or aggression, then our dead will have died in vain, and we shall leave our building unfinished. For those who build on the dead must build for immortality. Physical boundaries cannot contain them; but in the soul of the people, if we make room for them, they will live on forever, and in the spirit we may still have part and place with them.

And because the collective soul of the race is only the sum total of individual souls, I can discern no way to true national greatness except through the cultivation of citizenship. Experience has proved that there can be no stability either of law or league unless it is sustained by the moral necessity of mankind; and, for this reason, I feel that our first international agreement should be the agreement on a world standard of honour—on a rule of ethical principles in public as well as in private relations. I confess that a paternalism that enfeebles the character appears to me scarcely less destructive than a license that intoxicates. Between the two lies the golden mean of power with charity, of enlightened individualism, of Christian principles, not applied on the surface, but embodied in the very structure of civilization. Though I am not a religious man in the orthodox meaning, the last year has taught me that the world's hope lies not in treaties, but in the law of Christ that ye love one another.

This splendid dream of the perfectibility of human nature may not have led us very far in the past, but at least it has never once led us wrong. There are ideas that flash by like comets, bearing a trail of light; and such an idea is that of world peace and brotherhood. Only those whose eyes are on the heavens behold it; yet these few may become the great adventurers of the spirit, the prophets and seers of the new age for mankind. There has never been a great invention that did not begin as a dream, just as there has never been a great truth that did not begin as a heresy. And, if we look back over history, we find that the sublime moments with men and with nations, are those in which they break free from the anchorage of the past, and set sail toward the unknown seas, on a new spiritual voyage of discovery.

It is thus that I would see America, not as schoolmistress or common scold to the nations, but as chosen leader by example, rather than by authority. I would see her, when this crisis is safely past, keeping still to her onward vision, and her high and solemn mood of service and sacrifice; and it is in the spirit of humility, not of pride, that I would have her stretch the hand of friendship alike to the great and the little peoples. She has had no wiser leaders than the Founders of this Republic, and I would see her return, as far as she can return, to the lonely freedom in which they left her. I would see her enter no world covenant except one that is sustained not by physical force, but by the moral law; and I would, above all, see her follow her own great destiny with free hands and unbandaged eyes. For her true mission is not that of universal pedagogue—her true mission is to prove to the incredulous Powers the reality of her own political ideals—to make Democracy, not a sublime postulate, but a self-evident truth.

I have written as words came to me, knowing that I could write to you freely and frankly, as I could to no one else, of the life of the mind. Your friendship I can trust always, in any circumstances; and it is only by thinking impersonally that I can escape the tyranny of personal things. I have not written of my surroundings over here, because I could tell you only what you have read in hundreds of letters—in hundreds of magazines. It is all alike. One and all, we see the same sights. War is not the fine and splendid thing some of us at home believe it to be. There is dirt and cruelty and injustice in France, as well as glory and heroism. I have seen the good and the evil of the battlefields, just as I have seen the good and the evil of peace, and I have learned that the romance of war depends as much upon the thickness of the atmosphere as upon the square miles of the distance. It is pretty prosaic at close range; yet at the very worst of it, I have seen flashes of an almost inconceivable beauty. For it brings one up against the reality, and the reality is not matter, but spirit.

I am trying to do the best work of my life, and I am doing it just for my country.

God bless you.

DAVID BLACKBURN.

CHAPTER XII
The Vision

AT the end of June, Caroline learned from the papers that Blackburn had returned to Briarlay; and the same day she heard through Daisy Colfax that Alan Wythe had been killed in France.

"I feel so sorry for poor Angelica," said the young woman mournfully. "They were always such devoted friends. But, of course, it is splendid to think that he was a hero, and I know that is the way Angelica will look at it."

At the moment, though Caroline had liked Alan, the thing that impressed her most was the way in which the whole world shared in the conspiracy to protect Angelica from the consequences of her own acts. Evidently no hint of scandal had ever touched her friendship for Alan.

"I am sorry," said Caroline, "I always liked him."

"Oh, everybody did! You know that Mr. Blackburn has come home?"

"Yes, I saw it in the paper."

"And Cousin Matty tells me that you are going away to camp?"

