At eleven o’clock of that New Year’s night the snow still fell, but the wind had increased to a gale, and shook the eastward windows of Agnes Ashe’s bedchamber.

Nurse and baby were sound asleep in the adjoining nursery. Even in the well-built house and curtained room, the night-light wavered in the unquiet air, sending fitful hosts of specter shadows scurrying over the ceiling and falling down the walls. Sometimes one dropped upon the bed and made mouths or crooked lean fingers at the convalescent. Now and then they whispered something in fleeing or skulking past. When this happened they spoke of her husband and how he had carried off both her babies downstairs. For Baby Nest’s crib was gone. She had been doubly robbed.

The door of communication between the rooms was ajar. Mrs. Ashe had need to move cautiously in arising and wrapping herself in a dressing gown. She had been three weeks upstairs. Mrs. Ames had declared her too feeble to walk across the room unaided, but to-night she felt strong and restless. Her brain was teeming with fledged thoughts, crying and fluttering to escape. If she had pen and ink she could begin another book, now that the nurse was asleep and Barton out. But that was not her reason for getting up and slipping on the wrapper. Oh, no! She drew the door to behind her cautiously, listened with held breath for sounds from the inner room, and hearing nothing, smiled cunningly, crept to the stair-head and down the polished steps. Their chill struck through the slippers into which she had thrust her stockingless feet; she shivered in the wind that drove fine snow under the front door and whistled jeeringly at her as she went by.

The library was void of human presence but warm and murky red with firelight. The vivid glow of the Argand burner, as she touched the regulator, shone upon glittering eyes, scarlet cheeks, and red lips that showed her teeth in the fixed smile of successful cunning. She found what she sought at once. Barton had left “The Story of Walter King” upon the table beside his reading chair. He would be out late. There was nothing to call him home and he was fond of his club. She was quite safe for an hour or two—secure from spy and intrusion—she and her brain-baby.

Clasping it to her heart, she wept and smiled, rocked herself to and fro as she would cuddle Baby Nest, did the nurse allow it. There was nobody to meddle with her here. She settled herself in the easy-chair and, finding where Barton had left off, read on and on, until the type began to gyrate queerly in fantastic measure across the page. Her eyes were getting tired. The tyrant above-stairs had prohibited reading so long that the effort tried her strength.

Still holding the book to her bosom, she looked around. The library was not so orderly as when she visited it tri-daily. There were no flowers on the table, yet she fancied that she smelled Bon SilÈne roses, as she had on that far-back March night when she unlocked the door leading into her beautiful, comforting Other World, where no rough blasts shook buds from blowing, no iron hand pressed down Fancy and held in Imagination with curb and bridle. The ash-cup of the bronze smoking table was filled with ashes, burnt stumps of cigars littered the hearth. Seeing them she bethought herself of the truncated brown canoe tossing in the foam-fringe of the tide on the Old Point beach. By shutting her eyes she could reproduce the scene with the minuteness of a photograph; could see the floating and swooping gulls, silver-breasted against the blue sky, and hear the swash of the waters between the rocks.

She was dreaming! It would never do to fall asleep here and be discovered by Barton or Mrs. Ames! Rubbing her eyes, she forced herself to note that one slipper lay on the rug, the other under a chair, just as Barton had kicked it off.

“Fie! fie! what would people say of a literary woman’s menage, were these things seen?”

Presently, when her head stopped reeling, she would pick them up and straighten the slumber-robe, all crumpled together on the foot of the lounge, the pillow of which was indented by Barton’s head. Sitting bolt upright, she stared at robe and cushion, so eloquent of her husband’s recent presence. Her eyes were dry with misery, her features worked into sharpness. She looked, not six, but twenty years older than the hale man who had lain there, indolent and at ease, while she turned wretchedly upon her bed throughout the tedious afternoon.

Oh, the dead Past! Oh, murdered Love!

“He said that no pure woman would have written that book,” she murmured. “He must never know! Why, he would turn me into the street to-night, if he found it out.”