"I have just had my call, and I am leaving next week. I hope it means France very soon, but of course no one knows."

"Well, be sure to take a great deal more than they tell you to. I know a nurse who said she almost froze the first winter. Do you really have to wear woollen stockings? I should think they would make your flesh creep."

She passed on, blooming and lovely, and Caroline, with her bundle of woollen stockings under her arm, left the shop, and turned down a side street on her way to Mrs. Dandridge's. She was glad of the call, and yet—and yet—she had hoped deep down in her heart, a hope unspoken and unacknowledged, that she should see David again before she left Richmond. A moment would be enough—only it might be for the last time, and she felt that she must see him. In the last two months she had thought of him very little. Her work had engrossed her, and the hope of going to France had exhilarated her like wine through all the long days of drudgery. She had grown to expect so little of life that every pleasure was magnified into a blessing, and she found, in looking back, that an accumulation of agreeable incidents had provided her with a measure of happiness. Underneath it all was the knowledge of Blackburn, though love had come at last to take the place of a creed that one believes in, but seldom remembers. Yet she still kept the jewel in the casket, and it was only when she stopped now and then to reflect on her life, that she realized how long it had lain in its secret corner where the light of day never shone.

As she approached the boarding-house she saw a car by the sidewalk, and a minute afterwards, Mrs. Timberlake turned away from the door, and came down to the gate.

"Oh, Caroline, I was afraid I had missed you! Are you going very soon?"

"Not until next week." Did the housekeeper hear, she wondered, the wild throbbing of her heart?

"I came to see if you could come out for the night? Letty has been ailing for several days, and the doctor says she has a touch of fever. Miss Bradley is ill in bed, and we can't get a nurse anywhere until to-morrow. Of course Mammy Riah and I can manage, but David and I would both feel so much easier if you would come."

"Of course, I'll come. I'll get my bag in a minute. It is already packed." Without waiting for Mrs. Timberlake's reply, she ran into the house, and came out with the suitcase in her hands. "Tell me about Letty. Is her temperature high?"

"It has been all day, but you know how it is with children, as I told David this morning. You heard that David was back?"

"I saw it in the paper."

"He came very unexpectedly. Of course he couldn't cable about the boat, and the telegram he sent from New York didn't get to me until after he was in the house. He is looking badly, but I am sure it isn't the work. I believe other things have been worrying him."

The car had passed out of Grace Street, and was running in the direction of Monument Avenue. As they went on, Caroline remembered the April morning when she had come in this same car down the familiar street, where flags were flying so gaily. It seemed a hundred years ago—not one year, but a hundred! Life was the same, and yet not the same, since the very heart of it was altered. The same sky shone, deeply blue, overhead; the same sun illuminated the houses; the same flags were flying; the same persons passed under the glittering green of the leaves. It was all just as it had been on that April morning—and yet how different!

"I suppose he is anxious about Letty?" she said.

"Even before that I noticed how much he had changed. It was only when he was telling me about Roane that he looked a bit like himself. My dear, can you believe that Roane has really turned into a hero?"

"No, I cannot. It must have been a long turning." She was talking only to make sound. How could it matter to her what Roane had turned into?

"He's been fighting with the French, and David says he's won every decoration they have to give. He is doing splendid things, like saving lives under fire, and once he even saved a Red Cross dog at the risk of his life. David says it's the way he makes a jest of it that the French like—as if he were doing it for amusement. That's like Roane Fitzhugh, isn't it? What do you suppose David meant when he said that beneath it all was a profound disillusionment?"

"I don't know, but I never denied that Roane had a sense of humour."

"You never liked him, and neither did David. He says now that Roane isn't really any more of a hero than he always was, but that he has found a background where his single virtue is more conspicuous than his collective vices. I believe he is the only human being I ever knew David to be unjust to."

Caroline laughed. "There are some virtues it is simply impossible to believe in. Whenever I hear of Roane Fitzhugh—even when I hear things like this—I always remember that he kissed me when he was drunk."

"He hasn't touched a drop since the war. David says he is getting all the excitement he wants in other ways."

"And I suppose when the war is over he'll have to get it again from drink." It didn't make any difference whether he was a hero or not, she told herself, she should always feel that way about him. After all, he was probably not the first hero who had given a woman good cause to despise him.

"Oh, I hope not!" Unlike Caroline, the housekeeper had always had a weakness for Roane, though she disapproved of his habits. But a good man, she often said to herself in excuse, might have bad habits, just as a bad man might have good ones. The Lord would have to find something else to judge people by at the day of reckoning. "He is the only man I've ever known who could see through Angelica," she concluded after a pause.

"He began early. She always got everything he wanted when they were children. I've heard him say so."

"Well, I wrote to him about her the other day. Did I tell you I'd heard from Cousin Fanny Baylor, who has been with her in Chicago?"

"No, you didn't tell me. How long ago was it?"

"It couldn't have been more than three weeks. She wrote me that Angelica was only the wreck of herself, and that the operation was really much more serious than we had ever been told. The doctor said there was no hope of any permanent cure, though she might linger on, as an invalid, for a good many years."

"And does she know? Mrs. Blackburn, I mean?"

"They wouldn't tell her. Cousin Fanny said the doctors and nurses had all been so careful to keep it from her, and that the surgeon who operated said he could not strike hope out of Angelica's heart by telling her. Angelica has shown the most beautiful spirit, she wrote, and everybody in the hospital thought her perfectly lovely. She left there some months ago, and, of course, she believed that she was going to get well in time. It's funny, isn't it, that the doctor who is attending her now should be so crazy about her? Cousin Fanny says he is one of the most distinguished men in Chicago, but it sounds to me very much as if he were the sort of fool that Alan Wythe was."

"Could the war have changed her? Perhaps she is different now since Alan Wythe was killed?"

Mrs. Timberlake met this with a sound that was between a sniff and a snort. "I expect it's only in books that war, or anything else, makes people over in a minute like that. In real life women like Angelica don't get converted, or if they do, it doesn't last overnight. You can't raise a thunderstorm in a soap bubble. No, Angelica will go on until she dies being exactly what she has always been, and people will go on until she dies and afterwards, believing that she is different. I reckon it would take more than a world war, it would take a universal cataclysm, to change Angelica."

For a time they drove on in silence, and when the housekeeper spoke again it was in a less positive tone. "It wouldn't surprise me if she was sorry now that she ever left David."

Caroline started. "Do you mean she would want to come back?"

"It wouldn't surprise me," Mrs. Timberlake repeated firmly.

"Then she didn't get the divorce?"

"No, she didn't get it, and there wouldn't be any use in her beginning all over again, now that Alan is dead. If she is really as ill as they say, I reckon she'd be more comfortable at Briarlay—even if that doctor out yonder is crazy about her."

"Well, she could find one here who would be just as crazy." There was an accent of bitterness in Caroline's voice.

"Oh, yes, she wouldn't have to worry about that. The only thing that would seem to stand in her way is David, and I don't know that she has ever paid much attention to him."

"Not even as an obstacle. But how can she come back if he doesn't want her?" It really appeared a problem to Caroline.

"Oh, she'll make him want her—or try to——"

"Do you think she can?"

Mrs. Timberlake pondered the question. "No, I don't believe that she can, but she can make him feel sorry for her, and with David that would be half the battle."

"That and Letty, I suppose."

"Yes, she has been writing to Letty very often, and her letters are so sweet that the child has begun to ask when she is coming home. You know how easily children forget?"

Caroline sighed under her breath. "Oh, I know—but, even then, how could Mr. Blackburn?"

"He wouldn't forget. If he thought it was right, he would do it if it killed him, but he would remember till his dying day. That's how David is made. He is like a rock about his duty, and I sometimes think feelings don't count with him at all."

"Yet he did love her once."

"Yes, he loved her once—and, of course," she amended suddenly, reverting to the traditional formula, "Nobody believes that Angelica ever did anything really wrong."