She crossed the room, catching at the furniture as she staggered along to the secretary. The key hung upon a hidden hook under the drawers. She felt for it, opened the central compartment of the escritoire, and took out an old, roomy portfolio. There were papers in it that must be destroyed. She meant to do it before she was taken ill, but everything had been so sudden. It would never do to leave them for other eyes in case of her death. While she fumbled in the pockets and drew out the MSS. she checked herself in repeating irrelevant rhymes:

“If only my head would be steady and clear again for five minutes!”

The portfolio was nearly emptied into her lap when an awful voice from the doorway said:

“Mrs. Ashe! what am I to think of this extraordinary proceeding?”

Mrs. Ames, portentous in flannel gown and curl-papers, confronted the affrighted culprit. Through the open door and down the stairway came the wail of the hungry baby.

“I only came down for her brother,” tremblingly clutching her book, and letting the portfolio slide to the floor. “I felt so strong! so well! I will run up to the little sister now—at once. Poor little Nest! she wants me, I suppose?”

Mrs. Gamp’s severe eyes softened into anxiety. She spoke soothingly, in passing her powerful arm around the shaking form.

“Yes, dear. She wants mamma. Lean on me and don’t hurry too much. The stairs are a steep climb.”

Upon the upper landing Agnes, stopping to breathe, smiled piteously into the compassionate face.

“You see”—showing a corner of the volume hidden in the folds of her gown—“this is as much my baby as the other one, and I knew he was downstairs all alone. You will let me keep him—won’t you?”

“Certainly, dear! We’ll put him to bed with you, right under your pillow.”

“And not a word to Barton?” Putting her lips close to the other’s ear, she whispered fearfully—“You know he would turn us both out into the street if he knew.”

“He shan’t hear a lisp from me!” asseverated the nurse stoutly. “We’ll have the two of you sound asleep before he comes in.”

She always humored delirious patients. In such cases veracity courtesied to expediency.

The prime fellows made up a theater party after the club dinner and ended a jolly day with a jollier supper. The silvery tongue of the French timepiece upon the library mantel said it was one o’clock as Barton, entering, was amazed to see that he must have left the Argand reading burner up at full height. A second step showed traces of other occupation than his and of later date. His wife’s secretary was open, a portfolio lay wide upon the floor, and the rug was strewed with papers. Before the suspicion of burglary could cross his mind, he trod upon something hard. It was a heavy gold hair pin of a peculiar pattern, which Agnes wore constantly. He had noticed it in her hair at noon to-day, as her head lay back against the cushions, weighed down, it would seem, by the heavy coils.

Had that hypocritical hag of a nurse allowed such outrageous imprudence in his absence? He examined the lock of the secretary. The key which he believed was kept upstairs by Agnes was in it; a survey of the apartment revealed no other signs of unwonted disorder.

“Oh, these women!” his face, florid with champagne, hock, and righteous choler, crimsoned apoplectically when he stooped for the portfolio. A sheet of paper, covered with his wife’s neat, compact chirography, fell out.

It was in verse, and bore no caption.

“So-ho! poetry!”

As in a dream, he seemed to hear Agnes’ voice:

“I am not a bard at all. When I am in the dark, or at best in a half-light—sorry or weary, or lonely of heart—my thoughts take rhythmic shape.”

At the bottom of the third page of the rhymes was a date.

“October 5, 188—.”

He recollected the day. He had gone off to join some friends for a week’s hunting, leaving her in a quiet mountain inn.

“And she was lonely of heart—poor little wifie!”

He sat down to read:

The champagne had been heady, and there was a good deal of hock. Tears of maudlin sentimentality suffused the reader’s eyes at the metrical tribute to himself as his wife’s “hero-saint.” So long as she published nothing of the sort, it was pleasant to find, accidentally, that she wrote love verses in his absence, dedicated to him. He had not suspected how much she felt their parting—she had borne herself so heroically. Brushing away the soft moisture, he read on:

He went over the second section of the poem twice before the wine-warmed brain accepted the significance of the lines.