For the rest of the long drive they sat in silence; and it seemed to Caroline, while the car turned into the lane and ran the last half mile to the house, that time had stopped and she was back again in the October afternoon when she had first come to Briarlay. It was no longer a hundred years ago. In the midst of the June foliage—the soft green of the leaves, the emerald green of the grass, the dark olive green of the junipers—in the midst of the wonderful brightness and richness of summer—she was enveloped, as if by a drifting fragrance, in the atmosphere of that day in autumn. It came to life not as a memory, but as a moment that existed, outside of time, in eternity. It was here, around, within, and above her, a fact like any other fact; yet she perceived it, not through her senses, but through an intuitive recognition to which she could not give a name. Under the summer sky she saw again the elm leaves falling slowly; she approached again the red walls in the glimmer of sunset; and she felt again the divine certainty that the house contained for her the whole measure of human experience. Then the car stopped; the door opened; and the scene faded like the vision of a clairvoyant. Imagination, nothing more! She had stepped from the dream into the actuality, and out of the actuality she heard Mrs. Timberlake's dry tones remarking that David had not come home from the office.

"Let me go to Letty. I should like to see Letty at once," said Caroline.

"Then run straight upstairs to the night nursery. I know she will be almost out of her head with joy."

Moses had opened the front door, and as Caroline entered, she glanced quickly about her, trying to discover if there had been any changes. But the house was unaltered. It was like a greenhouse from which the rarest blossom had been removed, leaving still a subtle and penetrating perfume. All the profusion of detail, the dubious taste, the warmth of colour, and the lavishness of decoration, were still there. From the drawing-room she caught the sheen of pink silk, and she imagined for an instant that Angelica's fair head drooped, like a golden lily, among the surroundings she had chosen. There was a lack of discrimination, she saw now even more plainly than on that first afternoon, but there was an abundance of dramatic effect. One might imagine one's self in any character—even the character of an angel—with a background like that!

As she drew near to the nursery door she heard Letty's voice exclaiming excitedly, "There's Miss Meade, mammy, I hear Miss Meade coming!" Then Mammy Riah opened the door, and the next minute the child was stretching out her arms and crying with pleasure.

"I asked father to send for you," she said, "I told him you could make me well faster than Miss Bradley." She appeared to Caroline to have grown unnaturally tall and thin, like the picture of Alice in Wonderland they used to laugh over together. Her face was curiously transparent and "peaked," as Mrs. Timberlake had said, and the flush of fever could not disguise the waxen look of the skin. In her straight little nightgown, which was fastened close at the throat, and with the big blue bow on the top of her smooth brown head, she looked so wistful and pathetic that she brought a lump to Caroline's throat. Was it any wonder that Blackburn was anxious when she gazed up at him like that?

"I want to hurry up and get well, Miss Meade," she began, "because it makes father so unhappy when I am sick. It really hurts father dreadfully."

"But you're getting well. There isn't much the matter, is there, mammy?"

"She'd be jes ez peart ez I is, ef'n Miss Matty 'ould quit pokin' physic down 'er thoat. Dar ain' nuttin' else in de worl' de matter wid 'er. Whut you reckon Miss Matty know about hit? Ain't she done been teckin' physic day in en day out sence befo' de flood, en ain't she all squinched up, en jes ez yaller ez a punkin, now?"

"I don't mind the medicine if it will make me well," said the child.

"And you take what the doctor gives you too?"

"Oh, yes, I take that too. Between them," she added with a sigh, "there is a great deal to take."

"It is because you are growing so fast. You are a big girl now."

Letty laughed. "Father doesn't want me to get much taller. He doesn't want me to be tall when I'm grown up—but I can't help it, if it keeps up. Do you think I've grown any since the last time I measured, Mammy Riah?"

"Naw, honey, dat you ain't. You ain' growed a winch."

"She means an inch," said Letty. "Some people can't understand her. Even father can't sometimes, but I always can." Then drawing Caroline down on the bed, she began stroking her arm with a soft caressing touch. "Do you suppose mother will come back now that you have?" she asked. "When you are here she wouldn't have so much trouble. She used to say that you took trouble off her."

"Perhaps she will. You would like to see her, darling?"

The child thought earnestly for a moment. "I'd like to see her," she answered, "she is so pretty."

"It would make you happier if she came back?"

A smile, which was like the wise smile of an old person, flickered over Letty's features. "Wasn't it funny?" she said. "Father asked me that this morning."

A tremor shook Caroline's heart. "And what did you tell him?"

"I told him I'd like her to come back if she wanted to very badly. It hurts mother so not to do what she wants to do. It makes her cry."

"She says she wants to come back?"

"I think she wants to see me. Her letters are very sad. They sound as if she wanted to see me very much, don't they mammy? Somebody has to read them to me because I can read only plain writing. How long will it be, Miss Meade, before I can read any kind, even the sort where the letters all look just alike and go right into one another?"

"Soon, dear. You are getting on beautifully. Now I'll run into my room, and put on my uniform. You like me in uniform, don't you?"

"I like you any way," answered Letty politely. "You always look so fresh, just like a sparkling shower, Cousin Daisy says. She means the sort of shower you have in summer when the sun shines on the rain."

Going into her room, Caroline bathed her face in cold water, and brushed her hair until it rolled in a shining curve back from her forehead. She was just slipping into her uniform when there was a knock at the door, and Mrs. Timberlake said, without looking in,

"David has come home, and he has asked for you. Will you go down to the library?"

"In one minute. I am ready." Her voice was clear and firm; but, as she left the room and passed slowly down the staircase, by the copy of the Sistine Madonna, by the ivory walls of the hall and the pink walls of the drawing-room, she understood how the women felt who rode in the tumbril to the guillotine. It was the hardest hour of her life, and she must summon all the courage of her spirit to meet it. Then she remembered her father's saying, that after the worst had happened, one began to take things easier, and an infusion of strength flowed from her mind into her heart and her limbs. If the worst was before her now, in a little while it would be over—in a little while she could pass on to hospital wards, and the sounds of the battlefield, and the external horrors that would release her from the torment of personal things.

The door of the library was open, and Blackburn stood in the faint sunshine by the window—in the very spot where he had stood on the night when she had gone to tell him that Angelica had ordered her car to go to the tableaux. As she entered, he crossed the room and held her hand for an instant; then, turning together, they passed through the window, and out on the brick terrace. All the way down the stairs she had wondered what she should say to him in the beginning; but now, while they stood there in the golden light, high above the June splendour of the rose garden, she said only,

"Oh, how lovely it is! How lovely!"

He was looking at her closely. "You are working too hard. Your eyes are tired."

"I must go on working. What is there in the world except work?" Though she tried to speak brightly, there was a ripple of sadness in her voice. Her eyes were on the garden, and it seemed to her that it blazed suddenly with an intolerable beauty—a beauty that hurt her quivering senses like sound. All the magic loveliness of the roses, all the reflected wonder and light and colour of the sunset, appeared to mingle and crash through her brain, like the violent crescendo of some triumphant music. She had not wanted colour; she had attuned her life to grey days and quiet backgrounds, and the stark forms of things that were without warmth or life. But beauty, she felt, was unendurable—beauty was what she had not reckoned with in her world.

"You are going to France?" he asked.

"I am leaving for camp next week. That means France, I hope."

"Until the end of the war?"

"Until the end—or as long as I hold out. I shall not give up."

For the first time she had turned to look at him, and as she raised her lashes a veil of dry, scorching pain gathered before her eyes. He looked older, he looked changed, and, as Mrs. Timberlake had said, he looked as if he had suffered. The energy, the force which had always seemed to her dynamic, was still there in his keen brown face, in his muscular figure; only when he smiled did she notice that the youth in his eyes had passed into bitterness—not the bitterness of ineffectual rebellion, but the bitterness that accepts life on its own terms, and conquers.

"When I parted from you last autumn," he said suddenly, "I was full of hope. I could look ahead with confidence, and with happiness. I felt, in a way, that the worst was over for both of us—that the future would be better and richer. I never looked forward to life with more trust than I did then," he added, as if the memory of the past were forcing the words out of him.

"And I, also," she answered, with her sincere and earnest gaze on his face, "I believed, and I hoped."

He looked away from her over the red and white roses. "It is different now. I can see nothing for myself—nothing for my own life. Where hope was there is only emptiness."

The sunset was reflected in the shining light of her eyes. "Life can never be empty for me while I have your friendship and can think of you."