Then, he swore a little. He would be no-matter-what-ed if he could make out women’s fantasies. He supposed this was a fancy sketch, an impersonal rigmarole, altogether, but it was no-matter-what-ed (again) disagreeable stuff for a fellow to read who recollected that he had ridden away last October from a dry-eyed wife into the burning heart of such a wood as was here described. He did not remember turning under the maple tree, it was true—if indeed there were a maple tree at the top of the hill. There might be some mistake in the whole thing, but it went against a fellow’s grain to admit the possibility that his wife had another man even in the eye of her imagination.

He renewed the business of collecting the scattered papers. He would read no more poetry to-night, but an unsealed law envelope, without address, lay under the armchair. It was white and fresh, and the folds of the instrument inclosed were crisp with newness. He pulled it out:

The shock cleared the lawyer’s head on the instant. He perused the document to signatures, seals, and witnesses, refolded and restored it to the envelope, put it back into the portfolio, and the portfolio into the escritoire, turned the key in the lock and took his stand upon the rug, his hands behind his back, his back to the fire. His face was purple, his eyes glared.

“So much for marrying a literary woman! They are a bad lot!”

He spat it out viciously and a bitter, sounding oath after it.

The door-bell rang loudly, attended by the sound of stamping feet upon the mat outside. The master of the house answered the summons. The family physician crowded in past him, pulling off his overcoat as he came.

“How is she?” he demanded, without preamble.

“She! Who?”

“Mrs. Ashe! One of your maids telephoned for me at half-past twelve, from the nearest station—‘Come at once! Mrs. Ashe is dangerously ill.’ Can there be some mistake?”

Mrs. Ames called him from the top of the stairs: “Come up quick, please, doctor. It takes two of us to hold her in bed.”

The doctor rushed upstairs. Barton walked leisurely back into the library and shut the door. A woman who had sat here reading old MSS. and new contracts until she heard her husband’s latchkey in the outer door, then rushed off up a long flight of stairs to avoid him, in such frantic haste that she fell into a fit at the top, might come out of it without his help. He would never be fooled by her again, so help him God!

Half an hour went by and he had not moved, although the stealthy rush of feet overhead bespoke excitement and yet caution on the part of the attendants, and twice a faint scream penetrated the ceiling. At last he reached out his hand for pen and paper and began a letter.

The pen stopped. He could have sworn that someone passed him, so close that he felt the wind from floating garments, and that there was the odor of Bon SilÈne roses in the air. It was strangely still overhead. Cold sweat broke out all over him; when he strove to resume his writing, his fingers were nerveless. Slow, heavy feet came down the stairs and to the library door. It was opened without the ceremony of knocking, and the physician appeared.

A withering glance took in the details of the quiet figure at the table, the paper, and the pen arrested in the hand. He went through no form of merciful preparation.

“Mr. Ashe! your wife is dead! A severe shock of some kind—the nurse thinks you can explain it—brought on convulsions and suffusion of the brain.”

Baby Nest survived her mother but a week. Her father married again, eighteen months afterward, a beautiful society girl with a tolerable fortune.

She said a good thing in my hearing the other night, which I offer here in the place of the conventional moral, my story having none.

“What have you been doing with yourself all the winter?” she asked of a fine-featured, dainty little old lady, whose blue blood adds nameless finish to the fair product of brains and breeding. “I have not seen you for an age.”

“I have gone out to few large assemblies this season,” said Queen Mab. “But I have greatly enjoyed certain conclaves of choice spirits, to which I have been admitted. Evenings with the Laurence Huttons, the Edmund Clarence Stedmans, the Brander Matthewses, and Mr. and Mrs. William Dean Howells are something to be remembered forever with pride and delight.”

“Ye-es?” the priceless lace on bust and sleeves swaying in the languid breeze of her fan. “I have heard others say that some of these Bohemians are really very, very nice—don’t you know?”[B]

THE END

[A] Literal report.