By the glow in his face she knew that her words had moved him; yet he spoke, after a moment, as if he had not heard them. "It is only fair that you should know the truth," he said slowly and gravely, "that you should know that I have cared for you, and cared, I think, in the way you would wish me to. Nothing in my life has been more genuine than this feeling. I have tested it in the last year, and I know that it is as real as myself. You have been not only an emotion in my heart—you have been a thought in my mind—every minute—through everything——" He stopped, and still without turning his eyes on her, went on more rapidly, "As a lover I might always have been a failure. There have been so many other things. Life has had a way of crowding out emotion to make room for other problems and responsibilities. I am telling you this now because we are parting—perhaps for a time, perhaps for ever. The end no one can see——"

Beyond the rose garden, in one of the pointed red cedars down in the meadow, a thrush was singing; and it seemed to her, while she listened, that the song was in her own heart as well as in the bird's—that it was pouring from her soul in a rapture of wonder and delight.

"I can never be unhappy again," she answered. "The memory of this will be enough. I can never be unhappy again."

From the cedar, which rose olive black against the golden disc of the sun, the bird sang of hope and love and the happiness that is longer than grief.

"The end no one can see," he said, and—it may have been only because of the singing bird in her heart—she felt that the roughness of pain had passed out of his voice. Then, before she could reply, he asked hurriedly, "Has Letty spoken to you of her mother?"

"Yes, she talked of her the little while that I saw her."

"You think the child would be happier if she were here?"

For an instant she hesitated. "I think," she replied at last, "that it would be fairer to the child—especially when she is older."

"Her mother writes to her."

"Yes. I think Letty feels that she wishes to come home."

The bird had stopped singing. Lonely, silent, still as the coming night, the cedar rose in a darkening spire against the afterglow.

"For us there can be no possible life together," he added presently. "We should be strangers as we have been for years. She writes me that she has been ill—that there was a serious operation——"

"Have the doctors told her the truth?"

"I think not. She knows only that she does not regain her strength, that she still suffers pain at times. Because of this it may be easier."

"You mean easier because you pity her? That I can understand. Pity makes anything possible."

"I am sorry for her, yes—but pity would not be strong enough to make me let her come back. There is something else."

"There is the child."

"The child, of course. Letty's wish would mean a great deal, but I doubt if that would be strong enough. There is still something else."

"I know," she said, "you feel that it is right—that you must do it because of that."

He shook his head. "I have tried to be honest. It is that, and yet it is not that alone. I wonder if I can make you understand?"

"Has there ever been a time when I did not understand?"

"God bless you, no. And I feel that you will understand now—that you alone—you only among the people who know me, will really understand." For a time he was silent, and when at last he went on, it was in a voice from which all emotion had faded: "Pity might move me, but pity could not drive me to do a thing that will ruin my life—while it lasts. Letty's good would weigh more with me; but can I be sure—can you, or any one else, be sure that it is really for Letty's good? The doubt in this could so easily be turned into an excuse—an evasion. No, the reason that brings me to it is larger, broader, deeper, and more impersonal than any of these. It is an idea rather than a fact. If I do it, it will be not because of anything that has happened at Briarlay; it will be because of things that have happened in France. It will be because of my year of loneliness and thought, and because of the spirit of sacrifice that surrounded me. If one's ideal, if one's country—if the national life, is worth dying for—then surely it is worth living for. If it deserves the sacrifice of all the youth of the world—then surely it deserves every other sacrifice. Our young men have died for liberty, and the least that we older ones can do is to make that liberty a thing for which a man may lay down his life unashamed."

The emotion had returned now; and she felt, when he went on again, that she was listening to the throbbing heart of the man.

"The young have given their future for the sake of a belief," he said slowly, "for the belief that civilization is better than barbarism, that humanity is better than savagery, that democracy has something finer and nobler to give mankind than has autocracy. They died believing in America, and America, unless she is false to her dead, must keep that faith untarnished. If she lowers her standards of personal responsibility, if she turns liberty into lawlessness, if she makes herself unworthy of that ultimate sacrifice—the sacrifice of her best—then spiritual, if not physical, defeat must await her. The responsibility is yours and mine. It belongs to the individual American, and it cannot be laid on the peace table, or turned over to the President. There was never a leader yet that was great enough to make a great nation."

As he paused, she lifted her eyes, and looked into his without answering. It was the unseen that guided him, she knew. It would be always the unseen. That was the law of his nature, and she would accept it now, and in the future. "I understand," she said, simply, after a moment.

"It is because you understand," he answered, "because I can trust you to understand, that I am speaking to you like this, from my heart. My dear, this was what I meant when I wrote you that nationality is nothing for personality is everything. Our democracy is in the making. It is an experiment, not an achievement; and it will depend, not on the size of its navy, but on the character of its citizens, whether or not it becomes a failure. There must be unselfish patriotism; there must be sacrifice for the general good—a willing, instead of a forced, sacrifice. There must be these things, and there must be, also, the feeling that the laws are not for the particular case, but for the abstract class, not for the one, but for the many—that a democracy which has been consecrated by sacrifice must not stoop, either in its citizens, or in its Government, to the pursuit of selfish ends. All this must be a matter of personal choice rather than of necessity. I have seen death faced with gladness for a great cause, and, though I am not always strong enough to keep the vision, I have learned that life may be faced, if not with gladness, at least with courage and patience, for a great ideal——"

His voice broke off suddenly, and they were both silent. The sun had gone down long ago, and it seemed to Caroline that the approaching twilight was flooded with memories. She was ready for the sacrifice; she could meet the future; and at the moment she felt that, because of the hour she had just lived, the future would not be empty. Whatever it might bring, she knew that she could face it with serenity—that she was not afraid of life, that she would live it in the whole, not in the part—in its pain as well as in its joy, in its denial as well as in its fulfilment, in its emptiness as well as in its abundance. The great thing was that she should not fall short of what he expected of her, that she should be strong when he needed strength.

She looked up at him, hesitating before she answered; and while she hesitated, there was the sound of hurrying footsteps in the library, and Mrs. Timberlake came through the room to the terrace.

"David," she called in a startled voice. "Did you know that Angelica was coming back?"

He answered without turning. "Yes, I knew it."

"She is here now—in the hall. Did you expect her so soon?"

"Not so soon. She telegraphed me last night."

"Mrs. Mallow met her at the Hot Springs yesterday, and told her that Letty was ill. That brought her down. She has been at the Hot Springs for several weeks."

Blackburn had grown white; but, without speaking, he turned away from the terrace, and walked through the library to the hall. Near the door Angelica was leaning on the arm of a nurse, and as he approached, she broke away from the support, and took a single step forward.

"Oh, David, I want my child! You cannot keep me away from my child!"

She was pale and worn, her face was transparent and drawn, and there were hollows under the grey velvet of her eyes; but she was still lovely—she was still unconquerable. The enchanting lines had not altered. Though her colour had been blotted out, as if by the single stroke of a brush, the radiance of her expression was unchanged, and when she smiled her face looked again as if the light of heaven had fallen over it. Never, not even in the days of her summer splendour, had Caroline felt so strongly the invincible power of her charm and her pathos.

"No, I cannot keep you away from her," Blackburn answered gently, and at his words Angelica moved toward the staircase.

"Help me, Cousin Matty. Take me to her." Abandoning the nurse, she caught Mrs. Timberlake's arm, clinging to her with all her strength, while the two ascended the stairs together.

Blackburn turned back into the library, and, for a moment, Caroline was left alone with the stranger.

"Have you known Mrs. Blackburn long?" asked the other nurse, "she must have been so very beautiful."

"For some time. Yes, she was beautiful."

"Of course, she is lovely still. It is the kind of face that nothing could make ugly—but I keep wondering what she was like before she was so dreadfully thin. You can tell just to look at her what a sad life she has had, though she bears it so wonderfully, and there isn't a word of bitterness in anything that she says. I never knew a lovelier nature."

She passed up the stairs after the others, her arms filled with Angelica's wraps, and her plain young face enkindled with sympathy and compassion. Clearly Angelica had found another worshipper and disciple.

Alone in the hall, Caroline looked through the library to the pale glimmer of the terrace where Blackburn was standing. He was gazing away from her to the rose garden, which was faintly powdered with the silver of dusk; and while she stood there, with her answer to him still unuttered, it seemed to her that, beyond the meadows and the river, light was shining on the far horizon.

THE END

colophon

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

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